I'm not sure the title of this commentary is actually true, but it does point to a thought that can be helpful. In essence, how we make pictures is constantly changing since the first days of photography. Technology marches on, continually, relentlessly. The content of what are photographs portray, the artistic content, remains relevant and possibly even innovative even after the passage of decades.

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Here, deep in the age of media, doesn't it seem obvious that there is a raging and ever-present contest for our attention. Consider the next hour of leisure in your life. What will you do with that 60 minutes? Watch TV? Read a book? Listen to some music? Go shopping? Spend time with your friends or family? Or, will you dedicate those 60 minutes to looking at art, especially photographic art?

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There now exist so many different media we can choose for the output of our photographs. These choices imply that we need to process our images with the output medium in mind. An image intended for a small scale phone/screen presentation is likely to require different processing than if we intend to make a large scale framed print. We could possibly have a dozen different completions with any given image, each produced for a different kind of presentation.

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Over the years, I've talked a lot about using a camera like a Xerox copy machine. If your photograph shows me what I would have seen had I been standing next to you at the moment of exposure, how does your photograph bring me something new, something from you, something valuable?

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I can't blame camera manufacturers for wanting to call our attention to their new features. However, it's amazing how many times the new features they brag about have absolutely nothing to do with my photography. It seems as though there are always technical solutions being offered for non-existent problems.

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Here we are in that week between the Christmas and New Year holidays when a lot of people take time off from work for a few personal days. For years, I thought of this week as a time I could concentrate on some darkroom work. I'd leap into the week full of enthusiasm in anticipation of a shower of creative ideas and inspiration. That's when I learned that relying on creativity on demand is a strategy that rarely works.

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LW1486 - Alternative Aesthetics

Photography has a natural aesthetic we might call photographic realism. The typical photograph is intended to mimic human vision and that aesthetic is the default for most photographs. There does exist the possibility, however, to borrow aesthetics from other media and forms of artistic expression. Recently I've been playing with a dark and moody aesthetic inspired by the look of film noir.

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Every Picture Is a Compromise, a series at www.brooksjensenarts.com.

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"How to" tutorials and camera reviews are everywhere on YouTube, but if you're interested in photography and the creative life, you need to know about the incredible resources you can access as a member of LensWork Online.

Clearly I'm not the only photographer who has dreamed of a single lens that would do everything I need. The popularity of so-called "superzoom" lenses would demonstrate that. I've tried several superzoom alternatives and all of them have left me unimpressed for one reason or another. Even with today's ultra-advanced lens designs and manufacturing tolerances, it seems there is always a compromise that leaves me unsatisfied. Statistically, however, in the last 8 years I've made 92% of my captures with just two lenses that cover the "superzoom" range of focal lengths.

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During one of the first Christmas holidays after my divorce in the late 1980s, I drove over to Eastern Oregon on Christmas Day for a little photography. I made one image that day. It took years for me to understand what that image was, but in many ways it changed my relationship with photography profoundly. Among other things, that image taught me that sometimes a photograph can be personally valuable yet have no impact beyond that. That doesn't diminish its importance to us.

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I was looking at an astronomy website when it introduced me to a term and concept I'd never heard before. Describing the resolution of an image based on how close the spaceship had come to one of Saturn's orbiting moons, it said that each pixel in the photograph represented five meters worth of subject matter. I've never thought about "pixels per meter" before. I think there is some value in this idea for us terrestrial landscape photographers.

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