"I'm like, Dude, I got my axe. That's all I need." You say that like it's a bad thing. Go out and use it. Then you can write about photography!

"For me the problem of work like this is that it is documentary but not expressive." This is not the first time I've seen you post something to this effect - as if you have a downer on documentary photography, but the first time I'm not deleting my reply. Why is that a problem? Why does photography have to be 'expressive'? Whatever that means. What's wrong with photographs being documentary in nature in order to clearly illustrate what things look like? That can be done while still making photographs that work as pictures. Which possibly makes them even better as documents. There's a trend for art-documentary photography that is trying to be expressive, or 'poetic', that fails to tell you anything about the subject because it's trying to work through metaphor or some such nonsense. What you say about the passage of time is a good point. Old photographs, regardless of technical or artistic qualities become fascinating to look at because they show us things that no longer exist. I'm probably not making myself too clear as this subject really needs a lot more thinking about, but my point really is that looking at or taking photographs which are 'inexpressive' documents is just as worthwhile as looking at or taking those which aspire to the condition of art. I'd say it's an even more worthwhile use of photography for amateurs and hobbyists as they can record the quotidian stuff that gets overlooked, striving to do that in a way that makes their pictures a little more polished than the casual vernacular snap. The hardest thing, though, is finding a way to preserve the resulting pictures. Hard copies of some kind, even if not your beloved 'fine prints', seems the most likely one. Photography is an egalitarian medium. Don't make it elitist.

Some photos 'work' and some don't. Trying to explain why they work (and giving it a fancy sounding name) might be intellectually interesting, but it doesn't help anyone take others that also work. It's like inspiration, you can't force it. The trick is to recognise it when it turns up and grab it with both hands. But it won't turn up if you don't point your camera at something. [I think I would respectfully disagree with "but it doesn't help anyone take others that also work"—because so much of the work of photographing is editing. After you work a subject and have a hundred pictures from that motif or idea, you still have to decide which one is the one. —Mike]

What's needed when it comes to making pictures is a little less conversation and a bit more action. [Well, the conversation part is the part we do here. Along these lines, my former teacher Mark L. Power described the working process as, "Think, shoot, think." The shooting part is important, but so is the thinking part. --Mike]

Maybe for the same reason/s that people shoot anything in black and white in 2024.They think there's a 'look' to it that digital can't provide. As if a 'look' is more important than pictures...

I have a theory that engineer types lack a sense of humour/humor. It's kinda looking like theory and practice are the same.

"What is notable about these vernacular family photos is that they overwhelmingly have zero aesthetic merit." There's more to photographs and photography than aesthetics and, as MJ wrote in an earlier post about documentary, "personal expressivity". I've been using cameras since 1976. As I've got older I've come to appreciate photographs that are primarily about what they depict far more than those that have been made for solely aesthetic or expressive reasons. A casual snap of a family member may be treasured far more than a carefully staged portrait. There's a world of photography beyond that of the serious photographer and the gallery world. We should treasure vernacular photographs. Those taken on smartphones might not survive as long as prints of old. Which will be a loss to future generations. Of course there is no reason a photograph taken to show something can't be made with a view to aesthetics and/or expression. Form following content. I realise I'm not making myself very clear but elitist attitudes to photographs, an egalitarian medium if ever there was one, really get my goat.

https://www.anonymous-project.com/

Free worked for Daniel Meadows. But different times, different style? https://www.danielmeadows.co.uk/gallery/photographs/portraits-from-the-free-photographic-omnibus-1973-1974/portraits-from-the-free-photographic-omnibus

I've stopped trying to make 'art' or 'great photographs' or whatever you want to call them. Now I prefer to record what I see around me, the everyday and unremarkable, because, having aged, I realise it might well be gone tomorrow or next week (as might I). It feels a more useful reason for an amateur/hobbyist owning a camera than making attempts at art that will be appreciated by a handful of similar photographers. This approach does require the pictures to be made retrievable. Which is where DIY zine and book publishing comes in handy. Which is a whole other topic.

You lost me at "CIE 1931 is the big color blob in the background." [There's a Wikipedia article about it. CIE 1931 was the first thorough attempt to quantitatively link wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum with psychologically perceived colors in human color vision. It's represented by the colored background shape in that graph. All you need to know is that shape represents graphically "all the colors the human eye can perceive." The superimposed triangles then represent the limits of the colors encompassed by the various standard color spaces. Is that clear? --Mike]

I watched the Sam Abell video again, or half of it, after I realised that I wasn't getting the same thing from it as I did on first viewing. I now find that kind of 'classic' photography as outdated as I do the stuff that informed my taste in the 1970s - HCB etc. Although his advice about the details of making a good picture are sound I find his compositions look contrived and self-conscious to me now. Too much about themselves (and how clever the photographer is) and not enough about the subject. If they were really good you wouldn't notice how cleverly they'd been composed. At least Abell shoots in colour.... [I always felt similarly about Garry Winogrand. He talked a lot about "getting out of the way" but his composition seemed contrived to me. You could always tell a Winogrand, even when it wasn't one! To me, his friend Lee Friedlander was the one who put me in a place and let me see it. I more readily felt the "thereness" in Friedlanders from the street. At least Winogrand shot in B&W! :-) So what informs your taste these days? --Mike]

Towards the end of his life I overheard my father tell someone that he had been "a failure, but a happy failure". That'll do for me.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b084j8yq

Kenneth Tanaka: "Pay attention to what you’re putting in that frame, and where you’re putting it. Everything in the frame matters. Forget 'pretty.' Does it communicate what you want to say or depict? Does it record what you want to remember in, say, years to come? That’s the main purpose for using a camera for most of us." That's the quote of the week for me. :-)

You don't have to take a wrist watch out of your pocket to look at it. Unlike a pocket computer aka phone. Expensive watches are not timepieces they are jewellery. You can get a perfectly reliable watch for a lot less that $100 - like under £20.

"The majority of the greatest photographers in the medium's history were or are art photographers, and they account for the majority of the photographers the public knows about and cares about. " Really? I think you are looking at it from inside the photo-world bubble. In the UK a common comment to anyone with a 'good' camera for many decades (and still for those of a certain age) would be to say, "Who do you think you are? David Bailey?" Another photographer's name I might expect non-photography people to know here would be Don McCullin. The only others might be Martin Parr and Rankin. While these might have their pictures shown in galleries I'd class Bailey and Rankin as commercial photographers, McCullin as a photojournalist and Parr as a documentary photographer (although he plays the art game). One interesting thing about photographs is that depending on their context of display they can fit in different categories. A commercial, reportage or documentary photo can also be an art photograph. TBH I don't think the majority of the general public give a toss about big name photographers or art photography. I make Peter Wright bang on the money. Poetry and 'art' really don't have much relevance to the lives of most people.

Worse than not knowing what you're good at is knowing what you do best, but not liking doing it and wanting to do something that you know you aren't as good at or even unsuited to doing.

That was all far more confusing than any camera menu I've come across.

I'm far less interested(as in hardly at all) in how photographs 'look', lenses 'render' and other such airy-fairy matters than I am in the formal construction of a photograph and how that affects what a photograph is a picture of, about and has to communicate.

Auto ISO and ISO beyond 400 which isn't a grainy/noisy mess.

I think I found it on Facebook after getting the GDPR nonsense. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=234414541362864&ref=watch_permalink

KNEE-kon in the UK? Everyone I know says NICK-on.

Old joke. Sure I heard it on an archive episode of Hancock recently.

“The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band” ― Brian Eno