second life photography discussion

[Orwar]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But there are no "bad" photos, because a photograph can mean so much more than mere technique and aesthetics. It can be a record of love or friendship, or capture a memorable moment. It can even just be a self-affirmation. They all have value, even if that may not reside in something that is evident to all viewers.

   I disagree. Sentimentality may hold some value to very specific individuals, but there is a whole lot of just totally rubbish photos out there. Quite a few of my own creation! 

[Claireschen Hesten]

16 hours ago, xXJupiterHeightsXx Starchild said:

maybe some could help me better understand why? I noticed within the art and photography of second life it seems those who put way less effort into pictures and avatar appearance have a higher likelihood of more reactions, following and comments, meanwhile someone like me who spends well over 7 hours on a photoshoot from start to finish who very well cleans up and cares about detail yet the follows, reactions and comments are nowhere to be found

I don't really look in the art and photography section that often. I do check the vanity threads in the avatar section and sometimes post. With the range of viewers, hardware and in viewer photo tools available I don't know if someone just adjusted their camera position to front view and clicked save on the snapshot or they spent many hours setting up the shot to look that way.

[Aiyumei]

4 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

there are no "bad" photos

I beg to differ, Scy. Observe.

Jokes aside, this was intentionally produced by a friend of mine to be this hideous 

But as everyone in the thread already pointed out, there are no "bad" photos. Art in all it's forms is matter of perspective, for some it can be true work of art and for others... well... As far as "liking" photos goes, I feel it's now more about how many know you rather than how many appreciate your artistic skill. If you are all over the forums interacting with everyone there's a high chance those people will interact back and essentially give you thumbs up.

1 hour ago, Claireschen Hesten said:

With the range of viewers, hardware and in viewer photo tools available I don't know if someone just adjusted their camera position to front view and clicked save on the snapshot or they spent many hours setting up the shot to look that way.

If you've dabbled long enough with the different viewers and what they are capable of, it's fairly easy to tell if the photo is raw shot or edited. Usually by the shading or lights. As far as editing goes, one can spend 10 minutes in photoshop and do lovely edit or spend hours just adding depth to an image.

And as quite few photographers I see on my flickr feed these days - #nophotoshop, #unedited, #noreshade
Then you zoom and you see specific areas blurred, sharpened, bokeh effects, perfect shadow rendering and these very minor cuts on the skin where different parts come together magically removed. 

(ᵔᴥᵔ)

[Rowan Amore]

Although some photos are just low grade p.orn, IMO.  There's nothing artistic or redeeming about 30 pics of the same slex session with arms and legs disappearing into the furniture.  I agree with @Orwar...some are just rubbish.

[Rolig Loon]

5 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I agree with @Orwar...some are just rubbish.

I used to think I could tell rubbish when I saw it, but that was in the days before serious artists started nailing bananas to the wall. I think our cultural standards for rubbish have been shot to hell.  If you have a really BAD photo, just give it a title like "Ode to Banality" or "Oh, the Inhumanity!".  The critics will love it.

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

but that was in the days before serious artists started nailing bananas to the wall.

I forgot that is a real thing! (Saw the in-world art with it and forgot it's also RL.)

[Rowan Amore]

 

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

 

..I see pearls!

Edited March 8, 2023 by Love Zhaoying

[Orwar]

16 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I used to think I could tell rubbish when I saw it, but that was in the days before serious artists started nailing bananas to the wall. I think our cultural standards for rubbish have been shot to hell.

   Nah. Our cultural standards for rubbish in general are fine. It's just our so-called critics gone a bit loopy.

   .. That our culture then chooses to give a dang about what our critics are spouting, now there's something we ought to look into ..

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Orwar said:

Our cultural standards for rubbish in general are fine.

Rubbish, art - who's to know? I guess "art" is the one people pay to see!

Edited March 8, 2023 by Love Zhaoying

[Scylla Rhiadra]

I am not going to rush to the aesthetic defence of any and every pic that gets hung on a gallery wall by any means, but it might be wise to be a bit circumspect about trashing contemporary "cultural standards." Virtually every new movement in art, music, and literature has been, at its inception, derided as easy-to-produce garbage.

Here's a small but representative quote from a satirical art review published in 1874:

"Le papier peint à l’état embryonnaire est encore plus fait que cette marine-là!" 

"Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape!"

The painting in question is Claude Monet's "Impression. Sunrise."

 

 

[Orwar]

6 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Virtually every new movement in art, music, and literature has been, at its inception, derided as easy-to-produce garbage.

   I'm fairly confident this isn't going to be reappraised in a few hundred years to be determined to be up there with baroque or impressionism:

59 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

There's nothing artistic or redeeming about 30 pics of the same slex session with arms and legs disappearing into the furniture.

   Besides, there's a difference between an art movement and someone's shoddy pics. Not every word put down to paper becomes a classic through the passing of time. Furthermore it doesn't really concern us, we live here and now, we can't go about bothering ourselves with what people's tastes may be like when we've all turned to dust - a few centuries from now pizza with pineapple may well be the national dish of France for all we know; that doesn't make it an acceptable dish to expose any human being to in the 21st century.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   I'm fairly confident this isn't going to be reappraised in a few hundred years to be determined to be up there with baroque or impressionism:

   Besides, there's a difference between an art movement and someone's shoddy pics. Not every word put down to paper becomes a classic through the passing of time. Furthermore it doesn't really concern us, we live here and now, we can't go about bothering ourselves with what people's tastes may be like when we've all turned to dust - a few centuries from now pizza with pineapple may well be the national dish of France for all we know; that doesn't make it an acceptable dish to expose any human being to in the 21st century.

Well, no. Again, I'm not going to try to defend the aesthetic or technical or artistic value of each and every photo posted somewhere.

What I was responding to specifically was the suggestion creeping into some of these comments that "modern art" has gone to hell in a handbasket, standards have been thrown out the door, kids these days, etc., etc.

A bit of historical perspective is useful in teaching caution about such broad-brush (so to speak) generalizations.

[Love Zhaoying]

21 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

A bit of historical perspective is useful in teaching caution about such broad-brush (so to speak) generalizations.

..says the "painted lady"!  (What? You got that Mona Lisa smile!)

28 minutes ago, Orwar said:

47 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Virtually every new movement in art, music, and literature has been, at its inception, derided as easy-to-produce garbage.

   I'm fairly confident this isn't going to be reappraised in a few hundred years to be determined to be up there with baroque or impressionism:

1 hour ago, Rowan Amore said:

There's nothing artistic or redeeming about 30 pics of the same slex session with arms and legs disappearing into the furniture.

Of course, none of us are qualified to discuss current art.  In the future, there will be a highly trained docent, who will understand and convey each and every nuance of the oh-so-carefully composed um, smut.

Edited March 8, 2023 by Love Zhaoying

[Rowan Amore]

Says how I feel quite nicely...

 

Because if everything is art, then nothing is. Every word, every concept, requires exclusivity to have meaning. If everything is art, then art simply means everything, and we already have a word for everything: it’s, everything.

Art is an elusive concept. It has a high degree of subjectivity, that is for sure. We are right to leave the days behind where old white men told the rest of the world what was good and what was not.

But that doesn’t mean we are all artists just because we create within the same medium as artists. To refer to it as so cheapens it. It lowers the bar to the point that we no longer need to try.  ~Daniel Skomer

[MoiraKathleen]

While I don't consider any SL pictures I post as "shoddy", I also don't consider my SL (or RL) pictures as "art".   I don't think that the 'how does your avatar look today" thread was ever considered to be only art pictures when it was first started - it was very informal and welcoming to anyone who wanted to post pictures in it.  There were several posters who also did the more artistic very set up and photoshopped photographs, but there was another avatar photo thread (Vanity) where they usually posted those pictures.  I take inworld pictures to capture experiences or looks mainly for myself, and from time to time there's one or two that I really like and choose to post to share with others.  Except for a few landscape pictures (and picture threads that have to do with what your SL, or SL house, looks like) I tend to avoid posting pictures in threads that appear to have an "artsy" intent.

[Rolig Loon]

51 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

What I was responding to specifically was the suggestion creeping into some of these comments that "modern art" has gone to hell in a handbasket, standards have been thrown out the door, kids these days, etc., etc.

Yeah, and I made my comment with tongue in cheek, too.  There's a continuum between "fine" art and the stuff my granddaughters give me to post on the fridge. I can like things on both ends of the spectrum and consider them art without batting an eye.  Still, at a personal level I can consider some creations to be unsatisfying enough that they don't meet my own fuddy-duddy standards.  Bananas nailed to the wall fall in that category, regardless of what the professional critics say. That's my story and I'm sticking by it.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

43 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

In the future, there will be a highly trained docent, who will understand and convey each and every nuance of the oh-so-carefully composed um, smut.

Well, again . . . careful!

James Joyce's Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover were both famously excoriated and banned for their "obscenity" for decades. They are both now considered classics of 20th-century literature, and for good reason (although I personally can't stand Lawrence).

Is Gustave Courbet's 1866 painting L'Origine du monde "smut"? As recently as 2011, Facebook censored its appearance on its platform, and disabled the account of an artist who had posted it; they were sued in France, and eventually had to concede the point in 2018.*

Warning: this is very NSFW

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Origin-of-the-World.jpg/1280px-Origin-of-the-World.jpg

(I myself use this painting in a pic of mine that is on display in my WIP gallery. Although I've not publicized that gallery at all, that one has sold . . . rather well!)

Everyone has the right to like and dislike what they want, for whatever reason. I've noted that I despise D. H. Lawrence, despite acknowledging his literary genius, and I tend to unfollow people who focus on sex shots on Flickr (one exception being a forumite whose photographic abilities I admire, and whom I like personally). And god knows, I am not defending all pornography by any stretch. 

But I am very wary of terms like "smut" that reduce the real complexity of artistic meaning to a mere recitation of surface features or elements.

*ETA and note: One reason I've posted a link to Courbet's painting rather than the image itself is that LL, unlike Facebook (now), would not permit its appearance here. It's also why you won't find my pic referencing the Courbet on this forum.

Edited March 8, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Yeah, and I made my comment with tongue in cheek, too.  There's a continuum between "fine" art and the stuff my granddaughters give me to post on the fridge. I can like things on both ends of the spectrum and consider them art without batting an eye.  Still, at a personal level I can consider some creations to be unsatisfying enough that they don't meet my own fuddy-duddy standards.  Bananas nailed to the wall fall in that category, regardless of what the professional critics say. That's my story and I'm sticking by it.

Yes, I don't disagree.

I am not arguing that we should park our critical faculties at the door the moment we enter an art gallery. On the contrary, I'm suggesting that they are more valuable than ever, precisely because determining what produces "legitimate artistic meaning" (however we might view that nebulous concept) is not simple or easy.

I am merely counseling a certain amount of caution about generalizations. 

And personal standards or judgements are entirely valid -- so long as we don't attempt to impose them on everyone else, of course. But I know that you know that.

[Ceka Cianci]

1 hour ago, Orwar said:

    - a few centuries from now pizza with pineapple may well be the national dish of France for all we know; that doesn't make it an acceptable dish to expose any human being to in the 21st century.

Fear what you don't understand! \o/

More Pizza for MEH!!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Ceka Cianci said:

Fear what you don't understand! \o/

More Pizza for MEH!!

ewwwww.

Ok, this is going too far.

I am now convinced: we live in degenerate times.

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I am not arguing that we should park our critical faculties at the door the moment we enter an art gallery. On the contrary, I'm suggesting that they are more valuable than ever, precisely because determining what produces "legitimate artistic meaning" (however we might view that nebulous concept) is not simple or easy.

I am merely counseling a certain amount of caution about generalizations. 

And personal standards or judgements are entirely valid -- so long as we don't attempt to impose them on everyone else, of course. But I know that you know that.

I quite agree. I rankle at the relativist position that everything is art or the extreme attitude that there can be no standards because art is what the artist says it is. Still, I acknowledge that there will always be some people out there who really love bananas nailed to walls and that my own particular standards may be a wee bit myopic.  But I didn't say that out loud and you can't quote me.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

9 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

you can't quote me

Quote you?

I've got a screenshot!!!

Bwahahahahah!!! 

[Love Zhaoying]

19 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

James Joyce's Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover were both famously excoriated and banned for their "obscenity" for decades.

Not surprising, the 40+ page last sentence of Ulysses was partly musings while self-pleasuring with a banana. While reading a few pages to the class in my 1984 high school book report, I self-censored the word beginning with "f" used as a pejorative for "gay males".

If you did not see the humor in my contextual use of the word "smut", that's rather literal of you! Sorry! ("Smut" is one of those now-seemingly archaic words, used mostly for emphasis these days - and rarely used at all in the U.S. Therefore, it is "fair game" for irony and exaggeration / hyperbole.) 

Hard to lecture me if you missed my point.

 

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Quote you?

I've got a screenshot!!!

Bwahahahahah!!! 

Virtual Secrets, blackmail, or Hobson's choice..