Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve.
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Newsstand: November 23, 2009
Transit City and Transit Cities
The Daily Photoist: November 23, 2009
Televisualist: A Kinder, Gentler Televisualist
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Gee whiz. More shots from the same photographer -- and from the same day -- as the September 3rd Daily Photoist. Surely there can't be that few halfway passable photographers in our city, and certainly not ones who emulate an Abercrombie & Fitch ad agency pitching now for Urban Outfitters.
I think that's a back-handed compliment. Or sth.
Meh. *Shrug*
These photos were taken three different days at three different locations. I think they're all lovely, and that they look particularly good together.
I'm having a 70s flashback with the plaid shirts and undershirt tank top
lovely is the word.
Ah, beautiful young people. So easy on the eyes, and the brain.
@David:
I stand corrected: one of the trio were shot on the same day as the September 3rd instalment of the Daily Photoist. Hair-splitting, all things considered.
But we already know you find the photos to be lovely: you're the editor, and we see exactly what you like. The variety and vitality of a regular photo feature is only as strong as the aesthetic values behind the critical or editorial body calling the shots. Deep lake versus shallow lake, really: one has convection, while the other sits still.
In other words, Torontoist (or any publication, for that matter) benefits from multiple people who rotate the selection of Daily Photoist postings.
How about we supplement the Photoist with polaroids of your wang. Ya know? Spice it up a little! It is unfortunate that more people aren’t submitting other photography more often then trickling in, but at least David is determined at keeping a steady flow in.
Thanks for your suggestion, accozzaglia, but there are currently no plans to change Daily Photoist's format.
@Gauldar: Torontoist's Flickr Pool has, on average, 80 new photos added to it every day. We're doing just fine as far as quality and quantity of submissions go, thanks.
Ahh, my bad. I usualy can only tell whenever there is a little thing at the bottom of the article "Photo by ". I'd probibly would have had more information had I actualy been able to view Flickr Pool at work, where access is blocked out for being a "social or networking" site. Ahh well, sucks to be me.
Don't take it personally, David. It's your job as editor to field criticism and suggestions from your readership, even when it's harsh. But as editor, this suggestion raises the complaint which, one way or another, reflects poorly on a city-region-wide publication whose mandate is about bringing forward the freshest news and talent not found elsewhere locally.
That said, the Daily Photoist shall benefit from a fresh eyes*. Put it in a different light: it's not unlike last year's Hart House Camera Club Exhibition, wherein the Club found three judges to panel photo submissions. All fine and well, except that the trio's aesthetic styles and backgrounds overlapped uncannily, leaving little shoulder room for variety with the finalists. It resulted in a cadre of numbingly similar selections.
* No, m'dear, I'm not interested, nor is anyone else I know -- just in case this was interpreted as self-promotion.
[That was "eye", not "eyes", fwiw.]
hey david, when are you going to put me on the payroll? Abercrombie....er.... urban outfitters don't pay me enough.
accozzagila, if david agrees, maybe we can get you on the payroll as my assistant? (send me your resume first)
@tomms: What are you griping about? You're getting fistfuls of gratis promo time from all this hubbub. Gift horse! :)
Did anyone but accozzaglia (and David and tomms) even notice the continuity, or conclude that Toronto is a shallow place with 2 photographers to its name (and the other guy was busy)?
i've critiqued David Topping in the past (well, mainly for how i disagree with his Vandalist section), but i think that its wrong to pick apart his Photoist choices.
he's chosen some pictures that i have thought were amazing (the beach shot of the child being thrown in the air, the digitally-altered seagull, the above-the-clouds shot of the CN Tower), and he's selected some pictures that have been, well...boring.
but hey, that's art. its personal and not always all-encompassing. i look at these 3 photos and i see: a really hot girl who was captured well in a photo, a hipster wearing a shirt and a 1973-era picture of a guy (that was taken recently). amazing? nah. nice? sure. others may think otherwise, and hey, that's art.
as far as critiquing Topping's selections, has anyone bothered to either a) submit their pictures to the Flickr pool?, b) bothered to look at the Toronto pool from which he makes his selections? Didn't think so.
@atomeyes99:
I don't dispute that David has selected some impressive shots. That isn't the point. It's that having one-person editorial team selecting photos or images to publish limits the variety and diversity selected from the photo pool.
And to wit, a) I have done so; and b) I do, from time to time, probably every couple of months when I have some down time to get lost on Flickr. Anybody else?
How do they get that greenish-turquoise tint to the photos? I seem to see this a lot in pro/enthusiast photography. Is it just a filter?
The colour cast is likely done after the fact in Camera RAW/Lightroom/Aperture using the RAW file from the camera (shooting in RAW allows much better control over the colour channels, as it's all the information the sensor catches, bit-for-bit…if you're pro or semi-pro, you shouldn't be shooting in JPEG) and then taken into Photoshop for finessing. Editing the RAW or DNG file is non-destructive.
You can also dick around with the channels in Photoshop, but it's better going into Photoshop with as much information preserved as possible from the start, as many changes are destructive and permanent to the original data.
It's a faux cross-processing effect in some digital manipulation software, like Marc was explaining. This is apparently digital-sourced, per the EXIF metadata for those shots.
Old skool cross-processing is done the wet way: take E-6 film and process it in C-41 chemistry. In English, that just means have slide film processed in the chemicals used to make negatives.
I love shooting film. Even if what I shoot is total rubbish. :)
@spacejack:
Enjoy the real deal. :)
Thanks guys. I remember seeing the cross-processed stuff my photographer friends would print. I wasn't sure if with digital it was the sensor on high-end equipment or what.
If, like me, you're too cheap to keep up with the latest Adobe & Apple stuff, this looks like a low-rent alternative.
@spacejack: Nah. Just play with film. It's a lot more fun (if you enjoy tactile and haptic experiences), and it makes you really think out in advance how you compose your shots.
@atomeyes99: Since this discussion has raised questions about variety and recognition for notable shots over rotten photography* on Torontoist's Flickr pool (and how only a select few photographer's styles seem to pass one editor's solitary muster), it turns out that a few more images than previously realized from my bin were added to the pool over the past few months. So, uh, there.
* These are mostly of course complete rubbish. They do at least add one node of variety to the pool along with many other much better photographers who'll never see the light of day on a Torontoist entry, because their locally made work and style invariably fall outside one person's very specific aesthetics.
^^are you taking a shot at David Topping's taste or his selection process? or both?
and since i like photography, can you show me some examples of what you would like shown on Photoist? curious to what you like and how it differs from David's selections.
@atomeyes99: I'm critiquing his selections process, which consists of him and him. One person, no matter how good they are, always have limitations to diversity in their tastes. I don't think anyone can completely escape that. If left as is, then it would make more sense to call it "Editor's Photoist of the Day" or sslt.
One suggestion to work around that would be to encourage all existing Torontoist staff to rotate their favourites from the pool in a contributory fashion. I enjoy seeing what grabs other people, as it communicates their own personality and world view. It would keep the daily feature fresh and less predictable.
What I want to see when I sit down with my cup of coffee each morning is something that will surprise me, even if I don't personally care for it. The point is to be kept on your toes. It's a bit like the early days of MuchMusic when you never knew what music video would be played next. It might suck, and it might own, but you were willing to take a wait-and-see approach with hope that something would steal your attention. There's magic to that.
By having a photo feature, but to have only one person making the selections is like having the editor write all the articles for one publication (which at one time was actually the case for newspapers in Upper Canada, say around the 1830s to a bit after Confederation. Then the sizes -- and competition -- grew and more writers were added slowly, making the papers less like "party organs" and more like story-reporting journalism).
To contrast, I'd be very surprised to learn that a major online paper's "Day in Pictures" feature is completely chosen by one person. To have one person call all the shots is the modern analogue to the "party organ" of yore. Another analogy is to compare it to a small art gallery, where only one curator showcases what they like. Niche galleries are interesting, but people's tastes are fickle and varied. Many of those galleries end up being fly-by-night and faint memories just a few years later.
Does that answer your question?
For a free news service I think your being a little too picky.
If you insist.
Gauldar is right.
I assume David gets paid. likely not a handsome salary, but he still gets paid.
so you're asking Torontoist to either hire more paid people to help with Photoist, or you are asking people who may not be versed in art/photography to help make the selection?
i've been a cynical bastard in the past but, in the end, Torontoist is a free website. enjoy the positives, bitch about the negatives and move on.
if you dislike David's choices, either: a) try to get him fired, b) try to take over his job for him, c) give him feedback and hopefully he listens to peoples' comments and looks at making changes, d) grin and bare it, e) move on to another website
@atomeyes99:
I am not suggesting that Torontoist hire a bunch of people. To have tastes in photos doesn't require a versed command, and David -- far as I know -- is an editor-in-chief, not a photo expert. I am suggesting that the on-hand staff contributors rotate their favourite photos in the Daily Photoist column. That's not a huge thing to ask, particularly if they volunteer themselves to pick out their faves.
David will do what David will do. On the last bit you wrote, I've unambiguously run with option C. At times, I'm fairly up front as I've been here. This post-and-thread hit on a personal pet peeve, particularly as Torontoist on the one hand don't want to shoehorn themselves into a cultural niche (like "a staff of only white 20-something West-end hipsters"), and yet at times exhibit just that -- the Daily Photoist, particularly. It's cognitive dissonance.
As editor, David may either be as receptive or as diminutively dismissive to reader input as he so elects. And he has. Advertising helps pay for Torontoist's continuing presence, and advertisers expect a minimum guaranteed hit/share count for the dollars they spend. And a Torontoist without reader comments would be a fairly lonely place.
At the mercy of everyone else, I've exhausted the point (and I apologize for that). I'm moving on from this thread. Thanks for putting up with me.
I'm getting to this a little late because I've been somewhat preoccupied, but I hope my response clears things up for anyone wondering how (and why) Photoist works.
The reason why just one person picks Photoist, and why that one person is me, is twofold: first, I want Torontoist to look good every morning, and picking Photoist gives me control over that—like a Photo Editor who chooses the lead photo to go above the fold with the top story in a major newspaper. I do think that if you look through the Photo archives you'll see that I regularly choose a diverse range of shots from a diverse range of photographers, and you should know that I am absolutely conscious of that every day when I pick a photo and a photographer to feature the following day. Second, it's an inefficient use of limited staff resources to alternate between (and pay) two people to pick the shots. We used to do it that way and stopped precisely for that reason. In this case, it's simply a case of too many cooks; if the sole purpose of this blog was to feature photos, the complaint might hold a bit more water, I think.
It's also worth clarifying that the suggestion that there are "photographers who'll never see the light of day on a Torontoist entry, because their locally made work and style invariably fall outside one person's very specific aesthetics" is just plain silly (even setting aside from the silly idea that I have "very specific aesthetics," beyond liking things that are pretty or interesting): the dozens of other staffers on Torontoist choose the photos they want to go with their posts, and those photos regularly come from our pool.
Also, re: "David—far as I know—is an editor-in-chief, not a photo expert." I'm not a "photo expert," no, but I am a photographer, a pretty decent one who gets hired to do it and whose work is solicited by magazines and newspapers you probably like just fine.
But there's a larger issue that you're missing, which might not make you feel any better: as editor-in-chief and the person responsible for all hiring, I only bring people onto Torontoist who I like and who I see as a good fit for the site anyway. So ultimately, if I had to vastly, vastly simplify and overstate things, Torontoist is like one big Photoist: it highlights the work of people whose work I like.
Anyway, the Daily Photoist tomorrow will knock you all off your asses.