Author: Richard R. Barron

A Photo that Shall Live in Infamy

/ Richard R. Barron

I have shot a lot of hard-hitting photos in my career, spanning personal tragedy, death, natural disasters, the human drama of athletic competition, and much more. I have been threatened, called names, yelled at, almost assaulted, run over by athletes on the field, hit by baseballs, etc. Once I even covered my own car crash.

Flattened Armadillo, Oklahoma State Highway 19, c. 1991
Flattened Armadillo, Oklahoma State Highway 19, c. 1991

With all the images over the years, you would imagine that images at scenes that showed life and property being lost would garner the most wrath from a sensitive public. But no. The most offensive image I ever published, at least based on the incredibly hostile reaction of our readers, was this 1991 image of an armadillo that had been squished by traffic, then painted over by the highway department while striping the centerline on state highway 19 west of Ada. One caller to my home phone, who courageously withheld his identity, said I was, “a sick son of a b!tch.”

The Zone

/ Richard R. Barron

A friend commented recently that one of my photos really impressed her. The photo, a black-and-white shot of a mission graveyard south of Farmington, New Mexico, was made one morning in 2003 as David Martin and I were ending an excellent desert hiking trip, Desert Cold. One reason it’s possible to make photos like this is that when I travel, those who are with me and I have an agreement that we are in “The Zone.” The rules of The Zone are simple: anytime anyone wants to stop and make a picture, we stop and make a picture, no questions asked.

I know that many of you share the experience of going on family vacations. When I was 11, we drove to California, and along the way we stopped at White Sands National Monument. I don’t know if you have been there, but I have been four times now, and not only is it a very interesting photographic subject, it’s a playground wonderland of gypsum sand and sunshine. When we were there in 1974, we stopped about a third of the way along the Dunes Drive where the sand dunes start to get interesting, got out and posed for a picture, then got back in the car and drove the rest of the Dunes Drive, past the giant, pure, glistening mountains of perfect white sand. We couldn’t get out and play on them because we had to be somewhere – Yuma or something – by a certain time.

When, as an adult, I began to travel the American west, I decided that I wouldn’t be like that; anything we wanted to stop and see or photograph would be on the list. Thus, “The Zone.”

Made with my Minolta DiMage 7i in black-and-white mode on a cold November morning, this image of a southwestern mission graveyard in northwest New Mexico was made possible by “The Zone.”
Made with my Minolta DiMage 7i in black-and-white mode on a cold November morning, this image of a southwestern mission graveyard in northwest New Mexico was made possible by “The Zone.”

Why Your Web Site (or Photoblog) is Unviewable

/ Richard R. Barron / 3 Comments

Here are some things you can do to discourage me from visiting your web site.

  • Intro page that says “click here to enter my site.” Let’s assume I went to your web site to enter it in the first place. Thanks for wasting my time.
  • Flash player intro that takes more than a second or two to load. I could take the chance that this thing won’t take nine minutes to load, or I could close it right now.
  • Mysterious images to click on with no words. I am never in the mood to guess about what I am clicking, even if you think it makes you seem deep or dark.
  • Music that automatically plays without my requesting it. I’m either enjoying my own music, or have a legitimate reason for having it turned off, like conversation. If you have music on your web site, it’s as if you think we all need to hear music that you like. Window closed, bookmarked not.
  • Sparkletags, ads that claim I’ve won something, animations that invite me to shoot something and win, or animated slide shows of your terrible photos. Do I really want to spend 90 seconds watching all this crap load? The internet is big enough without you gobbling up my broadband with your terrible taste.
  • Any page that resizes my windows or changes any of my settings. People, please. This is my computer.
  • Text that is a color or style that conflicts with the background. Usually this is bright red text against a royal blue background, but also includes repeating photos in the background. Trust me when I say that you have nothing worth saying that requires me to squint or get a headache.
  • Your terrible blogging. What you are really asking your readers to do is something you would not: read about the banal minutia of other people’s lives. If you want readers, your blog must be entertaining.

I’m not saying that all websites are train wrecks, but come on, you know who you are. Maybe it’s time to remove that dancing icon you found on AOL in 1997, and move on. Maybe it’s time to rethink the blaze green headlines and blaze orange text. Maybe we don’t want to hear “Rock You Like a Hurricane” as often as you do. Think about it.

The Stare

/ Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

I was cruising though some links on a friend’s blog this morning and came across one family blog after another that featured photos of their children. The photos weren’t very good, in part because of a common element: the Stare. The Stare is ubiquitous and pervasive in amateur photography, and ultimately ruins what might be otherwise excellent pictures. I’m talking about the act of stopping whatever neat thing is going on and ordering the subjects to stare at the camera and grin. The result isn’t a picture of a moment in time, but a picture of people posing for a picture.

Abby has a cordial chat with Buxton the Goat, 2004
Abby has a cordial chat with Buxton the Goat, 2004
The reason for this is that when you ask the subjects to stare at the camera, you are no longer observing a moment, but are part of it, and often you have taken over the moment all together. And the biggest reason people do this all the time isn’t that they aren’t very good at photographing candid moments (though that is usually true), but because that’s how they were trained since infancy to behave when a camera is near. In fact, if a parent sees me trying to photograph their child for my newspaper, they will often, without even asking me, stop whatever is going on, and tell their kid to “smile for the camera.” Usually this means that the moment itself is over, and I usually just thank them and go shoot someone else.
Being locked into this paradigm is one of the key reasons there is so much bad photography in the world. My own family is comfortable enough in front of the camera, and skilled enough behind it, to allow us to escape the vice of posing.
This isn’t a skill you can develop quickly; often you will feel the urge to pose people out of fear that you’ll otherwise miss the entire photo opportunity. But as you work harder to find more and more genuinely candid moments, you will realize that you are losing interest in the Stare.