darinboville

[darinboville]

Book Review: Coming and Going by Jim Goldberg

Jim Goldberg’s new book, Coming and Going, is a mess. It’s a mess of photographs, a mess of handwritten text, of notes, letters, a mess of collages of photographs often hundreds of images to a page, a mess of people I have no idea who they are, a mess of little details related to the page in ways that only Jim knows. The book is a mess from its front cover, throughout its three hundred and sixty…

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Book Review: Pier 24's Photobook of Photobooks

Oil paintings don’t look that great in books but photographs do. This is part —but only a part—of the reason why photobooks are ubiquitous in the photo art world. No other art form seems so naturally inclined to the printed page, no other art form is so augmented (it is hoped) by being placed in sequence, a turn of the page informing the previous image as it reveals the next. Take a stack of…

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My Things-to-do List

When I post about my photo projects it all comes out nice and neat, one project following another, all neatly lined up and each progressing from milestone to milestone as if I have some spreadsheet charting each day’s goals and metrics to measure my progress. (I should, come to think of it, but I don’t.) Of course, in the real world, it’s all a sort of a mess, one project moving forward today,…

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Want to Subscribe? Please Try Again.

Housekeeping note: If you’ve tried to subscribe in the past but never received a confirmation e-mail or that e-mail arrived too late, please try again. There was an error in the settings of the mailing list service I use and they did not clearly notify me that the problem existed. Some people would get e-mails to confirm their subscription, some would not. I think I have fixed it. If you haven’t…

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Go to the Show (in Lancaster, California)

Doing anything between this Saturday and December 29th? If not, head out to Lancaster, California, and see the Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees exhibit at the Museum of Art and History (MOAH). It’s part of a Getty-funded initiative that explores overlapping areas of art and science (an idea that is near and dear to my heart, of course). Featuring the work of forty artists—I have four pieces…

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Find Something Wonderful

A local church, off Highway One in Half Moon Bay, is known for its yearly book sale. I try to go whenever I can and I’ve found many cool things over the years, even when I arrived late. During the pandemic they stopped holding book sales but, at last, they started up again this past weekend, and I found several “winners.” The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, by…

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Book Review: Photography Is a Generous Medium

Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel CoenPhotographs by Lee Friedlander, edited by Joel CohenPublished by Fraenkel Gallery, 72 pages, published in 2023Purchase via the Fraenkel Gallery page (preferred) or via Amazon I think it was in the book Friedlander First Fifty where I read that Lee Friedlander puts his prints in various boxes, categorized by various keywords—chain link fence, pick-up trucks,…

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What do Infrared Photographs in HDR Look Like?

Some photographs look more or less the same in HDR with perhaps a few specular highlights growing lighter, the photograph looking maybe a tad more lifelike than before. Infrared photographs, however, seem born for HDR. The white of the photographs, indicative of a high degree of IR reflectivity, comes alive with the new highlight headroom. To experiment with this I made a few snapshots in IR…

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The Top 10 Posts

A little over four ago I started this blog with no better plan other than I wanted to do a “Covid Project,” and I began by writing a post where I begged for a bigger camera: I want a camera that tells me if what I am shooting is good or bad, whether the idea is dumb, tells me whether it’s been done before. I want a camera that takes away the slogging through thousands of images, a never-sleeping…

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Book Review: A Maker In the Desert

scott b. davis: sonora by scott b. davis132 pages and 93 images, Published by Radius Books in 2021 Book information and purchase page at Radius Books or see the Amazon listing There is a useful exercise, when learning photography, where you choose any random location—a street corner, a meadow, a parking lot, the hallway in your home, really just anywhere—and your task is to create ten…

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<I>Owlscapes</I> Revisted

[This page is graphics intensive and may take a few seconds to load.] I’ve been exploring my own images, looking again at work I thought was finished, converting works to HDR to try to better understand this new technology and what it means to my own photography. HDR still photography—the “HDR” stands for “High Dynamic Range”—is a still image that takes advantage of the expended brightness…

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SDR and HDR Comparison Video

Did I mention I couldn’t sleep? Understanding HDR still images, though it seems easy, is hard. We’ve spent many years looking at SDR images, agonizing over SDR images. We pondered the colors, the sharpness, all manner of subtleties, but we didn’t give much thought to brightness levels, to the idea that we were working in an old, old, paradigm based on cathode ray tube TVs. To help give people a…

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Books On My Desk: Buried Things in the Sand, Buried Things in Your Mind

Egypt and the Holy Land in Historic Photographs. 77 Views by Francis Frith.Introduction by Julia Van Haaften, Selection and Commentary by Jon E Manic WhitePublished by Dover Publications, 1980 Frith was an English photographer in the 1850s who made images of the Middle East, scenic views of the day that, a hundred and seventy-five years later, are so much more than that. This thin Dover…

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Owlscapes

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What Do We Call AI-Photography?

We need a name for this new thing, this new way of generating photo-realistic images. That name sure isn’t “photography.” There is a great outcry amongst the Twittering masses over this question, every photographer now a philosopher, ontology replacing cryptocurrency as the consuming topic of both those who sense photography’s death and those who see its technological rebirth. AI-photography…

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Landscape Words and a Fellow Traveler Teaches

From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry LopezPublished in 2023 by the Sheldon Museum of Art (at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment Review written during the rainstorms of early 2023. I’m writing this review by headlamp, the vignetted illumination giving a backlit glow to each of the images of the book. I feel that I am in a…

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The Many Images of The Black and White Forest

Now that the photography portion of my project, The Black and White Forest, is done all I have to do is sift through the thousands of images to find a few that are worthy of being the Chosen Ones. I hate this part. Stanley Kubrick once called the process of making a film a “slog” and at this point in any project I know what he meant. The first cut is easy—just delete anything that is obviously…