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Re: [OM] Potato Photo

Subject: Re: [OM] Potato Photo
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2016 14:36:06 -0800
On 1/21/2016 11:42 AM, Tina Manley wrote:
Maybe I should quit all of this hard stuff and just photograph potatoes:

http://petapixel.com/2016/01/21/this-photo-of-a-potato-sold-for-over-1000000/

Reading further, does this mean that if I'd managed to slip the print I stood in front of just a few years ago under my shirt and get the few steps out of the museum ... ;-)

Worth more than the amusing art print I bought nearby, anyway.

Of course, he did more than one shot before getting what he wanted, or at least ended up printing, and may have printed more than one; so I don't know if the one I was looking at was "the" million $ one.

What interested me at the time was the placement of this image in the show. It was about the transition from Pictorialism to more "photographic" images started by Group f64, with examples from pure Pictorialism forward, in a number of cases, by the same photographers, as their work changed. The Nautilus was included in the Pictorialist section, which surprised me, but seemed to me at home there.* Although shot over several hours at f64, it does not have the cutting sharpness of many f64 images, but more a slight softness of detail and magical, glowing light.

A question could be how much of the magic was the photographer and how much 
slight movements in the subject. :-D

'Due to the technical limitations of the film and the camera he used, he was forced to make extremely long exposures that were easily ruined by vibrations. Weston's grandson Kim Weston said his grandfather propped up the shell on the end of an oil drum (the arc of the drum can barely be seen in the background of the image),^<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_%28photograph%29#cite_note-5> and the thin metal oil drum head was sensitive to the slightest movement. Weston expressed his frustrations in his 'Daybooks/:/

   Wednesday, June 15: "Yesterday I tried again: result, movement! The exposure was 
4^1 ⁄_2 hours, so to repeat was no
   joy, with all the preoccupation of keeping quiet children and cat, ‒ but I went 
ahead and await development."

   The next day: "The shells again moved! It must be the heavy trucks that pass 
jar the building ever so slightly.
   Anyway, I have quit trying: I can afford no more
film."^<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_%28photograph%29#cite_note-6> He recorded that over the next several months he made fourteen negatives of shells. It's not known exactly when he took this particular image, but it had to have been made between April 1 and June 8, 1927, when he recorded in his journal "Last evening I had printed, and am ready to show all shell negatives…"' <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_%28photograph%29>

Missed Opportunity Moose

* Just checked the decent reproduction in "125 Photographs", and it agrees with 
my recollection.

--
What if the Hokey Pokey *IS* what it's all about?
--
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