naophoros Posts
I have really been interested in black & white recently. I just shot a wedding, and could not help changing many of the photos over to black & white, because they just looked better, if you know what I mean. I have also created my first black & white gallery for the website, using some yet unseen photos from the streets of Sanjiang, China.
Not too long back, I listened to an interview with Phillip Jones Griffiths, the honored war photographer who published Vietnam Inc. In watching the interview, he had some interesting comments about black & white photography in photojournalism, some things I had never really thought of.
I have just put up a gallery focused on Chinese guesthouses. It is not going to be displayed in any national art gallery, but it is a fun, photographic look at something that is a very engrained part of my life in China. And honestly, I fear that China’s development is going to destroy the quaint, stoic guesthouse and turn it into some smutty, cheap lodging.
With so many of my travels taking me deep into the Chinese countryside, I usually have had not choice but to warm up to these little guesthouses, because there has been no other lodging option in town. The beds are nothing to write home about, the bathrooms are notoriously awkward to use, and the neighborhood environment is often a little to karaoke-loving for me. Still, as I say in the gallery itself, it hits somewhere close to home.
I have thought much about this topic the past few weeks. I have heard countless digital photographers say there is not a need for filters anymore, because the desired effects can just be edited on the computer in post-processing. Some traditional folks take it too far the other way and say that filters must be applied to the original shot and cannot be created in a computer.
I land in the middle of that debate. Some filters cannot be replaced and change the photo in such a way that would take days in the computer, if even possible in the first place. Other filters are pretty much pointless.
