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Anonymous11/11/25, 22:41No.4482153
what the hell happened to lighting? 40 years ago you'd have a nice controlled hairlight even on a presidential portrait
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Anon11/11/25, 22:46No.4482154
That’s a great photo, really. I like the softness of the background and, somehow, the slightly off-centre position of his face makes the image more interesting to look at. Also, dat black point is *chef’s kiss.*
>What the hell happened to lighting?
I don’t know so tolerate my spitballing a moment. Lack of education? LEDs? High sensitivity digital photography? A fetish for “natural” lighting, i.e. available light? Hubris and arrogance? Penny-pinching or laziness?
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Anon11/11/25, 23:07No.4482163
It only looks nice with film.
Actually, this applies to photos in general. Digital looks wrong. I'm not saying there's any fundamental reason why, but (with the exception of grain and sharpness) photos look worse year by year since digital happened.
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Anon11/12/25, 21:35No.4482420
Shit photographers I guess. There was thread a while back that posted the worst government portraits and one of some woman had the ISO set to about 25,600. The noise was insane and somehow it still became her official portrait kek.
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Anon11/12/25, 21:51No.4482426
>what the hell happened to lighting?
Boomer pieces of fucking shit. They didn't transfer knowledge like the greedy fucks they are. A boomer only knows how to criticize younger generations but he will never correct them or how to do the right thing. Boomer have globally fucked over younger generations. Now young photographers know fuck all about lighting and prefer natural light or gimmicky hyper colored meme led lights.Fuck boomers.
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Anon11/13/25, 08:18No.4482526
I think what's really happening here is this guy, Michael Evans, is a great photographer of Ronald Reagan. The drawing style of this lens is really nice but it was also masterfully used by the man behind the camera. I like how his whole face but *just* his face is in focus, and there's no blur even on the tip of his nose. Well, maybe some.
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Anon11/13/25, 08:24No.4482527
>12/2/05 ATLANTA (AP) _ Michael Evans, the White House photojournalist most famous for capturing an iconic image of a laughing Ronald Reagan wearing a worn cowboy hat, died Thursday at his home in Atlanta. He was 61. He died after a four year battle with cancer.
>After Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980, Evans became the new president's personal photographer, a job independent of the White House's press office. For the next four years, he made a pictorial record of Reagan's administration, standing behind the president when he was shot in 1981."I just lowered my camera as the shots rang out," Evans wrote in July 2004 for the Digital Journalist. "Instinctively, I fired a frame as I raised my camera, then took one more before I dropped to the ground myself."
>Born to Canadian diplomats stationed in Havana and South Africa, Evans showed an early interest in politics. His photojournalism career began in 1959 when he was a teenager at the Port Hope Evening Guide in Ontario, where he was paid $2 a photo to cover high school football games. He later worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, The New York Times and Time Magazine. In 1975, while covering Reagan's unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he took the famous picture of the future president, which ran on the covers of Time, Newsweek and People magazines after the president's death last year. In 1982, he set up a nonprofit corporation to photograph 595 of Washington's most powerful people. He later developed computer programs to find photos in large collections and briefly worked in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's photo department.A memorial service for Evans will be held Tuesday at 3:45 at St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Atlanta.
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Anon11/13/25, 08:27No.4482531
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Anon11/13/25, 08:28No.4482532
I like this guy. He looks like a real go-getter.
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Anon11/13/25, 08:29No.4482533
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Anon11/13/25, 08:30No.4482535
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Anon11/13/25, 08:45No.4482537
https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0219/apix.html
>"I don't like smiles particularly, although if they smile, that's OK,'' he says from behind his desk. "I just don't generally encourage it.'' What he's after, he says, is "a pleasant picture. I like people with a pleasant expression, a little twinkle in the eye, a little spark.''
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-03-31-ca-18755-story.html
>“I wanted to fill in the blanks about the first four years of the Reagan Administration,” Evans said when asked why he didn’t use his off hours to photograph sports, nature or anything other than the ubiquitous men in suits that dominate his working days and his book’s pages. “After being at the White House for a while, I became aware of a whole stream of people whose hands were on the levers of power. The operation seemed like a giant Rube Goldberg machine on the banks of the Potomac.”
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-opening-the-michael-evans-portrait-exhibit-the-corcoran-gallery-art
>For the past 4 years Michael Evans has been our official White House photographer, snapping the parade of events at the Executive Mansion and traveling with us around the world. Mike has captured everything from Cabinet meetings to Easter egg rolls, and his thousands of pictures provide a full and fascinating record of the hard work, exhilaration, and pageantry of American government.
>And yet, in the course of his duties, Mike saw the need for another kind of record-one that would focus entirely on individuals. In these pictures there would be no seals of office, no shots of executives behind their desks or journalists at their typewriters. There would be no flags, no gardens, no tall, white pillars. Each subject would simply stand before a backdrop of plain gray. Michael would snap, and in the picture that resulted, nothing would matter but the individual—the way he or she stood, the way they held their hands, the look on his or her face.
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Anon11/13/25, 08:47No.4482538
He even photographed Martin Luther.
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Anon11/13/25, 08:51No.4482539
An interesting man, rest in peace.
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Anon11/13/25, 08:52No.4482540
For the curious: https://michaelawevansphotos.blogspot.com/
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Anon11/13/25, 22:05No.4482637
this was shot by a great photog interested in making great photos of people, that will always stand out
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Anon11/20/25, 08:57No.4484097
Ever since the producers of commercials did a study a couple of decades ago and found out that children and people with lower intelligence paid more attention to video if the camera was constantly moving, good cinematography and lighting no longer mattered as long as you had a shaky image. Then it moved on to television programs where it looks like everything was shot handheld. Cheap background synthesized music followed. Works out well for the production company because it saves them money. That migrated into still photography where proper lighting no longer matters as long as you grade your images.
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Anon11/20/25, 09:05No.4484098
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Anon11/21/25, 01:11No.4484158
Back then you had to get it right in camera. Now every fag thinks they can fix it in Photoshop. That's all has gone to shit