Here I wrap up a diaristic overview of our 2006 vacation to Kentucky and Texas (and parts in between), the first part of which is here.
On vacation
The immediate family and I have been on vacation for about 9 days now, in the States. I had meant to try to write periodic updates on how the trip was going, but internet access has been spotty and well, I’m on vacation!
But here are some highlights and various notes, more for my benefit than your erudition perhaps:
*This year’s vacation finds us on the mainland US, as opposed to our two previous ones which were to Hawaii. We’re visiting my father who lives in Western Kentucky. We also made a drive west to Texas to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area to visit relatives, which is where I’m now at as I type this.
I object, your honor
Knowing me and my curmudgeonliness when it comes to photography as well as my friend Dirk does, I was not surprised to see his little “shout out” to me in his recent post about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography:
although my friend Higashimori [my sometime online nickname] is bound to object, with good reason as always
Dirk didn’t specify what exactly I might object to, the example of HDR that he posted, or the idea of HDR photography itself. But with such an invitation to object, who am I to show up to the party and just stand in the corner, so let’s object to both!
The photo itself is okay, just that. The shot is not really that interesting and I fail to see what positive (or negative for that matter) effect the HDR “filter” has had. (There are others in this user’s “photostream” I perhaps would’ve chosen over this one but no matter). It certainly is not as “amped up” as it could be, and I suppose the photographer can be credited with employing a bit of subtlety in a genre usually so sorely lacking of it. But it still announces itself as HDR, and I don’t think it would ever transcend that.
As for the current flavor of the month (or year), HDR, it strikes me as a fad not much different than that “tilt-shift” god-awfulness that was making the rounds of design mags and Lomo/Holga-esque websites a few months back. (Or is that shit still going around, I lose track of these trends). As Dirk noted, when used in moderation the HDR effect can be nice (I can’t go as far as to use his word “remarkable,” however), but that’s just the trouble: with trends like this they most often are not used with restraint. It mostly seems to be about who can pump up the volume and out-HDR the rest. Or who can rack up the most “cool photo” comments on Flickr. The mutual admiration society that is Flickr only serves to attract even more artiste-wannabees for whom “awesome photo” is only a plug-in away. As Dirk writes, “You run the software and you’re there. And so is everyone else.”
Just taking a spin around some of the HDR groups at Flickr (there are tons of them, including a few “no HDR” ones), I can’t help but be underwhelmed by the sheer mediocrity of it all. It’s like a whole bunch of folks just discovered they could buy a “paint-by-numbers” kit at Wal-mart and kid themselves they could paint. For what purpose, other than to prove to themselves they could follow a tutorial and do it? If the vast majority of HDR photos didn’t look like something just this side of black light posters, would the Flickr-ites even be paying much attention? But hey, as long as the “community” thinks it’s a “great use of HDR,” then who gives a shit, right?
As you may have noticed, I’m at the point where Flickr annoys me, and it may well be that my reaction to HDR is being colored by my feelings about the portal. Would I be so bothered if the galleries at photo.net or fredmiranda or luminous-landscape were being inundated with this pastiche of pretentiousness? Well, yes, I would. That said, it does strike me that Flickr and HDR are somehow part and parcel of the same problem. What “photoblogs” were a couple of years ago to Coolpix users posting artful and oozing-with-meaning shots of their back porch dappled in sunlight, Flickr seems, with its “groups” to gather users and their photos together, and its much-ballyhooed “community” aspect providing the seal of approval, the perfect echo chamber in which to incubate banality masquerading as profundity.
I’m sure there will come along something else to tickle the fancy of the Photo 2.0 crowd in no short order, and then it will remain to be seen whether there will be a separating of the wheat from the chaff (or pixels from the halos if you prefer) and we might be able to experience HDR work that engages one on a deeper level than simply “look at me.” But if I were a betting man, I would put my money on it dying under the weight of its own trendiness.