Reply To: Feel free to turn your critical eye my way

[ebi]

Jesus, OC, the photos are really bad. Curious to see what your film work looked like. The technical issues aside, it doesn’t appear you know how to light, pose or, really, take photographs at all.

You really seem to favor this photo, since you decided to make it your profile picture: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=638585066185531&set=a.592053060838732.1073741827.591852427525462&type=1&theater

It’s not good. Shooting digital doesn’t mean you enhance photographs with shitty graphics. You can let publications do that for you.

I don’t really come from a film world. I learned on film. This means that I shot film, developed B&W in the beginning and then eventually started paying someone else to process negatives. Then I switched to transparency b/c it was actually saving me money (and time) while on a college student budget and then transferred those transparencies to digital by scanning on a drum scanner. My transition into shooting digital was made very easy by the fact that transparency and digital were very similar. Transparency was incredibly sensitive to exposure compared to negative film. In a lot of ways it still is. So while I don’t have decades of experience with film, I can say that I truly and completely understand it.

That being said, film is completely dead. Aside from a few magazines, it’s not being used at all. Conde Nast Traveler was using it, but they just fired almost their entire photo team…and I think that means that film photography won’t be used anymore. It doesn’t matter if that is a good or bad thing. Magazines are dying a slow death anyways. In the meantime, photographers have to shoot digital these days. It’s not even a real question anymore. The most important aspect is whether a photographer can shoot amazing photographs. From what I’ve seen, you cannot. And given that there isn’t that tremendous amount of a learning curve anymore, because digital can be amazing even with super cheap cameras and shitty photographers with a little bit of good luck, you gotta bring it, man. And you aren’t.

I agree with the naysayers here. Your work is very bad. It’s fauxtog/front page material.

Don’t take it too personally though. It’s not like you are the only one. There’s an entire fucking website devoted to it.