Sunday, December 11, 2011

Madonna con bambino

I think you can guess how I feel about the underlying story, but that aside, this is a great picture by Anastasia Taylor-Lind:

Mother holding infant(embiggen)

More here.

4 comments:

Jack said...

A beautiful picture. A good illustration of why photography is called "painting with light."

bjkeefe said...

I know someone who might say painting (e.g.)is painting with light, but good line, nonetheless. ;)

Jack said...

I'm not sure where I heard that concept the first time. I think it was in Ansel Adam's The Camera, the first in his three book series on photography, books that were my bibles at one time in my life. (He said wistfully.) But of course, that's what the word "photography" means, too: photo comes from the Greek (right?) for light, and "graph" comes from the Greek for "drawing" (if memory serves).

I suppose no one thinks about the fact that what a camera does is it captures the light reflecting from the sufaces in front of the camera, but I think to be a good photography one needs to always try to keep this in mind -- and this is especially true of black and white.

The fact that cameras capture light isn't obvious in every photograph, but there are some pictures, like the one you posted here, where it is very clear the role light plays in painting the scene.

Now I'm in the mood to go dig up those old Adams books... sadly they are in storage along with that whole chapter of my life...

bjkeefe said...

If by "that whole chapter" you mean you used to be into photography, I'd both encourage you to give it another shot and to post some of your earlier work.

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