Originally posted by BrianR The article made it sound like his business was built on traditional landscape and wildlife photography and that creating art (and the digital processing he's using) is a recent dramatic shift in his approach, and was not his massive money making technique.
Not that this should stop anyone from pursuing their creative vision...
I'm not sure why that's relevant. The guy has made millions, he's looking back on lifetime of work, this is what he sees as important. To make art.
To me his current interpretation is spot on and I'd encourage anyone to bypass the nonsense and cut to the chase.
His other advice is also worth reading. My take would be he's finally realized it was his artistic vision that was selling his images, not his subject matter.
Originally posted by gaweidert National Geographic did not pick the most artistic or stunning photographs for their articles.
Too funny, National Geographic took the 2000 images the photographer submitted, they picked the best ten, then took the most artistic one. Your statement that they did no artistic evaluation of the images is absolutely , insane. The process is well documented. Otherwise their images would look like the photos in medical text books. I have never once seen an image in National Geographic that wasn't a piece ofart on it's own. That doesn't happen by accident. I'm really unclear as to why you even say these things. Surely, you'e aware of the difference between National Geographic and medical / biology texts. The park biologist I talk to is always complaining about the lack of composition skills of donated photos that are to be used in the park wildlife guides. He judges those images as more than illustration. And that's always been true. The fact that you are documenting something, doesn't mean you can't do it artistically. A man of your background should know that more than anyone else, not be posting hogwash like that.
I suspect that your evaluation of art was so ingrained, that you could focus on the technical, because you knew intuitively which images were good enough on an artistic level and got rid of those that weren't before you even started looking at the technical aspects of the image. Either that, or as in the case of many art directors, they ask for the Artist/photgraphers 10 best and make the final selection themselves, usingg the photographer's artistic vision to cull the images.