If you don't make prints are you a serious photographer?

[Mike Buckley]

Maybe my thoughts on "serious" work is that if it is serious, it deserves to stand on its own, in print.

That's a really helpful context and not one that I remember seeing or thinking about. I would amend the thought for my use to be that one way to describe the overall effectiveness of an image is to state whether it deserves to stand on its own in all formats. Notice that there is no helpfulness, at least not to me, in attaching a label to it such as serious or not serious.

[RBSinTo]

For the purpose of the discussion I can say that I never make prints of anything I photographer, and I consider my picture taking to be very serious.
I really don't understand this type of idiotic pontification.
One could just as arbitrarily pick a brand of gear, a particular focal length or even photogenre and assign to it and those who use it or practice it as being serious or not.
To my mind this is another one of those Kardashian threads: a thread for the sake of a thread.

[Tronhard]

Hi Wayne:

I really appreciate your efforts to engage with me on this.

I take your point about Balog on several counts. What I was reaching for was that his work was published essentially to get to an audience using non-printed images, and they had to be so for, as you correctly point out, the stills were joined together to make a time lapse presentation. The fact, under the circumstances that this is the only way it could have been done, points to the value of the softcopy.

I absolutely and completely agree with your comments about social media. That is a whole subject on its own and probably not for this forum. Let me just say that I worry (and did so as the parent of a teenager some years ago) about the amount of material people publish about themselves on the web. Not to mention the frustration I feel as they all queue up to take "selfies" of themselves, obscuring whatever I want to photograph!! In my IT work I do a lot of stuff in the area of security, and the risk that people take with what they reveal about themselves is a big issue. Still, I must admit I had not focused on that type of publishing in my comments. In terms of the softcopy I was looking at people who create images that will not be printed on paper, but do so with the same care and attention, and targeted on correctly configured screens to be viewed in a similar way to printed images, i.e. not a quick slide show. As I mentioned in my first post like the NatGeo Wildlife Photographer road show display.

I must admit to a personal interest here, which I did not want to inject into the discussion as it is about me rather than the principle. Years ago I had operations on my eyes to correct myopia. The laser surgery was successful in sharpening my vision but at the cost of burning out some of the photo receptors in my eyes, and further it did not extend widely enough to cover the full dilation of the pupils. As a consequence I am somewhat night blind, as the pupil gets wider that the corrected area and my brain has to interpret corrected and uncorrected vision. Since then I could not read a normal book at night and have depended on backlit screens to be able to see text and images at night. When I look at prints in anything but bright light I see them as quite dull. So that led me towards putting stuff on screens. Now that is not a cop out to justify my supporting for printing for larger screens, I think they are a great way of seeing images now and will only get better in the future. What I want to say is that I put the same care and attention into my digitally viewed images as one would for a print. The results appear in my home on decent-sized high quality screen, just like framed prints. I have never disputed the value of prints, I just want the value of what I, and those like me, do to be accepted as a serious effort too.

The discussion began with the plaintive comments by my club VP and editor that I listed in the first post. He was decrying the loss of entries into print competition and I think he was trying to use statements as listed to influence people to engage, but did so without limiting his comments to his agenda re: competitions. I took issue with the generalized nature of the statements as a set. So I don't compete and if I did it would not be in the form of prints.

One of the real benefits of debate such as this is it challenges us to really see the various issues, to establish definitions that are so often taken for granted and become the issues themselves. For me it goes right back to the definition of what is photography? We all know the rough translation from the Greek being painting or drawing with light, but that leaves a lot of manoeuvring space... painting with what and on what? As I understand it the practice of using light to create images goes back to the Chinese with the use of a type of pinhole camera and shadows to create lines that they drew or painted on. Sure they did so on some kind of hardcopy but they didn't use a modern camera. Most of us don't use film any more but I still encounter a few people who say that the art lies in the film era and the chemical darkroom, and who won't touch digital if you paid them! So photography has moved on with technology, but we still call it photography, and it still embraces the same general stages of capture, storage, enhancement and presentation.

In the end I think I have evolved one understanding that I hope we can all live with. We all love the process of creating images using light, and we should celebrate that shared creative commonality above all. We do so for different reasons: to document, influence, or express ourselves through artistic creativity. Some choose to compete and some don't. We do so using different capture technologies and to different media. Whether something is "serious" photography or not is very much a subjective opinion, and I think the label should be focused on the effort put in to be creative and achieve excellence rather than medium it is done on - which is where I find common ground with your comments about types of media uploads. I hope printing on paper continues and I hope that the use of digital media (i.e. publishing to screens) will develop with the technology. It shouldn't be a competition, or a camp that one belongs to.

Because photography involves both art and a technology there will inevitably be debates as to the relative merits of one technology vs. another. While debates continually rage as to the best brand or type of camera equipment, it is clear that people see merit in both paper and digital media, and debates will rage on no doubt. What I expect is that what technologies we are debating now may not be the ones in, say, 50 years' time, but we will have the same debates! The pace of change is ever increasing and being prepared to embrace change is itself one of the biggest challenges we face, as it comes at a pace never before seen in our history.

[chauncey]

I rarely have anything printed...simply due to lack of knowledge. The myriad of substrates available,
to me is mind boggling...what type of image looks best using what paper confounds me.

It's taken me eight years to become reasonably adept at PS and I still haven't learned proper color
schemes...the "art of printing", and I do consider it an art form, if done correctly, would seem to be a
skill that, time wise, would seen to be beyond my degenerating mind. Ergo, I don't print.

[Tronhard]

For the purpose of the discussion I can say that I never make prints of anything I photographer, and I consider my picture taking to be very serious.
I really don't understand this type of idiotic pontification.
One could just as arbitrarily pick a brand of gear, a particular focal length or even photogenre and assign to it and those who use it or practice it as being serious or not.
To my mind this is another one of those Kardashian threads: a thread for the sake of a thread.

Hi Robert:
Thank you for your constructive and considered input! It is always good to get more positive feedback about a post that you have a choice to engage with, so we appreciate your efforts in doing so. As you say you have some difficulty comprehending the content may I inquire if you took the time to read it all, or just the start and then skipped to the end? If this is a "thread for the sake of a thread" may we take it then that your contribution is a post for the sake of a post?