Heath Robinson vs Rube Goldberg

Or how I learned to love photography.

Old photographers will remember the sorts of things that we did in the darkroom to produce the special effects. Weeks spent gathering equipment, chemicals, containers, tanks, agitators...months spent sealing the space against the ingress of light - while letting the most aggressive of the poisonous fumes escape...hours spent trying to get the negatives to register accurately in the gate of the enlarger or he paper to register accurately on the easel. Then the clean up afterwards. Scrubbing the stains out of the bathtub before the wife discovers them...

Now we just download a plug-in app and click the mouse. All over in a second and no scrubbing. All the fun has evaporated.

Well, no, it hasn't. Not by a long way. We now have the wireless link and the WiFi and the iPhone  and the hot spot and all the other horrors of modern electronics. In the interests of saving the lives of copper miners by reducing the amount of cables that are needed, I have prepared a plan for the best selfie ever.

1. PocketWizard transmitter in pocket firing a...

2. Camera with a transmitter firing...

3. Several speedlights wirelessly, in full TTL, with frosting and sprinkles, while the camera is...

4. Recording the image on the WiFi card that sends the image off to the computer that...

5. Sends the image automatically to Facebook, Twitter, and Google who then pass it on to...

6. ASIO, NSA, the FBI, the KGB, Mossad, M.I.5, and Julian Assange while simultaneously...

7. Sending it to the Epson 3000 printer that whirs away while...

8. It goes to the cloud where it then rains down on your iPad, and iPhone.

All this within a fraction of a second. No smells, no stains. The bathtub is pristine. Your bank account has a hole in it but that is the price of progress. Cheer up - with on-line banking you don't even have to go to the local branch. You can stay at home and press the shutter release a second time.

The first shot will cost you $ 8900 but the second brings it down to $ 4450... a snip!

We Love Photography - We Hate Cockroaches

You can be forgiven for wondering at the conjunction in the title - our shop slogan with crawling insects. Leaving aside speculation about the characters of the sales staff, I can explain.

Someone in the shop asked me how I got good results for belly dance photographs and images of model cars. I think they wanted me to tell them a secret of a special lens or a special light - an item they could buy to improve their own pictures. I was delighted to tell them the secret, but it did not involve selling a piece of equipment - it involved selling an idea. And the price was cheap.

The real way to get good images of anything - cars, cockroaches, brides, or belly dancers - is to either love or hate the basic subject. You can choose for yourself which emotion you fancy, and you can freely switch between them as you like - provided you really do care one way or the other.

If you don't - either through general lack of interest in any topic or burnout from long exposure to it - any pictures you make will show this. And the people seeing those pictures will perceive that disinterest. That's a powerful clue for them to let them know how they should react to your work, and they will comply readily. If you don't care, they won't either, and you have wasted everybody's time.

I think this is a pretty good explanation for a number of photographic books and monographs that I have seen in bookstores in Melbourne over the years. The old Printed Image bookstore in Prahran had shelves of them - the NGV bookstores at the main gallery or their Federation Square branch are also pretty good ...errr...dump bins. Okay, not every picture book is Cowboy Kate but some of the depths of banality that are plumbed by small publishers...

Not talking about vanity photo books or self-publishing here - the things that we make of our holiday snaps or our hobbies. These actually have some substance - the audience may be limited to a family, club, or individual, but the book is often intense and treasured. At least the thick ones can be used to swat cockroaches with.

Heading image: Thanx to Jane and Henri