I've been attending the Digital Darkroom lecture series at the Annenberg Space for Photography for over a month and am still troubled by the issues of technique as it relates to photography. There was an interesting post thread at Flak Photo related to this concerns also.
So what is the importance of technique - if I use Gaussian blur am I disqualified from being a "real" photographer - or is it artist? Is this dialog similar to something that sculpture had almost a century ago with Duchamp?
As a photographer I'm part gear head, it's one of the ways that I connect with what I want to say - like a musician choosing an instrument that they're going to speak with. Plus, not everything I do is serious - I like having a format for quick sketches (hipstamatic), one for really covering a location (digital) and one from the heart (large format). All of those speak to different parts of how I want to express myself.
My newest love is wet-plate. It's got the magic of large format with a luminous voice. The above image is from an afternoon spent at a friend's house.
