Benski wrote:
Well just going totally off piste, I think this belief that consumerism, greed, commercialism.. are sicknesses, goes totally against any objective interpretation of the data.

There is no need to interpret:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LuZYeaJhj8

You see, all these charts and speakers are more or less a form of propaganda. In that sense they are not objective but rather aim to make people believe that everything is fine, going in the right direction etc by presenting a particular aspect in an easy form. The same way the church says "Just surrender yourself to us and everything will be all right. Trust me." That's the game all leaders play, so they have more followers to support them. But just because one has a TV and a smart phone instead of a cave life doesn't mean that inwardly he is still not the same. As you see in the video (and million similar ones) - we are the same savages, just in a different cave. That is the kind of sickness I am talking about. Remember also that one strives for outward abundance when one is inwardly poor. So having more material things is not necessarily a sign of health. That doesn't mean we should become monks, that is the other sickness (the reaction), again: 0 and 1. We seem to have difficulty with balancing, having the right amount we actually need.

Well there are these concepts like creative theft and decontextualisation. 50 years ago William Burroughs was advocating creative theft and cutting up other people's work, and today half the music we listen to is samples and cut-ups. And the only measure is whether people still connect with it, and whether it's relevant to the world today.

But if one just takes something from another - what is one creating? It seems to me these are again clever verbal excuses. People connect with porn sites all the time, they also connect with drugs, with silly selfies with 5000 likes etc. Is that creative? I don't think appreciation of the masses has any significance at all. There can be no measure for beauty. The moment you measure you have turned it into a commodity.

One of the biggest problems with retouching I think. Photographers assume you can add the extra 10-20% to the work, and stop chasing it themselves.

I wish it was only 10-20% It seems to me they often expect 500%.

BTW it is amazing there is a thread where we can talk about various things but someone may find this inappropriate off-topic

anchev wrote:
There is no need to interpret:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LuZYeaJhj8

You see, all these charts and speakers are more or less a form of propaganda. In that sense they are not objective but rather aim to make people believe that everything is fine, going in the right direction etc by presenting a particular aspect in an easy form. The same way the church says "Just surrender yourself to us and everything will be all right. Trust me." That's the game all leaders play, so they have more followers to support them. But just because one has a TV and a smart phone instead of a cave life doesn't mean that inwardly he is still not the same. As you see in the video (and million similar ones) - we are the same savages, just in a different cave. That is the kind of sickness I am talking about. Remember also that one strives for outward abundance when one is inwardly poor. So having more material things is not necessarily a sign of health. That doesn't mean we should become monks, that is the other sickness (the reaction), again: 0 and 1. We seem to have difficulty with balancing, having the right amount we actually need.

Videos like that are just the media effect: we get to see the worst dozen things happening in a world of nearly 7 billion people.. Populations are much more easy to control when they believe there are constant outside threats and a general decline – so there's a need to keep people fearful – whether it's Orwell's 1984, with the continuous, pointless wars; North Korea making its people believe they're fighting constant US threats; Russia's paranoia, etc. And we do it too.

I know a lot of people like to dispute the economic data, but global life expectancy supports the figures, and that's much harder to manipulate. The average Chinese lived to 48 in the 60s, not they live till nearly 78. That's an enormous change in the quality of life, freedom and options available, and it came from free market economics.

We think violence and chaos rule today? Again, the media is how we know the world, and it's as edited as any Hollywood film. Steve Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature presents this very unpopular (but statistically valid) argument that violence has actually drastically declined in this era – there's never been a point in human history when you've been less likely to be killed in combat or experience violence:

But if one just takes something from another - what is one creating? It seems to me these are again clever verbal excuses. People connect with porn sites all the time, they also connect with drugs, with silly selfies with 5000 likes etc. Is that creative? I don't think appreciation of the masses has any significance at all. There can be no measure for beauty. The moment you measure you have turned it into a commodity.

If we say we can't measure, then it all becomes relativism and subjectivity – nothing more than personal whims.. Which sounds a lot more like advertising and commercialisation to me, being that not trying to create anything of lasting value.

William Burroughs describes the job of the artist to expose people to what they know but don't know that they know.. So you can take examples like James Joyce – back in his day critics thought he was unreadable, now we use all those techniques (non-linear storytelling, abstraction) in US TV shows.. So it takes people like Joyce to challenge the status quo, then move society forwards.. The measure is your influence on future work.

Likewise people used to attack modern art with their umbrellas. Now we see work no less abstract than Pollock on CD covers. Again, I wouldn't see the ultimate commercialisation of art as a bad thing. I think the likes of Warhol celebrated commercialism and populism in an artistic context, and I think Japan's one of the most creative and open cultures in the world, despite being bombarded with commercialism from all angles.

I wish it was only 10-20% It seems to me they often expect 500%.

BTW it is amazing there is a thread where we can talk about various things but someone may find this inappropriate off-topic

Ha, it often is 500%.

Benski wrote:
The average Chinese lived to 48 in the 60s, not they live till nearly 78. That's an enormous change in the quality of life, freedom and options available, and it came from free market economics.

It says increased quantity, not quality. Living longer doesn't mean living better. It also needs clarification: what is better. Today's problems are much more complicated than the problems people had in older ages. The technology we have and which improves the basic aspects of our life but creates havoc in other aspects. It is a huge topic, we can't possibly go into all that in a forum thread.

We think violence and chaos rule today?

No? What happened to Die Hard 4?

Again, the media is how we know the world, and it's as edited as any Hollywood film. Steve Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature presents this very unpopular (but statistically valid) argument that violence has actually drastically declined in this era – there's never been a point in human history when you've been less likely to be killed in combat or experience violence:

Yeah... now the point we reached is to face a global extinction (ecologically and otherwise). The people who create the wars are those who talk about how safe the world has become (hear the clapping in the hall). I don't know any of those names you quote and to be honest - these stats are quite superficial to me. Violence is not just a butchery. There are hidden, subtle forms of violence. It is not about the expression but about the inward state. One can hurt another deeply with a word, with a look, with a hand gesture. Again it is not something we can discuss casually and make a conclusion about just by looking at someone's charts.

If we say we can't measure, then it all becomes relativism and subjectivity – nothing more than personal whims.. Which sounds a lot more like advertising and commercialisation to me, being that not trying to create anything of lasting value.

Is the beautiful sunset that makes one stop and forget about everything advertising and commercialism? Can you measure it? Or is it more objective to look at something measured by the market, e.g.:

http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-roth … ion-2015-5

And what value have the 5000 likes on the silly selfie? You see - the measure itself is the subjectivity, just in larger scale. The sunset doesn't need appreciation or a number. It is there and it will be there long after we are gone. We have also measured this:



but we can't possibly grasp it. To us it is just an image on the screen which we look at and say "oh, how nice" and move on to the next one.

... then move society forwards.. The measure is your influence on future work.

Forwards to what? Isn't that another illusion? We create the idea of forward movement and conform to it.

Let's better talk about LUTs

anchev wrote:
It says increased quantity, not quality. Living longer doesn't mean living better. It also needs clarification: what is better. Today's problems are much more complicated than the problems people had in older ages. The technology we have and which improves the basic aspects of our life but creates havoc in other aspects. It is a huge topic, we can't possibly go into all that in a forum thread.

But then the danger of talking about more abstract aspects of modern life (things that can't be quantified and backed up with data) is that it's very difficult to say anything about the world.. Our exposure to it is so localised and limited, and informed by a media which has virtually no interest in providing a balanced or realistic perspective .. As the old saying goes: We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

If you've not seen it, I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on this. Swedish professor and statistician, Hans Rosling, using some very modern techniques to look at data on the modern world. He's famous for an experiment in which he demonstrates that monkeys (by guessing) know more about the world we live in than university graduates, and it's a very close call with professors. So on data alone, there's a huge gulf between belief and reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI

Yeah... now the point we reached is to face a global extinction (ecologically and otherwise). The people who create the wars are those who talk about how safe the world has become (hear the clapping in the hall). I don't know any of those names you quote and to be honest - these stats are quite superficial to me. Violence is not just a butchery. There are hidden, subtle forms of violence. It is not about the expression but about the inward state. One can hurt another deeply with a word, with a look, with a hand gesture. Again it is not something we can discuss casually and make a conclusion about just by looking at someone's charts.

Again, you need data (how good it is is another matter) to get a perspective that reaches beyond our own bubbles, or the theatre of mass media.. What some psychologists say is that our perceptions of threats, paranoia and anxiety really come because, as a species, we're not used to having it this easy .. We evolved in a much more violent, hostile environment than the one we find ourselves in today.

The environment is really a problem of population. You either need most the world in extreme poverty, or you need a much smaller human population. And we can't forget extinction events are relatively common on this planet, and that we're already 9/10th of the way through this planet's inhabitable period due to our proximity to the Sun.. So my optimistic view is that in creating challenges for ourselves, we'll develop the technologies necessary to terraform other planets. Better than being complacent and getting wiped out by a meteorite.

Is the beautiful sunset that makes one stop and forget about everything advertising and commercialism? Can you measure it? Or is it more objective to look at something measured by the market, e.g.:

http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-roth … ion-2015-5

And what value have the 5000 likes on the silly selfie? You see - the measure itself is the subjectivity, just in larger scale. The sunset doesn't need appreciation or a number. It is there and it will be there long after we are gone. We have also measured this:

Isn't it so frustrating you can never really catch a great sunset in a photo? Likewise a moon or stars .. You can make pretty pictures, but in shrinking a sunset down to a little frame, it loses 99% of what it is, and just becomes a nice gradient of colours on a little screen.

My perspective on art is that it's really about the advancement of human thinking. From tribes in constant war, to early civilisations, to whatever we're moving towards (which I'd still say, in terms of data, is something to be optimistic about .. it just amazes me we're curing people with paralysis, giving people bionic legs .. these people would've been left to the wolves only a handful of generations ago) .. Science and philosophy evolve within cultures, and the fringes of culture are where you find art (until it's absorbed and becomes everyday).

So to own a Rothko is to own a small piece of human culture. And when you look at our defense budget, I think art is a relative bargain. Plus it's a great way to preserve value in an unstable global financial system.

Let's better talk about LUTs

Always a pleasure to talk to an intelligent person with a different viewpoint

Dan Howell wrote:
Purchased the New York Group. Am still sorting thru all of the options. Here is one example using the Norman Colour



I think there are some good possibilities with the filters.

Very nice.

Benski wrote:
But then the danger of talking about more abstract aspects of modern life (things that can't be quantified and backed up with data) is that it's very difficult to say anything about the world..

Exactly! Too many people talk, too little see.

Our exposure to it is so localised and limited, and informed by a media which has virtually no interest in providing a balanced or realistic perspective ..

That has changed a lot in the recent years. Nowadays we have access to much more information, so everyone is free to look.

If you've not seen it, I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on this
...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI

To me personally, what stands out in this presentation is a man who talks about child death and poverty and tries to be funny and entertaining all the time with his jokes. Isolated intellectual analysis cannot possibly bring fullness and depth of understanding. I don't want to go into all that as we are already quite off-topic.

We evolved in a much more violent, hostile environment than the one we find ourselves in today.

Seeing what the world is today - I question that.

The environment is really a problem of population. You either need most the world in extreme poverty, or you need a much smaller human population.

But that is again 1 or 0 - exactly what we do _not_ need.

And we can't forget extinction events are relatively common on this planet, and that we're already 9/10th of the way through this planet's inhabitable period due to our proximity to the Sun.. So my optimistic view is that in creating challenges for ourselves, we'll develop the technologies necessary to terraform other planets. Better than being complacent and getting wiped out by a meteorite.

Oh... let's not do this in the forum

Isn't it so frustrating you can never really catch a great sunset in a photo? Likewise a moon or stars .. You can make pretty pictures, but in shrinking a sunset down to a little frame, it loses 99% of what it is, and just becomes a nice gradient of colours on a little screen.

Well, a picture is just visual excerpt. It can't give you the warmth of the sun, the feeling of stillness of the nature, the air, the buzzing of the insects around or the sound of the birds.

My perspective on art is that it's really about the advancement of human thinking. From tribes in constant war, to early civilisations, to whatever we're moving towards (which I'd still say, in terms of data, is something to be optimistic about .. it just amazes me we're curing people with paralysis, giving people bionic legs .. these people would've been left to the wolves only a handful of generations ago) .. Science and philosophy evolve within cultures, and the fringes of culture are where you find art (until it's absorbed and becomes everyday).

So we cure all these people and then through a huge bomb on them with a press of a button because we are "peace makers". And then a Hollywood star goes to the destructed area and takes some shots with poor wounded children to show how much we care, and the photographer gets an award and his picture sells for a million $. These are our values, art and culture. Sadly.

Always a pleasure to talk to an intelligent person with a different viewpoint

Me too but I am afraid we are way off-topic. So if you want we can do this by PM. Let's go back to color now

Benski wrote:
My bias here, but with a LUT, if I couldn't get the background not to overlap with the skin tones, I'd have to recolour the bits it's not getting right. Depending on the situation, I might find that less convenient. If it's a chair leg that's supposed to be blue tinted, I'd have to find a colour somewhere between the chair leg and the background tint, and repaint on a Colour layer. Presumably?

I am not quite sure what you mean. Here is with the LUT:



As far as I understand your action creates masks automatically by using the image in order to isolate particular parts and then shift the colors. A LUT can do that without masks as it already has all the possible masks (even the ones which your action doesn't use) - the whole image - as a source. Not that LUTs work with masks, I am just trying to make an analogy.

anchev wrote:
Nice image Dan.

Would be possible to see also how it looks when you use the .cube LUT? It is interesting to compare the transition areas which currently show something like a stepped change of colors, e.g. in the armpit and temporal area.

Here are links to different versions:
First is the 'native' file. Second is your LUT. Third is the Norman Colour LUT.

http://danhowell.info/AA_NativeColor_DSC2197.jpg
http://danhowell.info/AA_AnchevLUT_DSC2197.jpg
http://danhowell.info/AA_RogueEssence_DSC2197.jpg

Both are nice. Yours stays on the cool side and energizes the highlights--at least in this file.

Dan Howell wrote:
Both are nice. Yours stays on the cool side and energizes the highlights--at least in this file.

That's because the "raw" VF image is color graded as I mentioned and contains stronger yellows. It is not a calibrated LUT.

But regardless of that, see how the LUT (on the left) produces much smoother transition and there is no such banding-like effect in the areas I was wondering about:

anchev wrote:
Well, I don't use C1 and I don't study extensively the work of particular names. To me this is just standard teal/orange look.

Personally I don't like the almost bruised knee and magenta toes (although I don't use C1). Unless the image aims to show that she has been on her knees right before the shot was taken, that is too eye catching. But of course these images have many variations around the web and we have no idea which one is the original:


From: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/sl … e-magazine

Definitely prefer this version. Thanks for pursuing the comparisons and drawing our eyes to things.

Jim Lafferty wrote:
The idea is that you're going to deliver a file that's less likely to be screwed up down the production chain when some magazine intern uploads it to their site.

You can never escape from that. Recently I saw some of the images I retouched for a client in a magazine. Someone blurred them after me

BTW I googled for that photographer who Benski likes so much and I see he has great images indeed. But there are some other issues which don't seem appropriate for someone who shoots celebs. See the halos around the subjects:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/10133167881108239/




Maybe we should send him a LUT?

Speaking of magazines I also found this higher res image and I am not really impressed by the retouching (note the domain name):

http://www.vogue.com/wp-content/uploads … an-roy.jpg



So I was just starting to think that probably someone destroys his images before uploading them to some N-th party sites but after seeing this I changed my mind.

Jim Lafferty wrote:
It's funny you say that and are debating AdobeRGB vs. sRGB. A friend of mine attended a NJR seminar years back and he said one of his strategies is retouching in and delivering in sRGB color space, despite this being "wrong". The idea is that you're going to deliver a file that's less likely to be screwed up down the production chain when some magazine intern uploads it to their site.

Whatever the case, clearly you have your preferences, as others are welcome to. But there's nothing about working in CaptureOne, apart from a flawed workflow, that lends skin tones a purple hue at the extremities. This is a space heater and makeup issue first, then a uniform hue slider adjustment in the color tool later   

I totally agree about delivering in sRGB. The main problem I've always found is there's such a high chance the photographer or designer/marketing dept. you're working with don't understand colour profiles or just forget. And of course with the Internet, it doesn't matter how good it looks in a magazine, because 99% of people are going to see it on the web. In the wrong colour profile.

Actually with Capture One I was referring to the Uniform skin tones feature. So you can get skin all the exact same hue. Unnaturally so. And that can be cool – the more David Slijper colourised look (when you colourise b&w film, you tend to get unnaturally uniform hues) .. But with NJR and Annie L, the backdrops they shoot with are often fairly neutral colours; and in adding a colour wash in post, you've got flexibility with how that colour interacts with skin tones. So the purple in the Jessica Simpson shot would've likely been the sheer amount of navy they're adding in post, mixing with the darker skin tones, and being left in rather than masked out. Which gives it an oil painting feel – painters rarely use uniform skin colouring, and mix a lot of background into shadows.

You can see even with a desaturated look, the leg on the left, where the skin highlights meet the shadows, there's a background turquoise leaking in. And to me that's the aesthetic. The alternative is the colourised look, where every colour's kept clean.

anchev wrote:
So I was just starting to think that probably someone destroys his images before uploading them to some N-th party sites but after seeing this I changed my mind.

You're seeing through the eyes of an engineer/retoucher.

A lot of these guys are really untechnical. But so are most photographers, agents, celebrities, and certainly the public.. I called it the curse of the engineer. The more you see an image in terms of tools and techniques, the less you're actually seeing the image. (I'm only conscious of it because I know how prone I am to this.)

For me what these retouchers bring is bold creativity with colours and styles, and being contemporary and ahead of the curve. Same way David Lachapelle's got as far as he has without knowing what the lens focal lengths mean.. One of my favourite Annie L shoots – if you see a big version, there's visible camera shake all over the image.. Shot with a single key light ($50 Softlighter .. plenty of lower rung photographers would use far more lighting), handheld, dragged the shutter.. It's SO untechnical. But it's oozing style. It could be a painting. Who cares about technical?

Benski wrote:
A lot of these guys are really untechnical. But so are most photographers, agents, celebrities, and certainly the public.. I called it the curse of the engineer. The more you see an image in terms of tools and techniques, the less you're actually seeing the image. (I'm only conscious of it because I know how prone I am to this.)

For me what these retouchers bring is bold creativity with colours and styles, and being contemporary and ahead of the curve. Same way David Lachapelle's got as far as he has without knowing what the lens focal lengths mean.. One of my favourite Annie L shoots – if you see a big version, there's visible camera shake all over the image.. Shot with a single key light ($50 Softlighter .. plenty of lower rung photographers would use far more lighting), handheld, dragged the shutter.. It's SO untechnical. But it's oozing style. It could be a painting. Who cares about technical?

Spot on! I couldn't agree more with what you've said.

Benski wrote:
You're seeing through the eyes of an engineer/retoucher.

Obviously. But does one have to be an imaging professional in order to see that people don't have halos in real world and their skin is not some blotchy polished thing?

A lot of these guys are really untechnical. But so are most photographers, agents, celebrities, and certainly the public.. I called it the curse of the engineer. The more you see an image in terms of tools and techniques, the less you're actually seeing the image.

But I am not talking about technicalities but about the final result. To me the problem is exactly the _not_ seeing as we talked earlier. I see 2 issues here:

1. The tools which software producers (Adobe) make. In particular: things like shadows/highlights/clarity sliders which work with masks and create halos and filtering

2. Boosted brands and names with obviously low understanding of imaging who never explore beyond the tools they receive from 1.

This is a problem because people who start learning about photography and retouching see this and just because there is some pop name on it they start repeating mechanically the meaningless phrases "high end" and "industry standard" and all the rest of it. And they never really learn, they just repeat, always quoting someone else's authority. At certain point they even become arrogant and start teaching others to repeat. I don't think anyone who is in that pattern sees anything at all (except maybe the brand/name).

For me what these retouchers bring is bold creativity with colours and styles

Are you saying that copying something made a few centuries ago and repeated a million times means to create something?

Who cares about technical?

The very question implies that technical is something dry, senseless, separate, no beauty in it. But the actuality is that the word art and techno- both mean the same thing - skill. And skill does not imply creativity as you can be a skillful copier. I don't know if you have noticed but there is this modern tendency to take a copy of something or combine what already exists (usually quite tastelessly and unskillfully) and call it art, creativity and start to boost its so called perceived value in order to sell it. Words really loose their meaning.

Ken Marcus Studios wrote:
Has anybody here tried the New York Pack on Photoshop 5.5 ?

Wondering if it can work on something other than CC6 ?

KM

Loaded into 5.5 but it wouldn't work and ultimately crashed. Works fine w/ CC 2015.5

anchev wrote:
But I am not talking about technicalities but about the final result. To me the problem is exactly the _not_ seeing as we talked earlier. I see 2 issues here:

1. The tools which software producers (Adobe) make. In particular: things like shadows/highlights/clarity sliders which work with masks and create halos and filtering

2. Boosted brands and names with obviously low understanding of imaging who never explore beyond the tools they receive from 1.

This is a problem because people who start learning about photography and retouching see this and just because there is some pop name on it they start repeating mechanically the meaningless phrases "high end" and "industry standard" and all the rest of it. And they never really learn, they just repeat, always quoting someone else's authority. At certain point they even become arrogant and start teaching others to repeat. I don't think anyone who is in that pattern sees anything at all (except maybe the brand/name).

I think it's natural that the medium (Photoshop) impart some of its qualities on the aesthetic .. Many artists use the texture of the brushes they're using in paintings .. And I'm sure if the aim of art were photo-realism, these would be no-nos (it wouldn't make sense to have brush strokes on images of real things).

I had a passionate hatred for the HDR craze of a few years back – time judges these things; I don't see much of it anymore.. The halos we were getting then, and the disaster it made of colours – possibly photography's darkest hour .. But in these examples – like Lachapelle's work – the slightly hyperreal look doesn't look distasteful to me .. What I wouldn't want from that image is just a girl stood in a stairwell. Which it very easily could've been. I want someone who can shoot a celeb and make them look like a mythical being. Funnily enough one of my favourite artists (Tamara Lempicka) was using halos (and colour bleed in shadows) 100 years ago:

Are you saying that copying something made a few centuries ago and repeated a million times means to create something?

I think great art transcends time and space

The very question implies that technical is something dry, senseless, separate, no beauty in it. But the actuality is that the word art and techno- both mean the same thing - skill. And skill does not imply creativity as you can be a skillful copier. I don't know if you have noticed but there is this modern tendency to take a copy of something or combine what already exists (usually quite tastelessly and unskillfully) and call it art, creativity and start to boost its so called perceived value in order to sell it. Words really loose their meaning.

I'd say most 20th century art was about the ability to take work from any era, and make something new by putting it in a new context.. The genius of Hiphop isn't necessarily in the making, but in being able to make music isn't limited by the person making it (sampling). What could be more 21th century?

Stanley Kubrick would say: why pay someone to score a soundtrack when we can pick music from the greatest composers in history? Why make the work any less great than it has the potential to be? The work is the only thing you're ever going to be judged on.. If a tone-deaf musician can make the best piece of music I've ever heard, then they've really discovered something that can take art forwards.. I don't think it's a coincidence many of the best musical pairings have been someone very technical working with someone very abstract (Morrison and Manzarek, Lennon and McCartney, etc).

Benski wrote:
I think great art transcends time and space

Of course. But the question was not about art but about creativity - two separate, not necessarily related things. You can be a great artist skillfully copying others (like the ones who make perfect duplicates). But that is not creativity.

anchev wrote:
Of course. But the question was not about art but about creativity - two separate, not necessarily related things. You can be a great artist skillfully copying others (like the ones who make perfect duplicates). But that is not creativity.

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

I think one of the most interesting questions art asked in the 20th century was whether it mattered who made the work. Obviously a lot of what we attribute to da Vinci and Michelangelo was the work of their assistants. Warhol had a factory, that could churn out Warhol works Warhol never touched.

Then there's the question of whether our own knowledge of who made the work affects how we perceive it. Look at the same piece of work under the belief it's made by a child, a monkey or a computer, and you may see three different works. So where does creativity fit into this? William Burroughs might say it's nothing more than a sterile expression of the artist's ego.

Benski wrote:
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

I've read this quote a few times before, and always felt a bit uneasy with it. As a tongue-in-cheek reminder that ''there is nothing new under the sun', and that all great artists have achieved their heights by 'standing on the shoulders of giants', I think it hits the mark. But taken at face value it seems to imply that the definition of criminality is the lack of sufficient skill to avoid detection.

The quote has been attributed to Einstein and others, but it seems the original statement, from which the current quote is derived, probably read more like, "Whereas with x the height of originality is genius, with y the height of originality is skill in concealing origins."

Which reminds me of the famous critique - "Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good."

Benski wrote:
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

I think one of the most interesting questions art asked in the 20th century was whether it mattered who made the work. Obviously a lot of what we attribute to da Vinci and Michelangelo was the work of their assistants. Warhol had a factory, that could churn out Warhol works Warhol never touched.

Then there's the question of whether our own knowledge of who made the work affects how we perceive it. Look at the same piece of work under the belief it's made by a child, a monkey or a computer, and you may see three different works. So where does creativity fit into this? William Burroughs might say it's nothing more than a sterile expression of the artist's ego.

You see... if one always tries to look at things through quoting what others have said and all the names the only result will be more and more confusion and more questions. Creativity is not something that fits into anything else, that's the whole beauty of it. It comes only when one is free inwardly. This means also free from knowledge about the past and from authority (including the authority of one's own self). Without total emptiness there is no creativity, there are only quotations and ego scratching. In the same sense: unlike in art/skill/technology, there is no "how" in creativity because the how implies something which is already known, existing, nothing new. When you are creative you don't know that you are creative. It is not an intellectual process. The intellect may come later and see that it is something new but it has no place in the creation itself. So there can be no name in creativity, no comparison, no censor.

woofw wrote:
I bought the NY preset 2 days ago and still have not receive any links to download it and couldn't find any links on their site.
I emailed them yesterday with my order no and  have not heard from them. Is this site legit? Lucky it's thru Paypal, if by the weekend I still haven't heard from them I'll do a claim.

The download link is on the order complete page. Literally the first thing that comes up once you've completed the order. But it's a bit small and easy to miss.

http://appliedimage.co/faq/

a k mac wrote:
I've read this quote a few times before, and always felt a bit uneasy with it. As a tongue-in-cheek reminder that ''there is nothing new under the sun', and that all great artists have achieved their heights by 'standing on the shoulders of giants', I think it hits the mark. But taken at face value it seems to imply that the definition of criminality is the lack of sufficient skill to avoid detection.

The quote has been attributed to Einstein and others, but it seems the original statement, from which the current quote is derived, probably read more like, "Whereas with x the height of originality is genius, with y the height of originality is skill in concealing origins."

Which reminds me of the famous critique - "Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good."

Very good!

And yes, I've heard it attributed to Einstein, and da Vinci, possibly Oscar Wilde. I think when we look at a pursuit like music, or fashion photography, you're always starting from a technical and cultural framework that's really nothing more than an approved list of things we've plagiarised to the point of untraceability.

And I suppose the measure of your work is what impact it has on that list. Whether it's William Burroughs showing you can create something new by cutting something old into pieces, or Jazz pioneers demonstrating a lot of the rules in the list can be thrown away. But I think even if your whole act was being a carbon copy of Ansel Adams, just doing that in this era would make it different. And that would either be interesting to people or it wouldn't. So I'm not sure creativity is even a real thing. I think it may be more of a descriptive quality we apply to things.

anchev wrote:
You see... if one always tries to look at things through quoting what others have said and all the names the only result will be more and more confusion and more questions. Creativity is not something that fits into anything else, that's the whole beauty of it. It comes only when one is free inwardly. This means also free from knowledge about the past and from authority (including the authority of one's own self). Without total emptiness there is no creativity, there are only quotations and ego scratching. In the same sense: unlike in art/skill/technology, there is no "how" in creativity because the how implies something which is already known, existing, nothing new. When you are creative you don't know that you are creative. It is not an intellectual process. The intellect may come later and see that it is something new but it has no place in the creation itself. So there can be no name in creativity, no comparison, no censor.

I think it depends whether you see the individual as the source of art or a limitation. I'd suggest dreams are an extreme example of this..

The creativity we exhibit in dreams far exceeds where we go in everyday life.. It's a free-form brain-dance of meaning, images, symbols, people we've never met.. And yet the one almost universal quality dreams and acid trips have is that no matter how profound they are to us, no one else finds them interesting.

The fact they're a pure expression of your own programming, your own neutral networks, means they have no cultural framework that makes them meaningful to other people. Which is why I think an artist has to be careful how much of themselves they actually put into work.

Kiyoshi Fujino wrote:
it's not down to her choice of camera body or lens.

True that... never said it was.  What AL is riding on is about 3 decades of noted celebrity photography... and some obviously better camera, lighting and posing skills than most photographers in her early years.  Combine that with some noted brown nosing and butt-kissing of the right people... and some controversial 'eye brow raising' images in a then conservative world... and you have a receipt for some early years marked success.  There are dozens of photographers on this site who could blow her skills away...