(inspired by a wise Mastodon thread)

It made me think that a lot of people’s real hobby is gatekeeping, but they apply it to different avocations.

Way back in the ’90s I was a member of a photography club. Each month, there would be a competition among members. Pictures were scored from 1-5 on each of three criteria, which were something like technical expertise, aesthetics, and realization of the month’s theme. Everything was highly formalized with rules. Entries could only be recent slides, must comply with very specific labelling requirements, and so on, but the rules didn’t end there. Interpretation of the theme had to be extremely literal. I was lectured about frivolity on more than one occasion when using the theme metaphorically.

In the technical category, there were also a lot of absolutes. Visible grain in an image at normal magnification was an immediate disqualification. Technical points were deducted if there was anything remotely out of focus. Portraits which were allowed to have bokeh — but only if you couldn’t determine how many blades the lens diaphragm had. Furthermore, it was considered a technical flaw to have a portrait where the subject’s nose broke the outline of their face or had more than one reflected light visible in each eye. It wasn’t considered good form to mention make of the camera during the competition itself, but everybody knew who shot Leicas or had Zeiss lenses on their Nikons, and this influenced technical scores accordingly.

But beyond these kinds of rules, one of the old-timers had developed a set of “aesthetic guidelines” which were ruthlessly applied (in retrospect, these may have been born of some form of OCD). Two points would be subtracted from any image’s aesthetic score if there was water breaking the bottom of the frame “because that’s bad composition.” Any image that was brighter near the bottom than the top lost points. Landscapes that were not black and white had to have a person or a horse visible “to create interest.” Pictures of urban or industrial scenes had to be taken in hard daylight, while pictures of nature would lose points for not being taken at the Golden Hour. Pictures of people had to have an even number of eyes visible. Lines always had to lead into the image and never out.

I remember on one occasion, two of the judges arguing about a picture’s aesthetic qualities and one finally taking out a tape measure to confirm that the eye of a seabird was not exactly 33% from two edges of the frame. He triumphantly reduced the picture’s score for violating the “rule of thirds.”

I tried to participate on their terms for a lot longer than I should have. I was routinely chastised for not taking photography seriously because I didn’t study up on the rules. Needless to say, I eventually quit. I’d lost a lot of enthusiasm for photography, and it took a long time to get excited about it again.

I see this as a common thing in “typical guy hobbies” be they photography, cars, phones, motorcycles, programming languages, computers, guitars, knives, operating systems, guns, bicycles, or gaming systems. It often manifests as confusing the gear with the hobby, but also devolves into arguments about X being better than Y. It turns out that arguing in-group / out-group status is more interesting for a lot of folks than the hobby they’re ostensibly enjoying.

“Forget that stuff,” I yell (trying to convince myself and everyone else). Go out and do the thing, use what you’ve got, and enjoy it. That’s the real point, after all.

A window frame like this is a good way to test lens distortion and/or your post-processing workflow. As much as I hate it, Adobe Lightroom did a reasonably good job compensating for the lens distortion.

1/1000sec at f/8. Nikon D780, VR 28-300 f/3.5-5.6G at 82mm.

I have always had a strangely strong relationship to places. It’s difficult to verbalize, but having a deep familiarity with a locale has been a fundamental way I relate to the world. This extends into mapping fantastic places I’ve read about upon the physical world.

For example, when I spent some summer months of my tweens on the Gulf Islands near Vancouver, the archipelago became Earthsea in my mind. Around that same timeframe, I lived near Altadena. When I “discovered” Tolkien’s works, Middle-earth started imprinting upon the local terrain.

The San Gabriel mountains formed an excellent stand-in for the Misty Mountains. In winter, the clouds sit on the peaks, in Spring, the “June Gloom” does the same, and in the summer, the mountains were nearly hidden by the swirling smog of the late 70s.

The area is filled with places that mapped across those worlds. There’s a windy road above a tributary to the Arroyo Seco that goes through forests of oak and deodar, and in the early evening when the sky grows dark the lights in the windows of houses on the lower slope twinkle mysteriously. It was exactly what Rivendell looked like in my mind’s eye.

As I’d read, local places would overlay. The craggy entrance to Colby Canyon with its guardian trees, the steep drop-off ridges around Mount San Gabriel, the rough-hewn tunnel just down the trail at Eaton Saddle, the rustic cabins among the bright streams and white alder groves in Sturtevant Canyon, the high forested ridges above Ice-House Canyon — all mapped to places within the Lord of the Rings for me.

Decades later, when the blockbuster movies came out, I opted not to see them. The images in my head and the mappings to places I know were too important to be overwritten by Peter Jackon’s vision.

(Disclaimer: this photo has been digitally altered beyond just adjusting color and exposure. I removed telephone poles, a power pylon, and a lot of wires.)

Descanso Gardens are ridiculously photogenic at any time, but on a slightly overcast spring day?