Whytake describes itself thus: “whytake.net is the first Social Network dedicated exclusively to Nature Photographers - Designed by Nature Photographers, for Nature Photographers”. I discovered the site about a year ago, if I remember correctly following up a link to one of the founders, Rafael Rojas (a really excellent photographer, by the way).

Whytake is really nicely designed, and has a very different ethos to Flickr, 500px and the like. By limiting the number of photographers that members can upload to 48, it encourages a portfolio mindset, rather than the usual “spray and pray”. The Nature theme is strictly enforced. It is also rather light on the social side, which could be seen as a plus or a negative. There is no commenting on photos, no groups, no - thank god - awards.  You can add other member’s photos to your favourites, and that’s it. Members can create fairly extensive profiles, and also add posts to a personal wall.  There are centrally organised “photos of the day” and challenges, and that’s about it. Pretty refreshing really.

The average quality level borders on intimidating.

Whytake seems to be more about discovery than self-promotion at the moment, and providing the essential tools for “discovered” photos to market themselves.  By defining and maintaining tight constraints, it encourages quality. It’s also totally non-commercial. Whytake seems to be something of a well kept secret, I’d say it deserves to be more widely known.

Of all the photos I took over my recent 3 day trip to Venice, this is my favourite, and the one I chose to print.  It’s also the first large (A3+ for now, but I’m going to make an A2 for framing) print I’ve made from a Sigma DP2M file, and the detail is just shockingly good. It’s difficult to settle for less now!

Ok, so it’s not the classic Venice shot by any stretch, but it’s the sort of atmosphere I was looking for. More Michael Dibdin than Agatha Christie.

I was also pleased to find that you can make long exposure photos with the Sigma with no particular problem. The auto white balance is pretty weird, but that is fairly easily fixed.

After 5 weeks in Patagonia and Antarctica, and a huge editing and processing backlog to get through and even maybe publish, what was the obvious thing to do? Of course!! Go to Venice and take some more photos! Well, I’m not making any excuses. Venice is a magical place, especially in February, and it’s just down the road. So. Here is a small selection of, maybe, a slightly different take on La Serenissima. No gondolas, no bridges, no canals (well, almost). And all captured with the quite unbelievable Sigma DP2 Merrill. Oh, and I’ve also got about 300 Olympus Pen Venice shots to get through before I can get back to the backlog!

Venice, apparently, is the photographer’s dream. And indeed, I would imagine that upwards of hundreds of thousands of shots of Her Sereness are captured every day. And yet, it is quite remarkable that searches on the web for interesting books of Venetian photography give pretty barren results. Obviously there are endless shots of the Canale Grande from the Rialto bridge, of St Mark’s square (or rather the square that people think is St Mark’s but isn’t), of gondolas, etc, but actual, creative, thought inspiring stuff ? Not so much.

There are some examples I know of, but they’re quite left of centre. The late Simon Marsden’s “City of Haunting Dreams” is gorgeous, but obviously rather gothic (Marsden is the undisputed master of infrared and “supernatural” photography). And there’s Spanish photographer Toni Catany’s “Venise”, very much a book of two halves, and which seems rather hard to get hold of these days.  Leafing through both of these, Catany’s work seems to have influenced me more, at least his later stuff.

I have just ordered Christopher Thomas’ Venice in Solitude, which looks good, but again is a little specialised (he uses a now extinct large format Polaroid film). So where’s the classic ? Where’s the “Lost in Venice” that should be in every bookshop, every Venice corner tourist trap? Apparently it doesn’t exist. Maybe with everybody busy taking their own photos, there’s no market for it ? Maybe it is just impossible to grab and fix that elusive essence of Venice, which keeps flashing in the corner of your eye, but vanishes as you try to fix it on film or screen. Maybe some well-known (but not to me) Italian photographer has cornered the market ? Actually, I don’t think so, I did that search too. 

There are a couple of local photographers I discovered selling prints ands stuff, but I’m not going to link to them, because frankly they’re no better than the average visitor. And there are people doing photo tours - should be a sitting target, but again they seem sadly uninspiring.

In the current edition of Reponses Photo, you can find three “alternative” views of Venice, by three winners of Fuji cameras taken to Venice by the slightly ridiculous and rather pretentious Jean-Christophe Bechet. The results are disappointing to put it mildly (although Bechet naturally thinks they’re great). One shot modern docks in the fog - ok, fine, Venice has a modern side. Hold the front page. One shot the inside of (modern) museums - well frankly I would have thought he’d have found more, and better, material in Paris. And one was a little more courageous and shot Venice at night. At least he tried. Why did it not occur to Bechet that the real challenge lies not in avoiding replicating the millions of tourist shots, but perhaps to do them well, with an eye to really nailing what it is that captivates people about the floating city.  But no, that wouldn’t be arty enough. Except that it would. Venice could, and should, be the muse for some photographer’s masterpiece. But strangely it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Maybe I’m just ignorant I’ll carry on searching. Suggestions, anybody ?

An unavoidable part of Antarctic Peninsula cruises is crossing the Drake Passage. Apart from the high probability of gut-churning seas, it takes at least 2 full days, more if you’re headed further South. Fortunately one of the compensations onboard OneOcean’s Akademik Vavilov is a well stocked polar library, which included a number of photo books. Most of these books were either historical (Frank Hurley, etc) or recent monographs by well-known photographers. The latter tend to follow the fine art, “National Geographic” school - beautifully crafted representations of the natural beauty of the polar regions, in the style of the particular photographer. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, of course, it’s what pretty much all photographers onboard aspired to, however unrealistically, me included. And OneOcean make sure to have not only a excellent staff photographer on-board, but often as well a professional, known photographer as “artist in residence”, for example Daisy Gilardini, or in our case, Ira Meyer. But the book that grabbed my attention was somewhat different. First of all it stood out by having a stark, subdued cover photo. And second, much to my delight, it appeared to, and indeed did, contain exclsively panoramic photography. I had stumbled across “The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole“, by Stuart Klipper, and it turned out to be quite a discovery.

The photography featured in the book came out of a number of visits to the Antarctic as part of the US National Science Foundation’s artist and writers programme. This has given Stuart Klipper extensive and near-exclusive access to areas of the continent well off the tourist trail, and from these he has built up a fantastic body of work. This work is generally more aligned with the “extraordinary in the ordinary” ethos pioneered by Stephen Shore, but with the twist that there is little ordinary in this particular subject matter. It presents a much more reflective and impressionistic view than we usually see. His photographs often dictate no obvious focal point. The subject is the whole frame, and often at first glance it could seem void of interest. There are few “wow” moments. But give it a little time and space, and the otherworldliness of the scene starts to take hold. Far more than another shot of an impossibly blue iceberg against a dramatic sky, Klipper’s vast expanses of ice under soft, subdued light give you a true picture of Antarctica. And it doesn’t hurt that the majority of his work is made using the unattainable, unrealistic camera of my dreams, the Linhof Technorama 617. Which in a short documentary clip, he’s seen using handheld, for heaven’s sake!

Finding further information about Stuart Klipper is not totally straightforward. He has a website, but to say it is inscrutable is putting it mildly. When you do manage to find anything written about or by him, he seems to come across as an erudite, engaging, committed, entertaining and slightly insane character. He’s certainly a million miles away from the standard pro landscape photographer type. He offers no workshops, no gear reviews, he doesn’t sell his work, at least not directly. He doesn’t even sell his book. In fact he doesn’t even mention it on his website. He does have a Facebook page, but that has only photos on it. Which, actually, is more than enough. His non-polar work is equally fascinating, and again mainly 617 panoramic. All in all he seems to pretty much a denizen of the “art” end of the photography world (actually I’ve discovered that he is an associate professor of art at the University of Colorado).

Although it’s a bit glib to say so, I feel just a little bit validated by Stuart Klipper’s work. Although I enjoy “normal” photogaphy and try to do a good job of it, both myself and others have noticed that panoramic format work is where my heart really lies. And I have a lot of shots in my archive which could be taken for attempts at copying Stuart Klipper.

So, as soon as I’d got a little immersed in “The Antarctic: From the Circle to the Pole” for the first time, I couldn’t resist going to grab my XPan, and spending some time outside in the southern reaches of the Drake Passage shooting a whole roll of essentially nothing, with a few chunks of ice floating in it. Totally undistracted by the later, unavoidable lures of penguins, whales, leopard seals and big blue icebergs against dramatic skies (and indeed anybody else on deck), I tried to let the approaching Antarctic speak to me.

—-

Coda - actually, doing a touch more Googling turns up quite a lot of references to Stuart Klipper, even on one of my favourite websites, The Online Photographer.  I obviously haven’t been paying attention. It’s also gratifying to discover that pretty much everything I’ve read about him is more or less aligned with my own reactions.

Oh, and two great quotes from this interview:

Film or digital, why ?
I’m not a Luddite. Film is what
the Linhof uses.

When asked why he prefers the ‘wide-field’ format he simply says ‘because it’s wider’.