On the importance of sensor cleaning

When I turned on the news this morning, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world was one again ending. Global markets and house prices were falling faster than a meteor, unemployment and public spending were rising just as quickly in the opposite direction, and clearly it’s the end of civilisation as we know it.

*Sigh*

I packaged up my daughter and drove her to school.

It was an utterly absolutely fabulous morning. Blue skies, crisp autumnal air, falling leaves everywhere. Simply beautiful. Suddenly all the doom and gloom seemed utterly irrelevant. The air seemed crisper, clearer and everything seemed so different. It was like a change in the wind, and I could smell it as tangibly as if it were clearly visible in front of me. It felt like I’d suddenly side-stepped into a parallel universe where everything seemed the same, but I knew it wasn’t. Reality just seemed different (then again, it could be my tumour slooshing around, who knows?)

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Of course the bloggie commenters in my last post were right. Photographers are generally wiser than the rest of us. Those who spend a lifetime observing others tend to have better perspective than ordinary mortals. Who needs psychotherapy when you’ve got a camera, huh?

Despite my previous doom-fest about money (which is what I’m trained to do, after all), my non-official opinion is that money is pretty meaningless. Bet you’d never thought you’d hear an accountant say that, eh? But it’s true. To me, money is just another form of energy which flows around in endless circles. The way we choose to make, spend and invest this energy is a direct reflection of who we are and how we think about life.

Most of the folks reading this are photographic creatives in some shape or form: photographers, models, writers, artists, and so forth. This generally means that unless you’re a money-focussed marketing guru like Damien Hirst, you will probably hold the opinion that photography and art largely stand outside the financial and political world. Creativity offers escape from the falling skies by losing the artist in his own imagination, thereby offering the key to a highly effective strategy for coping with the worldly crap going on around us. Spending your energies by practising your art not only affirms who you are as a person and how you want to live your life, but it also offers the best possible therapy for all your woes. With every click of the shutter you give meaning to all this craziness, you rise above the small stuff and affirm belief in the beauty of the world.

(Caution: Dodgy photographic metaphor alert! All sensible, intelligent, sane readers please abandon ship and come back tomorrow.)

When you spend every waking moment immersed in the photographic universe, all your energies are spent crafting the Big Picture, the one lifetime shot that defines you as a person. As with all photographs though, the problem is that the Big Picture often doesn’t turn out as well as the image you originally visualised in your head, perhaps because of lack of knowledge but mostly because of external influences that have compromised your vision.

Recessions, politics and even who wins the next election are all just background noise in your photograph. Noise, dirt and dust are facts of life in photography. They are always there, distorting the overall clarity of the image. How well you minimise those distortions depends on the type and quality of your imaging sensor, as well as how well you keep it clean. Novice photographers are usually nervous about cleaning their camera's sensor. Yet it’s not as hard as you imagine, especially if you have an inbuilt self cleaning sensor unit which does it automatically for you.

Alas I don’t have the ability to self-clean yet, but I’m working on it. In the meantime, I’m focussing on my big picture by spending all my energies as wisely as possible.

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Althaia

(Yeah, I really do write some total tosh you know. It’s a constant wonder to me that anyone reads it. Still, one woman’s lunacy is another man’s wisdom I guess. Or not, as the case may be.)

Money Mayhem

What has a front has a back. The bigger the front, the bigger the back.

Macrobiotic theory

Sorry folks, no photography today. I know, I know, this is a photography blog, not an economics blog. However I’m a money-woman by trade, so I’m just sitting back today and watching the financial world collapse around my ears. So far the FTSE 100 has fallen 5% today. The Dow Jones is about to open. Things are going to get pretty nasty.

Hot on the heels of Fred and Fannie, Lehman’s could be enough to trigger a catastrophic economic collapse, similar to Black Thursday which triggered the start of The Great Depression. Am I being overly alarmist? Well, that rather depends on how the US Government reacts to this latest crisis.

Barack Obama commented that the Lehman bankruptcy posed "a major threat" to the US economy. Of course he blamed the Bush administration's economic philosophy and said, "This turmoil is a major threat to our economy and its ability to create good-paying jobs and help working Americans pay their bills, save for the future and make their mortgage payments." No kidding, Barack. Really? So how are you going to fix it, eh?

One thing’s for sure, the fallout from this ongoing financial turmoil will be huge. Socially, financially and politically, the world will never be the same again.

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Althaia contemplates the latest banking collapse

It’s a Man’s World

Another whopper of a post. You'll need alcohol for this one. I repeat: Do not attempt without being suitably plastered or you’ll ever make it to the end.

Last weekend we went to a Hogwarts Schmooze-up where parents were able to meet and greet the top professors and the eminent school governors. They were very interested in meeting Rich in particular, the fact that he was an internet entrepreneur and a photographer highly impressed them and they were very keen to give him their business cards. It was noticeable that no-one at any time asked me what I did for a living, no-one offered me a business card, and although they were happy to talk to me about the kids, I was treated as a wife who was there merely as an extension of my husband. Lordy, I thought such sexist stereotyping went out with the ark, but apparently not. I’ve never been a trophy wife before, so this was an entirely new experience for me. Clearly careers are for men not women, and I should just stay home and knit.

And then I got to thinking. Does such sexual career stereotyping extend into the photographic world? Now I’m not talking about modelling here, I’m talking about the artists who create the images. So I did some research and what I found astonished me.

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Apparently 90% of photographers are men, and a paltry 10% are women. And what is even more interesting is that this 90/10 split applies to ALL areas of photography, not just photographing images of people. The evidence is unanimous, female photographers are always in the minority, regardless of photographic genre. Landscapes, fine-art, travel, glamour, fetish, fashion, whatever, it’s a man’s world. Even readerships of photographic magazines (excluding women’s magazines and fashion) show a clear 80% male/20% female divide.

How so?

To me it’s a mystery. Why are there more male photographers than female? I don’t believe for one moment it’s because magazines are sexist when choosing photographic submissions. The majority of editors I’ve come across are strictly equal opportunity motivated, and they are genuinely delighted to receive submissions from women. So why aren’t there more Annie Leibovitz’s out there? Yes we all know the famous names such as Diane Arbus and Tina Modotti, to name but two, and there are thousands more talented published female photographers of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are in the minority. Maureen Gallagher of Lenswork observed that although MFA programs show a 50/50 split between men and women, once the Masters degree is done very few female graduates stay the course end and up doing photography for a living.

What is happening to these young women photographers after they earn their degree and enter the photographic industry? Do the majority quit to raise a family, or maybe they become teachers instead? Or do these young female photographers become so quickly disillusioned with “the biz” that they then decide on a different career path? Gallagher wondered if this was due to the fault of the university courses themselves? Maybe they lack the proper marketing-based training to enable these women to make it in “the real world” as successful photographers? Or perhaps the problem is that the industry is too competitive and male orientated. I know from personal experience just how difficult it is to succeed in a male orientated profession and you have to demonstrate a certain type of ruthlessness and aggression to get ahead and become “one of the boys.” Perhaps female artists are more sensitive than balshy accountants like myself, and thus are not able to be emotionally hard enough to make the necessary personality adjustments in order to compete. Is female nature the main reason for why these women abandon the photographic profession?

I do believe there’s some truth in the psychological gender stereotyping argument. Perhaps the reason why so many landscape photographers are men, for example, is due to the fact that men are thought to be inherently more anti-social and find it easier to be alone. Biologically human females are hard-wired to be more sociable in groups, so is this the reason that female photographers decide to teach photography and/or prefer to shoot mainly portraits, still life and culturally orientated themes? Obviously this genre classification is not exclusive, and no-one should take offence here. I’m not trying to be sexist, I’m just trying to find some answers. I’m analysing statistics, generalising wildly and there are always exceptions to every rule, the more the merrier – indeed, let’s challenge stereotyping whenever possible because how else can you bring about change?

Lastly there’s the important matter of market forces to consider. Of course the vast majority of photographic models are women because the industry is driven by consumer demand. Most glamour and nude photographs are looked at by men, so it follows that most models are women and most photographers are men. The industry is simply responding to heterosexual stereotyping. People like to photograph what they find attractive and beautiful, and thus is follows that there are more male photographers photographing chix than women. Again, this is the essence of human nature. Glamour, fetish and nude photographers love women and being with them, otherwise they wouldn’t do what they do, but how much of that is because the models are obviously attractive and sexy and how much of it is because they genuinely find it easier to relate to being with women rather than men? In the end, it always seems to come back to human physiology and psychology before anything else.

So that’s it then. Whether or not you become a working photographer is all down to different hard-wiring between men and women. You only spend your life as a photographer if it’s in your nature to do so, and what genre you choose depends on your gender and sexual orientation.

Is it really that simple? And if so, how can we change the 90/10 split and should we even try?

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Images are of Althaia

All comments welcome here folks. Don’t be shy now. Put aside your political correctness and sock it to me. I’m seeking the truth, no matter how unpalatable we laydeez might find it.