Nothing to it, but to do it. You have to write a first post at some point. No two ways about it. Probably have to dedicate a few words to describing myself. One warning though: the artistic me is my schizofrene alterego who believes any selfrespecting artist requires an adequate artistname more befitting of the endeavour.
He calls himself 32BT, try-to-beat. That used to be thirty-to-beat because the family, when they still had confidence in him, thought he’d be driving a Porsche before his thirties birthday. Now he just tries to beat a mundane life, like the rest of us.
First of all, Da Beat don’t do film. As in photographic still-image film, not movie. Although he doesn’t do movie either. As a kid, he once did film using a classic automatic point&shoot, and still managed to get a complete roll of underexposed film, thus ending what perhaps could have been a successful career in photography.
Da Beat also don’t do selfies. Even today there are a limited number of images of him, and he prefers it that way. There are people that have a need to be in front of the camera, and there are people that feel a need to be behind the camera. Despite Da Beat’s early experience, he belongs to the latter.
Da Beat’s been into digital imaging since forever. In fact, he has been manipulating digital pixels for around 40 years now. He went thru a classic print preparation training. That is, printing-press print preparation. Da Beat even had a formal typesetting training to boot. He used to be an apple aficionado, not because it was fashionable, but that’s what the industry used. Desktop publishing. Da Beat still uses Apple though he wants to add; with increasing reluctance.
When digital photography became more available and mainstream in the year 2000 (yes, really, it existed since long before that), Da Beat created photoshop plugins for photographers that provided the digital equivalent of conventional analogue techniques to ease the transition from film to digital. He used to be somewhat known for a plugin called Convert to BW Pro, which did exactly what the title says. Interactive, prefiltering, filmselection, grading, the lot.
Which brings Da Beat to the subject of B&W. Da Beat, as mentioned, don’t do film, never did, so he has no qualms regarding the look & feel of some once renowned B&W film with some kind or other type of esoteric developing process. He do a lot of B&W though, and that is not because he claims some faux artsy background in analogue, nor feeling a need to replicate any passed golden age of photography, but because most images are about graphics.
And the number one rule in graphics is this: design in B&W, then add color. Being lazy by nature, Da Beat tends to skip that second part.
In addition, color usually requires a lot of finetuning whereas our color perception is, by its very nature, extremely imprecise. What appears to be a good representation of atmosphere today, may be totally off the next. That said, Da Beat will certainly do color, even with clearly graphical images, especially when color is an important part of the experience.
And finally, photography is, if anything, about storytelling. No matter how much technology is advancing the industry, no matter how much computational imaging or even AI will dominate our collective image making, Da Beat cares for story and experience. Storytelling and experience, not equipment. No amount of expensive gear and no amount of AI and computational imaging will make up for your inability to tell a story or transfer an experience.
32BT 