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Great Photographs No.7 – Das Bäumchen (The Little Tree) (c.1929)

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Alfred Renger-Patzsch "Das Bäumchen" (1926)


This is a photograph with which I have some difficulty.

Das Bäumchen, by Albert Renger-Patzsch, is considered by many to be one of the world’s great photographs. Some class it as being amongst the top 100 of all time.  According to these experts, it ranks with ‘Migrant Mother’, ‘Earthrise’ and ‘Igor Stravinsky’.

And it’s not just experts’ opinion. Or maybe it’s because of the experts’ opinion, collectors go into a feeding frenzy when it comes on the market. Prints of Das Bäumchen sell for eye-watering sums. Here’s an extract from an auctioneer’s report in 2007:

Albert Renger-Patzsch’s “Das Bäumchen, 1929″, but printed in the 1950s, was bid up by a multitude of phones. After the phone banks quieted down, lot 82, which had been estimated at $6,000-8,000, sold to one of those phone bidders for $60,000.

Sixty thousand dollars? Ten times the estimated price? For this photograph? Why?

I regret to say that I am mystified by this. To me the image is bland to the point of boredom. And, coupled with the uninspiring scene is uninspiring composition.

In an effort to understand and maybe get some insight, I have read through various expert commentaries. Here is an extract from one:

… there is a palpable stillness about the picture, a sense of the artist’s quiet, patient and quasi-spiritual observation of an insignificant yet transcendental moment in time. The photographer has knowingly invited the eye of the spectator to roam over a landscape that is in no way distinguished. On the contrary, he would seem wilfully to have selected an undramatic, relatively flat and featureless terrain …

… and more …

… the picture is one of considerable, if understated, beauty and subtlety. The white highlight that runs down the black line of the trunk is just one – surely the most graphic – of the ways in which the sunlight gently caresses and animates this landscape. The irregular, yet perfectly balanced symmetry – like that of a leaf one might say – can be read as a metaphor for the order that is to be found in the natural world …

I’m sorry,  I’ve read through all that, and a lot more that is similar, and I still can’t see it.

The sapling cuts the picture almost exactly in half vertically. And we can’t see its upper branches at all. There is a line of rather dirty melting snow in the foreground, and the background is featureless rolling countryside – the sort of countryside you can see anywhere. Drab and uninspiring. There appear to be two more banks of melting snow in the distance, one of them bisecting the trunk. Apart from that, there is nothing of any interest. At least the horizon doesn’t cut the picture exactly in half … not quite … but that’s about the only thing that can be said for it. It’s nothing more than a slightly undulating line. The sky is empty.

In my opinion Renger-Patzsch took much better photographs. Here’s one …

Albert Renger-Patzsch 'Buchenwald im November' (1936)

Personally, I wouldn’t class this as a ‘great’ photograph, either. But it seems to me to be a significantly better image. It’s far more evocative, full of mystery, strange, slightly eerie and graphically strong too.

So why is Das Bäumchen regarded as being so great? In what way is it better than Buchenwald im November? Why is a collector prepared to pay $60’000 dollars for a print that was made nearly 30 years later?

I think that if I’d taken a photograph like it I would have considered it a mistake and thrown it away.

Can someone explain?



Here are some links to other commentaries on Albert Renger-Patzsch:

Prof. Boerner’s Explorations

eyEArchives



Filed Under: black and white, classic, composition, great, historic, opinion, photographers Tagged With: , , , ,

255, 255, 25

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What does that mean?

Those numbers, for anyone who doesn’t recognise them, are the values of pure white in a digital photograph: pure red—255,  pure green—255, and pure blue—255. If you remember your physics, a mix of those three primary colours produces white.

And if you get large amounts of it in an image, unintentionally, you’ve got the curse of ‘blown highlights’. Here’s one of my photos suffering from it …

Swiss cheese makers
Swiss cheese makers – overexposed

The clouds (especially at the top right), the sides of the men’s faces, their shirts, and the cover on the strange cheese-carrying contraption on the man’s head are all pure white, i.e. burned out.

It could have been a good photo … I like the low viewpoint and wide angle. But, as far as I’m concerned, it’s useless.

Why does this happen? Can’t modern cameras, with all their fancy electronics, get it right?

They find it tough. The problem has arisen in this case because there’s huge ‘dynamic range’ in this scene, from the brilliant clouds to the dark, almost black shadows on Djan’s trousers.

We tend not to notice this because our eyes are good at handling dynamic range. But cameras are far less successful. And digital cameras are worse than film ones. Here I had the camera set to aperture priority (it was an ever-changing scene and I wanted a good depth of field) and the camera tried to average out the range of tones present.

“Yeah …” do I hear you say, “… but you can fix that in Photoshop, can’t you?”

No, I can’t. No one can. In areas showing 255, 255, 255 there is no additional information. They’re burned out. I can reduce them to a uniform grey. But what good’s that?

Underexposure is not so bad. Information can often be retrieved from areas of shadow. But you can’t get something from nothing. Here’s the same image, tweaked in Photoshop, to bring out the shadow areas and enhance the colour …

Swiss cheese makers
After tweaking in Photoshop

Now you can see detail in Djans’ trousers. But those highlights remain a terrible blank white. It’s still a useless image for all practical purposes (except as a bad example).

What could I have done to overcome this?

There are two possibilities:

  1. The less good option would have been to have the camera on manual, set the exposure for the clouds, so they come out correctly, and then try to recover something from the dark areas later on, back at my computer.

  2. The better option would have been to set the exposure the same way, but use a flash to fill in the dark areas. It’s better because it gets it right in the camera, and that’s what you should always aim for.

Ah well … such are the tribulations of photography. I hope I meet Djan and his mate again somewhere. They’re an interesting and photogenic pair, and I’ll try not to make the same mistake again.

Filed Under: advice, exposure, fill in flash, overexposure, people, switzerland, tips, underexposure, white Tagged With: , , ,

Ten tips for winning photo competitions

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This post has been removed

and now can be found as a page

here


Filed Under: advice, animal, close up, competition, flower, insect, macro, tips Tagged With: , , , , , ,

It’s all a blur

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At the fair

Normally I don’t like photographs that are blurred all over.

Call me old-fashioned, but in my opinion they usually look like mistakes, with the mistake covered up by calling it ‘Art’.

In general, I believe that at least one section of a photograph should be in focus and sharp. But there are always exceptions to every rule.

And I think this is one of them.

All right … all right … so I’m biased. After all, it is my photograph.

So why do I think this one works, despite the lack of any sort of sharpness?

I like it because it shows a scene with which very many people will be familiar. And I feel that it captures that scene in a way to which people can relate. There’s the expression on the woman driver’s face, and her active pose. She’s swinging her car around to the right, up and into the picture.  There’s the swirl of colours – and they are a swirl – that grade from cool blue at the left to warm orange at the right. And the bumper car is moving into the orange. There is a hint of the other fair-goers and bumper cars, but they are only a hint, and they are even more blurred. No other people appear in the photograph, so concentrating the viewer’s attention on the couple. To me it captures something of the spirit of the night.

I took it the early hours of this morning, at about 1 o’clock, at the Fêtes de Genève. This is the annual summer festival when the Swiss city of Geneva goes berserk and people let their hair down. (Geneva is not the sombre Calvinist place people would have you believe.)

I was wandering the fairground with a 50mm f1.4 prime lens on my camera. That’s a pretty fast lens. But even so, with the lens wide open, I had to have the ISO rating turned up to 800 in order to get a manageable shutter speed. Again … I usually like to keep the ISO rating down as low as possible because the higher you turn it up, the more noise you get. But, in this case, the presence of a little bit of noise adds a sense of immediacy to the image.

Yes, I like this photograph and am well-pleased with it. What do you think?

Filed Under: action, featured, low light, motion blur, people, techniques Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Great Photographs No. 6 – Guerrillero Heroico (1960)

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Guerrillero Heroico

This is the best-known photograph in the world.

That’s a bold statement. Have I got justification for it?

Yes. This photograph has adorned posters, leaflets, books, drinks bottles, flags, T-shirts, CD and record covers, banners, walls and a host of other surfaces. It has been prominent in events ranging from the student riots in Paris, 1968, to present-day conflicts in the Middle East and Latin America.

It has come to symbolise anti-establishment thought and action to such an extent that it has achieved the status of an icon. It has inspired contemporary art and been hi-jacked by commerce. Its illegal use in advertising has spawned a number of international lawsuits. It has been used and abused by mega-stars and comedians. It is so well-known that no matter how it is altered – by means of reversals, silhouettes, posterisations, collage, wire-framing or colour changes – it is instantly recognisable. Its meaning is understood even by those who have no idea who the guy is.

The man is Ernesto Rafael ‘Che’ Guevara de la Serna, a revolutionary leader, and a major figure in the Cuban Revolution. This photograph of him was taken by Alberto ‘Korda’ Diaz Gutiérrez on the 5 March 1960, and Guevara was 31 years old.

The day before this photograph was taken, the French freighter La Coubre, with over 70 tons of explosives on board, had exploded in Havana harbour. The explosion killed a large number of Cubans (the exact number was never known). Claiming that this was an act of American sabotage, Cuban leader Fidel Castro called for a mass funeral at Havana’s Colón cemetery. As Castro gave his funeral oration, Che Guevara was next to him on the platform, together with French intellectuals Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Korda, Castro’s personal photographer, stood in the crowd immediately below. Before the Cuban revolution Korda had been a prominent fashion photographer, so he had an eye for charisma and beauty. He shot off a lot of photographs with his Leica M2, using a 90mm lens, taking advantage of his low viewpoint. Here’s the contact sheet from one of those films  …

The crucial photograph is fourth row down, third in from the left. It shows Guevara with an unknown man to his left and a bit of palm tree to the right. The final image has been cropped from this.

Why is it such a powerful photograph? To start with, the low viewpoint, with Guevara gazing enigmatically into the distance, is a classic ‘statuesque’ form. But, at the same time, Guevara’s wild hair and moustache, his beret at a rakish angle with its solitary star and his leather waistcoat all speak of non-conformity and revolution. His shoulders are turned a fraction to the left, whilst his head is to the right, as if he has just seen some approaching foe. There is an instant tension here.

His expression is extraordinary. It is an mixture of authority, independence and defiance, with a hint of wistfulness in it, too. As with Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’, you can read a whole host of emotions into it.

Posterised

Then, descending to a practical level, this portrait has an enormous graphic strength. Guevara’s white face, surrounded by his dark hair and the beret lends itself well to techniques such as posterisation.

Did all this stuff about ‘enigmas’ and ‘graphic quality’ go through Korda’s head as he was working with his camera, down in the crowd?

Of course not. He was ‘shooting on the hoof’. And, much later on, in speaking about the method he used, Korda said, “… this photograph is not the product of knowledge or technique. It was really coincidence, pure luck.”

Maybe so. But I think Korda is being a little bit too humble. As Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

Filed Under: black and white, classic, great, historic, people, portrait
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