Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Success! Idiot "Help" Turned Off

New York, New York

Many thanks to commenters who told me that Google+ was automatically helping my pictures "look more like professionals make."

Having spent the past two weekends teaching platinum printing workshops, I'm reminded of something I always stress when teaching.

Of all the countless bad photographic prints in the world, and all the countless billions of bad uploaded web presentations of photographs, almost all of them are the result of the photographer trying too hard, not from being lazy. And now we have robots to try too hard for us.

Here are two recent pictures that I couldn't get to publish correctly, before knowing where the off-switches were, because the robots of Google+ didn't think they looked professional enough.

Manchester, Connecticut

"text stop"—I-684, south of Brewster, New York

"Rest areas," or as we used to say in New Jersey, "pit stops," are now in New York state labeled "text stops," in order to encourage people not to text while driving.

No comments: