Horse Apples

The trend over on Luminous Landscape has, for a while now, been veering sharply away from my interests. Today, it veered even more sharply, with this post on the “What’s New” page:

It seems to me that most amateur photographers aren’t terribly excited about stills / video convergence. That’s OK – they don’t have to be – yet.

But for working pros it’s another matter. A just published article in the pro journal PDN, titled Seeing RED, looks at how sometime National Geographic photographer David McLain used the ultra high-definition Red One camcorder to shoot a print and video campaign in Baja for clothing company Horny Toad.

A new business opportunity is emerging for professional shooters and a new art form is developing for adventurous amateurs. Ignore it at your peril.

Stay tuned.

Uh huh. Ok, let me be the first to say it. I’m vaguely interested in video, in the sense that one of the blogs I follow closely, Doug Plummer’s excellent Dispatches, is reporting on Doug’s forays into video. Doug’s a very interesting guy, and for quite a while now, I’ve read with rapt interest not only about Doug’s photography but also his involvement in dance, and his neighborhood, and his learning about video. I don’t think Doug’s going to win a Pulitzer for his blogging, but he’s really smart, writes well, and works really hard, and he shares both the ups and downs of what he’s thinking and doing. And as a result, if Doug writes about photography, I’ll read about photography. If Doug writes about dancing, I’ll happily read what he writes, despite the fact I don’t dance. And if Doug decides to write about doing video, I’ll again happily read about it.

And, I admit, I read about cameras like the Red with some interest. I’m a technology guy, and so reading about new technology is always on my list, regardless of whether it’s new, inexpensive video technology or carbon nanotubes used to build space elevators.

Except for that minimal interest unrelated to my artmaking, though, I have no interest in video. I’d like to think I’m a pretty serious amateur photographer, but I still have no interest in video. I’m not saying it’s bad for other photographers to be interested – I think if they are, that’s fine, and if they aren’t, that’s just dandy too.

But this business of most amateur photographers not being terribly excited about still/video convergence, and how “that’s ok – they don’t have to be – yet.” And how a new art form is developing for adventurous amateurs, and I ignore it at my peril?

That’s a big, fat pile of smelly, steaming horse droppings. No amateur photographer on the planet can be even the slightest bit at peril because of some much ballyhooed ‘still/video convergence’. That’s arrant nonsense. What peril, exactly, could there be? If I continue to take walks around my house armed only with a still camera, and I continue to sit in my workroom and make still prints, will the still/video convergence storm troopers come and take me away?

I mean, what the hell could happen? Galleries will stop showing my work? Hell, galleries don’t show my work NOW. They can’t stop until they start. And, to be honest, I don’t much care that I’m not showing work in galleries, or getting book deals, and so on. The rewards are self-generated, and I don’t see that changing just because Canon managed to cram HD video capability into a camera body that I might buy for reasons entirely unrelated to that feature.

Here’s my advice for the people who, like Reichmann, are intent on making me feel anxiety about some meta-theoretic still/video convergence.

I will point out that, when word processing software made it easy to type and format both poetry and novels using the very same computer and software, no one was stupid enough to natter on endlessly about a ‘Poetry/Novel Convergence’ that would leave both professional and amateur writers behind if they didn’t breathlessly leap on to the bandwagon. Poets did not suddenly ‘ignore the poetry/novel convergence’ at their peril.

And so when you try to crank up my interest in this stuff by making me anxious or afraid, what you actually do is convince me that you’re ’round the bend and I should start ignoring your website and stop reading your nonsense.