  | 05 July 2012 04:34 |
| BaileyK Model  Location United Kingdom Hertfordshire | http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168894/Shoddy-genius-Photographs-taken-U-S-Olympic-team-slammed-disgraceful-wonder-mistakes-deliberate.html |
| 05 July 2012 05:14 |
| Mike_Dainty_ARTIST Photographer  Location United Kingdom Merseyside Liverpool | One of the secrets of being (or seeming to be) a good photographer is to never show your bad work. (Doh! just give that secret away) Sometimes though good photographers DO, either for effect or because they just don't give a flying fig.Hope this copy and paste works on a discussion here but if not look in our forums for An egg whisk and a sink plunger http://www.purestorm.com/forum/readThread.aspx?id=157908 Mike. |
| 05 July 2012 06:38 |
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| gerryquiff Photographer  Location United Kingdom Lanarkshire Bonnie Scotland | That what happens when you offer TFP for important pictures  |
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| I got a hot rod ford, and a two dollar bill; And I know a spot right over the hill. Theres soda pop and the dancings free So if you wanna have fun, come along with me. | ||
| 05 July 2012 06:38 |
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| Spike Photographer  Location United Kingdom Hertfordshire St Albans | The story of "The Emperor's new clothes" springs to mind.  |
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| "Photoshop is there to cut diamonds, not polish turds" | ||
 | 05 July 2012 07:47 |
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| Lysander Photographer  Location United Kingdom West Midlands Wolverhampton | Deliberately subversive.  If only he'd used a camera with a dirty sensor, instead of apoplexy, his critics would have suffered aneurisms.  |
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| "I would rather be Schroedinger's Cat than one of Pavlov's Dogs." | ||
| 05 July 2012 09:24 |
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| kt101 Photographer  Location United Kingdom Hertfordshire Borehamwood | Probably trying to set a new trend. OOOOPPPSSSS. Hold on. The GWCs have already done that. |
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| What do I know about photography..... I'm a mechanic/milkman/driver/dogsbody. etc. etc. etc. | ||
| 05 July 2012 17:10 |
| Mike_Dainty_ARTIST Photographer Location United Kingdom Merseyside Liverpool |  |
| 06 July 2012 14:29 |
| ayearepee Photographer  Location United Kingdom Wiltshire Salisbury | Ouch. I'm firmly of the opinion that he really is a terrible photographer, and that the stuff about being an unconventional artist is bluster. Now, he won an award for this photo: http://www.cas.sk/clanok/159611/fotografa-preslavil-zaber-obamu-v-prahe-na-miesto-cinu-sa-vratil.html And taken in isolation it's really good. Stylish, clever. Reminds me a bit of this famous photo by David Burnett, of Al Gore, taken with a Holga: http://www.davidburnett.com/fmsetgallery.html?gallery=Holga%20Eye But the rest of David Burnett's work is superb. He's got an eye. Perhaps he had to shoot hundreds of images to get this one, for example: http://www.davidburnett.com/detail.html?sortNumber=16&gallery=The%20Presidents%20&skipno=0 But he knew to exhibit that one and not the others. In contrast, looking at his gallery and on Google and so forth this other guy's work is uniformly mediocre. His award-winning photograph of President Obama was a fluke after all. He has a limited stock of bad ideas. He also took this photo of a tennis player whose face is obscured by a ball, which I've seen before: http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/7/6/30/n1759504.htm It's one of those pseudo-clever things you see on internet modelling sites. One of those ideas that seems cute for the first split-second second, but the more you think about it the more stupid it is. Judging by Google Images he's basically an events / red carpet shooter, although he doesn't even seem to be good at that: http://goo.gl/xYdgo The pictures look as if he was standing next to the official photographer. On a cloudy day. He doesn't have an eye. No personality. Any small-time school football photographer or school portrait photographer could have produced equal or superior work. The Olympic images are doubly bad. I've seen plenty of high fashion photography that looks awful at first glance, but you can tell that there's something going on; there's a vision, and as time goes by you can appreciate it. But with this stuff you can see exactly what he was trying to achieve, and you can see exactly how badly he failed. Which is worse than failing utterly, in my book. I mean, students at art school quickly learn that if your artistic statement is vague enough, no-one can tell whether you succeeded or failed. This chap wasn't smart enough for that. They look like the source images shot for movie posters or DVD cases or magazine covers, with the expectation that they're just a template for the Photoshop work - the *real work*. Now, perhaps they really *are* source images that were leaked without his say-so, and for some reason he's decided to pretend that he's infallibly brilliant. In which case he's a rubbish spin doctor. Perhaps he annoyed someone at AFP, and they decided to destroy him. Whatever the case I can't see the White House asking him to photograph the president any time soon. Another thing. The report says that the chap "has been a photographer for more than 20 years". Given that he was on assignment for AFP he presumably has some talent - persistence? - but I can't count the number of portfolios here and on The Other Leading Modelling Site which blather on about how the photographer has twenty, thirty years of experience. In fact it's usually "over thirty years". Never fifteen or seven or twenty-eight, always "over thirty years", that very formulation: http://goo.gl/i9mVM Nine thousand results. "Over thirty years". It's suspiciously consistent and not particularly impressive; after thirty years of plugging away at something I would expect either and incredibly well-developed individual style or absolute technical mastery, but that's seldom the case. |
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