When To Sign Your Image

[Ted Byrne]

Artists sign their work. Most photographers won't. What does that say about the self-confidence of photographers? In fact, there are many photographers who not only find it pretentious to sign an image, but will hurl it as a matter of fact, even a matter of scorn or derision.

Unsurprisingly I disagree. You will find my illustrated reasoning here: http://imagefiction.blogspot.com/2007/10/when-to-sign-photograph.html

Thoughts?

[eob]

I agree completely with your ideas about what makes a photographer "eligible" to sign his/her photographs. Some works are a result of just pressing the shutter release and some others are results of an intellectual process. They shouldn't be viewed and evaluated as equal. And photographers should know which image to sign and which one to skip. Of course, I am not talking about 'watermarking' images published on the Internet...

Incidentally, I couldn't complete the reading of your interesting article, because my eyes and brain are not capable of processing a white text on a black background for more than half a minute. Literally, I get a headache very quickly...

[Ted Byrne]

Ouch! Bummer!

Someone famous... I cannot actually recall who, maybe John Szorkowski (??) said that the worst thing you can do with a color image is to mount it on a light colored board, particularly white. I've noticed that color pops particularly well on a black mount. So that's why I've chosen that background for my blogsite. Unfortunately, there's no way to modify the background for text. Darn. You make a good point. Hate to lose any audience. Life is a tradeoff, eh? 

Ted

[eob]

Yeah, black background just for images doesn't bother me - only when I have to read white text, I get dizzy... People sometimes use medium-to-light gray color for text on web sites. That helps (at least in my case) a lot. Another method to ease up eye strain is using medium-to-dark grey for background instead of black. Oh well, there are different perceptions of color (including black and white) by different people. Personally, I would never say that "the worst thing you can do with a color image is to mount it on a light colored board, particularly white". That sounds like a dogma and I am very wary of any and all dogmas...

[habakuk]

Here - css is your friend. Each blog should be capable of using CSS (cascading style sheets) so you could define a style that makes all text background light grey and the text black, while you keep the rest of the board and especially the space around pictures in a nice black. But having pictures combined with text as in your blog will always be a compromise - either for readability or for the picture color quality. Having the text in a grey instead of a bright white is already a good idea.

cheers
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