An Almost Rant About Medium
The photograph above is not a perfect one. In fact it is the result of a mistake. I took a photograph of my granddaughter Rebecca at the Great Salt Lake with a Dresden-made swivel lens panoramic called a Noblex (company went bankrupt). It uses 120 film and the size of the negative (or transparency) is 2¼ inches wide by 7 inches long. I used b+w film and when I scanned it I added red and yellow to get the colour you see here. The other image within the image if of Bryce Canyon. I forgot to advance the film while not knowing that the double exposure option button was in effect.
The photograph is not ordinary. You can like it or not. But you will not find too many pictures like it in social media or here in Medium.
My rant (the almost one) is that because many of my blogs are tagged as photography or are in my Medium Photography Publication I get the Photo of the Day in my Medium Feed. The photographs are predictably narrow panoramics that feature landscapes and cityscapes. The portraits are in the same format and all are absolutely perfect. In some cases the photographs have a watermark like John Doe Photography. This latter feature reminds me of group photographic exhibitions in my neck of the woods (Vancouver) in which some of the photographers would put their business card on the wall by their photograph. Ugh! None if any of the photographs in those essays drop my jaw or inspire me.
My other rant are the essays that are illustrated but unattributed and that mostly are again that social media perfection in which women have no skin pores.
I am from that other century where we photographers worshiped Richard Avedon, Philippe Halsman, Irving Penn, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank and Helmut Newton. Lucky for us Annie Leibovitz is still alive to keep the memory of photographs that have style (an identifiable one), elegance and longevity in those of us that remember good things.
