For the purposes of this post I am referring to the quality of a photograph. Of course, even here there are many meanings. The technical quality of the image or of the print, the quality of the seeing or even the quality of the camera or lens used? And so many more. 

Before I tackle this in present terms let me run you through some history. As a career photo teacher my most used criteria when looking at student work was: is it sharp? This didn't mean sharp edge to edge, just sharp where it was meant to be sharp. This was usually due to the student not focusing the enlarger properly in analog days. On a deeper lever the quality question would be about the student's intention. Did he/she have one? Often they didn't. Mostly it was a form of "because I liked it", which doesn't help much. Later on students would learn to push back, to engage with me about what their intentions were, but a student starting out had no experience to draw on. Since I was the teacher, the one who "knew", my yes or no was usually  definitive. "Do it again" or "this print is out" in an edit usually was the kiss of death.

Teaching beginning students in the use of the 4 x 5 view camera was one of my ways to approach quality and I did it for years, both at Harvard and later at Northeastern. This difficult, bulky, slow, exhausting, recalcitrant tool taught "slow and steady", "meticulous", "disciplined", "procedural", "contemplative", "clean" and "planned" photographing whereas the 35 mm, or its digital equivalent, taught almost nothing, at least initially. If a student shot ten film holders (20 frames) in a day that was a big day whereas hundreds were child's play in the smaller format. Quality was the game and 4 x 5 was the way.

These days quality is a lot harder to determine. Hell, those that judge quality are a lot harder to figure out. For instance, I believe I am qualified as I've made the decision yes or no my whole career as a teacher. I was actually trained to critique, to teach and to evaluate. But many are deigned qualified to determine the excellence of an image because of the position they've appointed themselves to be in. Wow. Think about this: Bozo A has money, likes photography, but no training, buys a photo magazine. All of a sudden people are seeking Bozo A to tell them whether their pictures are good or not.  This is potentially really hard on someone who knows a lot and is a wonderful artist. Happens all the time.

Call me old fashioned but I still look to a really superb print as an arbiter of good quality. I want to know that the work I am seeing is well done, that there is high craft at work, that its maker knows what they are doing. And I still look to the photographer being the printer as I am usually suspicious of someone else printing someone's work. Of course, someone else printing your work can be done well, perhaps even better than you can print it yourself, but this involves close interaction with the printer to carry through with your intentions. Not for me, at least not yet.

On another level, assuming the photographer has passed the first test, is to look and see if the artist had intention and if so what it was. If there was thought, instinct, intuition perhaps, that went into the picture then was it successful, meaningful, smart, funny, insightful, deep, beautiful and so on. Pass that test, then on to the next: was it provocative, lasting, mysterious, something that would draw me to it again and again over time, was it moving, possibly infuriating, enigmatic, sumptuous, gorgeous, and so on. You get the point. 

Quality 

Perhaps it is determined through the eyes of the beholder as in different standards by different people.

Searching through the Oxford dictionary I found these in the Thesaurus section:

1the quality of life: standard, grade, class, caliber, condition, character, nature, form, rank, value, level; sort, type, kind, variety.

2 work of such quality is rare: excellence, superiority, merit, worth, value, virtue, caliber, eminence, distinction, incomparability; talent, skill, virtuosity, craftsmanship.

3 her good qualities: feature, trait, attribute, characteristic, point, aspect, facet, side, property.

You've done them, right? Had a private showing of your work to friends and colleagues. Maybe you know of a few people who bought your work before and you have new work you'd like them to see. By invitation:

A glass of wine, a beer, something good to eat, great conversation, some introductions, no big deal. A Sunday afternoon (when there's no football game), perhaps after work on a weeknight, a time to unwind, do something a little different and look at some art. Take some care how you prepare. Nice lighting, something good playing at low volume in the background. Perhaps even a few portfolios to look at that are well edited, beautifully printed and clearly presented.

Over now many years I've held these with varying degrees of success. I had one last year that almost no one came to, but other ones have been very good. No, this isn't just about selling your work, although that is a bonus if it does happen. It is about getting your work seen. 

Look, what's the point of good work languishing, sitting in a box somewhere unseen? If you're excited by something you've made that is really good and significant a gallery is not the only place for people to see it, it is just one of the places. Most galleries have long lead times and plan their shows far in advance. Few galleries can adapt quickly, show new work soon after it's made.  Even an exhibition space in a library or a hospital has a line of people wanting to show their work there. Then there is framing and an artist statement and a press release too: it all gets so formal (to say nothing about the expense).

Have a party, invite your friends and past supporters of your work. And show your work. Don't have a place to show your art? Find a room in the town hall, a meeting room in a church or synagogue, borrow the use of a conference room at work. Get industrious. Maybe you can get that gallery owner to come see your work, or that museum curator. Hint: offer to pick them up and return them. Too busy with the prep for your invitational art party? Ask a friend to do it. I've done this in Boston over the years. Chances are the curator will appreciate that you are making it easy for them. 

Invite anyone you can think of that will be moved by your work. Even strangers. Make sure you pester them with reminders about the event coming up. Each time you do that include a new amazing picture in your email or the card you send them. If you do send a card, make it be beautiful. The party is just one time but the card lasts and lasts. A curator I sent the card to of the barn in the wheat field didn't come to my party but years later I saw it on her bulletin board at her desk. 

Finally, think about it this way. You are a practicing artist making what you believe to be your best work ever. But you get shut out every which way you turn. The galleries won't see you, the museums are worse. The portfolio reviews are expensive, abusive and debilitating. Take control. Bring the people to you. Kill yourself getting it all together to have have your showing and only 13 people come? That's 13 more than if you'd done nothing. And who knows, maybe this one will start a tradition of you having one of these every couple of years or so. I say, go for it.

Wisdom. Seems like we have more older people with wisdom than ever before:

Mary Catherine Bateson is a writer, a cultural anthropologist, and a visiting scholar at Boston College. Her books include With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the bestselling Composing a Life, and Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom.

Living longer, we face choices never dreamed of by our grandparents or even our parents. How will you use the unprecedented freedom of your "found" years? "We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn," says Mary Catherine, author of the bestselling Composing a Life. She speaks of  how to transform a life into a journey that inspires, invigorates, and brings joy to yourself and others. We seek to learn to recognize and release expectations and stereotypes that no longer serve as we confront the big questions: What do I care about most deeply? What is my true purpose at this stage? Will I be a solo player in life or part of an orchestra? 

Professor Bateson is the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. She speaks about this new phase in our humanity, these "found years" where we live longer and have the ability to function fully beyond what was true in the past.

Being in this phase I can relate to that and believe I am capable of wisdom, at least in my field, my chosen professional interests as an educator and artist. Unless I am found to be senile. You readers may be the judges of that.

Yes, I have worn two hats over my whole career.

Educator and artist.

Not so unusual these days. I am sure many of you feel this way if not three or four hatted. Passionate about what earns you your salary, what you practice when you can (maybe photography in some form), perhaps parenting and the role you play in your children's lives or in managing your aging parents or a difficult sibling or loved one. And so on. Different hats.

But Bateson's premise rings true at least to this senior citizen. The anthropological fact is that we are living longer and in that living some are living longer with all their marbles and considerable physical abilities too. What does that mean to us in our society? She proposes some optimism for us in issues like climate change for she believes the aged may possess the wisdom to understand the extent of the crisis we are in. After all, my generation not only has caused some of it so we may be part of the solution. 

I find myself thinking that there may finally be some possibility of gun law reform and a national movement to get Congress to enact laws that limit their ownership, activity and use.

I made this several years ago at an air show at the Otis Air Force base on the Cape. The US Army had set up a recruiting booth and there were several guns arranged on a counter that you could fake shoot at a target. These boys were loving it. I made a few pictures from behind but it just wasn't working. So I walked around to the back of the booth and saw there was a gap right next to the target.

I am writing in response to the most recent massacre in Roseburg, Oregon. Another in a long list of killings by a single shooter. This must stop.

Years ago when Jim Fitts was the director of the PRC (the Photographic Resource Center) in Boston I submitted a large framed print of this image for their annual auction. The PRC auction was one of the first auctions in Boston created to raise funds for a non profit and certainly one of its most prestigeous. Farther back in years I had worn a tuxedo to one as I had been instrumental in the PRC being donated a Frederick Sommer print for the auction. Sommer prints sell for astronomical amounts. That was a good year for the auction.

At any rate I got a call from Fitts telling me he wouldn't put my print in the auction show. Right away I thought he was "censoring me" and was prepared to go on about free speech and this wasn't right. After all, they'd invited me to submit. He reminded me that this was a fund raising auction and that the print was atypical for me and to keep my eye on the prize, which was to raise funds for the PRC which desperately needed the money. Not to make controversy. I took the print back and instead submitted a wheat field picture which subsequently sold and made money for the PRC. Of course, he was right. Thanks Jim.

My point and what Bateson is saying? That as we live longer and retain our abilities to function fully in our society we as seniors are a huge and significant force in making policy and changing laws. And we vote.

This one below made in July 2014 on a kayaking trip down the Connecticut River on the border of New Hampshire and Vermont. I beached the kayak and walked up a mostly dry stream bed and found this:

We need to act on this issue of guns in our society. Right to carry? 2nd Amendment guaranteeing rights to own guns? The NRA? Law abiding gun owners? Or students in class asked what was their religion, then shot in the head for answering wrong? Obama's right. Make this the single issue in your vote for your representative in Congress. Don't like that person's stance on guns? Make clear your belief by voting them out.

We need to be wise about gun use. Other countries are.

Bob Dylan sings the times they are a changin' over and over again in a refrain on a record made in 1964. He was singing about the civil rights movement. Of course, things are always changing but something happened the other day that drove the point home about how things have changed in my world, the world of photography.

I headed out route 2 on a photo day. Late summer and glorious weather, big billowy clouds, not hot and not humid. For those of you that aren't local Route 2 starts in Boston and is four lanes heading west until about mid state then it turns into two lanes. It roughly parallels the Mass Pike but runs farther north. It continues all the way out to Williamstown at the western edge of the state. (I have been making aerial photographs along the length of Route 2 for a couple of years. To see these go here and to read about the project go here.) I wasn't very far out when I pulled over to drive through what used to be the US Army base at Fort Devens, now largely privatized with small companies, some residential housing and a business park. I pulled in at a sign that said Mirror Lake, parked, got my camera and walked down the dirt trail toward the lake. This was one of those, "I don't know what's there but I'm never going to find out unless I go down and check it out" walks.

I got down to where the trail opens up to see the lake on my left. I took a picture, not trying to do anything more than show this idyllic late summer scene:

I heard a woman's voice "Can I help you?" off to my right. I looked over to see a middle aged woman walking towards me, her hair pulled back in a pony tail, wearing a smile and shorts and a Mirror Lake T-shirt. I said that I was a photographer and just looking things over on this beautiful day. She said, "I can tell you are. You don't see many people with a camera these days." Bang. There it was. 

The big boys, or what we think of as the big boys, Canon and Nikon, are having trouble selling cameras. The whole field of point and shoots is almost all gone. DSLR sales are not terrible, but the market caters to us that are the shooters and our numbers are small compared to the amateur market. Smart phones have taken over as the camera of choice for most. What made the Nikons and Canons and others profitable over past years was the sale of millions of cameras to the amateur market. The cameras we use are halo products, made to set the bar high for those wanting better cameras so they can be "better" photographers and for pros, which most of us are. Sony is making some serious inroads into this more traditional model with big chip, smaller and mirrorless EVF cameras now. This is where most of us, as pros, are headed in the near term, those of us with our big heavy DSLR bodies and lenses. Can't come too soon for me. But Canon and Nikon and some others are way late to the party.

But she's right, of course. You don't see many people with cameras these days. Cameras in phones are just plain good enough for most now and we've always got our phone with us, don't we? When I stopped in at the Ale House for lunch in Gardner, MA later that same day after shooting with my too big and heavy Nikon for a couple of hours I put it down and pulled out my phone to see if I'd gotten an email, texted a friend, took a picture with it to share with another friend, ordered my food, looked at Facebook on my phone to see what what was up, ate my meal, paid and went back out with my too big and heavy Nikon to make more pictures. The only reason I need the DSLR is because I make prints, and usually large ones. This too will change.

The Times They are A Changin'.

I don't usually write about photo equipment. But for the past couple of years I've been using something that is way cool and that you may not know about. Briefly, most of you know I worked with an 8 x 10 view camera for 25 years. I photographed using 2/14 (120mm) systems as well and occasionally shot with  4 x 5. I  switched to full time digital in about 2006 and work with a DSLR system full time now.

My dream when moving on from all that time working with 8 x 10 inch sheet film was to have a smaller camera capable of the same or close to the same levels of quality within my lifetime. Drum roll please: for all intents and purposes that dream is now a reality. I am able to make large prints of close to the same level of quality as prints made with an 8 x 10 inch view camera. Bang!  Digital capture has come a long way.

What a remarkable thing. But there are limitations to standard cameras like DSLR's  as well. Cameras such as these fix the relationship of the lens to the image plane in a parallel configuration. This can be very  limiting. No correcting for convergence, no Scheimpflug principle. Don't know what that is?

Here is Wikepdia's answer:

The Scheimpflug principle is a geometric rule that describes the orientation of the plane of focus of an optical system (such as a camera) when the lens plane is not parallel to the image plane. It is commonly applied to the use of camera movements on a view camera.  The principle is named after Austrian army Captain Theodor Scheimpflug, who used it in devising a systematic method and apparatus for correcting perspective distortion in aerial photographs.

You may need to be  sitting down here: by tilting the lens you can increase sharpness from foreground to background without stopping down the aperture to increase depth of field. Sharpness from close to far with the lens wide open? Yup. The pebbles in that gravel driveway sharp on out the horizon with my 50mm lens set at f2? Yup. I'm not lying. View cameras can do this and, if you've snuck a look at the picture of the lens below, you probably are thinking that it will allow this as well. Yup.

I ram referring to modern perspective control (PC) lenses, sometimes called tilt/shift lenses.

I use the Nikkor 24mm f3.5 PC lens. Wouldn't it be great to be able to make view camera adjustments with a small camera? Well, you can. The Nikkor lens shifts up and down, and, when rotated, swings side to side. The lens also allows you to look up or down but the  photograph you make looks as though you are parallel to the surface. That's good because then the edges of the building will stay parallel instead of converging. Want to shoot straight on through that window and not be reflected in the glass? PC lens. The PC lens also tilts, taking the lens out of being parallel with the camera's sensor. It can also swing if rotated. Wish you could shoot straight out from your toes to the horizon and hold it all sharp? PC lens. Imagine being able to hold things sharp from foreground to background without having to stop the lens down.

For this one taken at the Russian River in California I used an 8 x10 camera tilted for sharpness using the Schiempflug principle.

Hand holdable? Yes, but not easy. The lenses are manual focus and the adjustment knobs are small. I've done it but its easier and more precise from a tripod. What else do you need to know? Because it can tilt and shift quite far you can vignette the image and, as at times you are using the lens at the edge of its circle of covering power, the image can also get quite soft, or blurry. Normally, this is my sharpest lens, particularly used without tilts and shifts. Also, these are pricey lenses, in the range of $2000. Nikon makes them in three lengths, 24, 45 and 85 mm. Canon too. Canon also makes a 17mm. These lenses are used most often for architectural photography by pros. But that doesn't mean you can't do great things with them. Finally, what about using a PC lens for selective focus? Using one to make the picture blurry in places where you don't want your photograph sharp. To make only one small thing sharp. Easy with a PC lens. This is the primary principle behind the whole company called Lensbaby; selective focus. Last point, you could rent a PC lens to try it out.

Series of mine where I used this lens? Sconset, Nantucket and Baldwinville (under the pseudonym Marc S. Meyer). One more thing. Tired of always having the foreground in your pictures? Want more sky without pointing up? Did Marc (sic) use a PC lens to reduce the foreground in the Baldwinville pictures? Yup.