On 2011-04-12 20:58 , Jim King wrote:
This blog post by Erwin Puts rang a few bells for me, and I suspect it will for
some of you as well:
http://www.imx.nl/photo/page152/page152.html\
okay -- i'll bite; i find Erwin Puts' essay to wishy-washy; it's
internally contradictory; he seems to romanticize film process as if it
were purely intuitive, yet he then warns against "common sense"
Puts seems to define professionalism as technical mastery (to me it is
as much about ethics, efficiency and emotional detachment), but
accepting his definition, i would disagree with him overall that
technical mastery must conflict with craft
this is hardly unique to photography -- i think of how a grounding in
CPU instruction sets and binary logic, of which i'm rarely conscious
these days, gave me confidence and trained my mind for much more
abstract programming; and i think of how my rudimentary technical
knowledge of sailing has held me back despite a strong intuitive sense
of the helm from an entire teen-hood of intense practice
i think there are many valid paths; one wonders if Puts' self-expressed
attunement to film and exposure came about without any rigorous
technical work ... that can happen, but when it does it usually comes
from intense, if intuitive, practice and/or that unconscious genius
which silently computes and internalizes technical knowledge for a few
lucky people (as it struck me when Bob Sullivan recently commented that
Gallia's "gonna be mighty good by the time she's a teenager, and she
won't really know why.")
so genius can "take care of it", practice can breed intuition without
technical understanding, and study of details can allow one to rise
above details; or any combination thereof
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
[email protected]
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
