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mtheory

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Posts posted by mtheory

  1. The reason artistic photography is dead to me is that I no longer find it challenging, that's all. The element of mystery, discovery and fun is gone. Photography has been so thoroughly explored that 99% it all ends up repeating itself. My commercial photography gigs are doing quite well though, and I'm excited to try medium format, but film is where the real fun is at for me.

  2. I didn't call Leica primitive, just not superior. I respect his style, but an equal result could be achieved shooting high-fps & high-megapixel and picking/cropping the perfect shot later. 

  3. ​I guess you can more or less say the same thing from every form of art. everything is just a repetition, where do you see true innovation in music, fashion, painting etc. It seems that every corner has been covered and artist just create around those lines. For film for example, the last boundary has been reached since 3D/digital effects has become so realistic that every thing is possible. But if your thoughts are about gallery work etc it is as much about who is taking the photo (history of work) as much as the photo itself. By that I mean that the value of the work of the artist, his history/research/sensibility count as much for the photo than just some lucky snapshot out of hundreds or thousand of photos of someone on instagram. 

    I disagree, neither music, fashion nor painting can be created as casually as an instagram photo. The tools for those disciplines are not in everyone's pocket. 16 year old girls don't create a dozen music tracks, fashion designs or paintings every day. These art forms still require money, learning, tools, effort.

    However, once a true clothing 3D printer is created and people can starting printing their own clothes, fashion design will crash the same way photography did. 

  4. I didn't like Joel Meyerwitz's point about Leica being superior due to the "dramatic but unseen context" its viewfinder provides...while it may be true for the photographer at the time of capture, the eventual audience looking at prints will never be aware of that unseen context, so it is irrelevant in my view. The frame IS where you provide both the subject AND the context, whatever is unseen literally no longer exists in photography. 

  5. Photography today is as special or unique as brushing your teeth. It stopped being a true craft or challenge, it has become ubiquitous, casual...therefore invisible. Look at instagram...I mean...it's just full of insanely great imagery being shot almost effortlessly in real time, and the more you look at it, the more you see that everything has been done now...it's all a copy of a copy of a copy...endless repetition. Essentially, when a discipline has nowhere else to go, when the boundaries have been explored, when it exhausts itself, this is when it dies.

    It's like...if everyone was an astronaut with a space craft that could do lightspeed travel...we'd get bored with space pretty quickly. Almost everyone is a photographer now.

    P.S I'm referring to photography artistically, not the commercial side, which is alive and well as ever. 

  6. Any digital content distributor ( apps, games, movies ) will tell you that the biggest challenge is content discovery. This film benefited from INSANE marketing, even the President gave it promotion, the value of that sort of exposure would normally cost tens of millions of dollars in marketing, in this case it's literally priceless. So this will change very little for independent producers who still cannot afford to stand out even if they manage to finance and produce a full feature film.

    What's gonna happen is that we will soon see a same-day release distribution for all movies as studios basically adopt online. Is this a good thing? Sure, for the consumer. But I'm personally concerned about the big players monopolizing the market...I was kind of hoping online distribution would fly under the radar of Hollywood for another decade and that this space would be colonized by indies ( Vimeo, etc. )...but the success of Snowpiercer and Interview is gonna attract the big sharks who will fucking stomp on the small fish with better production values, bigger marketing and lower prices...sort of the way big cinema chains killed all the indie mom-and-pop cinemas...by lower prices.

    Netflix is already spoiling viewers by super cheap prices and is screwing the artists that DO get distributed on it. If the big boys join the online distribution game they will start competing with Netflix and driving prices even lower.The fact that they slashed the price from $9.99 to $4.99 fucking terrifies me. They can afford to do that, while indies can't and need every dollar to survive. If they devalue online movies this way, then it will be TWICE as hard for indies to break even. It's very hard to make a profit on an indie film as it is, this will just make it even harder. :(

     

     

     

  7. ​It's irrelevant in the same way that everything else we do in life is irrelevant. Ultimately the sun will die and then the universe will die (maybe), but does that make our experiences any less worthwhile today? 

    Not at all, it makes our experiences here and now are far more relevant and worthwhile than the question of our place in the universe that we are not equipped to experience. If humans beings ever achieve thousand-year lifespans, the question of space might actually become relevant. Till then, I'm fine with having a Coke. :D

  8. Did you guys watch his first short film? I don't remember the name now, but it was on youtube, it was an black and white post-apocalyptic sci-fi fight scene...anyway it was really good for its time and you could see the guy's talent with editing and camerawork early on. 

  9. Totally random stream of thought here....since humans have a finite lifespan, I've always found it irrelevant to wonder about our place in the universe. I mean...exploring insects or plants under our feet is just about equally profound as stars or cosmos...It's all just data from sensory experience being fed into our brain that will one day reach its biological expiry date regardless of what is being processed...right?

  10. Yeah..I remember reading somewhere about the invention of the fork, yes the fork. Apparently a Roman princess from some barbarian province first brought it to the royal court, terrifying everyone with her "two-horned satanic stake". I think it was banned for some time before finally being accepted, with Italians using it for pasta and English adding a third "horn". So much for market research. ;)

  11. Most US/Russian space tech was pillaged from Germans, true. But still, all that spying from planes and satellites probably contributed to optical or image innovations that eventually made it into consumer tech.

    The sensor in the Chinese KINERAW 6K camera is repurposed from another industry with company being evasive about its origins. Pretty sure it's from some sort of govt funded program. I mean, who else has that kind of R'n'D budget in China?

  12. We don't have the user data for the C line but I assume the average C user is a renter, not a buyer. If that assumption is true, they have probably realized that to achieve true volume sales they need to target the "to own" users, and that is squarely $3K DSLR market. That would probably mean that their new EF line of lenses will be tailored for mirrorless DSLR videographers/filmmakers and cost above EF but below Cinema lenses.

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