Tag: Patrick LaRoque

Straight Out of Camera (SOOC)

Liked Make it darker by Patrick LaRoque (Patrick LaRoque)

At least fifty percent of the image is done in the darkroom—I think Gene would say ninety percent. The negative has the image, but it can’t produce the image completely, as the photographer saw it—not as Gene saw it.

Ahh…the good old days of film photography, when all you had to do was click the shutter (insert sarcasm emoji). The above quote is from photographer James Karales (from a very interesting 2013 article by Sam Stephenson in The Paris Review). Famous for his stunning coverage of the Civil Rights Movement at Look magazine in the 1960s, Karales first found work as Smith’s darkroom assistant, fresh out of college. He goes on:

Gene always liked to get separations around people, figures, and that was always done with potassium ferrocyanide. It was the contrast that made the prints difficult. Gene saw the contrast with his eyes, but the negative wouldn’t capture it the same way. So he would have to bring the lamp down and burn, and then if that spilled too much exposure and made it too dark, you would lighten it with the ferrocyanide.

Patrick’s post got me thinking that the Straight Out of Camera (SOOC) philosophy is a modern phenomenon that seems to track closely with the growth in the number of people owning digital cameras. It’s most active adherents are people for whom any work in the “digital darkroom” is anathema. I think some of these SOOC…

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Donald Trump, Tim Cook and Apple

Bookmarked …Declined To Comment. by Patrick LaRoque (laroquephoto.com)

I get it: Trump is a loaded gun ready to blow at every moment. He’s always one tweet away from another unhinged catastrophe. So you either tell him he’s the very bestest leader in all the world and get something out of it, or you fight and suffer reprisals. Cue Jeff Bezos. And I understand a company deciding NOT to fight. Because tariffs, because shareholders, because, because, because.

But if you stand next to Trump while he attacks the free press and say nothing, you are now complicit. If you stand next to Trump while he boasts of being solely responsible for a brand new Apple plant, when it is NOT EVEN an Apple-owned plant, and when it has in fact been making Mac Pros since 2013, you are now complicit. You are complicit in the destruction of truth, facts and reality. In the end, of decency and sanity.

And when Trump tweets about that very same “opening” and releases a video of it implying he made it all happen; when you provide him with the very words he immediately uses to lie again; when journalists reach out to you about this nonsense and you still decline to comment or to set the record straight…fuck me, but you’re now beyond complicit. Let’s not even start discussing China, Taiwan or Hong Kong.

I don’t want to play the What Steve Jobs Would’ve Done game. But every cell in my body tells me his belief system would’ve held, despite the folly of a mad king or any oppressive regime. That he would’ve recognized the moment and acted with the courage needed. He may have been many things but a coward wasn’t one of them.

So yeah I get it: all those words truly are now utterly empty.

Donald Trump, Tim Cook and Apple

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