RE: [Leica] Re: winter in GA

["B. D. Colen" <bdcolen@earthlink.net>]

- -----Original Message-----
From: owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
[mailto:owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us]On Behalf Of Allan
Wafkowski
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 7:33 PM
To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Subject: [Leica] Re: winter in GA


The lighting he uses is classic lighting, and you certainly have
something to learn from it. It's the same stuff I was taught 30 years
ago (and 30 years before me). I think that some of the hatred you hear
vented against it is due to lack of formal training by the ventees.

Yes, the lighting is classic and one can learn from the lighting - as long
as one ignores everything else about these "portraits."

But what an arrogant pile of crap to suggest that "some of the hatred that
you hear vented against it is due to lack of formal training by the ventees.
No one has said anything negative about the lighting techniques - and, btw,
I for one am quick to tell anyone that I have had no formal training in
photography and feel that lack when it comes to planned use of lighting.
What I and others have ranted about is the fact that everyone of the
subjects in these hideous "portraits" appears, at best, stuffed and mounted.
There is NO life in them. There is no personality in them. There is no sense
of a real person in them. They scream "I went and posed for the local hack
and baby, look at me now!"

Yes, as Jim Brick has said, this is what families and many executives want -
or used to want anyway...family members and executives whom, it is safe to
bet, have never spent more than an hour in an art museum unless on a school
trip in the third grade; family members and executives whose idea of fine
art is a Keene (Not Bob, but the hideous lithos of paintings of kids with
enormous eyes ;-) ) or the lithos by the guy who does all the cottage crap;
family members and executives who, prior to getting one of these wonderful
portraits shot got their annual portraits shot at Sears.

BTW - the fact that someone is the CEO of a corporation says less than
nothing about their taste, all it says is they are good at something related
to the business they head.

Sure, these techniques were taught and handed down for decades and decades,
from studio owner to apprentice, from Brooks professor to student. So what?
The same thing can be said about the way "sofa painting" is taught to the
starving artists who go to work in the factories where "sofa paintings" are
turned out by the tens of thousands.

So is lighting technique important and valuable? Of course it is, that goes
without saying. Is anything to be learned from the garbage under discussion
in terms of how to take a good, life-like, portrait? I would contend not.

B. D.


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