Len

[BarryBobPosthole]

These guys are my favorite photographers. Except for you of course. What I wanna know is how much of this is equipment and how much of it is art?


BKB

http://lava-light-galleries.smugmug.com/

[River1]

Great stuff Barry. I have two prints by CJ Kale that are amazing.

[LJ3]

Very cool stuff! Most of those images are heavily cooked in post processing but the images themselves are stunning on their own merit. There's a line (and I'm not sure where it is) that when someone takes an image SOOC (straight out of the camera) and begins dicking around with it that it becomes fine art and gets labelled as such. It's kinda cool to me though, that some of the talented folks out there these days see the image as the starting point for what they'd like to do. They capture the image and are so excited to get back home and start working on it.

So, lots of what that is art and quite a bit of it is equipment. The camera sensor (spendy), the lenses (spendy) have to be top shelf equipment to capture the dynamic range of the image (getting as much highlight and shadow detail as possible in the initial image), eliminating noise and graininess in the image (ISO or old school film ASA) has to be very low to get away with the amount of processing they're doing and still come out look clean and noise free. Many of those shots are what I consider low light situations and consumer level equipment just can't compete there.

[BarryBobPosthole]

When I talked to them at their shop I asked about his camera and lenses and he told me what the range of color was that his 'wave camera' as he called it would capture and it was on the order of 1000 times more than even high end consumer stuff. Personally, as long as the image is closer to how you would see it with your eyes, the processing stuff is fine, because then it brings your eye, or my eye anyway, to the composition. Unless its close to the way it really looks in other words, I might not pay a hell of a lot of attention to the composition of the image.
These guys do some crazy shit to get these images, particularly the volcano ones. But surprisingly most of the animal stuff they get is just getting out with a mask and snorkel and camera every day and shooting a buttload of pictures. And when they're out there that much, the chances of seeing something really cool are a lot greater.

BKB