A photoblog, concentrating on landscapes, by Charlie Loyd. My more personal site, with writing and everyday photography, is here.
I welcome questions and remarks, however technical or non-technical, by e-mail or message.
Yes. If you’re interested in one not listed there, or want other sizes, papers, framing, etc., e-mail me.
The domain name, 6jo.org, I picked up a while ago because it reads the same upside down (in typefaces with an open ‘g’).
As for an artist’s statement, I’m reluctant to put my intentions in words as well as photographs. This is a blog, not an exhibition; it’s always different. But it has developed its own flavor of careful simplicity. This means technical rigor and unclever composition. It means trying to show subjects without any effort to advertise, shame, exoticize, domesticate, ironize or glamorize them beyond what I see them doing by themselves.
In the constraints of this clean approach, in a curatorial rather than editorial way, I’m collecting photos which I think suggest two things at once: that the world is a kind of detective story, made of structured information accessible to anyone willing to look and think hard, but that the world is usually opaque or even mirror-like to our minds, and what meaning we can get to is at best partial and ambiguous. If there’s something I want to make look impressive here, it’s the length of the border between what we can know and what we can’t know from looking at things.
This question is badly under-asked. Careful examination of some landscape photographers’ work suggests they’re doing much more material manipulation than they imply, so I want to be clear about my standards.
In the sense of removing telephone poles, moving trees closer together, inserting sunbeams, etc., absolutely none. I am a realist here: besides in-camera effects like motion blur and depth of field (which are easily recognized, well understood, and often unavoidable), these photos are meant to be faithful representations of things that I looked at, not things I imagined. There is room in the world for other kinds of photography, but this is the kind that shows things as they could be seen, and it’s important to me that you can trust that.
That said, I usually spend a while on post-processing. I often add contrast to the default raw conversion, correct chromatic aberration and lens distortion, reduce noise, adjust color balance, USM with a radius of about one output pixel, and so on. But all this effort is aimed at reproducing, not producing; it’s about correcting differences between cameras and eyes.
For example, this photo came out of the camera almost entirely orange, because the sodium D-line emissions at 588.99 and 589.59 nanometers account for the great majority of the visible light from street lamps. But when I was standing there, my eyes were so adjusted that the cement looked merely yellowish, the sky was grayish, and the green in the vegetation was clear though not striking, so this is what I tried for.