Saturday 6 August 2005:   Wandering around Powell camp­ground just west of the crest of the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho, en route to Missoula Montana and beyond. I'm strolling through the paved areas with my camera in my hand and an old fellow bicycles by and says, "Oh, taking pictures, are you?" And I say, "I'm trying." And I wonder, what kind of pictures are left to take?

Stomping through a vastness of greenery, one gets a lot of pic­tures with green in them. Or pictures with a lot of green in them. Thick forests are so naturally monochromatic.

Ah, nature photography — nature photography has been DONE. Lots of talented people with fine equipment have scoured the surface (and near-surface) of Earth, photographing nature.

And what else is there? Portrait photography, scientific photo­graphy, astrophotography, marine photography. Landscapes, city­scapes, people-scapes, animal-scapes. For so many of these: THEY'VE BEEN DONE ALREADY! People and animals have been posed, structures have been approached with corrective lenses, tableaux have been built and staged.

I posit that, in terms of creative work, straight (un-manip­ulated) photography is finished, caput, muerte.

We of course have the nearly endless variety of human form and face and action and dress. And thus as long as people continue to look and act interesting, then interesting picures may be snapped of them or constructed around them.

But with straight photography DEAD, that leaves the technically exotic. Specialized lenses and filters and receptors — great macro, great tele, great wide-angle — narrow and/or shifted segments of spectrum, pushing the boundaries of light — radical power levels.

Of course there's the traditional manipulation of picture elements: careful setting-up of an image, placement of objects, the manu­facture of a viewpoint.

Every picture tells a story, don't it?

All the above lies in the realm of capturing the image. The other domain of creative image work is in editing, manipulating, reconstructing — post-production. These after-work technologies, techniques, approaches, have long been in the purview of motion picture production. It's studio work.

Renaissance artists had their production-line studios, structured in much the same way as modern cinema studios, with in-house and contract specialists, the work directed in its entirety by an individual or collective auteur, but the labor performed by crews of grunts, er craftspersons. Is it likely that serious still photography will go in the same direction, following the lead the the Warhol and Coombs art factories?

Or, since filmic auteurs with camcorders and computers and digital editing software can now construct serious productions in a backyard and a laptop, is it likely that the current cinema studio system will DEVOLVE, with serious work emanating from creative individuals or small teams with many cheap tools?

Major music labels once had studio production systems with in-house orchestras, arrangers, music directors, and many techincal and artistic specialists. And now we have talented individuals and small groups turning out and marketing their own hits,.without such studio-system backup, except maybe to handle the advertising. Again, will filmic production go the same way? And what are the implications for still photography?

For that, we have to think about whether a viable market for stills centers around glossy image journals; or glossy image books of maybe the coffee-table sort, or up-to-the-minute broadcast / cable news with gripping frames grabbed by citizens on the scene with their cellphone cameras; or the vast numbers of publications that consume and display tremendous amounts of imagery.

And/or pictures that go straight to Web, that go into private or public online galleries; or that illuminate news and feature pages, evocative and illustrative and (self-)promotional pages, crank pages and exploitative pages — the whole gamut.

So, except for pictures of news value or personal value, WHO CARES what an image is or looks like? Should the straight photographer be reduced to setting up pictures of funny animals and people in hopes of scoring placement on a WHAT'S ODD NEWS page on a media website? Should the experimental photographer try a mix of art and porn and abstraction, with vivid titles to gain the attention of fast-surfing web-browsers?

The present-day artist refuses to die.
 —Edgard Varese, RIP

I would ask, is still photography *in toto* dead? Except that there are enough slow-connect websites, paper publications, and static wallposter spaces, to absorb vast amounts of still imagery. Ah, but with the advent of high-bandwidth wireless connections and dynamic digital paper, still photography is probably eventually doomed.

The next question is, will that doom come about in my probable lifetime, in the next 40-50-60 years? Consider that digital photography effectively didn't exist 20 years ago, only started reaching consumer markets less than 10 years ago, and has really only become omnipresent and ubiquitous in the last couple years.

And how could it become MORE ubiquitous? Not just with cellphone cameras and pen cameras and the like, but with camera implants. First, an imaging element set in the front of your glasses frame. transmitting wirelessly to a recorder in your pocket. Then, the camera set into your face, looking like another piercing, another decorative stud, recording to a memory chip array implanted in your body, the contents of which can be offloaded to a remote device whenever you wish.

And eventually, a direct splice into your nervous system, to your optic and aural nerves, where your implanted memory array is just that: supplemental memory. Scenes that you have seen and heard and recorded -- you can go into that memory for instant recall at any time. Data from elsewhere can be loaded into that array for your recollection also.

This is all kind of old science-fiction stuff, having language chips or technical expertise chips or personality chips that you can swap-in as desired. At which point the photographer is definitely also the photograph.

Some of this sort of equipment will undoubtedly be implanted in animals also, for research and for espionage. Your spy-cat and spy-dog, and spy-rat and spy-bat and spy-frog, wandering around in territory about which you wish to know more.

As long as it's just the sensor and recording equipment, fine. When we start doing neural splicing, giving animals enhanced memories and skill sets and cybernetic communications links, WOW! We can extend the realm of operational technological telepathy, wirelessly linked cerebral implants, between not just humans, but humans and animals.

And to what else? Do any plants (such as predatory venus flytraps) have effective nervous systems? Would a suitably equipped giant sequoia or coast redwood tree take VERY slow pictures? Would they want to record their songs? Who or what would want to listen?

Again, some of these are very old science-fiction concepts and questions. But we are reaching the point where they can be implemented in the foreseeable future. Will wirelessly linking consciousnesses together create a hive-mind? Can that hive-mind encompass many species and order of life? At what point does life on Earth become one big soul? And can you take a picture of it? And who would want to look at that picture?

But that takes us far afield. We have the basics: tight closeups of sweaty flesh; geometric constructions based on classical proportions; colors that seem to throb; amusing postures and expressions of various lifeforms; carnage and ruin and decay; vacation snapshots. Floods of images, images of floods. Simplicity and complexity, clarity and confusion. Everything mercilessly photoshopped until it's artistic. Apply another digital filter, kids.

A good word is worth a thousand bad pictures.

Other Photo-Thoughts

• If sales aren't important, art is no problem.
• An experimental photographer / videographer, like a poet who reads in public, probably has other nasty habits.
• Avant-garde music and radical imaging techniques have a lucrative home in commercial cinema. Just don't expect audiences to pay any attention.
• There's always public access cable.
• In some towns you can staple small posters to phone poles. At least someone might see your images.
• Is your work just plain shit, or is it really fine shit?
• Perhaps you can smuggle your art into a gallery or museum. It's been done!
• Print your images on stickers and place them in toilets and urinals. Everybody can be a critic.
• Everyone likes pictures of animals, children, sea shores, and dead leaders and celebrities. Trees and clouds work too. Combine these freely and you, too, can be popular.

The moving photon writes, and having writ, vanishes.

Friday 16 December 2005:   For awhile now, I've been making photo panoramas and stitch-ups with the PhotoStitch 3.1 software that came free with my Canon S9000 printer. PS31 is fast and easy. But it has trouble with complex or large arrays, and requires that all the input shots be fairly carefully aligned and overlapped. I've more recently been using the free demo of AutoStitch which can take any number of shots aligned any which way, and piece them together... eventually. Not for the impatient.

Why photo-stitch? Because with the little point-n-shoot (PNS) digicams I have available now, that's the only way to build pano­ramas or other wide-aspect images. Also to build high-resolution images from lots of lo-res snaps. Also to get some special effects, like wrap-arounds of adjacent shots, almost like 3D.

Meanwhile, online, I found photo-artists' questionnaires. Guess I'll answer these insipid questions. But why?

Questions and Answers

• Roots? Post-WWII suburban southern California
• Age? Just past 56 (but it ain't the years, it's the mileage)
• Marital status? Hooked
• Place of residence / work? Volcano CA and Bisbee AZ
• Education? I grew up in Dad's darkroom, sorta; some arts in highschool and college; otherwise self-educated, even as an Army photographer
• Photographing since when? Late 1950's; more-or-less seriously on-and-off since mid-1970's
• Cameras used? Exclusively digital now; back in my chemical photo period, my faves were a 1934 German Kodak Retina, an Olympus PEN-FT (half-frame SLR), and a Yashicamat
• Favorite settings? posterizations, high-contrast
• I would like to meet who? Andy Warhol (too late)
• Favorite (portrait) photographer? Annie Liebowitz
• I take photos because? Probably because I must; challenges of visualization, manipulation, and chance
• What photos hang in my home? An old hacienda, and a street scene I shot in Germany in 1975; in the Bisbee house are various local scenes; otherwise we mostly hang paintings and drawings and lithos and fabrics (handmade art)
• Music on right now? Some classical-jukebox stuff off the Sacramento public FM station
• Last seen movie? Some Italian thing; will see KING KING soon
• Book last or now read? THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS: The Conflict Between Word and Image

Also, I've noticed certain features about photo portraits, which seen to follow rules. How can those rules be broken? All these rules can be compiled as decision tables; for a formula portrait, just consult the table. So, is a formula mandatory? If we chart the formulae used for most portraits, what other combinations are left?

Portrait Photography Rules

• Subject and background may each range between colored, or partly colored, or monochrome
• Background may be plain, or more-or-less mottled, or complex (constructed or 'found')
• Number of subjects may be one, two, or more
• Subject(s) may or may not be clothed
• Subject(s) may or may not be holding or doing something
• Subject(s) may or may not be adjacent to something other than the background.

Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away.
 —Paul Simon