What’s a “good” photograph & the camera as maker of patterns

Here’s a good photo, not wonderful by any means, just a decent photo:

This is pretty much the same shot, but it is a bad photo:

Why is it a bad photo? Because the camera moved during the relatively long exposure needed to capture the image in the dim evening light. I was using a hand-held camera (I don’t even own a tripod), so that’s a problem. But, you know what, I actually like that photo, perhaps even as much if not more than the previous photo, the “good” one. Why do I like it? Because of the colors and composition. It’s a pleasing image.

It's bad (only) in the sense that the blur interferes with the photo’s representational function. The photo is supposed to represent something, buildings in the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan. What if you don’t care about that function? Now, if you want to sell photos to magazines, then yes, you have to care about how well the photos represent their subjects. But if you’re not in that business – and I’m not – then that source of badness just disappears. What’s left is a pleasing image.

Let’s play around with that. In the following three photos I use Photoshop’s pixilate filter to alter the image. As the pixels get larger the photos representation function recedes further into the background:

Here’s another series, but I use a different version of the pixilate function.

Notice that this time the representation function is pretty much obliterated in the last image, and very badly degraded in the one before.

Lesson? 

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BTW, this is how I discovered ICM (intentional camera movement). I had this image that was blurred from camera movement, but I liked it. So I said to myself, Why don't I do that intentionally. That's when I started experimenting with deliberate camera movement. It's become a regular feature of my repertoire.