Photographs, Photographers and Photography

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED

2006-04-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

To allow better indexing of content and display of larger photographs, I have adopted the WordPress application and this blog is now hosted at my ISP rather than at Blogger.com.

You may access the new blog, which includes all the content here plus everything written after April 26, 2006, at http://www.pindelski.org/Photography, or by clicking here.

Now would be a good time to bookmark the new address.

Digital waste

2006-04-24T08:16:00.000-07:00

Maybe these fellows should learn photography first

A recent discusson on Apple's Aperture had a couple of postings which typify our day and age. One stated that Aperture was "...useless...." as it couldn't handle 'professional shoots', neatly combining two of the worst words in the photographic language. The other? Well, he made sure the whole world knew he was a dentist, so I won't say any more, except that if you want to pick up a cheap, little used Hasselblad, this is where you should go.

Closer reading disclosed that the would-be photographer was miffed that Aperture was slow handling his 2000 picture sessions. No kidding! Two thousand pictures taken during a single two hour event. Let's see - that's 17 pictures a minute. A picture every 4 seconds or so. This fellow, it seems to me, has three options:

1 - Get an Uzi sub-machine gun, to increase his firing rate to 600 shots a minute. The results may even do his subjects greater justice:

2 - Save the money on a few Uzi rounds and blow $10 on a really good book which will teach him basic composition:

3 - Buy a film camera which will reinforce, through scarcity, the skills taught in #2, above. With 36 to a roll at most, you would think he might learn something about taking pictures:

Heck, Aperture might just work at a reasonable speed after that.

Gary Winogrand would love these guys.

Apple's Aperture - now just $130

2006-04-23T08:47:00.000-07:00

There's still time to buy the best photo application for very little

Many have criticized Apple for the high $499 price tag for Aperture, especially as the application is still in the development stage. I wrote at length of my experiences with the product in this blog - Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and mentioned that I had purchased my copy from a web vendor for some $200 less than Apple was asking.

Well, a few days ago Apple did a couple of good things. They released an updated version of Aperture, version 1.1, which fixed some of the biggest complaints like RAW processing, file export, etc. and they also dropped the price by $200. For existing owners like me, that $200 means you have to mail in a piece of paper for a credit voucher which can be used at any Apple store. If you have Version 1.0, the download to Version 1.1 is free using the Software Update function in the Mac. So that brings the net cost down to $130 or so. While you do not get the new Version 1.1 instruction book, the new version has a downloadable twenty-three page booklet which describes all the changes.

Provided your Mac is not too old, there is no excuse for not using Aperture when the cost is $130. Buy the old version while supplies last and avoid the four week wait for the new boxed one. And, yes, I am totally conflicted and hope you all buy tons of Apple gear because I own the stock and you will make me rich. In the same way I own stock in the oil majors to keep my fuel costs down. Isn't capitalism wonderful?

Early photographic vision

2006-04-11T17:57:00.000-07:00

Uccello and Carravaggio had it down 500 years ago

As a boy growing up in London I lose count of the number of visits I made to The National Gallery in London. Whether going through my Impressionist period, High Renaissance or early Renaissance, there was always something there to fascinate and to intrigue. While photography had always been my first love in the visual arts, I think I learned more about seeing from gazing at the art in this great collection than from any number of photography books.

Some of these experiences left deep impressions. When asked which of the works on display I liked most, nay, desired to possess, the choices narrow to a few. Titian’s ‘Noli Me Tangere’ (1512) (Do Not Touch Me) of course. I have always been captivated by the dynamic use of diagonals - Christ, Mary Magdalen, the tree, the lovely warm light, Christ’s daring near-nakedness. You can feel the motion as he grabs the shroud to prevent Mary pulling on it. It is hard to conceive of a more perfectly balanced composition and if you think you cannot get away, as a photographer, with lampposts growing out of people’s heads, well just look what Titian did with that tree!

I have always felt that The National Gallery has way over-restored its Titians to near-Cibachrome color intensity, and that clearly shows here, but the magic of the picture saves the day.

So when it comes to lessons in composition, just check a few Titians out.

Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man (1485) is simply arresting. It’s one of the smallest paintings on display at 16” by 12” - the size of a regular photographic print. But you walk into that gallery and there’s only one thing you can see. The certainty of the gaze, the confident bearing, the red cap accent, the somewhat rushed rendering of the tunic, all to good purpose. It places all the focus on the eyes. When I first saw this - I was probably fourteen at the time - I made such a bee line for the picture that I nearly knocked over one of London’s dowager ladies in my rush. It’s that good. I frequently fantasized about pinching this masterpiece - how hard would it be to make off with a 16” by 12” canvas, after all? To this day the use of daylight and the way shadows model the face leave anything Vermeer did with lighting in, well, the shade.

As a photographer it is simply impossible not to like Caravaggio. Versions of The Supper at Emmaus hang in both the National Gallery and the Louvre, the diners’ ragged clothing rendered just so, the worms in the fruit on the table and, of course, Caravaggio’s signature lighting. But great as that painting is, it is simply eclipsed by The Conversion of Saul (St. Paul). In London’s Swinging Sixties the 21mm lens on a 35mm camera was de rigeur for any self respecting trendie. You saw its abuse everywhere, especially on record sleeves of the more extreme rock groups. Wild perspective, severely receding lines, objects very close to the lens, distortion galore. Well just take a look at this. Caravaggio had the 21mm figured. What is breathtaking about this canvas is how little space he has worked in. Painted in 1601 the canvas is simply enormous - some 7 1/2 by 6 feet. In other words, the horse is rendered at almost life size. Why so large? Caravaggio was a student of perspective. He knew that viewers would get too close to the painting, but that, by doing so, the grandeur of his ultra-wide angled vision would be correctly rendered and the perspective distortion would disappear. And so it does. The painting is immensely involving. You are there. Like a movie in a theater compared to the same thing on television, you have to see this live. Not reproduced.

But easily the strangest use of perspective on view in The National Gallery belongs to a visionary whose work preceded that of all the above, none other than Paolo Uccello. In 1450 he painted three enormous panels depicting the battle at San Romano in which the Florentine army defeated Siena some twenty years earlier. The three panels are some 6 feet by 10 feet in size. One (the weakest, and that’s a cruel critique) hangs in The National Gallery. The others hang in the Louvre and the Uffizi. Fitting that three of the greatest masterpieces of the early Renaissance should hang in the three greatest Renaissance collections.

Appropriately, the best hangs in the Florentine collection, but look, if you gave me the one in London I would have no issues with finding wall space for it. I assert that there is more to be learned, as a photographer, from this one painting than from any number of academic studies on the use of perspective. By the time this painting was made, artists understood the rendering of perspective well. Uccello just chose to disregard the rules, dramatically foreshortening perspective, predating surrealism by some six hundred years. The repeating motif of the lances, the purposeful abuse of sizing (look how small the dead soldier in the left foreground is), the steep, tilted, climbing background with the horsemen rendered way too large, the detritus of battle painted in seemingly random perspective. It’s magic. Simply the greatest lesson in the (ab)use of perspective on canvas.

As photographers, we have a lot to learn from the masters.

And no, I harbored no fantasies about making off with the Uccello. It’s just too big to stash under an English raincoat.

Boxers

2006-04-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Book review

I confess that I approached ‘Boxers’ by Carol Huebner Venezia (an American photographer, the exotic name notwithstanding) with great anticipation. The publicity talked of how the photographer had got inside the psyche of the professionals in Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn where many famous fighters had trained. Further, the publicists intoned, she counterbalances the tough end of the sport with pictures of fighters in Italy. I quote:

“Boxing offers those working class men who learn the sport a slim chance of realizing the American dream. But the price for social standing and above-average income is often broken bones and chronic health problems. In contrast, in Assisi, in the center of the Italian boxing world, boxing is about athletic competition and the art of the sport.”

Well, based on what I see here, she never made the remotest emotional contact with her subjects in either location. Indeed, some of the best pictures have no boxers in them - one of a young child in the ring and another of swinging sacks, or whatever you call those things, that boxers pummel. Nary a boxer in sight. Great pictures though.

Despite the high fallutin’ text, based largely in academic drivel, the woman’s inability to get inside the brains (or what’s left of them) of her subjects is mystifying. It’s not as if she didn’t try, as the pictures span over a decade.

Let me quote from the introduction just to reassure you I am not making this up:

“If we look at the group of pictures as a whole, there appears to be a clear impulse to movement both in the single photographs and as a sequence”. What? Nearly every picture in the book is stiffly posed in a pale imitation of August Sander. Sander is much lauded in the introduction let it be said, and the comparison only goes to show the photographer in a negative light.

One of the few snaps with movement is of the swinging medicine (yes, now I recall what they call them) balls in a deserted gym. Why these should be moving when there is no one in sight beats me, but it’s a neat idea, I suppose.

Here’s another Doozie from the intro:

“The objective approach of this photography avoids pathos or any explicit critique of society”.

Please.

So that’s where our higher education monies are going? To pay boobs to write claptrap like that? What a travesty. Time they got a real job and learned to write English.

Lots more of the above garbage is to be found in the introduction. No need to dwell there.

On to the pictures.

There are a scant thirty all told, one of which, the one so badly exposed that no facial details can be discerned, also appears on the cover. Not exactly what you would call value in a $30 paperback. Fully half of these are static portraits, some in what could be a studio setting, of half naked guys who, absent their gloves, could as well be construction workers. Or fit investment bankers, come to think of it. The remaining pictures are generally so irrelevant to the genre that I really wonder why the woman bothered? Maybe she liked to go to Gleason’s for the vicarious pleasure of seeing all those muscles, the camera as an excuse, but the guys in the ring clearly did not accept her as one of their own. Heck, she’s probably the wrong gender and color anyway.

I would like to say something positive about this book. I cannot. I just feel I have been ripped off.

Stamp out sensor dust

2006-04-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

Apple's Aperture has a unique tool for the job

It's no secret that image sensors in digital cameras with removeable lenses are prone to atrract dust. The Canon EOS 5D I use seems to be especially bad in this regard from what I have read on the various chat boards. While I give my sensor a swipe with the anti-static brush now and then, the reality is that sensor dust does crop up and can be a real problem if many snaps are exposed with the dust mote in place on the sensor.

The one positive about all of this is that Apple's Aperture has a tool to remove such dust spots, as the designers recognized that any particular speck of sensor dust will have the exact same position on the resulting photographs from image to image. The dust mote does not move even if the camera does.

Apple's Aperture provides a tool, unique as far as I can tell, which permits rapid removal of sensor dust from mutiple images. So if you have just taken two hundred pictures only to find an offending dust spot in each, at the same location, the Aperture Lift and Stamp tool is for you.

Here's how it works. In this picture you can see the Spot and Patch tools cross-haired locator at the top of the image, where the offending dust spot makes its home:

Hit enter and the circle becomes yellow, effecting removal of the spot on the selected image:

Unlike with Photoshop, there is no need to select a source for the patch - Aperture does it automatically based on the area sorrounding the defect.

Now click on the Lift part of the Lift and Stamp tool icons visible at the top of the screen - it's the one with the arrow pointing up.

The type is small here, but the original discloses that I have made four adjustments - Spot & Patch, Exposure, Highlights & Shadows and Sharpening.

Now highlight all the images with a like dust defect (Shift-Click for contiguous ones or Control-Click for non-adjacent ones), click the Stamp icon of the Lift and Stamp tool (the one with the arrow pointing down) and click on any one of the selected images.

The dust mote is removed in all of them. In my case, as I have also made Exposure, Highlight & Shadow and Sharpening adjustments, these would also be conferred on all these images. So if the images are different, do the Spot & Patch and Lift & Stamp work first, then selectively change other parameters in images as you please. The images selected for dust removal can be versions of one image, disparate images, or both.

Don't forget to clean the camera's sensor after doing this!

See what I mean about good design? Care to find this feature in Photoshop? I think not.

You can see a larger version of the image I am working on here.

Nothing changes

2006-04-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

Now you can get your Mac to lock up

Apple announced yesterday that you can now run Microsoft Windows on your Intel chipped Mac.

As you can see, Windows runs every bit as well on a Mac as it does on a Windows PC.

Just Say No to Windows. OS X is the best, most robust operating system for photographers. Period. And it's the only way you can run Aperture.

A simple precaution

2006-04-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

Protection for that exposed LCD screen on the Canon EOS 5D

For a few dollars from the good people at B&H I picked up a packet of three sheets of matte surfaced stick-on plastic screen protectors for the exposed rear LCD screen of the Canon EOS 5D.

I couldn't get quite the right size so I purchased the 3" one and shaved 9/64" off the long side and it fits fine. The packet comes with a nice cloth to make sure you have removed all grease from the screen before applying the plastic sheet and also includes a small hard plastic blade to smooth the film once in place. This spreads even pressure better than your finger can.

A side benefit, apart from the protection against scratches, is that the matte surface does a far better job of supressing reflections than the smooth surface of the original.

Happy Birthday Apple Computer!

2006-04-01T09:27:00.000-08:00

The machine for the visually minded

Apple Computer is thirty years old today!

When driven designer Steve Jobs and genius programmer Steve Wozniak started the company in the proverbial garage, Jobs joked that it seemed like a bit of a lark to do so on April Fools' Day, 1976.

What they have given all photographers is a superb set of tools to make the processing of pictures simple and intuitive.

As you can see, the design has evolved somewhat since that first machine:

Thank you Apple and here's to the next thirty years.

Wither digital?

2006-03-31T08:36:00.000-08:00

How long will digital last?

I wonder whether digital 35mm cameras have come to a point where the rate of technological change is very much in the world of diminishing returns?

I got thirty years out of my Leica M3, bought in 1973, and it remains very capable today. The later Leica lenses are a bit better than their predecessors, but other than that the major advance was in film technology, not in cameras. The MP and M7 differ little, functionally, from the M3, which was first sold in 1953.

My medium format Rollei 3.5F lasted me ten years and I was always a happy camper with it. It's every bit as good today as when it was made in the early-1960s and likewise benefitted from huge improvements in film quality.

Modern digital cameras like the Canon EOS 350D and 5D, and their counterparts from the competition, leave little to be desired quality wise and, except in the case of the very best film technicians, improve on 35mm and medium format film quality. My 5D easily equals and generally surpasses medium format quality with far greater ease of use and light weight thrown in. Absent mechanical or electronic failure, with attendant obsolescence problems as regards spare parts, it's hard to see why it shouldn't still be producing great 18" x 24" prints a decade hence, and the improvements from its many replacements would, it seems to me, be marginal at best. Lenses? The 24-105mm is tack sharp at all apertures and focal lengths. What's to improve?

As I upgrade when a technological leap occurs, which is why I waited so long for a full frame sensor DSLR, I would guess that the 5D will be at home here for many years to come.

Still, I didn't see CDs and DVDs coming, nor the Internet, nor wide screen TVs, nor the iPod for that matter. So there's doubtless some new revolutionary imaging technology around the corner that will make the above so much bunk. Now that's an intriguing prospect.

Your nearest and dearest

2006-03-30T13:23:00.000-08:00

Put them on a US postage stamp

If you want to mail friends and relatives with a legal stamp bearing the likeness of your nearest and dearest, go to Stamps.com, upload your favorite snap and send some money. Turnaround is about a week and the post offce accepts these. Here's our boy Winston:

New EOS 5D firmware

2006-03-29T08:10:00.000-08:00

It pays to stay current

Canon has released Firmware update 1.0.5 for the EOS 5D.

Here's mine loading and the result:

This fixes a problem with color pictures taken with the Standard Picture Style with +4 Color Density setting (the pictures would lose saturation on the sRGB setting and appear monochrome) and with the 85mm f/1.2L lens when used with the Canon 580EX flash where the shutter button would not work.

It's nice to stay current.

And now for some pictures

2006-03-28T09:23:00.000-08:00

Which is what it's all about.

All that cataloging in Aperture did have a bright side, specifically an opportunity to reacquaint myself with many pictures from days past. So after all this talk of cameras and printers and software in recent columns, I thought it might be nice to share some pictures with you.

As is the case, I suspect, with many photographers, I have perfect recall of the equipment and film used to take these, even though the stored files are silent, as it's not something I routinely record. The digital age, of course, does this for you today.

So here goes - 16 snaps chosen at random and in no particular order.

Cruft's Dog Show, 1973.
Leica M3, 90mm Elmar, TriX.
This fine wolfhound wanted to see what was happening from under that Harris Tweed jacket.

South Uist, Outer Hebrides, 1977.
A rugged, lonely place.
Nikon F, 28mm Vivitar, TriX.

Tuileries Gardens, Paris, 1977.
A life begins, another draws to a close.
Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX.

World Trade Centers, 1982.
Pentax ME Super, 40mm Pentax SMC, Kodachrome 64.

London, 2000.
Cabs old and new.
Leica M6, 35mm Asph Summicron, Kodachrome 64.

Tucson, Arizona.
A warm day!
Leica M6, 90mm Elmarit, Kodachrome 64.

Pebble Beach, California, 1987.
My wife calls this one 'The Pirate'.
Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R. Kodachrome 64.

Tuileries Gardens, Paris, 1975.
What's not to like about Paris?
Leica M3, 90mm Elmar, Kodachrome X.

Rodeo Drive, California, 1989.
Someone parked this huge '60s wagon on this costliest of shopping destinations.
Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64.

Bermuda, 1999.
Land of sublime architecture.
Leica M6, 90mm Elmarit, Kodachrome 64.

Somewhere in Arizona, 1988.
Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron-R, Kodachrome 64.

Hong Kong, 1995.
Statues ready for illicit export.
Rollei 35, 40mm Tessar, Kodachrome 64.

Pismo Beach, California, 2004.
A lazy, sunny afternoon by the Pacific.
Leica M2, 35mm Asph Summicron, Kodak Gold 100.

Union Square, San Francisco, 1999.
A child's wonder.
Leica M2, 35mm Asph Summicron, Kodak Gold 100.

Pasadena, California, 1988.
Gangster car.
Leica M3, 35mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1995.
Rocking horses at an antique dealer's.
Leica M2, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64.

Global interest

2006-03-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

Isn't the Internet wonderful?

Recent data on the locations of some of the visitors to this site - a truly global selection! Don't worry, I do not know your identity, only the location of the reader.

Let me see. The United Kindom where I grew up and learned that most civilized of games, cricket. When Hermann Hesse wrote of 'The Glass Bead Game' he must have been thinking about Lords.

Baden-Wurttemberg which my mother visited in 1938 and always spoke of fondly.

Poland of course - now how do I recover those 14,000 acres stolen from my family?

Holland and many pleasant memories of a wonderful country and its great people.

Russia, may she stay free and hew to true democracy.

Italy, the center of art, design, culture, fashion - always has been, always will be.

South Korea - may you become one again after the brutal regime up north collapses, as it must.

Lebanon - may you find peace and prosperity.

New Zealand - haven of beauty and fine people.

Mauritius - is there anywhere more beautiful?

Switzerland - thank you for my Patek Philippe, (yes, Patek, the salesman of the two, was a Pole) an analog dream in a digital world.

But above all, here is to all of you, for photography is tuly the universal language.

Apple's Aperture - Part IV

2006-03-26T06:43:00.000-08:00

Output, back-up and conclusions

Output in Aperture means several things. These include:

Paper prints
Slideshows
Books
PDF files
Lower resolution files
Web pages

All are beautifully implemented and for anyone unfamiliar with iPhoto ’06, the book publishing option is simply a knockout. Aperture offers what iPhoto’06 has and more. Apple is capitalizing on much of the code developed for iPhoto in Aperture. I would guess future releases will offer additional functionality to distinguish the products and keep Aperture premium priced.

At the same time, printing is where I ran into the first performance issues. First you choose Print and a screen with all the usual options pops up. This takes some twenty seconds. That is simply too slow. This is what you get:

Then Printer Settings is clicked for the normal OS X printer choice display. This is nearly instantaneous:

Click Print Preview and it’s another 30 seconds – way too slow:

I suspect Aperture is generating a print file from the original master and is taking it’s time about it. The comparable timings in Photoshop CS2 are 1 second, 2 seconds and 8 seconds, respectively, so Apple needs to improve this dramatically.

On the other hand, you need not choose just one image for printing. Multiple choices are fine and, strangely, do not take a lot longer.

Alternatively, you can elect to print a contact sheet or a light table with as much or as little EXIF data displayed, and while the delays are the same as for a single print, the power to show previews in this way is tremendous:

Finally, with my Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 printer, I can get margins as small on 8” x 10” and 13” x 19” prints (meaning 5/8”) as I did with the Epson 1270 which preceded it, so my pre-cut mat boards work fine.

Slideshows are very easy to create and, of course, you can add music from your iTunes library and have Aperture automatically fit the slide show to the length of the piece of music – just like in iPhoto ‘06:

Books are simply the bees knees. Drag and drop, resize, spread across two pages, have faded pictures as backgrounds, add text, you name it. No advanced computer language degree needed. Aperture will even scale and align the pages for you, as instructed, and hardcover and softcover options are available. You can submit the book to Apple for production or generate a PDF version for your printer of choice. As an example, my first time with this feature it took me five minutes to generate a 10 page book with cover and title pages. I have printed books in iPhoto ’06 at Apple and can testify to the quality of the reproduction.

When it comes to outputting lower resolution files, such as JPGs for web display, Aperture is sadly lacking, as it does not permit the user to specify dots per inch in the final file. The result is that the output image quality is simply horrid. Apple is aware of this and evidently Version 1.1 fixes that shortcoming. I really need this as it’s a great way of creating files for display in my Photoblog and I really do not want to use Photoshop any more than I have to. Add the fact that PS CS2 consistently locks up on me when I use ‘Save for Web’, meaning that I have to run Photoshop CS, its predecessor, to do this. Two versions of Photoshop. What a pain!

Finally, web pages. These take more time to explain than to do. It’s a ‘select the images and click a button’, add title and page layout then click to generate files to upload to your ISP or to your .Mac account if you prefer. Most intriguingly, you can create Smart Web Galleries which automatically add content as you add images with the keywords specified in the ‘Smart’ set up. In each case, a click appends as much – or as little – data as you want to each picture.

I like the Better HTML plug-in for iPhoto ’06 for my Web site and will stick with that for the sake of consistency for now, but the Aperture alternative is fine for someone starting out with a new design. Big image sizes on the highest quality setting are 300-400kB in size with thumbnails 16-20kB each. Aperture includes six themes, each elegant, and you can bet there will be more to come. Large image sizing is up to you – just dial it in.

So now Aperture isn’t looking so expensive after all.

Work is needed to speed printing and improve the quality of small exported files, otherwise the interface is elegant and effective. Just try to do some of these things in Photoshop … and Apple denies it’s crafting a Photoshop Killer. Sure. And I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Finally, backing up. I have written before about my back-up approach. While Apple says you should run the Aperture Library on your internal hard disk (my disk is 160gB) for best speed, I prefer to have the Aperture Library, as it is called, reside on one of my two external 250gB LaCie Firewire drives, the other being used for back-up. I use SuperDuper! to back-up automatically at midnight, when I am well and truly in the land of nod, and the application does incremental back-ups, meaning that only new and changed files are backed up. While a cursory examination of the hard disk containing the Aperture Library suggests it’s one big file, this is not the case. Apple is simply hiding the details. Control-click on the Library and then Show Package Contents gets you this:

Do the same click routine on any of the ‘.approject’ files and you get the details – this example contains only two picture files:

One more click routine and the individual JPG files are clearly visible. This file structure makes it possible for SuperDuper! to make smart, incremental back-ups. You can also determine the Aperture overhead for these two files, whose aggregate size is 266mB. The additional Aperture files add a scant 0.8mB or 0.3%. Hardly anything to worry about. So if you read about file bloat with Aperture, you had better disregard anything else written by that person. Versioning will add a little more but the bottom line is that Aperture’s filing system is economical.

Aperture, however, comes with its own back-up functions, named the Vault, and frankly they are sadly lacking in design and execution. First, the user has to initiate back-up. Load Aperture and the opening screen will tell you how many items remain to be backed up to the vault. You then have to execute the Vault instructions to do the back-up. This is wrong. Back-ups should never be voluntary or depend on user action. They should be automated so they cannot be forgotten. Worse, while Aperture is doing its back-up, which does appear to be incremental, the application cannot be used. Further, it’s horrendously slow to a fast Firewire drive, almost unusable with a USB 1 drive. Finally, the color indicator which shows whether a new Vault back-up is needed is simply wrong. Do a back-up, exit and reboot and what do you get? An indicator which says you should do another back-up. Lastly, the Vault file is not bootable, unlike a clean back-up done with SuperDuper! You have to restore the vault using Aperture and I don’t want to think how long that takes.

In other words, I’m sticking with SuperDuper! and disregarding the miserable afterthought known as the Vault. Apple should make this fast, timed and automated. As it is, it’s near worthless. Just Say No to the Vault.

Aperture does not permit the splitting of a Library over multiple discs. However, go here and you can download a free script that will allow your Library to span multiple drives.

Some have objected to Aperture’s proprietary file structure which appears similar to that used by iPhoto. If you ever want to get to your original file you have to do quite a bit of drilling down using the Finder unlike in, say, Extensis Portfolio, where you can see the files easily. This is a poorly thought out objection. With digital camera files being identified with a meaningless number, how often is the user going to want to access these directly? A proper, daily, incremental back-up (I check the file sizes weekly to make sure those of the original and back-up are identical down to the last byte) is all you need.

In conclusion, then, Aperture is a landmark application. It completely integrates Import, Versioning, Retrieval, Cataloging, Image Processing and Output with a superb user interface using much of iPhoto’s design and adding additional functionality. Missing features include Curves and tools like the Lasso. Functions in need of improvement include set-up for printing, back-up (easily worked around), JPG small file output, RAW processing (the last two, fixed, we are promised, in the forthcoming Version 1.1). Lens aberration and distortion corrections along the lines of Adobe Camera Raw would be nice too. That’s not too many complaints for the very first version of this application which will simply change the way you process your pictures, be they scans from film or files from a digital camera. Speed, printing apart, on my less than stellar iMac G5 is fine with 2,000 files loaded aggregating 22.3gB, with many of these files being 250mB scans from 4” x 5” large format film.

With a street price of around $330 and the upgrade to Version 1.1. free, that’s an awful lot for your money. Of course you do need an Apple computer but then if you are serious about photography you already have one of those, no? And lest I forget, during this intensive workout of the product, Aperture did lock up on me once. But that was my fault. You see, I made the stupid error of loading Microsoft Word at the same time....

Apple's Aperture - Part III

2006-03-25T08:37:00.000-08:00

Image adjustments

Starting from the premise that there is no way on God’s earth that image ‘processing’ will ever be fun for this photographer, it sounds disingenuous to admit that manipulating photographs in Aperture is, well, almost a blast. That’s because the natural flow of steps taken to get a good display or print image has been designed properly from scratch. And it doesn’t hurt that the user interface is simply gorgeous to look at.

Here’s the screen right after importing six RAW files from the Compact Flash card. As you can see from the lower browser panel, the displayed image has been manipulated as the browser shows a second copy in the Stack. The master for ever remains untouched in Aperture. While the original imported RAW file takes up 35mB, the addition of adjustments, which automatically creates a copy of the original file, adds but 0.5mB to the file’s storage needs. That’s because the copy only records details of the adjustments, not a copy of the whole picture file.

Hitting the F key for full screen display and the H key to bring up the Inspector you get this:

Now you simply follow down the adjustments in the order the tools appear on the right and you are done. Details can be viewed at any point by activating the Loupe:

All adjustments can be toggled on or off, so that their effect can be seen easily.

Want an ‘actual pixels’ view? Just hit the Z key:

Full screen view with multiple images? Highlight the ones of choice and hit F:

And that’s about it for image adjustments. There's actually much more to these than meets the eye and you can go here for the sixty page version very well written by Kendall Gelner.

The very fact that it takes so few words to explain image adjustments tells you Apple got it right. There are some things that you cannot do in the present version. They include creation of layers, controls to permit adjustment of perspective, correction of vignetting and lens distortions. Most significantly, while Aperture permits Levels to be adjusted, there is currently no Curves tool. That’s a pity as I like to tweak the curve now and then to liven up a picture. For these adjustments it’s back to that old dog Photoshop, I’m afraid. Aperture makes this easy by allowing the set up of an external editor of choice, so one menu click opens the image in Photoshop which will save it, after manipulation, in the original Aperture directory whence it came. Layers are flattened in Version 1.0.1 of Aperture but Apple says Version 1.1 will preserve them.

In other words, if you prefer graphic arts to photography, well maybe you should stick with Photoshop. For me Photoshop is an addiction as easily shaken as film, now that better alternatives exist, and I’ll bet Apple will enrich the feature set as time goes by.

Next: Printing and Exporting

Apple's Aperture - Part II

2006-03-24T06:29:00.000-08:00

Image import and cataloging

Now you would think that the recent spate of bad weather would be excuse enough for deep feelings of self-pity and general ‘woe is me’ dark Slavic thoughts.

Not a bit of it. Having determined to integrate my photo management with photo processing, I set about attacking the transfer of some three thousand pictures from the Extensis Portfolio 7 database into Aperture and making some sort of sense of them. Not to mention a few thousand more images languishing in iPhoto ’06. These really need to be shown who the master is.

First I set about rating the images with one to five stars. Five being the real corkers, the jaw droppers. The ones you would show Cartier-Bresson if he was still around just to embarrass him. It’s a depressing fact to have to admit that only fifty six photographs made it to this exalted status, going to prove that if you can take one or two showstoppers annually, that’s good, I suppose.

Then it came to the nitty gritty. I thought long and hard about how best to do this, given that the selection of cataloging methods in Aperture is myriad. Let’s see, there are Projects, which contain master files and all variations thereon. OK, so my boy Winston is a Project in the best sense of the word. Just ask my wife. So Winnie gets his own ‘Project’. Next in the hierarchy are Folders. I take a ‘formal’ birthday picture of the boy each year so I created a folder named ‘Birthdays’. The Folder does not actually contain any photographs but it can contain Projects or ‘Albums’. I set about creating five Albums under the Birthday Folder, naming them ‘Birthday 0’ through ‘Birthday 4’ (Hey! Give me a break. I did once graduate as an engineer, after all) and proceeded to drag and drop the respective snaps from the Library, where all the Extensis database images have been stored, onto these Folders.

Now if I click on the Birthday Folder all I see is a label saying ‘Birthdays’. Click on any of the five albums in this Folder and the images appear.

I would like to group all the remaining snaps of Winston into chronological order, by year, but I cannot use the file dates as nearly all these pictures were taken on film, so the file date is nothing more than the date on which the original negative or slide was scanned, which is meaningless as often as not. So with the aid of my memory (not so great) and my wife’s (wonderful) Winston was eventually packaged neatly into years and thereupon further broken down into descriptive albums, as shown here:

Now I have the Winston Project assuming some semblance of order, with the lowest level – all those Albums – each containing a few dozen images at most.

So how does all this help find a picture? Well, you can just look through the albums and the chances are good that you will find the right thing fairly quickly. Within each album I have used Aperture’s Stacking capability, to group pictures into stacks, the most descriptive appearing first, meaning on top of the stack. Here are the stacks in the Album named Home Feb 2002 under the ‘2002’ Folder:

As you can see, the stacks, stacked in this picture, contain 5 and 21 pictures, respectively. Click on the number ‘5’ in the first stack and the display now shows:

In this case I am using Stack to denote what are referred to in popular vernacular as ‘shoots’ (ugh!), each being a separate studio session.

So Stacking can do an awful lot to reduce screen clutter and also permits manipulation of, say, the color or sharpness of all the images in the Stack simultaneously. Ideal for studio pictures where the lighting is constant.

Finally, to aid retrieval at the micro-management level, there are Keywords. These are the coup de grace of image retrieval but it’s very much a case of ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’. If you are not very studied in their use, they become worthless for retrieval and searching purposes. Aperture simplifies things by allowing you to establish as many Keyword groups as you like. For example, the ‘Wedding’ group might include specific topics like Preparations, Hair, Makeup, etc. The ‘People’ group might include Man, Woman, Boy, Girl, etc. In all cases the first eight keywords are numbered 1 through 8 and appear in a menu for ease of selection, either by typing their number or with a mouse click. Aperture allows the assignment of keywords to multiple images, which simplifies things. I tend to avoid the use of Keywords as it’s hard to come up with a short list of ones that are specific enough. Too general and they are as useless as if they are too specific. I used them in Extensis Portfolio 7 and in iPhoto ’05 (the predecessor to ’06). They were hard to use in Extensis and unstable in iPhoto ’05. Once bitten, twice shy.

So that’s about it for import and cataloging, a process which can take a lot of time but must be done right to be useful. If you are importing from iPhoto '05 or ’06, Aperture will retain folders, albums and keywords generated in that application, which can be a huge timesaver.

One quick word on import speeds. Now that I am brave enough to try RAW, I’m still holding off as Aperture v 1.0.1 has a known problem with the quality of its RAW processing. Apple has acknowledged its inferiority to Adobe Camera Raw and has apparently fixed this in the Aperture 1.1 release scheduled for the end of March 2006. Still, I thought I might give RAW import a shot to see how fast, or slow, it would be with the 13mB RAW files which my Canon EOS 5D generates. I use an inexpensive Microtech Firewire card reader with the iMac G5 as it’s so much easier to use than connecting the mini-USB cable to the camera. Well, import is nothing short of blisteringly fast. Six RAW files took a scant 18 seconds to pop up on the Aperture screen. Wow!

As regards size, the six files on the Compact Flash card, some 80mB in all, took up 207mB on the computer's hard disk, so the size inflation after RAW processing is some 2.6 times. Stated differently, a 250gB hard disk should store approximately 5,500 files when 75% full. Hopefully at least a few of these will earn five stars ....

As for all of Apple’s claims for increased speed in Version 1.1, I’m not holding my breath. Look, I like a good marketing spiel as much as the next man, but their claims of speed increases for their new Intel chipped machines verge on plain dishonesty, based on what I have read. And the current version of Aperture runs just fine on my less than supersonic iMac G5.

Next time – Image processing.

Apple's Aperture - Part I

2006-03-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

Finally - software for photographers

The problem with a monopoly is that lack of competition not only stultifies development, it also results in horrid products.

The best recent examples of this affecting photographers are Adobe and Microsoft.

Adobe makes Photoshop which has the worst user interface of any application since the first spreadsheets came out. In contrast to the lean and mean look of those products, Photoshop errs on the bloated end of the spectrum. The need for annual revenues, known euphemistically as ‘upgrades’ in the software racket, means more menus and more seemingly non-integrated afterthoughts are tacked on annually. So now in Photoshop CS2 you have Bridge, which is intended to help you manage your files, and Adobe Camera Raw which converts RAW files to a format PS can work with. Not to mention a host of 'plug-ins' which confer features Adobe forgot in the first place.

Microsoft makes products so virulently bad, so terminally unreliable, that it’s a continuing source of wonder to me that any demanding photographer would ever let Windows in his home. Once the class action extortionists, masquerading as lawyers, get through with Big Tobacco and McDonalds, they will surely latch on to Microsoft which has probably killed more people than those two industries combined. The killer will become renowned as BSLUD, or Blue Screen Lock Up Death. Symptoms include frothing at the mouth, smashed LCD screens and a keyboard imprint on the dead user’s forehead, marking where he hit when the old blood pump gave out.

The racing engine designer Keith Duckworth, one half of the team that created the great Cosworth DFV V8 of Formula One fame, once said “Some firms don’t even have designers, just ‘engineering and development’ to try and fix what should have been designed right in the first place". He must have been speaking of Adobe and Microsoft.

When the realization dawned that my new Canon EOS 5D offered a high quality, uncompromised image storage format known as RAW I balked for three reasons. One, JPG fine was so breathtakingly good, why use anything else? Two, having more than one version of every picture, which RAW dictates, posed troubling storage and filing questions. Three, no one had thought through how photographers really work with RAW so I have avoided the format until now. Meanwhile you have PS CS2 for ‘processing’ and something else – iPhoto, iView or Extensis – for cataloging and image retrieval. A clunky process at best and further complicated when you want to store variations of the original image.

Now I am becoming a RAW convert. What happened? Along came Apple with its driven leader, Steve Jobs, who never listened to what the world told him. They said Unix would never work for the consumer. He made OS X – the best desktop operating system. Period. They said no one would pay $400 for a sleek version of the Walkman. It’s called the iPod and everyone wants one. The Wall Street analysts, most of whom have never used an Apple computer, slammed him for opening street front stores. There are now hundreds and growing daily.

Jobs must have used the miserable products from Adobe because he charged his team to make an image processing, storage and retrieval product that worked like the photographer does. It wasn’t lost on him that the big fat calf known as Photoshop was ripe for slaying and that the result could only mean more money for the stockholders. That is always a good thing.

So Apple released Aperture on an unsuspecting world in January, 2006. I held off purchasing the application until some water had passed over the dam. Version 1.0 of anything seldom works. Chat boards disclosed that the product was slow on older processors like the G4 and prone to locking up. To Apple’s discredit, they never released a trial version, instead asking a high $499 for the retail application. They must have known that the Apple Faithful would do their development work for them – a leaf out of Microsoft’s book – and, sure enough, Version 1.0.1 was not far behind.

Reading and viewing the details of the product it seemed a compelling proposition, but I was greatly concerned with the speed issue. Having upgraded my excellent iMac G4 (the one with the beautifully thought out screen on a stalk) for an iMac G5 not six months ago (the one with the poorly thought out non-adjustable screen) only to see it obsoleted twice in six months with a faster version and then with the Intel version, I was not about to upgrade again. I had loaded up my 2 gHz iMac with the maximum memory of 2 gB and the contrast with the G4 was striking. Superior graphics processing and double the memory resulted in 250 mB 4” x 5” scans loading in Photoshop CS2 in ten seconds compared to sixty before. All other operations – sharpening, rotating, distortion correction and so on – were likewise speeded up by something approaching an order of magnitude. So I wasn’t about to go back to a world where I had to wait a minute for things to happen.

As part of my due diligence I posted a question on the Apple Discussion board at Apple.com asking about speed of operation on my machine. In contrast to most chat boards where puerile arguments debating the relative merits of Canon versus Nikon seem to be the order of the day, the Apple boards are pretty meaty affairs with much quality content. Well, the first few answers were from American public school graduates who naturally struggled with reading, proceeding to inform me that the thing just flew on their Quad-processor equipped, two Cinema Display, $2,000 video card, $10,000 G5 professional machines. Thanks a lot. I asked again and a graduate of one of the better private schools, where they still teach reading, writing and arithmetic rather than home economics and diversity values, responded that his iMac G5 had the same graphics card as mine, an ATI Radeon 9600, albeit with just 1gB of RAM compared to my 2gB. His timings confirmed that Aperture should run fine on my iMac so I bought a copy.

No, not for $499 + CA tax to the crooks up north who go by the misnomer of ‘government’. Two minutes of Googling disclosed a vendor out of state with hundreds of positive reviews and Aperture was in my hands for the grand sum of $330 two days later.

I spent the first couple of days watching the provided DVD video tuition disk while trying the illustrated actions on the images of Tibet in the sample pictures on the installation disc. These are mostly 3mB Nikon Jpg files and the product worked fast. Very satisfying, albeit with only a few dozen images. While I must confess to being sick and tired of pictures of Tibetan folk dancers by now, the video is far superior to the printed materials when it comes to learning the product. And there is a lot to learn. Not because Aperture is complex in the foul way that, say, Photoshop is, but simply because the designers (note that: ‘designers’ not ‘engineers’) started with a blank sheet of paper and answered the simple question “How does a Photographer work?” The beauty of the video is that it walks you through the normal flow of work involved – importing the picture, cataloging and storing, processing and publication, be it print, book, album or web, for all of these functions are included. Suddenly $540, or rather $330, doesn’t seem so bad.

Here are some of the things that strike you as being just right, very much in the “why did no one think of that before?” camp:

The Loupe – press a key and an old fashioned photographer’s loupe appears selectively magnifying that part of the image you drag it to. Genius.

The Inspector – hit the ‘I’ key and a property inspector pops up showing the steps you may want to take in processing your image, in the order required to preserve best quality. These include Red Eye correction, Spot & Patch, Straighten, Rotate, Crop, Exposure (includes Exposure, Saturation, Brightness Contrast, Tint), White Balance, Monochrome Mixer, Color Monochrome, Sepia Tone, Noise Reduction and Sharpen. Each can be toggled on and off so the changes are immediately visible. Brilliant!

The Full Screen view – hit the letter F on the keyboard and the image of choice pops up on an otherwise empty screen. Tools are available as you mouse to the top or base of the screen, making for an uncluttered working space. Extra brilliant!

Versioning – this is so clever I simply cannot see living without it. While Apple advertises Aperture as ‘Designed for Professional Photographers’ and pushes the processing of RAW files, the Versioning concept is applicable to all commonly used formats like TIFF, PSD and JPG. Whenever you make changes to the master file imported into Aperture, a copy is automatically made and changes applied to the clone. And do not think this means file bloat, for the copy is merely a small file storing details of adjustments applied to the master when displayed. Very economical. You can have any number of versions and display these individually or collapsed into a stack. This contrasts with iPhoto which does change the master. Aperture solves the problem of storing multiple versions of files in one master stroke. Very brilliant!

Cataloging and keywords – Here much is lifted from the very capable iPhoto with any combination of Star Rating, Project Name, Keywords (available in multiple ‘libraries’ of your design and choice), Date Searches, and so on. Projects can be stored in any number of hierarchical folders. Until now I have used Extensis Portfolio 7 for cataloging and retrieval, dropping images into Photoshop for manipulation and printing. No more. Aperture does it all, better. Exceedingly brilliant!

The Light Table – just like you used to work with slides on a light box. Hit a key and drag the images of choice to the Light Table panel. Each can be moved and sized at will. This is simply right. That’s how I think. Print as a contact sheet or export as a PDF to show others. Beyond brilliant!

By the way, I took the pictures shown above on my Leica M3 with a 90mm lens and studio flash. You do not have to be a digital user to benefit from this landmark product.

And no, you will not be getting any Microsoft messages like this one when you switch to Aperture:

More in Part II.

Canon EOS 5D index

2006-03-22T07:51:00.000-08:00

Where to find my ramblings on the 5D, in chronological order

Introduction - Film is Dead
Purchase - Putting my money ....
Part 1 - Pandora's Box
Part 2 - Some prints yield a fond goodbye to medium format
Part 3 - Quality is subjective
Part 4 - Messing about
Part 5 - Upstrap in Action
Part 6 - Fix that flap
Part 7 - Limekiln
Part 8 - On Speed
Part 9 - Wetzlar goes to Tokyo
Part 10 - Taking Rube Goldberg for a Spin
Part 11 - Hearst's Castle
Part 12 - Digital Dust
Part 13 - Excuse me while I examine my Portlait setting through the Glid
Part 14 - A Gorgeous Bit o' Bottle
Part 15 - After the Purge
Part 16 - A break in the storm
Part 17 - Breaking up
Part 18 - Canon's EOS Capture
Part 19 - Long thoughts

Harry Callahan

2006-03-21T16:12:00.000-08:00

Book review

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) left a substantial body of work, yet I cannot help thinking he rues the fact that what he is remembered for most is the many pictures, frequently nudes, of his wife Eleanor.

And while he was an enthusiastic experimenter, be it with double exposures or light traces, these wonderful early pictures set a standard and style imitated, but seldom equaled, by many since.

It’s not that Eleanor is some sort of model ideal of a woman, whose modern image in men’s eyes dictates exaggerated breasts and miniscule hips. Quite the opposite. She is powerfully built, a woman of the mid-West, with solid bones and generous hips. A Real Woman. And does he do her justice. Whether it’s the powerful, face-on image showing a determined chin and direct gaze, or the many nude-in-landscape studies which define the genre, his photographs of his wife are never less than special and deservedly define his oeuvre.

The Chronology of his life in this book, published by Bulfinch, goes a long way to illustrating his restless mind and thirst for experiment. I quote:

1938 – Purchases first camera, a Rolleicord 120.

1941 – Begins to work with a 9 x 12 Linhof Technica (sic) camera.

1941 – Moved by the sharpness of Adams’ (sic) prints, trades enlarger for an 8 x 10 camera and begins to make contact prints.

1943 – Buys 35mm Contax single-lens reflex camera (sic – can’t they get anything right?) and begins two-year series of photographs of pedestrians.

The latter rival, by the way, anything done by Walker Evans in this genre, adopting a far grittier approach.

This is curiosity at its best and not mere fascination with equipment as Callahan takes lots and lots of pictures along the way.

He starts exhibiting in 1941 and thereafter it seems there is scarcely a month when a show or publication does not come to market.

Rightly so, for there is much to be learned from the mind of this true original, whether from the early monochrome or later color work.

Highly recommended.

Elton John's collection

2006-03-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

Chorus of Light - Photographs from the Sir Elton John Collection - book review

Elton John (sorry, ‘Sir Elton’ just sounds too silly) has a lot of talent. He also has a lot of money which allows him to feed his manic collector’s streak. The collection on view here is of his photographs.

The only reason to buy this book is that it can be picked up for just a few dollars, having been remaindered no sooner than it was published. What you get is a 13” x 9.5” collection of some 150 photographs, nicely reproduced, representing many of the classic images of the twentieth century. Why anyone would want to pay huge sums of money for ‘original’ photographs – a contradiction in terms if there ever was one – beats me, but you get to peek, almost free, at a fine collection here.

The interview with John, who is predictably egotistical, is actually quite interesting.

If you like classic photography this is a cheap entrée.

Walker Evans

2006-03-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

Book review

It’s hard to know what to make of Walker Evans’s photography. On the one hand he is justly famous for his depression era photographs of American sharecroppers and the misery of their existence, photographic work commissioned by the Roosevelt administration. On the other hand, much of his work can be dismissed as a twentieth century variation on Atget’s nineteenth century pictures of a seemingly deserted Paris. In Atget’s case, the lack of people can be attributed to the slow films of the era, where a passer by would render a ghostly image, if he recorded one at all. By contrast, for Evans the stillness of the cities he photographed is solely due to careful planning and composition. And frankly, the architectural photographs are, for the most part, unexceptional and boring, despite having been set up with infinite attention to lighting and timing.

To make matters more difficult, this book comes from the ‘sell it by the pound’ philosophy of American biography, one of the saddest developments in modern writing. Weighing in at some six hundred and fifty pages, it closes in 1956 with the death of the author, James Mellow, who died in 1997. Evans died in 1975 aged 72, leaving the last eighteen years of his life sketched by Mellow in a few paragraphs. So even allowing for the fact that those years were not amongst the most productive in Evans's life, they would have conceivably added another 200 pages to an already ominously thick tome

These were some of the thoughts going through my head as I approached the daunting task of reading about one of America’s most respected photographers. It has to be said, then, that this biography is really quite gripping. Mellow writes beautiful, idiosyncratic English and displays a genuine love for his subject. His exhaustive research never makes the text lugubrious or boring. Best of all, the many reproductions of Evans’s work are interspersed with the text, thus placing them in context with the writing. It is well worth trading some loss in reproduced quality for this optimal presentation of the work.

Evans was a curious mixture. Well versed in literature and painting, he more or less stumbled on photography. Maybe his most telling comment about his contemporaries was to the effect that he denigrated the obsession with technique shared by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Paul Strand “….none of whom I admire”, while admitting that technique interested him more than it did Cartier-Bresson “….though I admire his work very much.” A telling statement when you consider that Evans’s second exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1934 was with Manuel Alvarez Bravo and….Henri Cartier-Bresson. So one can read an element of envy into the comment on technique, and it brings one in a roundabout fashion to the realization that his best work by far was very much in the style of Cartier-Bresson.

Memorable photography is just that. Memorable. One remembers the pictures without having to look at them and those of Evans’s pictures I recall are all from the great street and subway images he took in the late-1920s and throughout the 1930s. The aggressive girl snapped on Fulton Street in 1929, the incongruously fur-attired black woman on 42nd Street in the same year and those incredible subway pictures taken in the late 1930s. Amazingly, Evans had challenged himself to take the subway pictures but then had to be pushed by mightily impressed friends to complete the project. He was nothing if not self-effacing. This seems very much a character trait – he was no self starter and needed the prodding of colleagues and business associates time and again to get on with the job. A self-starter would have left a broader body of work albeit maybe one of lower quality.

So Evans’s work can be enjoyed on many levels, from straight reportage and historical documentary to some of the finest street photography of his time. No prizes for guessing which impresses as great photography, though. Don’t be put off by the weightiness of this tome. It is an excellent study of a great photographer.

HP DesignJet 90 - Part IV

2006-03-16T06:37:00.000-08:00

A very capable monochrome printer

In addition to doing a very poor job of emphasizing the DesignJet 90's self calibration capabilities, courtesy of the built in colorimeter, Hewlett Packard does an even worse job as regards explaining quality monochrome printing. You have to delve deep into their web site to find a document named 'ICC Profiles - for black and white images'. This leads you to downloading a file containing 8 Jpgs, each containing 7 copies of the same monochrome photograph with slight tint variations. You start by printing the Neutral profile Jpg on paper of your choice then select the picture with the most pleasing tint. Say it's the one captioned 'Magenta'. You then proceed to the Magenta profile and print that Jpg, electing the best. Then all you have to do is download the related ICC profile from the HP web site and drop it into the /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles folder and choose that profile when printing in Photoshop.

It all takes less time to do than to describe and, once again, HP's instructions are outstanding. I did this using the three sheets of free HP Photo Matte paper provided with the printer, which is recommended for monochrome 'art' prints, whatever that means. As Himmler once remarked, "When I hear the word 'Art', I reach for my gun". Frankly I find the surface of this paper to be deader than yesterday's news but I suppose it's fine if you want to mount 4" x 6" prints in 30" x 40" mats, sign in 2B pencil and make sure you append a 1/10 designation. This confirms for the twit with a big checkbook that this is none other than a Limited Edition of ten, and the price, of course, is inversely proportional to the size of the photo.

Here's a snap of three of the profile pages and a 13" x 19" print made with the profile of choice on the DesignJet. This is an outstanding fine tuning capability, though I think I will stick with HP Photo Satin paper as I like a little life in my print surface.

In the original print a very full tonal scale is retained, though a glossier paper would improve on this further.

HP Designjet 90 - Part III

2006-03-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

An 18" x 24" print emerges after a spot of calibration

I can think of several dozen things I would rather do than calibrate a photo printer. Like pulling weeds, bathing the dog, polishing shoes, changing the oil in the car, stripping old paint, and on and on.

However, it rained today so that ruled out the weeds and paint. The oil is fresh. Bertie the Border Terrier is clean and my shoes look fine. So the inevitable came to pass and I spent a big part of the day calibrating the HP Designjet 90 for optimal results. By that I mean that the screen and printed images must be as close as possible with regard to colors and tonal range.

I concentrated my efforts on HP Premium Plus Photo Satin paper, which I expect to use the most. On more critical examination, it has slightly less sheen than Epson Premium Luster and slightly finer stippling. Either way, both papers retain detail well without the specular reflection problems of glossy surfaces.

First I learned what I had done wrong to cause the paper jam yesterday. The HP’s paper source tray is large and must abut just so with the body of the printer for the paper feed to work properly. I really do not have enough room behind this monster to load paper from behind and in any case I like the idea of the paper being properly supported as it wends its way past the print heads. I fancy a touch of furniture polish on the sides of the source tray will do wonders to ease the stiction between the mating plastic surfaces which makes full insertion of the tray tricky. Epson has it all over the HP here, as the paper is simply dropped in the feed slot from above and things work fine.

Still, 18” x 24” is a lot larger than 13” x 19” and cavalier handling of the paper will result in creases and malfunction. I found myself (literally) on the carpet more than once while loading the large size paper into the source tray, for lack of a large enough flat surface to place things on.

As regards color calibration, one thing I did not have to do is re-calibrate the screen with the Monaco colorimeter, as that profile was fresh. That still leaves a ton of variables and where the Epson preferred to deny Photoshop any color management, the HP’s instructions are quite the opposite and very detailed. There are so many steps it’s easy to miss something.

When I finally printed my first 18” x 24” it was like being back in the darkroom 35 years ago.

Breathtaking.

Simply breathtaking.

No question about it for this photographer. Nothing beats a Really Large Print.

Color matching is near perfect. I can do better but we are very much in the area of diminishing returns here. As for resolution, smoothness of tone, ease of creation of the original file, I challenge any medium format photographer to equal the output and sheer involving quality of the Canon EOS 5D’s full frame sensor. And I’m still only using JPG Fine here. RAW has yet to come.

I struggled a bit with nomenclature. It seems that 18” x 24” is called ‘Arch C’ in that moronic European size naming convention that printer manufacturers have adopted. For goodness sake, what the devil does Super B3, or JB5 or A2 mean to you? Now 12” x 15” or 16” x 20” we can all understand. Well, the engineers be damned. I scrawled ‘Arch C’ with one of those indelible pens beloved of graffiti artists all over the box of HP’s paper, the better to know what to dial in next time.

How much larger is 18” x 24” than 13” x 19”? See for yourself – the Leica is for scale (no, not for sale):

Yes, that’s our boy Winston on his fourth birthday. I learned from one of Canon’s tutorials on the web that setting the Threshold slider in Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask (what a stupid name for something that is intended to sharpen – engineers at it again) to 1 or 2, rather than zero, takes the bite out of facial pores and makes for a nicer look in portraits, so I dialed in 250/1/1 for this portrait. Despite being at 400 ISO and some two stops underexposed (ooops!) it’s near perfect as regards definition and tonal range once fixed in Photoshop.

There’s a lot of nonsense written about printers on the web. One ‘prominent’ site gave the HP a mediocre review, accusing the machine of color casts. Now I have no axe to grind for any particular manufacturer. I’m not paid by Hewlett Packard, or anyone else, and I do not get free printers and supplies to play with. I will use what works for me. But I cannot help suspecting that the boob writing this piece is fairly clueless about proper calibration of a printer which starts with the use of a colorimeter to profile the screen. He makes no mention of using one. The old rule applies. Garbage in, garbage out. I may denigrate technique as a means – nay, a hurdle – to an end, but you have to have it to get there consistently at a high level of quality

Want lousy prints from the HP? I have several I can offer you from today’s efforts. Want lousy prints from the Epson? Same answer. But want stunning, drop dead gorgeous framed pictures from either and you only have to calibrate things properly to be assured of the best results. The only way you will be able to tell the difference between Epson and HP prints is by the size. The market is simply too competitive for it to be otherwise.

Ink jet printers have not come very far in the last six years, based on my experience. Meaning the Epson 1270 was terrific back then and remains so today. Maybe inks are more permanent, maybe manufacturers’ paper profiles are better than before, but my standard for comparison is the old Epson 1270 and, believe me, that’s a very demanding benchmark indeed. I think I’m almost there in matching it with the HP Designjet 90. The only difference is that I can now go larger.

So if you want a good large format printer at some 60% of the price of the 17” Epson, you could do worse than the HP DesignJet 90. Or get the 130 model for a bit more if you need 24” wide. They do versions with a roll paper feed, and I avoided that like the plague. Ever tried to get roll paper to lie flat? They also do a version with a colorimeter for screen profiling, but as I already had one the base model printer worked for me.

'Expert' reviewers seem to overlook the fact that the HP DesignJet has a built in colorimeter to aid creation of a perfect paper profile for each of their papers. This does not obviate the need for a screen colorimeter like the Monaco to create a screen profile, but it ensures the paper's profile is accurately defined.

Here's how it works. You insert an 8.5" x 11" piece of HP paper of your choice and run the Calibrate Color utility. It prints a test pattern and then sucks the paper back in and, using the built in colorimeter, compares ideal against actual, adjusting the paper's profile as appropriate. That is very clever and HP does a lousy job of marketing a feature that no other consumer priced printer offers, as far as I know.

I have created three profiles thus - Satin, Gloss and Matte. Once done you throw away the pattern and get on with life. As with any paper, you have to remember to tell Photoshop which surface you are printing on but the rest is automatic.

By the way, the 18" x 24" print took 13 minutes to make and the HP Photo Satin paper is 76 lb. weight compared to 67 lbs. for Epson Premium Luster.

HP DesignJet 90 - Part II

2006-03-14T09:20:00.000-08:00

First serious prints and some myths debunked

Let's get the myths out of the way first. I had read somewhere on the World Wide (disinformation) Web that so much as a sneeze or a hint of moisture would make the inks on prints made with the HP DesignetJet printer run. I had the 8 1/2 " x 11" print from yesterday's evening trial run handy (it was made without any attempt to color balance nor did I use the right paper profile) so I let it dry for one hour and then took it to the Pindelski High Tech Test Lab, also known as the kitchen sink:

My dry elephant seals were now well and truly in their habitat as I soaked the lower half of the print with tap water for thirty seconds. That's a little more moisture than from a sneeze, I would think. Placing the half wet seals on the Pindelski High Tech Moisture Removal Center, aka the dish drying rack, I let the print air dry overnight and came back in the morning.

Guess what. No color changes or running ink to be seen. Just 'cause it's written don't mean it's so.

As it's raining today I decided to calibrate the printer and see what she could do on large prints. HP includes 3 sheets each of their Photo and Proofing Gloss, Photo Satin and Photo Matte with the printer in 13" x 19" size. Such generosity. I had also taken the precaution of buying 40 sheets of the HP Photo Satin in 18" x 24" to try the largest width the DesignJet 90 can handle. That's a lot larger than 13" x 19" - 75% larger.

It has been quite a while since I set up Photoshop to match the Epson 1270 and their Premium Luster paper to make things automatic, so I had quite forgotten how to get through all the arcane menus in Photoshop. Mercifully, HP provides a tutorial CD with the printer (what is happening at Hewlett Packard?), and this one actually loaded first time on the iMac G5, unlike the recalcitrant driver disk. The on-screen tutorial is really outstanding, narrated in clear, non-technical English. The thrust is simply one of "Select these options for the best print" without a lot of gobbledegook about gamuts, color spaces and all that garbage which has little interest to real life photographers who just want their print to come out like it looks on the screen.

I had earlier created a profile for the screen using the Monaco EZColor colorimeter thingy, so I left that alone as the monitor has not been on that long that color drift from age would be an issue.

Unlike the Epson 1270 which is silent when switched on and dormant, the DesignJet has a fan whirring away. Not really obtrusive but a wear part nonetheless, so I switched it off overnight. Warm up took just over a minute and I gave her a try with one of the free 13" x 19" sheets of HP Photo Satin whose sheen is identical, to my eye, to Epson Premium Luster though the weight of the paper seems quite a bit more. The back of the HP paper is rough rather than smooth, but I can't see that mattering either way.

I set up Photoshop as instructed on the CD video and saved the setting as 'HP Photo Satin'. I haven't tried the other papers but the HP Photo Matte looks interesting. It is dead matte, lighter in weight than either the Gloss or Satin and very much whiter viewed in daylight. HP recommends it for black and white printing which seems to make sense and indeed their web site has a ton of paper profiles together with very detailed instructions on how to get the best monochrome prints from the DesignJet. Nice to know but right now the focus is color, so that will have to wait.

Clearly, HP has done a great deal of work on color matching and paper profiles as you would expect from a company that has long had a leading position in large format printing in the graphics design and architectural work places.

The Epson 1270 is a very quiet printer. I always had to use it in non-bidirectional printing mode to avoid tracks on large prints, so that doubled printing time and, as I recall, a 13" x 19" would take some 28 minutes to make. The DesignJet is a different kettle of fish. It clanks, whirrs and grinds a lot when starting up and then gives a distinctive 'clack' with every pass of the print head on 13" and wider prints, although once running on smaller prints it's near silent. The table on which it sits has a space frame base construction - light but extremely strong - yet I could clearly see the table vibrate gently with each pass of the print head. To cut a long story short, the print emerged in 9 1/2 minutes and I let it dry an hour before comparing it to the screen in natural daylight. It was immediately clear that print quality was exceptional, indistinguishable from the Epson, and there was no sign of any ink tracks on the surface. The printed area had a 1/4" margin on the top, bottom and left side and a 7/16" margin on the right, making for a print size of 12 1/2" x 18 5/16", a tad larger than that from the Epson 1270.

One thing I do not like is that you have to adjust the input and output trays in disparate ways depending on the size of the paper, so I'm going to make a little guide for the commonly used sizes and paste it to the top of the printer. HP provides a good guide in their book, but it's more detailed than I need and involves too much hunting for the right settings.

After the print had dried for an hour I compared it with the image on the iMac's screen, which is some 14" wide and I must say it was very, very close. Greens in this landscape subject were a tad darker in the print but everything else was in order. The next test will be with a portrait, whose flesh tones should really provide for critical evaluation. That one will be 18" x 24".

HP DesignJet 90 - Part I

2006-03-13T18:06:00.000-08:00

The monster printer arrives

I dropped off the Epson 1270 printer at the UPS Store early in the afternoon not, it should be added, without a sigh. This great machine had served me well and many fine prints testify to its reliability and quality. I think my fine nephew will do great things with it. If nothing else, it will be a huge test of his technical skill - a 13" x 19" is not like making an 8" x 10". No sooner had I arrived home than Marty Paris, great acoustical guitarist that he is, arrived at the gate. "I have a big box for you" he intoned dramatically. Gulp! I had been without a printer for all of 45 minutes. Marty is our UPS man in his spare time and you could not meet a finer person.

Well, after Bert the Border Terrier had jumped in the UPS van for his cookie (Marty comes prepared) we struggled to get the 75 pound box on the dolly and lowered it gently to the ground. "Six years I got from the old printer, Marty". "Wow! Nothing lasts more than three years today. That's fantastic!" Nice to know the Epson has gone to a good home.

Bertie supervised while I struggled to unpack this bear. The fine people at B&H in New York had not chintzed on the packing, double boxing with more polystyrene peanuts than you really want to know about. By the time I got through the layers of tape, cardboard, polystyrene and plastic, the thing was almost manageable. The weight had halved. I had taken the precaution of clearing a space for it in the office - the old niche was too small - as well as running a long USB cable to feed it pictures. Enough time in the dark recesses of the wiring cabinet, replete with black beetles and cobwebs. There is a fortune waiting for the person who works out how to unwire home computers.

Now I must admit to some dismay on first extricating this monster from its cocoon. When I was an engineering student in London everyone knew that the finest laboratory instruments were made by Hewlett Packard. Later, on Wall Street, a like recognition played into the adoption of the HP12C as the calculator of choice. In neither case were clear instructions expected or available. You see, these devices were made by engineers for engineers, and no real engineer is going to read the instruction book. Heck, when Apollo was landing on the moon, did Buzz Aldrin check the book to determine why the panel was on the blink? Not a bit of it. A solid thump with a fist resolved the issue. It may have been "One small step for man" but a good bang ensured it was "A giant leap for humanity". Or something.

So the cause of my dismay was none other than some of the clearest instructions known to man, on huge paper that even I could read. I'm not sure whether this means you should buy HP stock or sell it....

Anyway, with psychological support from Bertram, I manhandled the thing onto that nice little oak toppped sofaback I had made many moons ago from some alder, which I ebonized, and some gorgeous stairing oak for the top. It wasn't conceived as a printer stand, but it does the job nicely.

HP does not supply a USB cable (how cheap is that?) but I was prepared, and my long cable was in place. The mechanical part of the installation was a breeze. You pop in six ink cartridges, followed by six print heads. Not for the colorblind, as several are like-sized, but easy to do.

Then came the software part. Now after my dismay at the clarity of the instructions, not to mention growing concern over the ease of the mechanical setup, I finally ran into a snag. And it was a big one. Try as it might, the drive mechanism in the iMac G5 refused to read the provided software CD. OK, I'm up to it, I can handle this, I'm not panicking. Dial up the HP web site, of course. Just download the driver. Not so easy, pal. The driver's there, but you cannot download it. Mail order only. Can you believe this? Is Carly Fiorina still in charge, dammit? I though they fired her with a $40mm handshake. OK, OK. I'll try HP Canada. No Designjet 90 in sight. Fine, how about England then. That bastion of civilization and decency must have the driver, no? No.

What to do? Well, maybe it's just a quirk of the G5's drive, or of the HP drive that made the CD. So I pop the CD in the iBook and Hey Presto!, she fires right up. Advised by Bert, that fount of wisdom, I plugged in one of the Firewire external drives to the iBook and before you could say 'Woof!' the software was on the G5's hard drive. Minutes later the printer was installed. No lockups. The only Windows you will find in the old estate are in the walls.

That's not to say that HP doen't have some humorists at Software Central. Take a look at their wonderful proofreading of their software installation intructions:

The letter 'u' somehow dropped off the HP typewriter.

By this time the sun is setting, the evening libation beckons and I only have time for one quick print from the wretched Photoshop to see if the printer is speaking to the G5. So I load up a RAW image of the elephant seals just north of Hearst Castle on the magnificent Pacific coast and .... a jam. A piercing noise emanates from the beast and the yellow light blinks. Now in case you think HP is no longer dominated by engineers, just take a look at the control panel on this machine:

Now do you see why Aldrin resorted to brute force? Same guy designed the bloody buttons in the Lunar Module, for God's sake. To be honest I had loaded one sheet of Epson Premium Luster in the HP to try things out, so maybe this was some sort of corporate rivalry at work and HP had the thing jam by design anytime non-HP paper was inserted. So I pressed every button in sight, threatened Bert with physical violence, and slammed ten more sheet of Epson's finest on top of the one I had loaded.

And she printed just fine. 105 seconds for an 8" x 10" which is about four times faster than that great Epson 1270. Colors were right, density a tad pale, but this may well be the start of a beautiful friendship. Even if the birth was a Caesarean.

Gary Winogrand

2006-03-13T08:52:00.000-08:00

Book review

The old dictum has it that “If you having nothing good to say, say nothing”, so I will earnestly struggle to say something good about Garry Winogrand’s street photography. I purchased my copy of this book in June, 1992 and, amazingly it remains in print. I return to it earnestly every year or two trying to see what the famed critics who all gush over Winogrand’s work are going on about.

True, some of the early work here is not bad, capturing the feel of 1950s and ‘60s America. Where a set piece is involved, such as a night club or an event or a zoo, in other words somewhere where Winogrand could actually be bothered to make the slightest effort at framing the picture, then indeed there is some good photography. The many pictures from the night club El Morocco are exemplars of their kind and the zoo pictures are poignant and thoughtful.

But the overall feeling I always come away with from my repeated occasional marathons through this book, is that, well, the photographs are, for the most part, surpassingly ugly. In his gushing essay on the photographer’s work John Szarkowski nonetheless pulls no punches between the lines. Take a look at the contact sheet of Winogrand’s street shots in 1961 (vital, involved, he actually bothered to raise his camera to eye level in a few) with the one from 1982. Sorry, the latter is pure garbage. The other way in which Szarkowski takes a side swipe at Winogrand’s work is in reciting some mind numbing statistics about Winogrand’s prodigious use of film during his Los Angeles period, 1979-1981. In that time, Winogrand processed 8,522 rolls of 35mm film with another 5,000 or so rolls taken but not proofed. Half a million pictures in 2 years. That’s 20 rolls a day. Can you wonder his contact sheet from this period is rubbish? Judging from the 1982 contacts he just walked the streets frantically pressing the button all the time without looking for or at a subject. Well, I suppose Kodak loved him.

By all means get the book to see the work of an American icon. Just don’t expect too much.

Long thoughts

2006-03-12T16:35:00.000-08:00

200mm and 400mm are great focal lengths for landscapes

I have always enjoyed using a lens around 200mm for landscape photography. On the one hand, it's relatively easy to hold steady hand held or with the aid of a monopod. On the other, it affords the easy opportunity of focusing on the essentials, cutting clutter.

I often find that selecting an elevated viewpoint and then composing to cut out the sky works well. This approach heightens the sense of drama and 'stacking' inherent in a lens of this length, such as in this picture taken the other day of some local vines just before spring pruning:

Another example of an elevated viewpoint, looking down into the valley in afternoon light is this one:

And finally, a strongly receding subject like this is only made bolder by the long lens:

Go longer, meaning 400mm in my case, and things get shakier. Literally. There's more bulk to manhandle and more lens length for the wind to bear upon. It's not that my 400mm lens is bad - it is not - but I have very rarely managed sharp large prints from it using film as they were nearly always plagued by definition-robbing camera shake. 400mm is long! The new 'film speed' opportunities offered by the full frame sensor in the Canon EOS 5D, even at 1600 ISO it's near noise free, have literally brought my old Leitz 400mm f/6.8 Telyt back to life, once it was suitably adapted for use on the Canon body. This was taken at 1600 ISO and I think the shutter speed the camera selected was 1/1000th. Hand held with no support, the original is wonderfully detailed:

Now while there may be an 'auto everything' Canon 200mm L lens in my future, it's really a pleasure to see these old Leitz 200mm and 400mm warhorses getting a new lease of life.

Canon's EOS Capture

2006-03-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

Instant digital gratification?

I messed about some more with the software Canon provides with its 5D camera, Digital Photo Professional (DPP). You know the application with all those comedic spelling errors.

Well, I found more spelling errors, true, but I got to wondering about the little USB cable Canon provides with the camera that plugs into a receptacle under that silly flap on the side.

After installing DPP on my iBook, I plugged the camera in and switched the 'Communications' option on the Tools menu on the LCD from 'Print/PTP' (the default) to 'PC Connect'. That really should read 'iMac Connect' but I'll let it go. With the camera switched on, go to DPP->Tools->Start EOS Capture on the iBook and you are ready.

Take a snap in RAW format and, hey presto!, the picture appears on the iBook's screen. It works as well in Jpg mode. You see the snap on a full screen where you can actually gauge sharpness, focus, exposure and so on, as opposed to the small LCD screen on the back of the camera where you mostly see your nose in the reflection.

For a studio photographer, whether taking product pictures or using live models, this strikes me as the bee's knees in functionality. The pictures are automatically transferred from the camera's card to the computer while all this is going on. Thus a smart pro could have his studio assistant view the screen shots and provide instant feedback allowing corrections to be made. After all, said assistant no longer has anything else to do as he's not loading film any more. And you thought Polaroid invented instant gratification?

With the camera set to the lowest quality Jpg setting, a sharp picture pops on the screen in 3 seconds; with RAW it pops up blurred in 5 seconds and takes another 10 seconds to sharpen. There's quite a bit of processinbg going on in this case and, let's face it, my iBook's 1.42 gHz processor isn't the fastest on the planet. The timing with RAW + low quality Jpg is similar.

A separate panel on the iBook's screen also appears allowing you to set many of the cameras settings using the keyboard, such as aperture, shutter, ISO, image quality. Most intriguingly, you can also enable a timer automating shots with stated intervals. Maybe astronomers will like this sort of thing?

The cable provided is ridiculously short - some eighteen inches - as to be unusable, but that's nothing an extension cable cannot fix.

Postscript: I tried this set-up with a 15 foot long USB extension cable using my iMac G5 which has a 2 gHz Power PC processor, 2 gB of memory and very fast video processing. A sharp RAW image is displayed in 5 seconds, highest quality Jpg takes 3 seconds and lowest quality Jpg is around 1.5 seconds. These times suggest this would be an extremely capable studio installation as, by the time you have set the camera down to look at the monitor, the image will be there.

Robert Capa

2006-03-11T07:26:00.000-08:00

Blood and Champagne - book review

I recall approaching this book with the thought that Capa was not really a very good photographer. I came away thinking otherwise, realizing that what makes a war photograph 'good' is not beautiful composition or perfect lighting or wonderful technique. No, the act of being there and recording the moment is what makes a war photograph good and no one bested Capa at that.

This book does not include any of Capa's pictures, being an unauthorized biography. No problem. Just go to the Magnum Photos web site to see hundreds of examples of his work. Alex Kershaw does a fine job of writing a gripping narrative which at the same time is well researched. While the book could do with fewer asterisked footnotes, the quality of research is never in doubt and the writing never dry or academic.

Capa, the man, clearly suffered from what we would now call an addictive personality. His determination to be at the latest war front speaks to his addiction to adrenaline. In between, there was the incessant gambling, the boozing and the women. The gambling nearly bankrupted the agency he founded with Cartier-Bresson, Chim Seymour and George Rodger, Magnum Photos. The boozing was tediously incessant. The women ranged from Ingrid Bergman to Parisian streetwalkers.

Yet what a life the man lead. From the Spanish revolution, where he was in the thick of the action on the Republican side, to the D-Day landings on murderous Omaha Beach, to Viet Nam which took his life, he swallowed his fear and waded into the front lines of action. Kershaw forthrightly addresses the question of whether the famous picture of the Spanish Republican soldier at the moment of death was faked, coming away uncertain. I think it was, having seen some purported contacts of the film roll years ago in a reputable British photography magazine which showed the soldier 'dying' half a dozen times in succession, but it's hardly likely that Magnum, or whoever owns the negatives, is going to release them if that is the case. No matter. One or two fakes in a life as prolific as Capa's can be forgiven.

He also recounts at considerable length the D-Day story, where Capa went in with the first wave on June 6, 1944, carrying two Contax cameras and a Rolleiflex, taking but 79 pictures. Not surprising he took so few. Capa was a studied photographer who knew not to waste film and knew even better that the goriest images would never pass muster with the censor at Life, whose audience was Middle Americans who wanted their war sanitized. Kershaw relates how a darkroom technician fried the films when drying them, leaving but 11 frames useable, 9 of which were published. To Life's eternal discredit, the magazine blamed Capa in print, saying the majority of pictures were too blurred to reproduce.

Later, having taken the required five training jumps, Capa parachuted in, yes parachuted in, with the 17th Airborne over Wesel on the Dutch border, in March 1945. Stunning courage. He was armed with his cameras and a spare pair of underpants into which he admitted having to change upon landing!

That his life ended in 1954 at the age of 41 is hardly surprising. First, he was feeling pressure from up-and-comers David Douglas Duncan and Larry Burrows. That meant just one more war. Second, he was, as ever, broke and in need of money. Third, his unwavering dedication to being in the front lines meant that sooner or later the inevitable would happen. So Capa, his best work done, trod on that fatal land mine.

"It's not enough to have talent", Kershaw quotes Capa as saying, "You also have to be Hungarian".

This is a gripping story. The book is available from Amazon.

Noise

2006-03-10T16:53:00.000-08:00

Shutters are all over the board

Over the years I have owned cameras from across the noise spectrum, by which I mean the noise the shutter makes when it’s tripped has varied from near silence to cacophonous. From a gentle whisper to a metalllic explosion.

For the most part, it’s fair to assume most photographers would agree that noise is not a good thing. Not only does it distract and cause vibration, there’s something just wrong about it. It’s in our genetic make-up. Why do you think the costliest real estate is invariably in the quietest locations, be it Fifth Avenue mansions with one foot thick stone walls or the sweeping estates of the Bel Air with the nearest neighbor hundreds of yards distant?

Silence, then, is a premium priced attribute, yet that fact seems to have escaped many camera manufacturers. Thinking back, the large Pentax 6x7 I owned years ago had the most wonderful lenses, yet the only truly sharp results I obtained from it were when it was used with a studio flash, with which it unfortunately synchronized at very low speeds. The problem was that tripping the shutter set off an explosion so loud, that people a hundred yards distant would duck for cover wondering which cowboy had come to down, guns blazing. So nice as that big negative was, and it fit 16” x 20” paper near perfectly, the camera had to go. The ten explosions a roll plus the onset of carpal tunnel from trying to hold this beast to eye level, not to mention hearing problems, were simply too much.

My large format gear is at the other end of the noise spectrum. In fact the lens shutters are so nearly totally silent, an illusion enhanced by the distance of the shutter from the operator and the huge space between lens and film which acts as a baffle, that sometimes I wish the shutters were a tad louder. Take the time I was photographing by a waterfall. Did that shutter trip or not? In other words, a crucial element essential in the design of all machines, feedback to the operator, is missing. It’s the same problem that makes using a silent keyboard so difficult.

Engineers will point out that noise is not just sound. Rather, it’s a collection of sounds of varying frequency, volume and duration all mixed together. So while I have no idea what the optimal mix is, I do know that higher frequencies are not a good thing as they tend to amplify the apparent noise too much. On the other hand, too much low frequency sound, is just as bad. As it takes far more energy to generate a loud low frequency sound than a loud one of high pitch - compare a cello or double bass to a violin - too much of the low stuff means something is moving hard and fast. Like a mirror thudding into a frame, protected only by a strip of neoprene. That spells vibration.

The second noisiest camera I ever owned was the Rollei 6003 medium format single lens reflex. What with the large instant return mirror, the electrical diaphragm and the motor yanking the film to the next frame, you could not be inconspicuous using one of these beasts. Rollei must have done something right with damping and vibration control, however, as even images at 1/15th or 1/8th second on a solid tripod showed no blurring from camera movement. And as a studio camera par excellence there’s an argument to be made in favor of noise as the subject knows that the picture has been taken. There’s that feedback thing again.

The Nikon F wasn’t bad. Like everything else about the camera, the noise was purposeful. No nonsense. ‘Built to last’ was the thought that came to mind when operating this brute of a camera. The Leicaflex SL that succeeded it in my tool kit gave the exact opposite impression. Tinny, limp-wristed, you always wondered how long things would last before the next trip to the repair shop. Quite a contrast to the magnificent solidity of the lenses.

The screw thread Leicas rangefinder were always far noisier than you expected. While their ‘clack’ was not that obtrusive, it hardly meshed with the Leica’s reputation as a stealth camera. The M3 and its successors were superior, though I always wished they were quieter, especially with that irritating shutter bounce on 1/15th and 1/30th, which every mechanical shutter M has had. The best in this regard was the M6 I used for several years which had a zinc top plate replacing the brass in the M2 and M3. Brass is ideal for chrome plating, but my M6 was black, so zinc was used as a cost saving. That camera had a beautiful shutter sound, sadly not matched by its build quality which was dramatically inferior to the M2 and M3. Plus the quick jam loading system was an absolute catastrophe - you had to crimp the film end to ensure it did not slip out of the stines meant to grasp it. So the M6 moved on, but not on account of its shutter sound. With any mechanical Leica M (I have not used the electronic M7) you get wonderful tactile feedback from the shutter release, to the extent that you know exactly how much pressure is needed to trip the shutter. Worth its weight in gold, whether on the street or in the studio.

The Canon EOS 5D is nothing to get excited about either way. The timbre of the noise is not objectionable, the volume is middle of the road, but you are going to be noticed when you press the button. For an electrical release, feedback is not bad. The first pressure to lock in focus and exposure is easily distinguished from the second which releases the shutter. There’s not that progressive feel of the Leica M’s shutter release, but it’s a worthy effort.

Setting aside the minority audience for large format cameras, the two quietest shutters I have used were from opposite camps. The one on the Rollei 3.5F was purely mechanical and wonderfully quiet. Feedback was not the greatest, not helped by the awkward location of the button, but it was a joy to use and hear.

The other was in the Mamiya 6, also a medium format camera. This one is purely electronic, the shutter release is actually an electrical switch, with all the challenges that poses for feedback design. Owing to an absence of a flapping mirror and the use of between the lens shutters, the camera was simply wonderfully quiet and what you did hear was just right.

Before closing, I have to say a word about the shutter in my Olympus 5050Z point and shoot. Near silent, Olympus felt obliged to add an option of an electronically generated shutter sound. This emanates from the camera’s speaker after the shutter is pressed. Unfortnately, it comes so late that it’s tomorrow by the time you hear it. Add the huge shutter lag and you have an example of how to get it dead wrong. Needless to add, the shutter release button has such poor resistance design that accidental exposures become the order of the day. At least you can switch off the electronic shutter noise.

So, camera designers, in my next camera I would like the sound of the Mamiya 6 with the tactile feedback of a Leica M2 or M3, with some of the overtones from the M6 for reassurance. The gun makers can use the Pentax 6x7 and Rollei 6003 as reference for their latest efforts. And the people at Olympus have some learning to do.

My M3 is what you hear when you tune in to this site, by the way.

Tony Ray Jones

2006-03-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

A Day Off - book review

The charm of the pictures in this wonderful book, published in 1974, is in marked contrast to the sheer nastiness of much of Rober Frank's work in 'The Americans'.

Ray-Jones was an Englishman who studied in America and apprenticed with Avedon, amongst others, so he was culturally well balanced. This picture book is about the fabled British 'Day Off,' which as often as not saw the resolute vacationer at the seaside in a raincoat, earnestly hoping for that one ray of sun.

What so contrasts this book with 'The Americans' is that where Frank sees nastiness, greed and despair in Americans, Ray-Jones sees nothing but charm and a wonderful quirkiness in the British, all nicely garnished with a sprinkling of levity. A light touch. The view, if you like, of a fellow traveller rather than that of a xenophobic critic.

All social classes are pictured here, from the wonderfully aristocratic boys at Eton School, the couple on the cover relaxing between acts of a Mozart opera at Glyndebourne, cows and all, participants in innumerable summer carnivals with all their eccentricity on display or the seaside shots which absolutely make the book.

This volume of photographs seems to be out of print but most of the pictures here can be found in current offerings of Ray-Jones's work. So sad that he died at the age of thirty, in 1972.

Highly recommended. While the printing in my paperback edition is muddy and too contrasty, none of that detracts from the wonderful pictures.

Breaking up

2006-03-09T08:10:00.000-08:00

35mm film just does not cut it for big prints.

I finally finished framing the last of the fifteen photographs for the walls of the home theater - a converted garage, I should add, lest you think I have hit the jackpot. A large room, some 700 square feet, it offers lots of wall space even after the big screen installation. All of these are 13” x 19” ink jet dye prints made on the fine Espon 1270, with the delays in framing resulting solely from the incompetence of the local art store (Michaels) which stated they could not get me more 22” or 28” frame pieces because it’s a popular size. No kidding. So I finally ordered the remaining ones from Documounts, an estimable business that wanted my money and charged half as much. They also provided all the mats and boards for the pictures and a local glazier cut the glass to fit. All told, a 22” x 28” mounted, matted and framed print, with a nice ebonized ash frame, ran some $60, or one third of the amount charged by the main street framing place.

So there I was last night wondering which movie to watch, while debating the day’s events with that vicious guard dog and breed standard, Bert the Border Terrier, seen above. The goal of the picture project, I reminded Bertram, was that all the snaps must have been taken within the last twelve months. No recycled inventory of past successes. Change or die. And, in the event, every last one of these snaps was taken within a few miles of our home in central coastal California. There are traditional landscapes, strange surreal beach scenes, and the occasional peeling old wall sign. Acting as tour guide for Bertie, whose attention was enhanced by the promise of a cookie, I recited the story of each for him.

By the by, I found myself thinking about the equipment used to take these pictures. First, the realization dawned that almost every last piece of ‘front end’ gear used has now been sold, given the compelling advantages of the full frame sensor in the digital Canon EOS 5D at these print sizes. Second, of the fifteen pictures, eight were taken on medium format, six on large format (4” x 5”) and just one on 35mm.

Now it wasn’t planned that way. What ended up on the walls had to have visual merit, but it also had to be critically sharp. The reason is that viewers do not respect the rule book that says you should step back when looking at a large photograph. Not a bit of it. The larger the picture, the closer they seem to want to get. Now each of these film originals had been accorded the highest quality processing. The negatives were correctly exposed, film was developed by a great pro lab in Santa Barbara (one of the few that does not play a game of soccer on the beach with your wet negatives) and the originals had been scanned on the highest quality dedicated scanners at 2400 dpi (large format) to 4000 dpi (medium format and 35mm). No grain or dirt reduction software was used to preserve definition. These technologies may be smart, but there’s a trade off. Post processing was done on my iMac G5 whose screen has been colorimetrically (or whatever you call it) balanced using a Monaco EZ Color Optix thingummyjig. You know, the puck you dangle on your screen to measure colors while mumbling incantations to various deities. Bottom line? Color on the screen matches color on the print.

The result is that you cannot tell the large format prints from the medium format ones, but you most certainly can tell the one done on 35mm. Not that there’s anything wrong with the definition in the latter. Using a well calibrated Leica M2 and a 35mm Asph Summicron, that original had, without a doubt, the benefit of the best performing camera/lens combination ever. The Summicron lens is simply breathtaking in its ability to resolve fine detail with great contrast. No, it’s the film that damns the print. You see, if you adopt the ‘stick your nose in the print’ viewing method, the 35mm original clearly shows the film beginning to break up at this print size. There is a hint of grain and, in landscape pictures with much fine filigree detail, that’s a no-no.

Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that for large prints, which are my goal, abandoning 35mm was the right thing to do. Up to 8” x 10”, decent technique and a top class scanner, meaning a dedicated film scanner not some cheesy flatbed, will get you fine prints from 35mm. Anything larger, forget it. Or, if you like the 35mm format with all its advantages of lens choices and compactness, well, Canon has a digital camera for you. By comparison with 35mm film, the full frame digital prints I have made recently are simply night and day when it comes to resolution and detail, and my technique remains unchanged.

The only way around this issue for ‘35mm film only’ photographers is to make sure you don’t show your work head to head with medium format or full frame digital. If you do, all your protestations about making great big prints from a small negative will be so much dross. If, on the other hand, your goal is display on a computer monitor, well, a Holga will do.

Speaking of which, if you like Holga-sized pictures, you can view the ones in my home theater here.

Robert Frank

2006-03-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

A man with an agenda - book review

When this book was originally published in France in 1958 (shock news), it would more appropriately have been titled 'The Ugly Americans', for Frank never misses an opportunity to show the very worst of America, whether making statements about race (the white man having his shoes polished by the black in a men's lavatory), toil (the workers slaving away in the mass production factory), crass commercialism (fully half of all the pictures here) or poverty (most of the rest). Nowehere is the nobility, generosity and selflessness of the great American spirit to be found.

So from that perspective, one might well regard The Americans as the ultimate hatchet job, where the victims praise the results which ridicule them.

Nonetheless, there is a lot to praise here. Yes, the photography is stark and the printing depressingly dark, at least in my paperback edition. However, Frank has an uncanny ability to spot the incongrous in daily life (who can forget his surreal picture of the boy with the Sousa horn?) and captures, again and again, that same Decisive Moment which so eluded Cartier-Bresson in his American pictures. And while it may be hard to set aside the prejudiced sociological criticism in this collection of pictures (the handful of images of affluent citizens clearly has an axe to grind), the result is a truly fine collection of what any picture book should be about. Great photographs.

Unsurprisingly, The Americans remains in print to this day. Every photographer's library should have a copy. Just take the left wing focus with a pinch of salt.

Choices

2006-03-07T07:36:00.000-08:00

They will always be limited at the top.

Reading the other day that Konica/Minolta had given up making cameras I started getting worried that we are headed for a world with too few choices when it comes to manufacturers of photo gear. Competition improves the breed, after all. Then a few moments of reflection suggested that maybe there never has been more than a very small handful of choices when it comes to the best of the best. What the pros use.

At the start of the second World War, your choice was 35mm or medium format. Sure, large format has been around for a hundred or more years and soldiers on today, but it’s hardly a product with what you would call critical mass. In 35mm it was the world of the rangefinder - meaning Leica or Contax. The Contax had it all over the Leica, more sophisticated in every way, but damned by a fragile shutter mechanism. Leica countered with a great shutter and maybe the worst viewfinder/rangefinder yet invented. In medium format there was no choice. It was Rolleiflex or nothing. Now little about twin lens reflex design makes sense, but it worked, had great lenses and a negative big enough that even the average duffer could make a decent 8” x 10” print.

In film the choice was greater - Kodak, Agfa, Ilford, Perutz, Adox - all made great monochrome emulsions and Kodak, of course, was working on Kodachrome. Two violin players, the Leopolds - Mannes and Godowsky - were locked in a lab by the boys in Rochester and emerged a couple of years later with Kodachrome, rated at all of 12 ASA. Just in time for the film to be used by Nazi photographers to record Hitler as he set about destroying the great race whence these two geniuses of chemistry came. If the Leica was the greatest camera of the century, and it was, then Kodachrome owns a similar place in the world of film. Kodachrome was simply fabulous. Without it 35mm color photography would not have blossomed the way it did.

In the early fifties Leica finally made the single greatest 35mm camera of all time. The M3. Learning from the Zeiss Contax that integration of the viewfinder and rangefinder into one eyepiece might just be a good idea, and that making the thing bigger than a pinhole could be a selling feature, they added a wonderful, sharply delineated rangefinder rectangle and those projected, illuminated, nay, electric, field of view frames that left you in no doubt whatsoever as to what your lens was seeing. And you could use that viewfinder in almost non-existent light, focusing and framing with the utmost confidence, taking your picture with the near silent whisper of the Leica shutter. They didn’t stop there. They crafted what remains the greatest 35mm lens made. The 50mm Summicron which remains, to this day, the standard all Japanese manufacturers aspire to. This pairing was a high point in engineering aesthetics and optical design.

The M3 and its descendants lasted in the pro's gadget bag through the mid-sixties when machismo dictated long lenses and brutal looks. The former to avoid the bullets, the latter to state unequivocally that your camera could double as a weapon in time of need. The smart people at Pentax may have invented the instant return mirror, but the Nikon F was the camera of the Viet Nam generation. Its brute good looks, augmented by the equally masculine finish of the lenses, said you were the Real Thing. Pentax was not to be outdone, however. They started painting their cameras black and had the smarts to give a few to a London fashion photographer par excellence named David Bailey. In stark contrast to the stodgy, patrician, epicene Beaton, wedded to his Rolleiflexes and his Royal sitters, Bailey rocked. He was a real man. Pentax pushed it. They ran one of the greatest camera ads ever. It showed a beaten up black Spotmatic, brass wear spots everywhere, with just three words. “David Bailey’s Pentax”. Wow! Here was a guy slogging it out in the studios of London with all those dolly birds and clearly having every bit as tough a time of it as the fellows in Nam with their Nikon Fs. Years later, Bailey admitted he had taken sandpaper to his Spotmatics and rubbed the paint off at strategic locations. It got him a lot of dates. Not bad for a few bob and a couple of minutes of elbow grease, huh? So in the ‘60s your choice in 35mm was Nikon or Pentax.

David Hemmings played Bailey in Antonioni’s wonderful movie ‘Blow Up’, though his weapons of choice were a Nikon F and a Hasselblad. Change in the medium format world was slower than in the frenetic corner known as 35mm. At least you finally had a choice. It was no longer just a clunky twin lens reflex Rolleiflex. Why, the Hasselblad, scarcely more competent, said you had arrived. Because you could afford it. OK, so the viewfinder was lousy and the mirror did not return after you pressed the button, but good marketing saw to it that you did not notice.

Enter the seventies and eighties and Canon began to get noticed. They could not compete with Nikon or Pentax for charisma, those marques having earned their stripes in the hellish fields of Viet Nam and Carnaby Street. So they had to sell something else. And that something was technology, backed with abundant capital. Fast, small motors to move the film? Of course. Coreless linear motors to focus the lens? Naturally. Fast sensors to provide autofocus? Absoluement. Eye controlled focus? Well, we did it just to show that we could. Suddenly the competitors were rocked by this Japanese copier-making powerhouse with seemingly infinite resources, and they have been playing catch up ever since. But the old rule prevailed. In 35mm your choices were few at the top. Canon, Nikon, and maybe Pentax.

In medium format, the old guys were still at it. Rollei came out with a camera that four people bought, the SL66. Its huge mass and focal plane shutter which hated working with studio flash made sure that no one bought it. Zenza came out with something even worse, the Bronica, which jammed as soon as you looked at it. They had taken the worst of the Rollei and made it .... worse. Working photographers preferred proper flash synchronization and bought a Hasselblad. Rollei fixed that deficiency with their wonderful 6000 series of medium format SLRs, but it was too late. Traction had been ceded to Hasselblad. The Hasselblad may have been horribly unreliable but it was glamor personified. Plus it shared Rollei’s great German lens providers. An entry ticket to the world of Madison Avenue. So, like a Jaguar owner, you bought two hoping that one would survive while the other was in the shop.

Then in the ‘90s, digital arrived. No matter that the first efforts were comical in the extreme. Digital was Now and the old protagonists, Canon and Nikon, were at it again, followed by a somewhat breathless Pentax. The latter had one thing the two others could never understand. The word ‘elegance’ is part of Pentax’s genetic make up, a concept that never graced the worlds of Nikon and Canon. Olympus gave Pentax some competition when it came to chic design but let’s face it. What self respecting, red blooded American male was going to be seen with his wife’s camera? “David Bailey’s Olympus”? I don’t think so.

So, once again, choice was limited. Sure, you could have flirtations with minority brands like Minolta or Konica, but it was always rather comical to see the poor photographers using this gear. Like the people who were buying Saabs, hoping they would be sufficiently different that the downright horribleness of their choice would qualify them as eclectic, independent, thinkers. Wrong. They just didn’t get it.

Meanwhile, digital completely bypassed the medium format boys during this decade, and they will never recover the lead established by the big Japanese houses. When full frame digital beats medium format film, why would you blow $15k on a digital back for your Hassy when you could get a couple of Canon’s best bodies for the same coin and have something reliable to boot?

Leica? While issuing quarterly denials of impending bankruptcy their apparent goal is to sell only to Japanese collectors and tax exiles in Geneva. So you can’t have one. Settle for a Rolls or Bentley instead.

Film, meanwhile, had gone the way of Contax and Yashica and Konica and Minolta. The choices in color were now down to just two - Kodak and Fuji. The latter may have done a number on the former, taking away market share daily, but it’s all history now. Neither will be making color film by the end of the decade.

So there never have been that many choices at the top. Today it’s Canon or Nikon. Pentax for those willing to be different. And for medium format it’s Hasselblad digital, but who knows how long that will survive. And no one needs film.

A ten year digital device

2006-03-06T12:22:00.000-08:00

The Epson 1270 printer

When it first appeared on the market six years ago, the Epson 1270 color dye ink jet printer was the first consumer priced printer which could make large – meaning 13” wide and up to 44” long – prints with high quality and repeatability. I bought mine new in March, 2000 for $539.05 and proceeded to produce hundreds of color and monochrome prints with it. First in 8” x 10”, later in 13” x 19” sizes, which makes for a nice 22” x 28” wall sized matted, framed result.

I’m not writing this because the Epson has given up the ghost. Far from it. The only reason that I know exactly when I bought it and how much I paid is that I just resurrected the original shipping box from the attic and found the sales invoice in there. You see, the Epson will soon be making its way east to my nephew whose current printer is limited to 8” x 10”, and he know and loves the quality this machine is capable of, reliably producing at 13” x 19” prints.

Ink remains easily available, even if all the colors are in one cartridge and the Epson’s software is about as good at predicting the ink levels as the Federal Reserve is at predicting inflation. Which is to say it gets it in the ball park but don’t stake your life (or next print) on it. Epson sold a lot of these wonderful printers and given the profit margins on ink sales you can bet fresh ink cartridges will be available for a long time.

Conservatively, I’m guessing that the 1270 has at least another four good years left in it, which makes for a ten year life in a digital age where products are seemingly obsolete days after hitting the market. Epson made the 1270 obsolete soon after I bought mine and eventually switched to pigment based inks with claims of great longevity. Didn’t worry me one bit. I have framed originals which are six years old and they look as fresh as the day they were made. I simply do not display them in full daylight eight hours a day.

One of the great appeals of the Epson 1270 was that its use of dye based inks, despite their reputation for fading, resulted in a color print quality very similar to that obtained with the old Cibachrome process. This was, for most, not something to be undertaken at home, as the temperature margins of the chemicals were narrow to put it mildly and their toxicity comparable to the effluent from Chernobyl. What Cibachrome gave you was a wonderful depth of color albeit at the expense of high contrast, so it matched up nicely with milder emulsions like Kodachrome II and, later, Kodachrome 25 and 64, provided your exposure was spot on. Paired with that old grain hound GAF/Ansco 500, Cibachrome was a dream. It was a strict teacher, but get the exposure right and the dynamic range was there for all to see.

The only reason the 1270 is moving on is that I find I want to make 16” x 20” and 18” x 24” prints more often, and if that does not sound like much of a change the latter size is almost twice the area of 13” x 19”. That’s a lot bigger when it comes to visual impact.

So B&H Photo has an order from me for a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 (they are backlogged, suggesting the secret is out) offering dye based inks which, miracle of miracles, are allegedly fade resistant. I toyed with the idea of the Design Jet 130 model which goes up to 24” wide, but concluded that prints that large were pretty much the exception rather than the rule for me, so common sense prevailed over machismo.

Truth be told, I am a tad apprehensive about the new printer. Not that installing the thing worries me – heck, with an Apple iMac it’s just one more ‘Plug and Play’ exercise. No, as a long time user of HP’s 12C calculator (a device now some 25 years old!) my wariness results from my all too great familiarity with HP’s instruction manuals. Hewlett Packard was always an engineer’s company, run by and for engineers, with the brief exception of a disastrous, mercifully brief, time under a chief executive who confused her posterior with her elbow daily, while spending far too much time on the former in the corporate jet. Now that the company has returned as an engineering powerhouse, I’m afraid that the same people who wrote the manual for my 12C calculator will have been involved in the book for the DesignJet. They or their kids.

On the other hand, like all good engineers, they probably believe that instructions are for losers, so the first thing I propose to do when the machine finally arrives is to pitch the instruction book. Worked with the HP 12C and Reverse Polish Notation was never an issue for this Pole. Any descendant of a proud nation that can charge Panzers on horseback needs no instruction book. And it doesn’t hurt that I have an honors degree in Engineering earned before the days of ‘open book’ exams.

Goodbye Epson. You delivered beyond any rational expectations.

Tony Snowdon

2006-03-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

A great photographer

If nothing else, the British Royal Family has been adept at two things – choosing its parents well and being fortunate in having a select group of society photographers over the years to preserve their likenesses.

They include Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson, Patrick Lichfield and Tony Snowdon.

Whatever one might think of his choice in mates, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who became Lord Snowdon upon his marriage to Princess Margaret, rates not just as a fine Royal Photographer but also as one of the great photographers of our time. This vastly talented individual skipped easily between the worlds of industrial design (his work changed the making of wheelchairs for the disabled), architecture (the aviary at London Zoo is his) and photography. While many credit him with the first use of coarse grain in fashion pictures, his real forte lies in gritty social documentary, such as the series on mental institutions, and in portraiture.

Sittings is a fine book, though long out of print. It is rare that the warmth and gentility of a photographer is so clearly reflected in his subjects’ faces, yet those attributes shine clearly here time and again. The portrait of Meryl Streep in the gnarled tree is a masterpiece, plain and simple. The darkness of Brideshead Revisited perfectly reflected in Jeremy Irons’s melancholic stare. And where many would have made cruel fun of him, Snowdon’s portrait of Prince Charles in his racing colors is a simple and subtle image of rank and privilege. Indeed, were it not for the trust that Snowdon clearly engenders in his subjects, pictures such as this would never have been taken. Just ask yourself if you were a member of that much maligned family, would you trust anyone to take your picture?

If there is one picture above all others that deserves singling out here it is the portrait of Lady Thatcher. As is common with most of the photographs in this slim book, the set is simple to the point of being barren, the better to emphasize that great leader’s magnificent resolve and determination. You don’t have to agree with her politics to admire Snowdon’s portrait which is apolitical in the best sense of the word.

Most of these images are to be found in a current book of Tony Snowdon’s work entitled ‘Photographs by Snowdon – A Retrospective’. Any photo portraitist seeking to learn from the very best should search out that volume.

A break in the storm

2006-03-04T13:15:00.000-08:00

More than just a rainbow

Name any of the world's great democracies and the chances are that you will find its happy residents indulging in the cocktail hour before dinner. America, Britain, France, German, Australia, Brazil - all favor this pastime which many regard, myself included, as the very touchstone of civilization.

Then look at those dour nations who struggle with the very idea of 'one man, one vote'; God forbid 'one woman, one vote' for many do not even allow women the freedom of the ballot box. The Saudis? They don't drink. The Russians? They do nothing but drink. The North Koreans? Please....

So after a day of truly wretched weather which saw thunder showers every few minutes interspersed with brief rays of sunshine, the thought of the daily libation was very much on my mind as I made my way to the freezer with its gin every bit as cold as the glass next to the bottle. Just before opening the refrigerator I glanced to my left and there it was. A superb rainbow gracing the old estate - clear sky to its left and threatening clouds on the right. Now you should know I'm pretty much blind without my glasses but that didn't stop me from rushing to the office to grab the 5D, nearly damaging myself on that insouciant boulevardier Bertie the Border Terrier en route, and exiting stage left at a rate of knots that would have given pause to the staunchest of Olympic competitors.

Forget the old wives' tale that landscapes are a stationary subject. Not a bit of it. Give the elements five seconds and, likely as not, the effect is gone. So throwing caution to the winds I banged off a couple of snaps even though what I saw through the viewfinder was mostly a ghastly blur, trusting to the gods and the Canon's automation to get things more or less right.

I rushed back in at scarcely lower a pace and placed the card in the reader. Locating my glasses gave confirmation that all was right with the technology from Canon HQ, but when I loaded the picture into Photoshop and snapped it up to 100% original size (that's some 30" x 45" on a print with the 5D's full frame sensor) it became clear that the otherwise denuded tree on the right was replete with more birds than you could shake a stick at. The small picture here scarcely does it justice but a few moments later as I sipped the soothing elixir, the magic lighting long gone, I could not but help reflect on this wonderful bit of serendipity. If you have a broadband connection, click here for a larger version.

Paul Strand

2006-03-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

Book review

Sorry, I just don't get it.

For some forty years I have been trying to like Strand's work without success. Frankly, based on the evidence of this Aperture book, his output reeks of stunning mediocrity and, if the prints in this volume are a guide, he was a wretched printer to boot. Ansel Adams, at least, knew how to print.

The sheer pretentiousness of the narrative here, where it is expected that the reader will nod in breathless agreement at the genius of the photographs, is best typified by the way Strand's street portraits are extolled for his use of a right angle lens to avoid detection. His well known 'Blind Woman' is singled out as a prime example of this approach. For heaven's sake, the woman is BLIND. Why the subterfuge? He could have stuck his plate camera in her face and the result would have been no better, nor the photographer any more detected by the subject.

As for the argument that has it that technical limitations of the time explain the poor quality of the prints (or is it because of one of those hallowed rare metal printing processes where the resulting grime is meant to be admired?) that also fails to pass muster. Julia Margaret Cameron, a technically challenged photographer if ever there was one, was turning out superior work some 50 years earlier.

Pseudo intellectualism at its worst. If you an uncritical admirer of the New York Times, buy this book. Otherwise save your $50.

After the Purge

2006-03-03T11:01:00.000-08:00

Equipment then and now.

I took a few moments to take stock of how my equipment has changed over the past quarter as a result of the move to full frame digital.

Before:
3 Leicas (IIIG, M2, M3)
1 Leicaflex SL for long lenses
1 Bessa T for the 21mm Elmarit
21, 35, 50 (3), 90 (2) and 135mm Leica M lenses
200 and 400mm Leica Telyt lenses
Rollei 3.5F
Rollei 6003
40, 80, 150 and 350mm Rollei lenses
Rollei extension tubes
Mamiya 6MF when I didn’t want to drag the Rollei about
50, 75 and 150mm Mamiya lenses
Crown Graphic 4” x 5” with 90, 150 and 210mm lenses
Canon 4000 35mm scanner
Nikon 8000 medium format scanner
Epson 2450 large format scanner

After:
Canon EOS5D
24-105mm Canon lens
1 Leica M3
35, 50 and 90mm Leica M lenses
200 and 400mm Leica Telyt lenses adapted to the Canon
Crown Graphic 4” x 5” with 90, 150 and 210mm lenses
Epson 2450 large format scanner

Quite a reduction in clutter! The original goal, recall, was to get medium format quality without the bulk and complexity. The 5D came though with flying colors on that front, equalling or exceeding medium format quality at 30” print sizes, while making pictures possible that would never have been taken on film, thanks to Image Stabilization and grain free ISO 400 images.

Now I’m keeping the Leica M3. Not rational, I know, but it has been a dear friend for more than thirty years and we are not ready to part company. However, it seems appropriate to focus on the need for the 4” x 5” gear. If you can actually expose the film in this beast, large sharp prints are trivial, owing to the enormous size of the negative.

So I did my own little empirical comparison of pictures taken one week apart at Limekiln State Park with the Crown Graphic and with the Canon EOS 5D. This is about as unscientific as it gets and is based solely on my working method. I don’t think I need add what you can do with your lens test charts. We are talking real world results here.

So I compared 30” prints from both and, interestingly, there was little to choose. It seems easier to get a broad dynamic range from negative film than from digital, the latter needing more attention to exposure. Like using slide film. My large format Kodak VC160 negatives are scanned at 2400 dpi on a well tuned Epson 2450 flat bed scanner, using Silverfast Ai software. Doubtless drum scans would be even better but after waiting for two weeks for the film to be processed, I’m not about to wait two more for the scans.

For what are very similar scenes, the technical details could hardly be more different. Here's the 4” x 5” picture:

This was taken using a 210mm Rodenstock Sironar lens, probably 4-8 seconds at f/22. A massive Linhof tripod was used for stability. That lens is similar to a 75mm on 35mm. Setup time to take the picture was some five minutes. Processing was by Calypso Labs in California - an outfit that literally needs to clean up its act, judging from the amount of dust on the negative. The scan on the Epson took approximately 20 minutes. The file is 250 mB (!). Unsharp masking in Photoshop was 45/1/0 - in other words not a lot.

Now compare this with the Canon EOS 5D snap taken a week later.

Here I can disclose the technical details with certainty - they are part and parcel of the file. The shutter speed was 1/15th with the camera hand held on a monopod. ISO was set to 400 to allow a faster shutter speed. That’s a nice attribute of the Canon - ISO is used to control shutter speed. Up to ISO 800 grain is simply not an issue. The lens was fully opened at f/4 at a focal length of 40mm. Setup time was maybe 10 seconds. So the lighting was identical - 1/15 @ f/4 @ ISO 400 is nearly the same as 4 seconds @f/22 @ ISO 160. The original most certainly did not need any dust retouched, and I did not have to wait weeks for the negative to come back. The file size is 73 mB. USM in Photoshop was 250/3.2/0 - much more than with film and reflecting Canon’s own recommendation that the user starts at 300/0.3/0 to overcome the softening effect of the anti-aliasing filter in the camera.

So as a landscape camera the 5D excels. Meanwhile the Crown Graphic is on probation. There will be rare occasions where something larger than 30” x 40” may be called for (I cannot immediately recall ever having made a larger print) in which case a drum scan and a professional printing house would be called for with goodness knows how long a lead time. That is, of course, if color film in this size is still made when the need arises.

Elliott Erwitt

2006-03-03T07:18:00.000-08:00

Snaps - book review. Simply the funniest photographer ever.

Elliott Erwitt takes funny pictures. You could just write that and know all you need to about this compilation of a lifetime's worth of humor.

For life without Erwitt would be a sadder place indeed - like going to New York and finding that Zabars is no more. Or passing through Los Angeles and discovering that the Atlas Sausage Shop is out of Kielbasa. Or visiting any Young's pub in England only to find the beer is now served cold.

No matter that most of Erwitt's pictures are posed. Unlike frauds like Capa's dying Spanish soldier (the contact sheet has him managing to die six times in quick succession) or Smith's Minamata child in her mother's arms (carefully posed with artificial light under the guise of street reportage), Erwitt makes no pretense about his light hearted work and just lets you enjoy it.

And it is much harder to be a great comedian than a great dramatist, whether your chosen outlet is acting or photogaphy.

The only thing wrong with this book is that it has too many pictures in it. You really must savor a few at a time to avoid overload. And, mercifully, the narrative is a scant four of the five hundred and forty three pages.

Buy the hard back version. You will wear out the paperback in no time.

This is the work of a great photographer.

Bill Brandt

2006-03-02T08:09:00.000-08:00

Photographs - book review.

If your library of photography books is to contain only a handful of tomes, then someting showcasing Bill Brandt's work has to be on the short list.

Brandt may be one of the very few exceptions who proves that monochrome can be more powerful than color, for his is strictly a black and white vision of the world.

And what a vision it is. None of the work is derivative in any way, Frequently, the images are breathtakingly original. Whether it's his landscapes, or gritty scenes of coal miners or fabulous distorted nudes (sadly there are too few of these here), the viewer looks on in wonder at how one man could have done so much that was new. New and, let it be quickly added, horribly good.

Who can forget his portrait of a troubled Peter Sellers, taken between scenes for one of the Pink Panther comedies? Or his haunting image of Francis Bacon on Primrose Hill. His picture of Sir Kenneth and Lady Clarke, the spouse looking up at her esteemed husband with awe and respect (both well deserved in Sir Kenneth's case), is charming for its lack of nastiness, which would have been an easy and cheap shot in the lovely home occupied by the couple.

His landscapes are no less moving. See the shot of Skye with the gull's nest in the foreground. An image that hints at the best the surrealists did. Then turn to 'The Man Who Found Himself Alone in London' taken in a 1947 smog, an affliction which London continued to suffer until the mid-1960s, when clear air laws finally allowed one to breathe easily. Timeless.

We are taught to adulate the landscapes of Ansel Adams which, by comparison, are little more than picture postcards, albeit ones snapped by a supremely competent darkroom technician.

Buy this, or any, book about Brandt and you will have one of the shining exemplars of the greatest photography of our time.

A Gorgeous Bit o' Bottle

2006-03-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

Just mind you don’t fall in the water.

Hearst Castle is the most popular tourist destination in central California so I took the precaution of booking a ticket in advance rather than be faced with a long wait for the tour bus which takes you some two thousand feet above sea level to Hearst’s opulent home. While I may have trashed Hearst for his part in dragging down the quality of journalism, a visit to his Castle on the central coast makes me feel a lot better about how he spent his money. As one of the tour guides pointed out, this magpie of a man expended some 78 of his 81 years collecting, starting with a trip to Europe aged three when he asked his mother why they couldn’t simply buy all the the things he liked. Got to like that!

While waiting for the bus - I chose Tour 2 which takes in the upper levels with all the living quarters, the kitchen and the two pools - I chanced on a fellow photographer using a pretty exotic looking Canon L lens finished in white enamel. Now I had seen these things at televised sports events but had never actually encountered someone actually using one, so my curiosity was piqued.

I confess to being in two minds about that red stripe that Canon places on its best glass. On the one hand it tells fellow photographers that you are serious (or maybe just seriously rich) about your images. On the other, it smacks vaguely of driving around in a Rolls Royce or Mercedes. Rather ostentatious and an invitation to thieves everywhere. Short of resorting to brush and paint, there’s really no simple way of blacking out the offending red stripe, unlike the ease with which electrician’s tape can be used to take out the obnoxious markings on the camera’s body.

Mick M. responded that the lens was a 70-200mm f/2.8 L zoom, and an impressive piece it is. Hard not to be noticed with all that white paint which, I suppose, must leave the nature photographer for ever seeking camouflage. Mick then opened his camera bag to disclose a veritable cornucopia of Canon L glass. Let’s see, there was a 24-70mm zoom, an 85mm f/1.2 portrait lens (yes, f/1.2!), an extender for the zoom and a strange looking duck with an enormous, bulbous front element. Proferring it, Mick explained this was a 14mm f/2.8 ultra wide angle. Not a fish eye. A genuine wide angle. This, I confess, had me greatly intrigued, and when Mick explained that his cameras were a 20D and 10D, the fact that these have small image sensors led me to pounce.

“Why not stick that wide on my 5D and see what 14mm really feels like?”. It was the only trump card I held, what with the one body and just the 24-105 L on it.

What ensued was that the loudest sound to be heard in Hearst Castle’s parking lot was that of jaws dropping. Mick’s, when he held the camera up to his eye, and mine shortly after. Now I had used a 21mm Asph Elmarit on my Leica for many years, to the extent that in some ways it had become my standard lens. Despite the cheesy, distorted, plastic viewfinder it came with, the lens itself was seemingly perfect in every way. Sharp at all apertures, compact and distortion free, it left nothing to be desired optically. Point it into the sun and flare was noticeable by its absence. The Leica 21mm has moved on once I concluded that 24mm at the short end of the Canon’s zoom range was fine for my purposes, but not without a twang or two on the heartstrings. We had become firm friends.

I can only guess that there is some sort of macho rivalry between lens makers - maybe I should refer to them as programmers - when it comes to making the widest lenses. I checked B&H and Leica has a 15mm for their reflex camera (costing about as much as a new car, needless to add), Nikon has a 14mm, and the various after-market manufacturers have 14s and 15s aplenty. Given that all of these run $1000 or more, they can hardly be mass market items and about the only use I can envisage on a daily basis is for unscrupulous realtors looking to make interiors larger. “Here is the bathroom” instantly become “Here is the palatial bathroom”.

Nonetheless, the impact of the lens in the viewfinder was overwhelming, and framing with it, walking towards a subject, gave this user a distinct feeling of unsteadiness owing to the width of the field of view, far in excess of what the human eye perceives. To cut a long story short, Mick very generously offered me the use of the 14mm and I reciprocated with the use of my 5D into which he needed only place one of his digital film cards to have a go. I got first go and on arriving at Hearst’s home in the sky one of the first sights was the outdoor pool. The weather was just so, a wisp of a cloud or two in the sky and a pleasant mild day in California. How do people in the mid-west get through the winter?

Having a fair amount of experience with ultra-wide lenses I knew enough to avoid the bane of all these optics which is boring, extraneous foreground. You really have to get in close, so I proceeded to attack the pool with aplomb, forced to sight through the finder, never having used something this wide before. I can ‘think’ 21mm, but 14mm is like a scene from Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ by comparison. And vertigo was the order of the day as I teetered on the edge of Hearst’s ten foot deep outdoor pool! Now you absolutely have to use the hood with this lens, if for no other reason than there is no way to protect the cyclopean front element with a filter. It is simply too bulbous. And here’s a snap of the pool taken with Mick’s lens.

Though taken directly into the light, the lens seems flare free with just one small internal reflection visible in the picture. An extraordinary piece of design and execution. Will I be rushing out to buy one? No way. It’s the sort of thing I would use once a year and is inconsistent with my desire to minimize equipment, but thank you, Mick, for your generosity in allowing me to take a few pictures with this gorgeous bit o’ bottle.

If you would like to see a travelogue of a few more snaps from Hearst Castle, please click here.

Fixing distortions

2006-02-28T08:55:00.000-08:00

A tweak in Photoshop CS2

I'm finding the definition of the Canon 24-105mm IS L lens to be equal to anything on medium format or from Leica on 35mm. What is not so good, however, is that at 24mm you get noticeable barrel distortion (the sides bow outwards) and darkening in the corners.

Sometimes these aberrations do not matter but if you have strong horizontals or verticals or large smooth tone areas, they can be irritating to put it mildly.

I had thought that the only way to correct these was to take RAW images and make the adjustments in the very nice Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) interface. As I have written earlier, proper exposure technique results in little added benefit with the EOS 5D's full frame sensor using RAW compared with JPG Fine, at least for this user. Plus I'm getting comfortable with the in-camera processing of JPGs offered through the Picture Styles option. JPGs have the great benefit that file duplication is avoided and, of course, file sizes are smaller meaning import to your computer and loading in image processing software are both much faster.

Stated differently, I'm of the growing opinion that RAW is overrated. I do not see better definition or tonal range in any large prints I care to make. I have no need for an unprocessed original. Once I have processed it I like it as it is and cannot see changing it again. And the thought of having to catalog two images of each picture is complexity in search of confusion.

Well, looking through the myriad menus of Photoshop CS2 the other day, I chanced upon Filter->Distort->Lens Correction which offers the same ability to correct lens aberrations in JPGs as ACR does in RAW.

Here's how it looks corrected on a screen shot:

Both barrel distrortion and vignetting are quickly corrected, compared to the uncorrected original.

I'll experiment some more with RAW but JPG Fine is just, well, fine for me.

Image processing

2006-02-27T08:46:00.000-08:00

That’s digital workflow to you.

I did a fair bit of corresponding with people much more experienced with digital photography than I am, which is to say just about every photographer I know, asking how they manage the work flow for an efficient, low risk result.

Not surprisingly, the range of responses was about as broad as the styles of the photographers I spoke with. As with any mechanical process, workers will cast around empirically until something that feels right comes along.

My picture throughput is, I suppose, of two types. There are family pictures sent to me by one and all for eventual publication on the family web site. These arrive in hard copy, as film or slides, on CDs or by email. Generally of low resolution, and not much is needed for web publication, they get dropped into a current quarter album in iPhoto ‘06, are culled and sorted at quarter’s end, then crafted into web pages using the File->Export->Better HTML plug-in for iPhoto, all of it taking less time to do than to explain. After adding titles and dates, upload to the ISP using Transmit takes no time at all. A few seconds more and the menus on the site are updated for the latest quarter. This efficient routine has taken the drudgery out of the process and makes sharing the family site with all and sundry a lot of fun.

The other type of picture I have to process is my own ‘serious’ work. Stated differently, these are the snaps whose primary goal is large, framed, wall hanging prints, anywhere from 8” x 10” up. These fill up the walls at the old manse as well as making nice gifts for friends. The originals are scans from 35mm, medium format or 4” x 5” negatives or, increasingly, RAW or JPG images from the Canon EOS 5D. With all of the medium format gear sold and most of the 35mm equipment now gracing collectors’ cabinets in Japan, that leaves 200 mB large format scans and 4-12 mB JPG or RAW digital files to contend with. As iPhoto is immensely capable, handling even the recent CR2 Canon RAW format with aplomb, these get dumped into thematic directories therein (landscapes, forests, etc.) and, once culled, a double click opens the images in Photoshop CS2 as a native file or, in the case of RAW, in Adobe Camera Raw. Whatever processing is required is performed and the images are then saved to the iMac’s desktop and printed.

These desktop high quality files are then dropped into Extensis Portfolio 7 (now 8, but I have not bothered to upgrade), keywords are added to each, and the whole thing is backed up automatically overnight. Given the amount of time and effort expended through this point, a comprehensive back-up strategy is vital. The cost in light of the risk of loss is negligible. My back-up approach is three pronged. First, duplicates of the good personal pictures appear in iPhoto and Extensis libraries, albeit on the same disk drive. Second, at midnight the iMac’s internal hard disk is incrementally backed-up to an external LaCie Firewire hard drive. This is a bootable back-up with the full OS X Tiger operating system resident on the external drive, allowing me to boot from that drive in the event the internal disc in the iMac fails. The iPhoto and Extensis libraries do not reside on the iMac’s internal drive. Rather, they are stored on a second external LaCie Firewire drive, this a 250 gB monster, which in turn backs up incrementally to a third external 250 gB LaCie.

As backing up is even less exciting than doing your tax return and certainly easier to forget, an application named SuperDuper! takes care of the chore daily and automatically. It’s the first back-up application for the Mac that speaks to you in English rather than Geek and works perfectly. Ever the Doubting Thomas, I check the ‘bootability’ of the external drive monthly and compare the files sizes on the two 250 gB Lacies weekly to see that they remain identical.

Now my iPhoto ‘06/Portfolio 7 strategy may not be suitable for those taking a lot of pictures. but for the 500 or so family snaps and 200 or so personal pictures I reckon on saving annually, it’s fine for me. I confess I was tempted by Apple’s Aperture as a Swiss Army Knife solution for everything, but my research suggests that the application is far from debugged in its first version and needs a top of the line Mac computer to make it run at acceptable speed. As I have no intention of blowing five grand on the latter, Aperture can wait. I still think Photoshop has one of the worst interfaces known to Man (if not Geek), but Adobe Camera Raw for RAW files goes a long way to simplifying things. The folks at Adobe really need to take a look at iPhoto for user interface design.

I tried Adobe’s free beta release of Lightroom (I challenge you to find it on Adobe's web site) which has a nice look and feel stolen from Aperture. However, it is so slow in loading larger files on my iMac G5 as to be unusable. I would dearly love to drop the duplication resulting from using Portfolio 7, but as Apple has had some complaints about stability in iPhoto (though I have had no issues) I remain committed to the belt and (two sets of) suspenders approach until I can be convinced otherwise.

There seems to be a growing number of external RAW processors and sharpeners out there which plug-in to Photoshop, as if that application needed any more menu items. While I let others do my testing for me, everything I have read (after discounting the fact that 90% of what’s out there is nothing more than a paid endorsement) suggests that the native code in Photoshop CS2 is as good or better than the after-market variants. For me that means RAW conversion, curves, levels and unsharp masking, which is about all I ever use in CS2. Dust removal? A thing of the past with digital images.

Excuse me while I examine my Portlait setting through the Glid

2006-02-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

Either someone at Canon has a great sense of humor or they need better English-speaking programmers

I checked out the Canon software that came with the 5D; it's not bad but doesn't seem to add much to my preferred working method which is to drop all the files into an iPhoto '06 album (RAW included), preview them in iPhoto, then fix the best ones in Photoshop for saving in Extensis Portfolio 7 in PSD format - the industrial strength, bulletproof cataloging application I use.

Here's what I saw in a couple of menus in Digital Photo Professional, a Canon application far less competent than iPhoto for quick image manipulation, and very slow in converting from RAW:

Now do these guys at Canon have a sense of humor or what?

By the way, a RAW file saves as 8.4 mB in JPG, 36.4 mB in 8-bit TIFF and a whopping 72.8 mB in 16-bit TIFF.

Joe's NYC

2006-02-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

A Photoblog to satisfy your need for a daily fix

When I left Manhattan's West Side in 1987 for Los Angeles, the two closest friends I had in the world were the limo driver who would take me home from the southern tip of the island at ridiculous hours and my doorman. The driver was a whole lot more fun than the methadone case who held the door open, palm expertly proferred, once a year at Christmas. You see, Dimitri was a Russian emigre and we used to argue about Tchaikovsky and Chopin and Mussorgsky during the 30 minute trip home. Music and dance, whether in the streets or in more formal settings, were the artistic highlights of my many years in New York, but it was time to go.

Fulfilling the American business belief that motion beats action any day, I found myself revisiting the city on many needless cross country trips over the next few years and gradually fell out of love with it. Too dirty, too crooked, too everything.

However, every now and then I need a quick fix. Whether to confirm the wisdom of my decision or to see how wrong I was, I'm not exactly sure. And the best way to do this is to visit Joe Holmes's photoblog Joe's NYC where, without fail, you will find a new picture every day taken, as often as not, in Brooklyn or Manhattan. The work is fresh and vital, clearly done by one who loves his environment and captures the best and worst of the city I recall so well. Some of Holmes's best work was done in early 2005 when he and some friends set about documenting Fulton Fish Market on the lower East Side before some developer converted it to high rises.

Take a peek. It beats flying to New York and getting ripped off on the cab fare into town any day.

Digital Dust

2006-02-26T08:43:00.000-08:00

Or I'll be blowed!

Mooching around some of the Canon digital fora out there one recurring complaint seeems to be how much dust the EOS 5D attracts to its viewfinder.

Now while most of my pictures over the years have been snapped on rangefinder 35mm film cameras, with few dust bearing surfaces between subject and film, every SLR I have used has been plagued with the occasional speck of dust or a hair in the viewfinder. The 5D is no different. I suspect the increased use of plastics in modern cameras makes matters worse as they seem to retain static charges more, but when I did get some dust in the 5D's viewfinder the last thing I was going to do was blow it away.

When the maid vacuums the carpet she does just that - she vacuums. She does not blow. Blowing on dust in your camera seems the exactly wrong thing to do. You are a) Hoping to dislodge it, and b) Praying it magically exits the camera rather than getting embedded or relocated elsewhere inside. Ideally what is called for is something like those suction gadgets dentists use to remove waste water from the patient's mouth. Until something smart like that comes along - and imagine the liability issues in a country whose residents have long ago ceased taking responsibility for their actions - you can blow (!) your money on one of the Digital Camera Cleaning Kits. For your eighty dollars you get a small bottle of Miracle Solution, probably 2 cents worth of isopropyl alcohol, a 5 cent rubber tipped blower and a Digital Brush. The latter, you should understand, grows on Digital Camels only, hence it's price.

Me? I'll continue using the $5 anti-static film cleaning brush I have used for years when scanning film, holding the camera just so to let gravity do its thing with the dust, and I'll continue to avoid changing lenses in the middle of the Sahara in a sandstorm. I hate to admit it but the dust in my 5D didn't know any better and exited stage left after I gave it a gentle shove. Oh! yes, and I'll keep the change.

The Man, The Image and The World

2006-02-24T07:28:00.000-08:00

Henri Cartier-Bresson - Book review

The man couldn’t take a good color picture. His portrait pictures are, for the most part, eminently forgettable. His street pictures invariably use maximum depth of field and are without exception, humorless. He claimed to be a revolutionary while spending the last thirty years of his life in a multi-million dollar apartment on the Rue de Rivoli overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. He was a rabid self-publicist with over a dozen picture books to his name. And he did his best work over 70 years ago, mostly before 1934, though living into the 21st century.

But wait a minute….

The man jumping the puddle.

The blind boy feeling his way along the wall.

The kid on crutches.

The Gestapo informer.

The monocled man at the bull fight ring.

The Chinese eating from a rice bowl.

The eunuch.

The near-naked man at the wall in Russia.

The couple on the train.

The gored bull.

The French lunch on the banks of the Marne.

The behatted Orson Welles character in Spain against that wild wall of windows.

The beautiful couple in Los Angeles.

Giacometti on the Rue d’Alema in the pelting rain.

And on and on.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson will easily call to mind the images conjured up by these brief descriptions and it is just that which makes him such a great photographer. His work is memorable. Name another photographer where you can recall so many photographs.

Maybe what makes his very early work the best is the still fresh teachings of the cubist Andre Lhote. Maybe it was a clearer vision in a less cluttered world. Yet what is so amazing about these early pictures is that they were all taken on assignments during his years as a photojournalist. Amazing, because he chose to make beautifully composed and timed images where mere photographic records would have sufficed.

Traveling in then exotic lands like China and India, pretty much anything would have satisfied his editors. But he wanted to do better. Years later, famous and revered, he disclaimed his photojournalist roots and posed as an artist. Later still, he disavowed photography (an interesting negative marketing tactic which cleverly served to make his work all the more famous) while making some of the most banal sketches since the crayon was invented. None of that matters. His life’s work was done.

There is so much we can learn from him. In a digital age where photographers think nothing of banging off hundreds of pictures in the hope one comes out (interestingly a criticism George Bernard-Shaw leveled at early 35mm photographers, when likening them to the fish which lays many eggs trusting one would hatch) it gives you pause when you realize that his picture rate during the 1968 Paris riots, for example, was no more than four per hour. And you can bet his success rate was high.

What made it possible for him to make so many well timed and composed pictures? The invisibility of this gangly, raincoated man is well known. His visage beyond bland, it would be difficult to take note of this faceless man in the street. Recalling that he came to his medium with a well trained eye, what remains a wonder is the timing. Lhote may have taught him to see, but the skill of pre-visualization, knowing the precise moment when all those building blocks would fit just so, that was born not bred. Thus was the Decisive Moment created.

And if there is any quibble to be had with this magnificent book, whose reproductions are beyond reproach, it’s that none of Cartier-Bresson’s contact sheets are included. These bear out just how often he got it dead right, without any need to machine gun his Leica emulating the fish model.

So what of the post-war work? Well, he didn’t ‘get’ America any more than Robert Frank ever did. The images from the New World are replete with overfed Texans, gun toting kids and put-upon blacks. Nowhere is the beauty of America and the boundless generosity of its people on view. But what do you expect? Cartier-Bresson was, after all, French and his great inherited wealth had passed from bourgeois to royal status once he became its inheritor. This gave him license, of course, to mock the nouveau riches, whence he came. Further, the more recent work had lost its edge. With occasional exceptions the acidity of vision is gone. The architectural, nay cubist, compositional sense is no more. Maybe he got bored. Maybe he was no longer hungry. Or maybe fame had done its damage.

No matter. He transformed photography as we know it and is the spiritual father to all photographers. And you can forget all the rot about printing the whole negative and nothing but the whole negative. First I don't believe it. Second, who cares if the result is good?

As a one volume reprise of his seventy plus years of photography it would be hard to improve on this book, as long as you are prepared to discount the silly, uncritical, gushing essays….and HCB’s frightful pencil and charcoal sketches. I use this book as an interesting litmus test at home. Leaving it open on the bar for all to see, I know immediately a guest’s sensibilities when he pauses and turns the pages. Now that is someone with a shared passion.

And just for laughs, depending on whether he got his first Leica in 1932 or 1933 (the text is confused on this) it may just be that that man jumping the puddle wasn’t even taken on a Leica at all. Ha! ha! ha!

Monochrome flashback

2006-02-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

Still taking the occasional black and white picture

While I may have largely given up on black and white pictures, sometimes things just look better without color.

This was taken almost directly into the sun and the color original is already pretty desaturated. One click using the TLR Black and White Conversion action for Photoshop and a satisfying monochrome rendition results. I find the TLR plug-in gives a better monochrome tonal range than Photoshop's native 'Desaturate' command. There are lots of other interesting actions on that site, too.

Note the slight vignetting in the sky from the Canon 24-105mm L lens at 24mm. I left it in as it heightens the mood.

Hearst's Castle

2006-02-22T06:51:00.000-08:00

The only good thing to come out of yellow journalism

If the state of American journalism was headed solidly downwards in the 1930s, publisher William Randolph Hearst made sure that the pace to the bottom of the cess pit was accelerated. His populist, sensationalist brand of reporting bequeathed to the modern consumer prime time television news that focuses exclusively on the latest murder/rape/divorce, or the tribulations of some famous sports figure who has taken one steroid too many. Bread and circuses.

However, you can glean more useful information from one page of any American newspaper than from one hour of the so called prime time 'news' on television. Unless, that is, you read the New York Times or Washington Post, whose reporting sources tend to be Hollywood stars, supremely qualified to report on geopolitics and the fiscal state of the nation.

Thank you, Mr. Hearst.

However, Hearst's millions did leave us with one fine attraction, namely Hearst Castle on Highway One in central California, some 20 miles from my home. Taken as a whole it's something of an abomination, the ultimate in 'check book collecting', but digested in smaller pieces each of the many rooms packed with antiquities is a fine thing to behold. The Castle was Hearst's lifetime hobby, and his architect Julia Morgan was adding to it throughout his life. Hearst would buy a medieval ceiling on one of his European jaunts (he probably wanted to read the British press to see what was really going on), bring it home and tell Morgan to build a room around it. Now that's thinking big!

Driving by the other day on the way to see the elephant seal pups a few miles north on the beach, I took a picture from Highway One with the castle rising magnificently in the distance on top of the hill some mile and a half away. I had despaired of ever getting this right on film, as the long lens required only emphasized the atmospheric haze, but as I had my 400mm Leitz Telyt with me I gave it a shot anyway. I finally get to try RAW, I thought.

So I set the EOS 5D on RAW, the film speed at ISO 400 and the f/8 setting on the lens yielded a 1/500th second shutter speed. The result, after dropping the snap into Adobe's Photoshop CS2, which automatically opens Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), was disappointing. The haze had washed out the picture, and the Telyt lens, I know, does not lack for contrast.

However, a few tweaks of the sliders in ACR made things look better so I saved the file in PSD format and added the usual unsharp masking and a small tweak to the levels control and look what emerged:

Now I must confess that, so far, I have not found the Canon EOS 5D's Fine JPG images lacking in any way. The quality is outstanding, large prints a breeze and whatever JPG processing the camera does appears unobtrusive. Digital artifacts are invisible. Best of all, the file size is relatively small - some 4 mB or so. By contrast the 5D's RAW file is 14 mB and the processed PSD version balloons to a ridiculous 73 mB. Now that is large. So RAW appears to have a place for challenging subjects that need a lot of manipulation, but the extra processing time is not justified, for this user, on the average photograph. JPG Fine quality equals or exceeds anything from medium format and processing is fast and easy.

Still, it's nice to know RAW is available in the overall tool kit. Now I want to retake this picture early in the morning with the castle rising from the mist as California's sun gradually makes it visible.

Brassai

2006-02-21T08:02:00.000-08:00

The Monograph - book review.

Paris de Nuit, a collection of Brassai's pictures published in 1933, remains one of those books of photographs that are essential to understanding the street photography school of the early twentieth century. There is none of the acidity of Cartier-Bresson or the remoteness of Kertesz. Rather, there is a feeling that the photographer is one with his subjects in a city he loves dearly.

This tome, The Monograph, published in 2000 by Bulfinch, has much content from that classic, all of it reproduced in deep toned, juicy monochrome. While technique is never an issue with Brassai, always being superb, the large scale of this book only emphasizes just how good he was, considering the great limitations of the equipment of his day. This is 1933, for goodness sake, and no, there were no 5 frames-per-second digital cameras with shake reducing lenses available.

Something new for me, gleaned from this book, is how many of Brassai's pictures were crops of a larger negative. Sometimes one negative would result in two or three separate images. Shocking? Absolutely. Justifiable? Totally. If it's good, what do you care whether the whole frame was printed (what a silly pretentious idea) or not?

And if you thought the perversions of San Francisco, or earlier, New York and London, were in some way original, you need only check this book to learn that there is nothing new under the sun.

Degas was a fine photographer given the limitations of the medium in his time. His paintings speak loudly of the photographic world to come. Many images here conjure up memories of Degas's L'Absinthe and the lives of the down-and-outs of cafe society. Had Edgar Degas lived another thirty years, these are the pictures he would have taken. Brassai realized that vision. See it in this fine book.

Taking Rube Goldberg for a spin

2006-02-20T08:47:00.000-08:00

That's Heath Robinson to British readers

Having written about the complexities of getting my old Leitz 200mm f/4 Telyt to work on the Canon EOS 5D, I took the Rube Goldberg collection of lens, adapters and digital body combination for a spin yesterday, in that wonderful afternoon light you get right before a storm. Ergonomically the outfit handles unbelievably well and, mercifully, there is no wobble despite all those adapter rings.

I had the 5D set on 'Av', meaning I set the aperture (the lens is manual so you have no choice in the matter) and the camera sets the shutter speed. Anyway, at ISO 200 and f/5.6 the camera said 1/750 so I pressed the button. Here is the result:

I checked the screen preview on the 5D's LCD and it looked two stops overexposed, so I took another at f/11. Now this did not smell right. Years with manual cameras have done a decent job of calibrating the exposure meter in my brain, and f/5.6 looked about right to me.

Getting home I dropped the snaps in iPhoto and, sure enough, the original at f/5.6 was right, the other two stops underexposed. What gives? Well, I had cranked up the brightness of the Canon's screen to maximum in a vain attempt to make the thing visible in daylight. As a result, everything looks over exposed. So I have now reset the screen to the factory default.

The picture above is about half the original, yet is wonderfully well defined on a 13x enlargement. So those magicians at Leitz Wetzlar had it all right some forty years ago when this lens was first sold. A 40 year old lens on a 4 week old camera.... OK, so it's not auto-anything, but I mostly use long lenses on landscapes, which tend to be fairly stationary beasts. I'll leave sports photography to those far more expert than I will ever be. Or want to be, in that genre.

As for that LCD screen, I have adopted a one hundred year old technology to solve the problem. Diving into my 4"x5" Crown Graphic kit, I borrow the well worn black T shirt which I use to see the focusing screen on that behemoth and stick it over my head and the camera. This actually makes the LCD screen visible. Some things never change.

On the way home I spotted this gaggle of $1mm homes perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Anywhere else these would be slum dwellings but here in California these are considered luxury weekend getaways. Right dead on the San Andreas fault.

Whatever you think of the architecture, you may agree that this old lens still does the job.

Here's the center section at a 30x magnification ratio:

Worlds in a Small Room

2006-02-19T09:40:00.000-08:00

Some of Irving Penn's finest work.

Irving Penn is not just a great fashion photographer. Give him some spare time and off he goes on some personal project or other, frequently to the remotest places on earth, or the strangest. Like San Francisco.

This fine paperback shows pictures taken in his portable studio across the world, always by northern light. Published in 1974, it goes much further than August Sander’s cold, soulless work. Penn is vitally involved with, and sensitive to, his subjects, be they the mud people of New Guinea or Crete’s wizened old women.

If there are favorites then one has to be the group shot of Hell’s Angels with their women and machines, their leader looking like nothing so much as a Greek god. Then there are the Moroccan women so shrouded that only an eye protrudes.

I have been coming back to this book for some thirty years now and it never ceases to stimulate the senses and please the eye.

Daniel Gomes

2006-02-18T12:43:00.000-08:00

A special photographer

I learned of Daniel Gomes's photography through my involvement in Photoblogging.

This Brazilian artist works mostly in black and white, a medium I have largely abandoned, and shows how it should be done.

While photographs of children generally drive me to alcohol abuse, Daniel has many pictures of his beautiful daughter Gabriela on his photoblog site and they are something to behold, illustrating that sense of wild eyed wonder reserved solely for the very young. It does not hurt that Gabriela is absolutely divine.

Visit his site. It's well worth it.

Steam, Steel and Stars

2006-02-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

O. Winston Link's masterpiece.

Of all the books of railroad pictures you only need know of one. This one. Indeed, whenever photographs of breathtaking beauty are sought out, many in this book will be on the list of finalists regardless of subject.

Every picture in this book, all taken in the dying years of steam on the Norfolk and Western Railway of Virginia, is taken at night using flashbulbs, sometimes dozens at a time, using Link's specially made apparatus.

Link shows that, to do something well, you have to be totally involved in, and in love with, your subject matter.

The composition, the insights into the last years of Norman Rockwell's America, and the sheer love lavished on the work makes this book one of the very best picture books ever published, right up there with Cartier-Bresson's 'Decisive Moment', though the subject matter could hardly be more different.

You don't care about steam trains? No matter. If you care about drop dead, fabulous photography. you should have this book on your shelf.

Wetzlar goes to Tokyo

2006-02-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

Leica or Leicaflex lenses on the EOS 5D

About the time I was ordering the Canon EOS 5D it dawned on me that it would be nice to be able to use my Leica Telyt long focus lenses on the digital body. I have a 200mm f/4 which is quite decent and a 400mm f/6.8, the one with the trombone focus action, which is very good. Both were made for use on the horrid Leitz Visoflex mirror housing for the Leica M body, but I had been using them on my metered Leicaflex SL SLR (now sold) with a Leitz M to R adapter, code 14127. I finaly got around to selling the Visoflex, but it wouldn't go without kicking and screaming, as the first eBay buyer was a certified retard who decided he didn't want to pay. How do these losers get through life? Mercifully, eBay recognized this nut for what he is and deleted his slanderous, retaliatory feedback. A small nod in the direction of decency and honesty!

Sniffing around the internet, it became obvious that there was quite a number of adapter manufacturers who promised that Leicaflex lenses could be mounted on an EOS body. Prices ranged up to some $200. I bought one from Kiev Camera in the USA for $50, but promptly had to return it as it had a faulty lens locking pin. The folks at Kiev Camera sent me another one and that one works really well.

As you can see, the order of events is Telyt lens, M to R adapter and then R to EOS adapter. The 200mm Telyt shown here, being a truly ancient design, also has a Leica screw to Leica M adapter, # 14166. Despite all these adapters, the whole thing feels rock solid once assembled.

While the Telyt lenses are manual, indeed the 400mm does not even have preset stops, use is easy with the 5D on aperture priority. Indeed, that's the only way you can use it as the camera has no idea what is fitted, as there are no electronics to feed it the information. So you set the shutter and the camera choses the shutter speed. Focusing is also manual, as once again the lack of electronics defeats the focus confirmation light ordinarily seen in the viewfinder. No matter. The standard screen in the 5D works just fine with these long, slow lenses. For this very occasional long lens user the setup suffices, even though Rube Goldberg might be proud of the design! Both lenses preserve full focus to infinity with this arrangement.

But wait. The plot thickens. In going through all my gear trying to sell anything that was no longer used, I came across a near new El Nikkor 50mm enlarging lens which I had last used in those mercifully long past, dreary darkroom days. That would be 29 years ago. As any Leica user will tell you, sooner or later you end up in adapter hell, as Leitz made adapters for seemingly everything. They must love the art of machining in Wetzlar and, indeed, their adapters are things of mechanical beauty. The El Nikkor uses a Leica thread mount. A few seconds later and it's converted to Leica M bayonet with an adapter from the dark recesses of the cupboard where all my remaining junk hides. A separate adapter, # 16596 if you must know, converts my old Leica Bellows II, another remnant of the Visoflex years, into Leica M mount. Attach the M to Leicaflex to EOS adapter on the back and you have a free macro lens:

This gives larger than life images and, of course, infinity focus is not possible. Still, have you tried to sell an enlarging lens recently?

A better use is with the superbly sharp 135mm Leica Apo Telyt lens which gives images 2/3rds life size and also affords a far greater lens to subject difference allowing for better illumination of the subject. Nice to give these old warhorses a new lease of life.

On speed

2006-02-16T17:16:00.000-08:00

Not enough light? Just crank up the ISO!

I was snapping pictures at my son's fourth birthday party the other day and rather than use an intrusive flash, I though "Why not just crank up the ISO on the Canon EOS 5D and see what happens?"

So I set the speed to ISO 1600 and let the IS lens do it's thing, taking pictures at the f/4 maximum aperture with the camera setting the shutter as low as 1/8th second. The only duds were where the subject moved. The picture quality is simply breathtaking. On 35mm film I would be using a Leica with an f/1.4 lens with ISO 400 film and the grain would be obvious on an 8x enlargement. With these digital snaps, 13x enlargements are grain free, pores clearly visible.

When all was said and done I reset the ISO back to 650 and snapped this image of my exhausted wife, Elenia, with Bertie the Border Terrier. There is something amazing going on here.

The other night I was watching Sergio Leone's Western masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West with my sharp eyed nephew. Towards the end, right before the deciding duel between Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda, Leone fills the screen with Bronson's eyes. Now on a 7 foot wide screen that makes for a breathtaking photograph. Well, my nephew points out that you can make out the images of the film crew moving about in the reflection in Bronson's left eyeball. And, after rewinding the disk a bit, I have to say he was right.

Well, in this picture of my wife, in the 13" x 19" print the details in the window are clearly visible in the reflections on her rather gorgeous American Teeth. Just like in Bronson's eyeball. At ISO 650. Hand held by window light.

Advertising hoarding seen on the 101 freeway in Silicon Valley, California, with a picture of the Canon EOS 350 digital camera: "Film? History." Yes indeed.

Anything but digital

2006-02-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

There are some real bozos out there.

Sights by Elizabeth is an entertaining blog authored by Leigh Sheldon. A mixture of the quirky, humorous and warm hearted, it's a fun read. However, one thing I read there a few days ago really got my blood boiling and now that's it back down to 98.4F or thereabouts I thought it worthy of mention.

You see, Leigh had expressed an interest in exhibiting some of her work to a gallery owner, and made the political faux pas of admitting that she used a digital camera. Something she does, I should add, with aplomb. Well, in the art gallery world this is probably comparable to owning up, in academic circles, that you are a white, heterosexual, conservative, Republican, married with two kids, one spouse and a mortgage. In other words, it won't get you tenure any faster than Leigh's admission will get her exhibited.

This idiot stated with the voice of authority that "Anyone can take a good picture with a digital camera".

Wow!

What to do?

We all know people who drink wine by the label, buy equipment by the manufacturer and listen to audio gear hearing things some expert reviewer has told them to hear. Never mind that the 'independent' reviewer in all three cases received the review samples free in a modern version of payment by (review) results. There is no better way of putting these people in their place than by having a good laugh at their expense.

So what's wrong with telling this idiot that your pictures were taken on an antique wooden plate camera, discontinued 70 years ago, and that you hand coat all the plates yourself? Needless to add, the prints were made in the home darkroom using similarly obsolete materials, right? After all, is not the exhibited art work the only thing that matters?

Eliot Porter

2006-02-08T07:27:00.000-08:00

The Color of Wildness - book review

Published by Aperture, which immediately strikes a cautionary note in this reader. Oh! no - not another one of those pretentious tomes extolling the virtues of some photographer for the sole reason that everyone else does so.

Well, that's not the case here. Porter's work changed how we look at the outdoors, moving away from the mundane, overrated monochromes of that adept darkroom manipulator Ansel Adams, and seeing the details in all their beauty. And yes, the emphasis in all of Porter's work is beauty, greatly aided in this case by the well reproduced, large format pictures.

The book includes a fascinating essay by John Rohrbach explaining how Porter moved from black and white to color, despite snide asides from Adams and his set of toadies. It has long been my contention that Adams rejected color owing to his lack of ability in the medium, hiding behind the mistaken belief that if it's monochrome, it's Art. And it doesn't hurt to print on fancy paper using ridiculous assortments of chemicals to emphasize the fact.

The modern version of this idiom is the growing reference by photo sellers to 'giclee' prints, as if association with something French must be a good thing. What they mean is that they printed on an Epson ink jet. Making a virtue out of necessity. Sounds sexy and mysterious, it has to be said.

In Porter's own words 'I believe that when photographers reject the significance of color, they are denying one of our most precious attributes - color vision.'

Highly recommended.

Limekiln

2006-02-08T07:01:00.000-08:00

A very special place.

I have been visiting Limekiln State Park for some time now. It is seventy miles or so from home, up Highway One, so no excuse is needed for the drive. Roughly midway between Cambria and Carmel on the central California coast, it offers magnificent ancient redwoods and waterfalls galore. Best of all, it’s generally deserted and though I have paid more than my fair share of California taxes, I do not feel too badly about the $6 entrance fee. It is a special place and sheer hell to photograph.

One reason is that you are simply overwhelmed by the beauty of the venue, meaning your first few trips result in lousy pictures. Then as you get to learn it you begin to appreciate the huge contrast range and begin to tackle it as best as you can. Unlike most landscape photography where the best lighting is early and late, Limekiln is best photographed between noon and 2 p.m., by which time the coastal fog has burned off and the sun is high enough in the sky to penetrate the dark forests of one hundred foot high redwoods. Then you get that magic light effect of sun dappled spots surrounded by this herd of ancient giants.

Up to now my best work there has been on 4”x5” film, which means 1-8 second exposures on my favorite Kodak Portra VC160 film with the 90mm Angulon wide angle stopped down to f/22 or smaller in the perennial quest for depth of field. That means the massive Linhof tripod has to come along with the Crown Graphic and all those film holders. Well, by the time you get there, what with lugging all that gear, it feels like the cocktail hour. Anything to stop the shakes.

So today I tried something different. No excuse was needed to try the new toy, the Canon EOS 5D, but the gear was minimalist at best. The camera, the 24-105mm lens (OK, so it’s the only one I have. I’m making virtue out of necessity here), my little alloy monopod and that wonderful Leitz ball and socket head which I seem to have been born with. Add an inexpensive quick release plate on the camera and the monopod and you have the kit I used today.

Now I’m still sticking with 6mp JPGs. Not that RAW scares me but because I’m a dumb ass. In all my excitement when I was placing the order with B&H, all those eBay medium format sale proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I forgot to order a couple of 1gB CF cards on which to store the large 13mB RAW files. The only CF card I have at home is a 256 mB used in the Olympus C-5050Z, the one with the one hour shutter lag, so I stuck that in the 5D while waiting for the big capacity cards from B&H to arrive. Boy, UPS must just love me. In fact the gate to the estate finally gave up the ghost today from all those deliveries.... JPG gets me 47 images, RAW 13. Now 24 is about right for me, so JPG it is for now.

I’m rapidly learning that to extract maximum dynamic range from digital your exposure has to be pretty much spot on. It feels like using slide film again. Maybe 1/2 stop tolerance either way. That means sharpening my skills as I’m used to the two stop latitude of color negative film. It also means that, in Limekiln’s dark interior, I finally used the built in LCD screen on the back of the 5D to optimize exposure. At least it was dark enough to see it. Several pictures were a stop out, so I erased them on the spot (that wretched 256 mB card!) and re-exposed. Two clicks on the Info button and you get a little picture on the camera’s LCD screen with the overexposed bits flashing at you. Now is that cool or what? The working dynamic was fascinating to compare with 4”x5”. Where the latter dictates f/16 or smaller apertures, meaning seconds of exposure. I cranked up the 5D to 400 ASA (oops! ISO. That dates me!) having learned that the big sensor in the camera shows no noise at this speed. 1 1/2 stops gained. Then I shot at f/4, the maximum aperture on the 24-105mm, as the lens is simply very, very sharp at all openings. 4-5 stops gained. Then I used the IS in the lens to cut vibrations for another three stops gained. That’s some 9 stops gained over 4”x5”, meaning I was shooting at 1/30th @ f/4, aided by the monopod. And the results are critically sharp. My back does not hurt and I don’t feel a day over 50 on arriving home.

And what do you think was waiting at the (broken) gate when I returned? In addition to Bertie the Border Terrier, that is. Why, a couple of these:

It’s not lost on me that SanDisk use a Canon ‘L’ lens, distinguished by that red stripe, on the cover of the box. Keiretsu rules.

So next time you visit here I shall be messing about with RAW. Is this a steep learning curve or what?

Fix that flap

2006-02-07T09:50:00.000-08:00

A simple workaround for the clumsy flash socket cover on the EOS 5D

When using non-hot shoe flash, like my studio Novatron flash kit, this is how the flash cord is attached to the Canon EOS 5D body:

Can you believe this design?

However, for less than $20, Nikon still makes a hot shoe flash adapter, the AS-15, which can be locked in the hot shoe on the camera and the flash cord is then attached to the front:

It makes hand holding a lot easier and you prolong the life of that very fragile flash socket cover. What were they thinking of?

Cecily

2006-02-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

Not just your average queer.

I cannot remember a time when I was not aware of the multi-talented Englishman, Cecil Beaton (1904-1980). Photographer, writer, designer, he did all of these at the highest level.

Whether it was 1964 when My Fair Lady hit the big screen (Beaton designed all the gowns) or 1971 when his landmark show An Anthology of Fashion premiered at the Victoria and Albert museum in Kensington, or 1962 when at the tender age of ten, I first read his book, Photobiography, Beaton has always held a special place in my growth as a photographer.

Central to his development was a surpassing interest in fashion, and it has to be said that the classic Vionnet, Schiaparelli and Grès costumes on display at the V&A show were breathtakingly well exhibited. The Grès and a couple of magnificent Balenciagas stick in my mind even today. How did women fit in these? Beaton, of course, had all the right connections to secure loans of these high flights of couture from their rich and famous owners. Sharing an alma mater with Churchill (Harrow School) and a Cambridge graduate, Beaton occupied the rarefied, dandified world of fashion and aesthetes from day one. Even as a boy, he experimented, using his sisters and relatives as models, with exotic lighting and backgrounds, the latter of his own creation as often as not.

And before you dismiss him as just another pansy in a cultural subset seemingly dominated by them, take a look at his pictures of war torn London and you will see the work of a great, tough photographer, unafraid to risk life and limb. How can one look at his pictures of the ruins of St. Paul’s even today, and not feel hatred towards the German Master Race?

None of this is to deny that Beaton came in for his fair share of ridicule during a long life. His epicene manner did not help. In 1971 David Bailey made a vicious television documentary named Beaton by Bailey, where Beaton comes over as nothing so much as a tired old fag, none of this helped by Bailey’s reference to him as Cecily in a newspaper interview of the time. Not for nothing was this hatchet job dubbed Beaten by Bailey soon after its showing.

Then there was the ridiculous ‘love affair’ with Greta Garbo. A homosexual and a lesbian. Straight out of the Tchaikovsky playbook and just about as successful. Add accusations of being a relentless self publicist and publicity hound - how else does one get known for heaven’s sake? - and you might view the man with faint ridicule. Yet just one look at the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady or any one of hundreds of his great photographs of royalty and fashion (no confusing those two!) and you see the work of a great and original artist.

Hunt down some of his work. It’s worth it.

Upstrap in action

2006-02-06T13:34:00.000-08:00

Goodbye to the garish, inept horror story that is the Canon strap.

Here you can see what I am going on about - fancy being a walking billboard for Canon? Heck, I just paid them nearly $5k for the gear - if they want me to wear that, they need to pay me. Plus free repairs for when it slips off my shoulder. The Upstrap has a broad rubber pad with nipples on both sides. It is far more comfortable and simply does not slip. This is the SLR model for cameras over 2.25 lbs. I use the lighter RF/DC variant on my Leica M2 and M3.

Here you can see how it is threaded so that the 'tail' can be folded in between the two sides and retained by the slider. Neat.

Recommended without reservation unless, that is, you prefer gold chains displayed on your chest.

Messing about

2006-02-06T08:23:00.000-08:00

Tailoring the EOS 5D to my working method.

No one could accuse the Canon EOS 5D of lacking adjustability. Or maybe I should say ‘tailorability’. What with all those custom function, buttons and dials, there’s probably more combinations than there are dollars in the US deficit. However, like most of these things, it’s an 80/20 equation. 80% of the benefit is derived from 20% of the controls. The rest can be largely forgotten in the interest of sanity.

First, I got a bit daring and did a firmware upgrade. I learned this does not involve opening that silly rubber flap on the left of the camera; rather, you drop the software upgrade from the Canon website onto a CF card in your card reader (we are talking to Mac users here; Windows users need to get a life and switch), insert the card in the camera, click a few buttons and you are done. I upgraded from 1.0.1 to 1.0.3, something about avoiding accidentally gargantuan file sizes when the camera is held vertically, as well as brightening the LCD display. The body of the 5D must have a pendulum sensor as when you pick it up the activity light on the back flashes. I’m guessing this sensor tells the camera whether it is being held horizontally or vertically so that the image can be suitably rotated for viewing on the built in, useless, screen. Seems like the sensor circuit must have been interfering with something. Glad they fixed that. Maybe. Anyway, when they add the ‘Can I make your coffee in the morning?’ option at least I will know how to do the upgrade.

So far I have been taking pictures using the Standard Picture Style, meaning the camera adds three out of four parts sharpening and leaves everything else alone on JPGs. I added +1 to the Contrast setting as the images seemed a bit flat. Now they look great in Photoshop without the need to add contrast or mess with curves. At the same time USM needs came down from 150/1/0 to 100/1/0, suggesting that sharpness and contrast must somehow interact. Beautiful, large prints straight from the camera’s files!

Here’s a snap, taken earlier today, converted with the TLR B&W Action in Photoshop using those settings; the tonal range is nice and long:

Then I messed with some of the custom functions (‘CFn’). I set CFn 06 to 1/2 stop increments rather than 1/3rd. Who on earth thinks in 1/3rd stops? That’s confusing precision with accuracy. I set CFn 08, ISO Expansion, to ‘On’, meaning I add the 50 and 3200 ISO speeds. 50 is of no interest as even 400 is grain free, plus ISO 50 apparently compromises dynamic range, but 3200 might be fun. For some obscure reason the camera reports these as L and H rather than 50 and 3200, but it’s a small detail. The boys at Canon had thrown away their occupational psychology cookbooks when they added that feature. Then in CFn 16 I enabled the safety shift in Av or Tv (Aperture and Shutter priority). Meaning if I really screw up on the aperture setting in Av (I tend to think ‘Aperture’ rather than ‘Shutter Speed’, so I use Av or aperture priority), the 5D will adjust the shutter speed appropriately. Clever. That’s it for Custom Functions.

That leads to an interesting philosphical side track. I am convinced there are two types of photographic minds. The right brain artistic crowd who think ‘aperture first, let the shutter speed look after itself’ and the left brain formulaic set which thinks the other way. The right brainers think in terms of depth of field, differentiation, effect. The left brainers take sports photographs. At 8 frames a second. Substance over form.

On the exposure front I was noticing that several of my snaps were over exposed. So first I tried setting the exposure compensation to minus half a stop. You have to set the three position power switch to the third position to do this, so exposure compensation cannot be changed accidentally. A nice safety feature which is poorly explained in the instruction book. That, however, did not do it. So I switched to the 3% center area spot metering option and everything was sweetness and light. You meter on the key area, press the little asterisk-marked button on the back with your thumb to lock the light reading (an asterisk lights up below the viewing screen to tell you this has been done) and then press the shutter button. The last twenty pictures using this technique were perfectly exposed. So much for Canon’s much vaunted ‘Evaluative Metering’ - right up there with those great oxymorons ‘Military Intelligence’ and ‘US Democratic Party Tax Cuts’. In fairness, I have had a lot of experience doing this with the fabulous meter in the old Leicaflex SL, which was a semi-spot type. The even narrower angle of measurement of the EOS 5D’s spot mode just makes things easier, though I should add it’s not for the inexperienced. You have to know what to meter and why. In my minds eye I can visualize the center grey moving along the continuum of the dynamic range histogram.... Think of it like making love or riding a bicycle. Pretty intimidating until you get the hang of it, thereafter a lot of fun.

Here’s an example of that technique, also taken today - I metered on the rusty brown stain area on the side of the boat - a nice mid-point which I knew would wash out the white and benefit the blue:

So putting my preaching into practice, I swung by Montaña de Oro (“Mountain of Gold”) State Park today, just 35 miles south of home. Yes, yes, this was today also. A bright, 72F California winter day (if this doesn’t get you moving here nothing will), providing hugely contrasty lighting. Here’s spot metering at work:

The reading was from the foot of the, well.... foot, at the lower center right. No, I did not bracket. The dynamic range of the original is huge. The quality? 20x enlargements no problem.

As the advertisements said twenty years ago in National Geographic, ‘Now, It’s Canon’. They were just a bit premature, as digital was still a dream. No problem. I am gradually getting this machine to work for me and finding that post processing comes down to a minimum.

By the way, for an interesting interview on the topic of going digital with a really great British photographer, Patrick Lichfield, click here.

Quality is subjective

2006-02-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

How does the Canon EOS 5D measure up? Mostly ramblings on ergonomics.

A couple of columns back I mentioned how bulky the Canon EOS 5D felt, compared with that svelte street fighter, the Leica M. Why, even compared to a medium format Mamiya 6 rangefinder, it still feels bulky. This bulk is a mixture of the Large Amorphous Blob school of body styling, compounded by the sheer bigness of the 24-105 mm ‘L’ lens. Not much one can do about that, but I did get rid of the worthless lens hood which made a dramatic difference, not to mention that you can now take the lens off and stand it on end without fear of expensive crashing sounds.

So how does it feel from a quality perspective? First, it’s clearly well put together. No, not Leica engineered, bespoke, hand fitted, quality. More Lexus mass produced but with great quality control sort of thing. Seams are as parallel as on any Toyota. Wonder what I mean? Next time you are following a Detroit product in traffic, just glance at the seam between trunk lid and body. See? The eye is very sensitive about parallelism, which is why we notice the products of Detroit’s union labor as quickly as we spot a crooked horizon.

Most importantly, Canon got the texture of the body covering right. Now the Rollei 6000 series of medium format cameras use a wonderful, high tech diamond textured body covering. It looks great but makes no difference as no part of your hand ever comes in contact with it. You use a pistol grip in the right hand and the left cradles and focuses the lens. So body covering has no tactile bearing on the equation. The Mamiya 6, by contrast, like any rangefinder camera, is made to be solidly grasped with the right hand, with the left optionally on the body or under the lens. So quite why Mamiya felt obliged to cover their very well thought out camera with a covering which feels like nothing so much as wet kelp, beats me.

After 30 years of the miserably designed screw thread bodes which will forever remind us of the world’s worst rangefinder and viewfinder, Leica finally got ergonomics right with the M3 in the early fifties. Needless to say, some accountant took over engineering, so they managed to make a meal of things when the M4-2 and later versions came out. You see, they replaced that wonderful, textured rubber body covering with something akin to used greaseproof paper. By then the quality of the M rangefinder had been well and truly compromised so one might argue that this move was perfectly in context. The feel was gone.

The texture of the EOS 5D body covering is just right. Grippy enough to create confidence but not so rough as to intrude. I hope it stays grippy with use. The lens controls on the 24-105mm are not quite as good. The zoom ring is too rough and the texturing on both zoom and focus rings could stand improvement. At least they avoided a ‘one touch’ zoom where one ring does for both focus and zoom. Lesson One in ergonomics. Controls sharing multiple functions cause planes to fall out of the sky. And similar disasters. They should take a look at the early 50mm Leitz Wetzlar Summicron for guidance when they redesign those ring coverings. Heck, the patents have expired.

Then there are four other oversights, mercifully all easily fixed. First is the world’s worst camera strap. Not only does it scream CANON EOS DIGITAL, it cannot be shortened enough and the ends splay out all over the place. Adding insult to injury, it always manages to end up with the rubberized side out, so an over-the-shoulder perch is precarious indeed. Still, I suppose the screaming advertisement is less visible that way. Thank goodness for Al Stegmeyer at Upstrap.com.

Second is the placement of the film plane mark on the left rear of the prism housing. Now quite why an auto-everything camera needs a film plane mark I will leave for you to decide. The answer probably features right up there with the intent of the more arcane sections of the Internal Revenue Code. Unfortunately, this film plane mark is easily mistaken for the indicator mark which shows the setting of the exposure dial. And, because of parallax, you always think you are one click out on that dial, until you turn the camera around and .... oh!, so that’s the right mark! Why not just make this dial show its setting though a cut out in an overlapping window? Cost, I suppose. There goes that accountant again.

The last two? These are straight out of the play book of the nouveau riche. Now I understand that the Japanese are label obsessed, whether it’s Levis, Chanel or Mercedes. Go to stores carrying any of these and there they are, long lines of them, buying branded sweat shirts and baseball caps. In other words things you really do not want to be seen in when unmarked, even less so when emblazoned with the maker’s name in huge type. So whether that’s nouve Japponais or nouveau riche, I took a few seconds with the ancienne regime, AKA black electrical tape, and fixed the problem. My 5D is now incognito, and a third piece of tape (I was in a spending mood, I admit it) covers that useless film plane mark.

The design and placement of the shutter release button works well for me, though I do have rather long fingers. In the vertical position it’s just as easy to use, provided you turn the camera counter-clockwise viewed from behind, shutter release pointing to the sky. The other way round it’s a bit tricky to use.

The balance of the camera in the hand with the 24-105mm mounted is just fine. On a tripod it is, of course, a tad front heavy lacking frontal support otherwise conferred by one’s left hand, but not enough that you worry about stressing out the camera’s baseplate. Just make sure you tighten that ball and socket head on the tripod fully!

The rear screen, which allows setting of some seventeen million parameters - I use it only to erase a full card once downloaded to the iMac - is completely useless in sunlight. You need shade or an indoor setting to read the thing. It also constantly reminds me just how greasy one’s nose gets. Still, it probably serves well as a makeshift make-up mirror for women users.

Out of the box the camera body smells quite foul; all sorts of chemicals which something tells me are not ideal for the old blood stream. I left the camera out to air for a couple of days and that, plus a couple of well intentioned licks from Bert the Border Terrier, seem to have fixed the problem.

Then there’s the ‘what were they thinking of?’ feature which seems to exist in most machines.

Let’s see. With the Leica M it’s the world’s worst possible film loading system. This was redesigned with the M4 and became a Quick Jam system, updating the Slow Jam original. Rangefinder Leicas, to this day, have a tripod socket on the M so far to the right that it might as well be on another camera. Smart, that. Then of course there were the soft brass camera strap rings which made many a repair man happy. I had mine replaced with stainless steel ones. However, one can forgive all these peccadilloes in light of the fact that the Leica M is simply the greatest street photography machine ever made. They add a sort of charm, like Cindy Crawford’s mole.

On the Leicaflex SL it’s the world’s worst film advance lever, unless you have fingers as long as ET. Mine just sold to, yes you guessed it, a Japanese collector, so he won’t care. I can excuse that also, in exchange for the best viewfinder ever fitted to a 35mm SLR.

On the Nikon F it was a pentaprism so hard to remove that you had to use industrial tooling to depress the release button on the back.

On the 6000 series Rolleiflex it’s the focusing screen holder, made by a bunch of West Hollywood fairies. You really do not want to be changing that one too often. Or the miserably dim standard focusing screen which allows Rollei to extort another $200 from you for one that works. Beyond cynical.

In the Rolleiflex 3.5F twin lens medium format camera with the built in meter, it’s a protruding meter needle cover which breaks as soon as you look at it. The needle follows soon after. Same lousy standard focusing screen, too.

In the Mamiya 6MF it’s a cluttered viewfinder with all those silly ‘multiple format’ frames no one ever uses as well as a film wind mechanism made of the purest cheddar. Plus a meter switch that is Off at the red dot instead of On. Go figure.

No, with the 5D it’s not the ‘print’ button on the back which allows direct printing to a Canon printer. Everyone seems to trash that. What’s the big deal? Sounds like a neat feature for quick and dirty results - the rich man’s Polaroid, if you like. No, it’s the two hinged rubber covers on the left of the camera, hiding the flash socket and computer connections. Now the latter will be seldom used - probably for the occasional upgrade of firmware - but the flash socket is another thing. I like to use a Novatron studio flash outfit for portraiture and this wretched little flap is not only hard to prise up, it is also not so much hinged as it is bendy, owing to a crease in the rubber. It would have been better to just make a little slide over flap like the one on the other side. Excellently designed, that one hides the Compact Flash digital ‘film’ card.

All in all, for a camera of this complexity then, there are few ergonomic boo-boos. Those that cannot be readily cured - the invisible rear screen when viewed in sunlight, the rubber left side flap - are, for the most part, no big deal.

Finally, thank goodness for the short lens-flange-to-‘film’-plane distance in the EOS body. That allows me to use my old Leica Telyt lenses, with an inexpensive adapter while preserving the ability to focus to infinity.

Some prints yield a fond goodbye to medium format

2006-02-04T08:19:00.000-08:00

And some economics.

I dropped the three best snaps from yesterday’s foray with the Canon EOS 5D into Photoshop, added some unsharp masking (I use settings of 125/1/1 or thereabouts), bypassed the dust spotting step as there’s no film involved (hope that sensor stays clean!) and printed them on my Epson 1270 ink jet printer on Epson Premium Lustre Photo Paper. This has a nice mixture of sheen, for definition, and matt stippling to avoid looking too garish. Well, I have to say the results rival 4”x5” film originals for creamy smoothness in large areas devoid of detail and equal or exceed medium format for sharpness and resolution. That creamy smoothness is simply not available in 35mm film originals at these enlargement ratios. The dynamic range, meaning the extremes from black to white, is clearly superior to either 35mm or medium format, reflected in the ability to capture lots of detail in poorly lit or low contrast areas. And I’m not even trying. These are auto-everything prints with the camera set as the factory shipped it, with definition set to JPG fine.

Mission accomplished. One quarter of the bulk of medium format and better quality than available on rapidly dying film. The EOS 5D is a stake in the heart of the Big Yellow God in Rochester. Goodbye Rolleiflex and Mamiya. We had a nice time together.

Take this image as an example. Extreme contrast range, white whites, cavernous blacks. In other words, a traditional printer’s nightmare. However, one click and the Epson puts out a perfect 13” x 19” print a few minutes later.

Looking at the EXIF data for the picture in Photoshop (‘File Info’) I learn it was taken at the lens’s shortest focal length of 24mm at 1/30th at f/6.3. Handheld of course, with lack of motion blur attributable more to Canon’s IS technology than the photographer’s (not so) steady hand.

You can clearly see the barrel distortion introduced by the optics reflected in the bowing of the cross beam in the ceiling, though I understand a RAW file will allow easy correction of this. If there is color fringing at the corners from this fairly wide angle setting, I cannot see it, though once again Photoshop CS2 provides for correction of such aberrations.

OK, so now I’m feeling better about blowing $4,500, even if the gear was free after all those medium format sales. But how expensive is it, as a 2006 state-of-the-art piece of equipment? 1969 is a significant year for me. It was when I started saving for my Leica M3, finally purchased, used, in 1971. At that time, there were but two camera stores in London - Wallace Heaton and the Rest. Wallace Heaton, you see, provided cameras to Her Majesty QEII, the wonderful Queen Mother and the not so wonderful Duke of Edinburgh. Indeed, you can see the Queen on a UK postage stamp, headscarf and all, her Leica M3 held with the hands of an expert. Luckily for her, Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar gave her that one free, so she didn’t even have to sully her hands with commerce at the Wallace Heaton store. Still, I suppose she still had to buy film.

Before those days of internet pop-up ads, Wallace Heaton published a small paperback annually, known to one and all as the Blue Book, named after the color of its cover. No prizes for originality, true, but an icon of the times. So I checked the price of the current Leica, the M4, in the Blue Book for 1969 and this is what I saw:

That £169.8.8, equal to $474.41 in real money back then or $5,799.05 inflated at 7% annually through today. And lest you think the Leica was premium priced back then, the best SLR then made, the Nikon F, sold for almost exactly the same amount.

So now I’m not feeling too badly about the $3,000 I paid B&H for the EOS 5D body.

And as for the long line of Japanese waiting to buy my Leica M3 at 40 cents on the dollar, let me repeat: “It’s not for sale”. Yet. Heck, when the Nikkei hits 30,000 you can prise it from my clutches for $5,000. Maybe.

One of the reasons advanced for digital photography is that it is cheap. After all, no film or chemical processing is involved. Now I have to say this strikes me as sheer rot for those seeking to make big prints for wall hanging. I average three pictures a roll of film that I want to print big. With 4”x5” film it’s more like 75%. That large, slow-working format encourages economy of effort and cuts waste dramatically. So if it costs $10 for a roll of processed 35mm film of 24 exposures, that figures to some $3 per processed success. Printing on an ink jet adds maybe $2 for the large sheet of paper and $2 for the inks, so we have $7 so far, all told. Now buy a matte, a mounting board, glass, the frame and hanging hardware and your all in cost for a beautiful 22” x 28” framed, matted print skyrockets to $70. How, pray, is the $3 saved on film material to this equation? So if you are buying digital to save on film costs, you need to rethink the economics.

Unless, like most photographers, you never display your work properly mounted and framed.

That first ‘roll’

2006-02-03T08:15:00.000-08:00

First impressions - the Canon EOS 5D in use

Living in central coastal California brings with it many benefits. No big city problems, space to breathe, no pollution and beautiful countryside all around in what is rapidly becoming the Napa Valley of the south.

So it did not take much effort to take the EOS 5D for a short field trip along twisty Santa Rosa Creek Road from Highway 46 all the way down to Cambria.

First, I have to keep reminding myself that this camera was purchased to replace my wonderful medium format gear which, in turn reflected my split thinking about equipment. I love rangefinders, hence the Mamiya 6 three lens outfit (small, fast, quiet). I also like control over variables, thus the Rollei 6003 (big, heavy and noisy). So it’s a tad silly to compare the size and weight of the EOS 5D with the Leica M3, but instructive nonetheless, as both are ‘35mm’ cameras.

With the 24-105mm IS ‘L’ lens the 5D weighs in at just under four pounds, replete with garish strap announcing ‘CANON EOS DIGITAL’ in large woven letters. That will have to go. Not only is it an exercise in poor taste, it cannot be shortened enough to keep the camera at chest height, where it belongs. I have a proper strap on order from Upstrap.com.

The lens hood will be the second thing to go - the worst possible way of advertising ‘photographer’. I’ll check for flare and just let the UV filter take care of protection if flare is not an issue.

Finally, I wish the body was chrome, not black, but that is not an option. The last thing on earth I want to be mistaken for is a professional photographer and black cameras seem to scream ‘pro’. Imagine the three worst things you can say when asked what you do at a party: 1. I work for the IRS. 2. I am a proctologist. 3. I am a professional photographer. Ugh! All guaranteed to clear the room.

A rational 35mm comparison is with the Leica M3, 21mm, 35mm, 50mm and 90mm lenses. That gives a similar focal length range. I don’t have my 35mm as it’s out on loan, so I threw in the Bessa T body where my 21mm usually resides, and the weight comes out to a pound more. Swap the Bessa body for the 35mm and there’s nothing to choose. You trade the convenience of a zoom on the Canon for some of the fastest compact optics made - the 21mm is f/2.8, the others all f/2, compared with the f/4 of the 24-105mm. Now the Canon zoom lens very cleverly gains three stops through the use of the Image Stabilizer technology, but that’s another story.

Here’s the film gear on the scale.

Finally, overall bulk and looks. Ugh! As you can see the Canon is positively gargantuan next to the Leica - like the cuckoo placed parasitically in the poor warbler’s nest by its mother. Even without that ridiculous, poorly designed lens hood, it’s large. As for looks, the body is indistinguishable from any number of competing digital SLRs, meaning it’s largely an amorphous blob which screams ‘designed by computer’. It certainly will not feature in your dreams.

This is not a camera for people with small hands. The controls on the lens are large in diameter and take some getting used to. The zoom ring is not as smooth as one might like, though the manual focus ring is very sweet. The dim viewfinder, compared with the Leica, is remarkably uncluttered, with data readouts below the picture. They are not at all distracting. Indeed, I rather struggled to see these in daylight. What is startling is the speed with which the autofocus works and, at least with my first snaps today, the automatic focusing seems spot on. There is no shutter lag. None. You can take a first pressure on the shutter release to lock focus and exposure and the feel of the release is so well engineered that it could not be improved on. While much softer than the Leica’s, which is surely the gold standard, I would venture to suggest it’s better, as there is less likelihood of camera shake.

I‘m not a serial or bulk shooter so the three frames a second capability is of no use to me, other than it startled me this morning when I didn’t realize I had it on and took three pictures where only one was intended! 3 fps is fast. With no film to wind on, the camera is surprisingly quiet, not as quiet as the Leica, but the noise is largely devoid of metallic overtones, maybe owing to the plastic casing and well damped mirror. That makes it seem quiet. Clever. Well done Canon.

Ask me what the best engineered lenses I have used are and I would unhesitatingly reply Leica and Rollei 6x6, though early all metal Nikon lenses were also excellent when it comes to build quality. No compromises were made in the designs of these lenses as their cost and weight attest. Now this Canon pro-grade lens is a different kettle of fish. It seems very light for its massive bulk when you first pick it up. The general feel of quality is for all to see and, notably, there is absolutely no wobble in the moving parts or barrels, which I have never experienced with a zoom lens before. It doesn’t feel as if it could survive the next nuclear blast, unlike its German counterparts, but time will tell. It focuses to about one quarter life size fully extended. Good to have. The switches for auto/manual focus and for IS on/off on the side of the barrel cannot be moved by accident. At $1,250 it’s a bargain. Have you priced Leica glass recently?

To push things a bit I exposed a couple of shots at one stop down and ISO 200, depending on the noise-free nature of the large sensor to avoid ‘grain’. The 1/250th second exposure computes to 1/2,000 with IS, so camera motion is not an issue. That bears thinking about. Consider how much sharpness is gained from the miracle of reduced image blur which IS confers. 16x enlargements (meaning 16” x 24” from the full frame) were noise free and very sharp in the center. As good as medium format? Too early to say but my first reaction is very positive. I need to take some snaps with lots of fine filigree detail to answer that. If you are one of those photographers who likes resolution charts as purportedly objective measures well, you had better stop reading, because those will never be seen here. My interests in the functioning of camera tools is strictly empirical. Sharpness or resolution are like obscenity. I cannot define them but I know them when I see them.

The peacock’s head, from the center of the frame, is equivalent to a 30x enlargement. No image sharpening was used other than that provided by the 5D on the Standard setting. Clearly, this lens has potential. You can just see digital artifacts, bearing in mind this is an enormous enlargement. This was at 105mm, ISO 200, one stop down - f/5.6. Autofocus was used. Out of focus highlights are unobtrusive.

Click here and you can see a dozen pictures from this morning’s ramble, including the peacock original. None of these had any post-processing applied and, of course, file sizes were reduced to make loading speed acceptable. Some involve challenging lighting, confirming the exposure meter works well. I used the default Evaluative Metering, making no adjustments to the camera’s choices. These were all taken at the highest quality JPG setting which means files are some 6 megabytes in size, which compares favorably with some 150 megabytes for high quality scans from 120 medium format film. Stated differently, an older G4 Mac will have no problem loading these files in a few seconds. My commiserations is you use Windows.

I have yet to experiment with RAW which evidently yields a file twice the size of highest quality JPG. RAW should allow easy correction of lens barrel distortion and vignetting, so I suppose that’s the way to go.

I made a few 13” x 19” prints on my Epson ink jet after completing the above. Of these, more anon.

Pandora’s Box

2006-02-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

The Canon EOS 5D arrives

With so much in excess equipment sales proceeds burning a hole in my pocket, I splashed out wildly and paid the nice people at B&H in New York $20 more for Second Day shipping to the Templeton estate. This wild act of rash spending saw the Canon EOS 5D and the 24-105mm Canon lens arrive yesterday evening, where Bertie the Border Terrier and I dutifully placed it on the south patio so that we might contemplate what wonders this Pandora’s Box might disclose. Further, it was the Cocktail Hour, and nothing short of a second Japanese attack interrupts that.

This was a mixture of fun, as we enjoyed the delicious anticipation of what was inside, yet no less a period of deep apprehension. Setting aside my recent use of an Olympus Digital POS (that stands for Point or Shoot, because with that camera’s shutter lag you cannot have both) for the last 40 plus years I have been loading cameras with film and adjusting but three variables - shutter speed, aperture and focus, and most of the time these adjustments have been manual. Often, it should be added, with incantations to the exposure God, praying that I would be within four or five stops of the right settings.

Lest the reader wonders at my sense of apprehension, then it has to be pointed out that the camera in my hands for most of those forty plus years was a Leica M2 or M3. And because I know a good thing when I see my negatives, the lenses on those Leicas always said ‘Leitz, Wetzlar’ on the front. For all of Leica’s problems, they remain the standard against which to judge to this day. And what lenses. The distortion free 21mm Asph Elmarit. The ’standard’ 35mm Asph Summicron. Any number of 50mm Summicrons. The ne plus ultra 90mm Apo Asph Summicron, perhaps the most perfect optic ever made. And finally, one of the very sharpest, the 135mm Apo Telyt, now winging its way back after a one year loan to a friend on the east coast. Throw in a couple of Telyts used on the idiotic Visoflex housing and you can see where my heart lies, optically speaking.

Before the great day arrived I had done a spot of studying and had procured a nice little Firewire card reader for the iMac; all this talk of plugging the camera into your computer strikes me as so much nonsense. Just remove the card and place it in the reader. Further, I had also learned that the swines in marketing at Macromedia/Adobe had ensured that Photoshop CS would not read RAW files from the 5D, so I had grudgingly upgraded to Photoshop CS2 which does. Unfortunately, the latest Adobe Camera RAW software is not backwards compatible with the earlier version of the application. I had also spent some time on Canon’s web site studying the interactive tutorials on the 5D and digital photography in general and found them useful and entertaining. Most importantly, they took out some of the apprehension I was suffering from the oncoming blizzard of knobs, dials and menu options.

Now Bertie’s take on this was, as usual, philosophical. “What have you got to lose?” he asked rhetorically. “Heck, the gear in that box was free, after all, and you can always sell it for little loss if it’s not for you.” By now the sun had almost set and the Martini glass, sadly drained, was now home to a lonely cocktail onion. So I gave the onion to Bert (we are dealing with a pretty sophisticated animal here) and set about the box, hoping to snap at least one picture before sunset. You know the sort of thing - “My first picture with my new toy on the day I received it”.

So we opened the boxes up, stuck the lens on the body, popped in the battery (nice that they ship it partly charged), inserted a memory card and stuck our head out the front door. Notice the strict adherence to American Attention Span with regard to the instructions.

And this is what we saw:

And that, dear reader, is why I live in California.

Anyway, suitably drained after this emotional experience, Bertram and I headed for the home theater to watch Hitchcock’s Frenzy, to learn better how real pictures are taken.

The EOS 5D is here, it looks like it works and there’s more to come....

Erwin Blumenfeld

2006-02-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

There’s a lot to learn from this great photographer.

Whenever I get tired of reading yet another homage to Ansel Adams, that most glorified of darkroom technicians, I turn to the work of a real photographer who also happened to be a competent technician. The difference is that visualization never takes second place to darkroom technique with Erwin Blumenfeld.

Another in a long list of German outcasts, Blumenfeld (1987-1969) chanced upon a darkroom in his retail store in Berlin and a lifetime’s addiction started. Changing careers, he made his at Vogue and Harper’s during and after the war and was given remarkeable creative freedom.

His influence spread wide, his work a mix of the abstracted and the expressionist.

The other day I was rewatching the greatest Western film ever made, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and there, right in the middle, is a jaw dropping shot of Claudia Cardinale, whom the camera observes from above and through a screen atop her four poster. Now every image of Claudia Cardinale is an occasion for rejoicing, it’s just that this one immediately says that Leone was a Blumenfeld fan, and the movie is nothing more than a succession of glorious still images. Blumenfeld’s net of influence was cast wide.

The book’s cover picture is but one example of where less is more. Appearing on the cover of Vogue in October 1952, it personifies glamour, class, sensuality and eroticism yet nowhere are the model’s eyes to be seen. Seldom has a Jacques Fath dress or a gorgeous neck been done greater justice.

And as you leaf through this slim book, just the right length to prevent overload, you realize that Blumenfeld’s compositions are what makes the pictures so striking, never mind the peerless technique.

It’s a whole lot more fun than those wretched Adams prints.

Putting my money....

2006-01-31T10:14:00.000-08:00

....where my mouth is.

I have written quite a bit about the imminent demise of film in these columns. Now is the time of reckoning, where I make the move from my point-and-shoot-one-second-shutter-lag-digital to the real thing. My drivers are medium format quality without the bulk, full frame digital sensor, no shutter lag and the convenience of not having to process and scan film, in that order.

Let’s face it, if you want a full frame 35mm digital camera your choices are not great. Until a while back there were two from Kodak and one from Canon, all very expensive. Kodak, being the second worst run American company, just discontinued theirs, of course. That leaves only Canon, with a $7,000 very costly and very bulky offering. I cannot remember the model designation but it’s something like ‘2006 Model 15B we-just-upgraded-it-twice-this-month mega-digital something or other’.

Then, late last year, Canon capitalized on its lead with larger light sensors and released the EOS 5D for some $3,000. Now it may well be free with any purchase of two boxes of Corn Flakes two years hence, given the rate of depreciation of these digital wonders, but Canon’s exclusive offering makes it look positively cheap compared with the professional model. The smart people at the company priced it right - expensive enough that you can console yourself that it is a ‘professional’ camera, whatever that means, but cheap enough to attract a host of keen amateurs. Like me.

So I waited a while to let the initial bugs get sorted out, meanwhile pondering whether the sale of my medium format equipment should proceed immediately, given that film is unlikely to be available in this format for much longer. The value of this gear is important to me as I propose to make this whole change a zero cost affair. Enough with net equipment spending!

Now I’m a photographer and an American. That says when I list things on eBay I support the listings with the very best pictures, knowing that a good picture really is worth a thousand dollars. Forget words. Not American. So I spend the best part of a day with the Novatron studio flash, umbrellas, backdrops, you name it, and take revealing, detailed pictures of my wares. All on my little Olympus 5mp digital, the one with the one second shutter lag. All of this culminates in no fewer than eighteen listings on Fraud Central, excuse me eBay, the ultimate destination for sellers. Only America could conceive of a multi-billion dollar business where you can lie about your wares and be pretty much assured of free passage. Why so many auctions? Because history proves that you make more from breaking up sales into small parts. The ‘outfit for sale’ thing reduces your market and selling price.

Well, pretty much everything sold for top dollar and the household is now replete with packing boxes containing fine Rollei and Mamiya medium format equipment. It’s good to know that these superb tools are going to good homes and that UPS will make some money. I have $6,000 in the bank and B&H Photo Video in New York has a $6,000 order. And yes, that’s another $435 in sales taxes not paid to the thieves in Sacramento.

The first claim on these funds is my wife’s. I have long known that if you are to buy yourself a toy, budget 25-33% more than you plan to spend. That’s the cost of a face-saving gift for the wife and keeps things humming along smoothly on the marital front. Better still, one more divorce lawyer goes out of business for a modest cost increase to me. That is value for money. So my better half gets the cripple-framed Canon EOS Digital Rebel (what a dumb name) with a nice, if costly, Canon EF-S 17-85mm IS lens (I have been warned that the standard kit lens is made of cheese) and yours truly gets the EOS 5D with the 24-105mm IS pro quality lens. And in case you still think this is money poorly spent, just take one look at the object of my affections and you will know otherwise:

The next time you will be reading this I should have the camera in my hands and a few shots to show for it.

So why the insistence on full frame and why not a Leica? First, I like my wide angle lenses to be wide angle. A 21mm which becomes a 35mm on any one of a number of digital SLRs out there is senseless. Secondly, I like differential focus. That 90mm on full frame is 55mm on crippled frame. Suddenly your portrait lens has added one stop’s worth depth of field. After over 40 years with 35mm, I know how the depth of field feels with all my lenses. I do not propose to relearn that. So that ends the full frame vs. crippled frame debate. Finally, I want medium format quality and basic physics tells me that’s easier to do with a large original (or sensor) than with a small one.

And what happened to waiting for Leica? Nothing would make me happier than simply moving all my superb Leica glass from the M2 and M3 rangefinders to a digital M. Well, I concluded a while back that the lack of entrepreneurial vision and capital at Leica means we will not see a digital M for many years and even then you would be paying $6,000+ for a crippled frame sensor. Sure, the excuses everyone makes against full frame sensors with wide angle lenses that place the rear element too close to the ‘film’ are well known. We are told by these Luddites that the light rays strike the sensor at too acute an angle, causing definition problems. The solution is simple, but it takes some genius at Canon to implement it. Cameras can electronically sense focal length - that’s why you can see the exact focal length at which you took a picture displayed in the EXIF metadata stored with your digital snap. So when the focal length gets short, have a small vacuum device bow the sensor backwards, thus flexing the edges to a perpendicular angle to incoming peripheral light rays. Hard you say? Is not Canon the company that gave us lens gyroscopes (Image Stabilization), eye controlled focus (the camera focuses where your eyeball is pointed), full frame sensors, lenses with diffraction gratings to cut bulk, and on and on? And vacuum backs intended to keep the film flat are as old as the earth. Well, what’s called for here is a vacuum back that distorts the film. And let me tell you, there is no way on earth that Leica has the capital or the distribution to develop and market that.

Now I’m not about to sell all my Leica gear. First, it is not dependent on the continued existence of film to retain its value, unlike all that medium format gear I just sold. There are any number of Leica equipment fetishists out there, many in a newly recovering Japanese economy, that value retention is simply not an issue. Second, I still enjoy using the M rangefinders and can see that continuing for a while at least. Third, maybe Voigtlander/Cosina will come out with a full frame version of their Epson RD-1. In which case the Leica bodies will move on to pay for the new digital body and those phenomenal lenses will get another lease on life. So it’s premature to sell this gear.

In the meanwhile, with the goal of learning a complex piece of new equipment and making it work for me, I have loaned my M2 and 35mm Aspherical Summicron to a friend for a year. That should focus the mind wonderfully. Mine and hers! And yes, I still have the M3 if I need a quick fix.

At the movies

2006-01-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

Three great films about photography

Hollywood, for the most part, has not served still photographers well and there is little of note when it comes to portraying the profession. By the way, have you ever wondered why we refer to photography and prostitution as professions, when either can be practiced with a bare minimum of education? These are trades, not professions, though each doubtless includes some real artists in its ranks.

However, three films come to mind which not only do photography justice, but are also shining examples of great film making within their respective genres of comedy, drama and musical.

First comedy. John Waters’s ‘Pecker’ (1998) is, well, a typical John Waters movie. Something to offend everyone and hilariously funny for all but the thinnest skinned. This comedy portrays a teenager who is accidentally vaulted to stardom for his snapshots and somehow manages to survive the experience. No great substance here, but an absolute hoot to watch. Filmed, of course in Baltimore, which is the director’s home town.

Next drama, and here we are talking of a very great film indeed, made by the splendidly named Michelangelo Antonioni - a name to conjure with. ‘Blow Up’, dating from 1966 and purportedly modeled on the working-class-photographer-who-made-it-big David Bailey, the anti-hero, played expertly by David Hemmings, thinks he has photographed a body in a public park. Or has he? Full of mystery and great acting, filmed in a 1960s London largely devoid of people, the film has a haunted air. It’s a fascinating piece of history that bears repeated viewing and denies the audience simple solutions or a nice ending.

But I have saved the best for last. A delightful confection with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. ‘Funny Face’ was made by Stanley Donen in 1957, which seems a long time ago. Add the wonderful Kay Thompson and you have a prescription for champagne. French champagne (is there any other kind?) as the whole thing largely takes place in that most beautiful of cities, Paris. Mercifully, Parisians take up negligible screen time.

Fashion magazine photographer Astaire, modeled on Richard Avedon who advised on the movie, is invariably draped with Rolleiflexes, though almost all the pictures he takes are made on a huge field camera. Even the action shots. Not that hard to believe when you realize the shutter lag on this monster is far less than that on most modern digital wonders.

Kay Thompson’s opening number, ‘Think Pink’ is simply a show stopper. Diana Vreeland at Vogue was never this much fun.

And, of course Audrey Hepburn. Like her or hate her.

Astaire being Astaire manages to dance and sing between photo opportunities and Hepburn almost keeps up with him.

Let’s see, what else?

Well, did I mention the Givenchy gowns? Or George Gershwin’s music?

Should you ever get jaded with the process of taking pictures, just pull out this movie and watch the sequence in Paris where Astaire snaps Hepburn in a variety of posed settings, each snap appearing immediately on the screen once taken. When the cape swirls about her head and she squeals “Take the picture. Take the picture.” you are reminded of the sheer joy and excitement of photography. Just like the time that first black and white print appeared in the developer tray in your darkroom.

Impossible to think that any self respecting photographer would not have this magnificent movie on a shelf at home.

Hurry. It’s almost over.

2006-01-18T10:56:00.000-08:00

Don’t emulate the Poles in 1939

I can claim some authority in writing about the ostrich-like behavior of my noble Polish ancestors in 1939. You see, my ancestry goes back for more centuries than I care to admit in that most conquered, yet most proud, of nations. When I was growing up, I looked around, and once old enough to appreciate these things, I realized we were poor. Why so?

That was in London. Back in 1939 when the Stukas threatened and the Panzers loomed and the Polish army prepared to charge on horseback, my parents placed all their valuables in a safe in Warsaw. You might well question this asset diversification strategy when the most powerful, aggressive nation known to man was massing on Poland’s borders. I hold no rancor for my parents’ behavior. Hindsight tends to be perfect and if I could only get the Wall Street Journal a day or two early, place just a couple of hot trades, I would be writing this from my Gulfstream private jet. It happened. Get over it.

My parents, of course, were in deep denial. After all, how do you move 15,000 acres of some of the most beautiful land man has seen? Deep denial. Like modern users of film.

To get in the mood for this piece, I thought I would turn on an LP, for old times’ sake. They do sound good, we all know that. If you can disregard the scratches, the click and pops, the cleaning ritual and on and on. So I pulled an old Louis Armstrong number out and it’s playing as I write. There on the inner sleeve, forgotten, was a lovely note from my dear departed mother to herself. She wrote ‘od Tomeczka’, meaning it was from me. I had given her this LP on December 7, 1985.

So what has all this to do with photography?

Well, that little note on the inner sleeve of the 20 year old LP speaks to obsolescence every bit as much as film speaks to the sea change in photography. Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, it brought thoughts of the need for change flooding back to my brain.

Like most of us, I have been forced to change. LPs gave way to CDs. CDs eventually moved to the iPod, 300 discs in the space of a shirt pocket, fidelity uncompromised. The cathode ray tube gave way to the flat screen. VHS tapes moved on as DVDs came in. They must be due for obsolescence any time soon. How else are the electronics manufacturers going to stay alive?

And, like the aggressive German masses congregated on the border of my parents’ estate in September, 1939, that change is now rolling over the serious photographic world faster than we can begin to realize.

It started with the mass consumer. Easy prey for innovation, digital cameras were sprung on him seemingly overnight and, even if he still struggles to get the picture while squinting at the barely visible screen in broad daylight, the digital camera has become as de rigeur as the SUV. A staple of American life, meaning the rest of the world will follow in short order.

The professional press photographer got the idea three or four years ago when up-market SLRs started sporting acceptable definition and the city desk editor wanted to beat the competition with the latest picture of the celebrity of the day behaving badly. The studio and wedding professionals followed suit and Apple recently jumped on the bandwagon with software aimed solely at enhancing digital workflow with RAW files. It’s called Aperture. Some one third of the content in the leading Macintosh monthly, Macworld, is now dedicated to digital capture. Capture. That’s hip talk, I have learned, for snapping pictures.

The Art Photography set, however, held out, clutching their platinum prints to their troubled chests. Nothing can equal the quality of a darkroom print. Deep denial.

One second - I have to attend to my 80 year old technology and flip the LP after all of 20 minutes of playing time.

Well, I think the Art Photography set, while not wanting to admit it, is getting the idea. The last ball to fall.

I subscribe to a couple of top quality photo magazines. Strictly minority material. LensWork and View Camera. They showcase fine work and offer a good reading of the pulse of the market.

LensWork has a very high opinion of itself, right down to its small size masquerading as Art. The magazine has very high production values. Printing is fabulous (as it should be for so small a format), writing is excellent, the whole thing reeks of quality. Until a couple of issues ago they refused to accept ink jet prints for publication! Suddenly, seemingly 50% of their content is all digital - camera and print - and the equipment, which they invariably mention, is pretty much at the consumer end of the spectrum, meaning mid-range SLRs and the like. Nothing like market forces. Needless to add, content is strictly monochrome. They say it’s for aesthetic reasons, which means they cannot afford color with their miniscule print run. No matter. It’s a fine magazine whose content always makes you think. It’s going digital fast.

View Camera, on the other hand must have either some of the most dyslexic, or most stoned, proof readers in the world. It reminds me of that old leftie standby of English newspapers, The Guardian, known to one and all as The Grauniad. Beloved reading of faded academics in tired tweeds who think fondly of Stalin as a great liberator. An issue of either VC or TG without typos is like a US Congress without crooks. But once you get past this slovenliness, you find a fine magazine with a balanced mix of the photographic and the technical. I just received the current issue and what do I find? Articles on digital backs for 4”x5” cameras! Reminiscent , it is true, of Lord Chesterfield’s thoughts on sex - “The pleasure, momentary. One’s position, ridiculous. And the cost .... damnable.” Now you not only have to lug the camera, lenses and tripod, you need a laptop computer, back-up hard disks, cables and a very, very costly digital back. We are talking the cost of a new car here. Of course you save the weight of all those film holders. Great. And if you use a scanning back every picture takes many minutes to expose. Go on line to one of the advertisers selling scanning digital backs and you find a comparison of full frame 35mm digital (meaning Canon) with scanning 4”x5” backs. Now is that defensive or what?

Another article in Veer Pamela, sorry, View Camera, speaks to ULF. That’s Ultra Large Format to the ignorant, meaning people silly or strong enough to lug around 8”x10” cameras so they can make contact prints from the negatives, allowing them to be printed smaller than actual size in photography magazines. No, I’m not kidding. These poor photographers pool their meagre resources (all that’s left after their chiropractors’ fees) to convince Kodak, Ilford et al to make just one more batch of 8”x10” or 16”x20” film. Please. Humor us. Just one more time. The fact that Kodak and Ilford even bother confirms that they both deserve to go out of business. You want to own stock in a company engaging in this sort of trivial pursuit?

Denial. My parents were graduates of the art. These fellows are post-grads. The only difference is they are not risking their lives.

Aargh! The needle on that LP is stuck again, right in the middle of Basin Street Blues.

Stumbling about.

2006-01-16T12:55:00.000-08:00

Visit twenty new photography sites daily

One of the great frustrations of finding new photography on the internet is not knowing where to look.

You read about a site here, a friend recommends one there, in other words pure serendipity.

Now the StumbleUpon tool may not remove the random chance aspect of the search, but it does at least make finding new work easy .... and enthralling. The tool plugs into the Firefox browser and appears in a menu bar like so:

If you don’t use Firefox you can download it free from the web. Mine runs on an Apple and it may even run on a Windows PC, though candidly I couldn’t care less whether it does or not as I do not care to use the deeply flawed Microsoft operating system. I prefer something that does not constantly lock up.

The picture above is a screenshot of Firefox from my iMac. Download the tool (http://www.stumbleupon.com/), tell it you are interested in Photography and then click on the ‘Stumble!’ icon. You are taken to a random photography oriented web site. Click again and another site pops up. The rate of repetition is very low, so if you see something you like be sure to bookmark it.

Sites vary but the ratio seems to be about 80% photography: 20% technical instruction.

Every time I have Firefox on the screen I find myself heading for the Stumble! icon and discover wonderful images on many talented photographers’ web sites.

Cameras and aesthetic design

2006-01-15T10:45:00.001-08:00

Why are so few beautiful?

A friend kindly emailed me to alert me that a web chat board was offering a camera as a prize for the best picture taken in the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson. A worthy goal which will doubtless see some great work submitted.

Then I got to looking at the prize and was struck by how inexcusably ugly it was. Going by the name of the Zeiss Ikon ZM, there is no other way to describe this brick than in one simple word whose meaning needs no explanation: Ugly. I was going to preface the U word with a vulgarity describing part of the anatomy, the bit you sit on, but good taste prevailed. You get the idea.

I rarely write about equipment as, for the most part, it seems to me merely to be a tool to do the job. But this kind gesture on my friend’s part, who suggested I should submit some of my street snaps to the contest, got me thinking about the aesthetics of equipment, or more specifically, why so little in the way of camera gear is remotely attractive to look at.

So, like most photographers, I thought about the equipment I have owned, have borrowed and have lusted after. And in the interests of keeping this piece upbeat, I will concentrate on the cameras my eye remembers as beautiful, a work of art to hold and use, rather than all the others. And that is important to me. The old saw that has it that a poor worker blames his tools has it all wrong. It should be that a good worker uses beautiful tools. You think Michelangelo and his buddies didn’t discuss paints, brushes and canvases? Sure they did.

So I won’t refer to the brutish ugliness of the Nikon F, nor the brick like facade of the Mamiya RB67, nor even the Leicaflex Sl - a face only a parent could love - in this brief Statement of Preferences. And I will most certainly not refer to the Kodak Ektra.

The post-WWII list is, sadly, a short one.

Headed, of corse, by the chrome Leica M2. The most perfect blend of form and function ever designed. Color it black and you have nouveau riche - the young up-and-comer’s Porsche 911. Make it chrome and....aaahhh! Yes, this one is mine. With the wonderful 35mm Asph Summicron, no less.

But before that exemplar of taste and execution came along there was something equally fine to be had in the Zeiss Ikon Contax II and IIa. Forget the metered version with the ugly bump for the selenium cell meter. The un-metered camera was simply beautiful and aeons ahead of the cheesy looking screw thread Leicas of the time with their miserbale viewfinders. A top hat compared to a cloth cap. Note the beautiful symmetry of the finder windows and the knobs, the gorgeous proportions of the body. You just must pick it up.

No Rolleiflex twin lens reflex can be left out of this reckoning with, perhaps the metered 3.5F at the pinnacle, the lens being just the right size for the body, something lost in the 2.8 variant. This one was mine until I gave it to my nephew.

Whether it was because so many of the greats used it - Avedon, Penn, Beaton - or whether it had that secret something, call it balance, proportion, despite the rectangular shape, the Rollei is a beautiful camera.

Some miniature format cameras had that something called beauty too. Two of the best were the Tessina and the Minox. Regardless of their clandestine Cold War role in life, these two, especially the watch like Minox, had the secret ingredient. Have you ever opened a Minox for action? Try it. Sensuality redefined.

At the other end of the size spectrum,Linhof had what no American manufacturer could presume. A divine aesthetic sense. I won’t say anything about the Crown Graphic (heck! I own one) but just feast your eyes on this Super Technika.

Aah!.

Now that is a camera.

Now there’s a lot of German equipment permeating this piece. A nation that makes fine cameras and killing machines. But it’s eastern emulator, Japan, has had some pretty fine things to contribute to camera aesthetics too.

Take the fine line of early Canon SLRs. This is an FT. Note the finely sculpted controls and the general balance of the machine.

Olympus made a fine effort with the Pen F and even the bold gothic letter ‘F’ seems to work well for this courageous, innovative design. A camera with a sweet, feminine grace, with a bold escutcheon. I loved mine. Wish I had never sold it.

They tried later to recapture the spirit of the Pen F with the OM1 but the magic spark was, alas, gone.

Then two really great Japanese designs come to mind. One very good - the Pentax MV/ME. Another camera with jeweled precision and an absolute joy to use. My ME Super fell apart but not before we had had the most wonderful relationship.

But their earlier Pentax Spotmatic was, after all, an impossible act to follow. Here was a camera that was a joy to behold. To hold. To use. Forget all that nonsense you read about the Japanese being imitators. Just take a glance at the raw sensuality of the advance lever. The most beautiful thing to ever grace a mass produced object. And note those angled ‘Zeiss’ corners. The sincerest form of flattery is imitation. This was something that you would think should have set an example for the designers of the miserable looking Zeiss Ikon ZM, that execrable excresence passing for a camera. An example of which, sadly, they seem damnable unaware. As unaware as they are of their company’s glorious history of design.

2005 - taking stock.

2006-01-10T11:59:00.000-08:00

So what was accomplished, photographically speaking?

I was hanging some of my Really Large Prints the other day in the new home theater I had built - it’s actually a converted garage - which gave me pause to ask “What did you accomplish last year”?

As a matter of course I make it a practice to write down what I did right and wrong in managing money during the year for, while the lawyers keep reminding us that ‘Past performance is no guarantee of future results’ I tend to hew to Churchill’s variant which has it that ‘Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it’. In re-reading these self critical pieces over the years, recurring patterns of erroneous behavior are identified and, hopefully, remedied.

So to take a like approach to photography seems to make better sense as my driving goal is to take better pictures.

But what does ‘better’ mean? Those which get exhibited? Sold? Hung? Probably a mixture of all three. If you don’t show it you will never know how good you are. If you don’t sell it you are a commercial failure which may be good or bad. If you don’t hang it why on earth are you taking pictures in the first place? And while ‘exhibit’ takes increasingly new guises - books, cell phones, computers, the internet, a well framed picture hanging on the wall remains the touchstone of photographic display.

Well, what about the successes? Listing these first makes it easier to enumerate the failures.

I published my book Street Smarts, containing 100 monochrome pictures taken in London and Paris in the seventies. It taught me how hard it is to get all the material together, how difficult it is to get it all submitted and looking just so, and how impossible it is to sell a book of pictures. This is the ultimate vanity project - you may feel good about doing it but don’t expect to make money. Best of all, this allowed me to get all that monochrome content well and truly out of my system and free me up from the legacy overhang of being a ‘street’ photographer. That genre is done, for me at least.

I got rid of a bunch of excess gear that was just collecting dust, and I’m not a gear collector. Now I’m down to one 35mm system (Leica M), two 6x6 systems (Rollei 6003 and Mamiya 6) and one 4x5 system (Crown Graphic). I fancy the clunky Rollei 6003 will hit the block in 2006. Too much gear still!

I learned lots about 4x5 when I picked up my 50 year old Crown Graphic and a couple of extra lenses for a song. What a blast to use and negative quality that remains unsurpassed to this day.

I started this blog which forces me to put down in writing what I am thinking about the world of photography. Write it down, the old rule has it, and it’s serious. Talk or think about it and it’s noise.

I got selected for a one man show - due in 2007 - at a local gallery after showing the director my prints. That felt really good as it confirmed that I have the drudgery of printing/mounting/framing down to where it no longer intrudes in the creative process. It felt even better to know that someone else liked my work. And no, she did not ask me what camera I use. And, best of all, all the pictures were New Work, not recycled old stuff.

I started a Photoblog and came away with mixed feelings. The positive is that there’s lots of great work out there. The negative is that most of what’s out there is sheer, unmitigated garbage. I also learned that my dated use of film as a recording medium is incompatible with the ‘picture a day’ pressure in the Photoblog world, so I stepped back and now post one a month, if that. Feels better until digital matures and all that film equipment can go to a collector at some ridiculous premium to what I paid for it. Thank God for the Japanese - where would the used Leica market be without them?

I built my home theater which comes with one huge photographic advantage. Lots of display space.

I confirmed, if ever confirmation was needed, that the products of the Microsoft Corporation are one of the biggest frauds ever pulled on the consuming public and remain blissfully happy with my iMac three years after making the switch. No downtime, just speed to get the drudgery part of the photographic process done. Bottom feeding tort lawyers continue to sue cigarette and hamburger vendors. Wrong place to fish. When will they realize that Microsoft has killed more people than these twin evils combined? Just think of all those coronaries at the keyboard of a Windows PC....

I learned, as age encroaches, that many tasks are best delegated to those better skilled to do them. Processing, framing and so on. I add no value here.

I re-immersed myself in books about art and photography and tried hard to sharpen my vision.

Hmmm. Not a bad list. Feeling pretty good. OK then, what about the not so good bits?

My vision still lack clarity. Thematic approaches to photography make sense. The ‘always carry a camera’ thing is meaningless. Carry it with a mission and you get somewhere. I tried to apply this last year by focusing on three themes - The Fading Past (old wall signs), The Beach Creatures (driftwood at the beach) and The California Forests (I’m quite useless at these but keep trying).

I would like to become technically better with the 4x5 format for it has so much to offer. Maybe it’s just in the nature of things, I tell myself, that the equipment is clunky and a mess to use.

I would like to delegate all printing of Really Big Prints as it’s simply a waste of time when others can do it better and you are messing about with the yet again clogged ink jet printer at home. And I’ll bet the cost is comparable. Got to find a good printer for 2006.

I cannot consistently take good pictures. Maybe that’s because I do not do it enough or maybe it’s the unexplainable nature of the creative process. Sometimes you can do it, mostly you cannot. I do know that machine gunning for pictures is anathema to me and only results in a drop in quality so some other mechanism is needed. One thing I have found that works is to scout out a location without a camera, pre-visualize it - then come back later with the equipment. That seems consonant with my working style.

And, finally, I am still very keen to go all digital, but have yet to find a camera which does it for me.

Will the last person leaving Rochester please put the lights out?

2006-01-09T09:48:00.001-08:00

Kodak destroys the remnants of its brand equity

The genius that makes America the most successful free market economy ever seen can be summarized in one word: Marketing.

Think up something new, make it desirable and sell it at a fair price and the consumer will work overtime to make sure he can buy it.

That’s not to say that enormous errors are absent from the field that is America’s specialty.

Take for example the Nissan Infinity campaign, conceived by Madison Avenue for Nissan’s luxury automobiles, some 15 years ago when the only competition in sight was Lexus and Mercedes Benz. The TV commercials showed fields of wheat gently swaying in the breeze but nary an Infinity in sight. Maybe those fields were actually growing pot and the Madison Avenue slickers had been smoking the crop. Suffice it to say that Infinity sold very few cars (and they were awfully good cars) that year and never caught up with the lead Lexus established in 1990.

Another, this time English, booboo comes to mind. For as long as anyone could remember, Woodbines cigarettes had focused solely on a working class consumer, the packaging and design projecting an image of honest market positioning. The illustration shows the classic, simple lines well.

Then some twit, doing his research in an abstracted office setting, not knowing a cloth cap from a pack of sausages, decided that what the working class consumer needed was a glossy, flip top, crush proof box. With a commensurate price increase.

Sales went through the floor and never recovered.

So what has all this to do with photography? Well, just when you thought the Marketing Dusies of all time had been committed, along comes Kodak with a repeat of the Woodbines fiasco. It’s not enough that the company is in dire straits and may well be heading for bankruptcy. Rather than focusing on the dictates of the new challenges upstart ‘photography’ companies - like Samsung, Sony, Apple, HP - are posing, what does Kodak do?

Heck, why not take one of the world’s most famous logos and destroy it? Now you can happily gaze at the new Kodak logo while wondering why it makes you think your eyes are crossed. A apt image for a company that has lost its way and its consumer.

Delgate the drudge of routine printing

2005-12-04T13:51:00.000-08:00

American ingenuity never ceases to amaze.

Every year about this time our family - my wife, our son, the dog, the cat and I - engage in a nerve trying ritual.

The annual Christmas postcard picture.

For years now we have been taking this picture on the nearest point and shoot digital camera which falls to hand as the probability of catching all five cast members with bright smiles, good expressions and open eyes is .... well about as likely as that of finding a politician with integrity. Not impossible, but difficult, to say the least. So we place the camera on a tripod, gather together and bang away. Twenty tries usually does it. This year it was twenty one. Digital, of course, with its instant feedback, ensures we get something useable without having to wait for the film to come back from processing and going through the whole ordeal again.

Now, the picture taking part of the process, I must admit, is far from the most trying. The tough work begins when it comes to printing forty or fifty hard copies to mail to all and sundry. As I ordinarily use my wide carriage Epson printer for large prints which end up mounted and framed, making 4” x 6” postcard-sized ones is sheer agony. You can bet that the print nozzles will be clogged, rendering all and sundry in shades of purest magenta on the first pass. Then, after wasting much time and ink using the self-cleaning cycle (only a marketer could have thought up that misnomer), I try to recover that template I made for Photoshop years ago which places four prints on one sheet. Well, of course, it’s either missing in action or the annual software upgrade has rendered it useless again. Then when I get that bit sorted, I invariably run out of ink.

But then what would you expect? Take one of the very worst designed applications, a study in user torture named Photoshop, and pair it with the least friendly consumer gadget since the VCR - the home printer - and you have a recipe for frustration and failure.

So, this year, I said No More. I had come across an advertisement by one of the large drug stores in the West, Walgreens, which said you could upload your snaps and then elect to have them printed and ready in sixty minutes at a store of your choice. So we uploaded the annual snap (number 21 of 21!) to the local Walgreens, after first downloading their software which, believe it or not, even came in a version that works with computers preferred by human beings rather than geeks. I mean, of course, Apples. And not sixty minutes later, an email arrived asking that we drop by to pick up the prints. No, they don’t deliver. Not yet, anyway.

So we took the boy and the dog for a stroll down the road and there they were. Fifty beautiful 4” x 6” prints, perfectly exposed with those wonderful skin tones the home printer only dreams about, processed in a Fuji Frontier machine right there in the store. Total cost? $8. Yes, 16 cents apiece. Now had they been using a Kodak machine I would have gone elsewhere, as the second worst run American corporation (the prize goes to GM by a considerable margin) is not even capable of making a reliable machine or supporting after market service in a timely manner. So unreliable are the Kodak machines, and so poorly supported, that even the Wall Street Journal noticed after the large Target store chain threatened to return all its machines and going with Fuji if service did not improve. At my local Target, the Kodak machine is typically down 40% of the time.

The point of this piece is that while film may indeed be dead, the commercially made print is alive and kicking.

When I originally wrote the Film is Dead piece, I posted it on Photo.net to gauge reactions. Some fifty emails later, many laced with obscenities and personal attacks, I had in fact confirmed that Film must be Dead, otherwise why would so many deny the facts in ghetto language? It is troubling, though, that these purported aesthetes never graduated from grammar school.

Since that time, America’s second worst run corporation has restated earnings (they don’t even know how much they are losing), laid off thousands more employees (if all else fails, blame the worker - right out of the GM play book), has discontinued monochrome printing paper (excuse me, silver gelatin to those who still use it for cheap effect or is that marketing again?) and obsoleted (‘rationalized’ in MBA speak) most of its color film offerings. And that was just in one fiscal quarter.

So while film, which I still use for serious work, is on the way out, shortly joining the wax cylinder and the LP record as an avocation of the lunatic fringe, the genius of American capitalism, that prime mover of this great nation of hustlers, remains alive and kicking by making easy printing from digital originals a trivial matter.

I for one, while Walgreens and Fuji did their thing, got on with other more fun things this year rather than wasting time with the execrable Photoshop interface and the ink jet printer.

So go ahead and send your casual digital snaps to the local drug store - just make sure it does not use a Kodak machine if you want your prints back any time soon.

Irving again

2005-10-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

The man was a God, but why the pretentiousness?

Proving yet again that there’s no money to be made in Art Books, I splashed out the princely sum of $31.50 on ‘Irving Penn Platinum Prints’. This book had no expense spared at the altar of authenticity.

Now before you accuse me of being unduly critical, a quick check of my earlier piece on Penn’s fine book ‘Worlds in a Small Room’ may be found here.

The man, clearly, is a God in the history of twentieth century photography.

So when I decided to splash out on ‘Platinum Prints’ it was not without foreboding. I have always eyed anything which purports to apply Secret Sauce to a common or garden process with deep suspicion. And, sadly, skepticism was more than justified in this case.

Yes, the famous pictures are all there - that old fraud Picasso, the future Mrs. Penn (well, at least the guy was straight, or it was one hell of a cover), that great black and white Vogue cover of the mesh vail, the Harley Hell’s Angels disguised as Greek gods, the mud people, Cecil(y) Beaton, all those neo-Sander portraits of horny handed sons of toil, those foul/smelly/gorgeous cigarette butts. In other words, Penn’s finest. No question, the reproduction quality of the prints is beyond criticism.

Then, over that height of civilized existence, the evening vodka Martini, I chanced on the back cover of the book only to see the following solemn inscription: ‘Over the years I have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect print. Irving Penn’.

Phew!

So the guy:

1 - Despite working for Vogue with all its resources, values his time so little that he has to make his own prints. Something a trained monkey can do reasonably well.

2 - He elects to waste thousands (thousands - do you believe that?) of hours in a darkroom rather than share more of his great vision with the world.

3 - An exotic process is clearly involved. Do I smell snake oil?

I yield to no one in my admiration for Irving Penn. Unlike his fake contemporary, Richard Avedon, Penn had an eye for what he believed in, not for what would sell. He was the Real Thing.

But then he has to go and tell the world that he is using some inane, archaic process to make his prints. They are no better for the fact that he wasted ‘thousands’ of hours on them, and that means they really are awfully good. Buy the book, disregard the blurb.

Just because the printing process is complex does not mean the print is a good picture. Thank goodness Penn’s work transcends the nonsense this book propounds.

Best and Worst

2005-08-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

During the past few weeks of getting a handful or really large prints mounted, matted, glassed and framed, I have come into contact with many photographic material vendors, good and bad. While a few experiences hardly make for a statistically meaningful sample, here are mine, fo what they are worth.

The Good:

B&H (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/) - though a huge company, which generally implies an uncaring attitude with those responsible hiding behind lawyers - the level of service and timely delivery from B&H is simply the best. I am on the West coast and it would be harder to be further away from their New York headquarters. But place an order on Sunday night and, sure as clockwork, it arrives the following Friday by UPS Ground. On site web ordering is superb, perpetual inventory tells you when an item is out of stock and on the couple of occasions I have had to reurn items, I was treated with courtesy (OK, New York courtesy, which is a little different) and my issue resolved timely. Simply the best.

Documounts (http://www.documounts.com/) - this is where I bought acid free mats and mounting board. They cut the mats to order and you can specify 1/32” accuracy for the cut out. My large order was prepared in seven days and at my California home, shipped from Oregon, three days later. The accuracy of cutting is beyond any criticism as was the professional packaging (just enough to keep everything safe without making it impossible to open). Mounts and mats are purely fungible - you want Nielsen Bainbridge archival, Google it and go for the lowest price. However, I could not find another vendor that does custom cutting and the price is competitive. A 22 x 28” mat with an 18 3/16” x 12 3/8” cut out (that’s how my Epson ink jet printer sizes a 13” x 19” nominal print) runs $24.33, including backing board and transparent protective sleeve for unframed display. Yes, you could cut these less yourself, mess with all the waste and blunt blades and equipment and on and on, but that suggests you should be in the mat cutting business rather than taking photographs.

Drytac Mounting Tissue (http://www.drytac.com/) - bare bones, two day delivery, no fancy packaging, but if you want dry mounting tissue fast and well priced, you cannot beat this supplier.

Poor Richard’s Press (www.poorrichards.com) - the local central California printer I used for my business cards and marketing brochures. Despite the down market name (something I told them they really need to change to attract the high margin carriage trade) the service I received from Paige Chamberlain in the Atascadero office was beyond compare, Do you know which way the address panel on a tri-fold should face to avoid having the thing get snarled up in the US Post Office’s machinery when the mailing is processed? Paige does. throw in 30 minutes of free marketing advice, fast feedback on what I did wrong in the brochure, and email upload of changes and you have a business that wants your business. I like that.

Inkjetart (http://www.inkjetart.com/) - a business from which I have bought Epson and Lyson supplies for years. Easy web ordering, fast shipping and no sales tax, as it’s in Utah and I am not. As a general principle, anything which can withhold money from the greedy and incompetent in all branches of government is a good thing and a principle I hew to strongly, having done more than my bit to grease the pockets of the losers in Sacramento and points east. It doesn’t hurt to know that Utah is the second most beautiful place in the west. After California.

Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com) - yes, here’s another public business that cares about its customer. It’s where I bought my LaCie hard drives for storing all those scanned photographs. Quick delivery, always timely, always honest.

LaCie (http://www.lacie.com/) - I have five of their external Firewire Porsche design hard drives for my iMac. Two 250 gB for the photographs, two 80 gB for my music (all CDs have now been sold after ripping these to the drives using Apple’s iTunes - even PC unfortunates can get to use this superb application, in between rebooting now and then) and a fifth 80 gB as a back-up boot drive in case the internal one in the iMac blows up. A great product, unobtrusive, quiet and, when one arrived with a noisy bearing, replaced immediately no questions asked. Thank you LaCie for helping me sleep well at night, knowing my data is safe. Heck, I might even forgive you that dumb French name.

MacConnecction (http://www.macconnection.com/) - this is where I bought the iMacG5 to replace the iMac G4, needing the greater front end speed for loading those 300 mB files - 15 seconds vs. 120 on the G4. They are in New Hampshire which, in addition to housing one of America’s very best business schools in the guise of Amos Tuck, also meets the fundamental test of not giving my money for support of the crooks in Sacramento and their variously deviant constituencies in San Francisco. Two day delivery was just that, phone service was courteous and well informed and the free Epson C86 printer thrown in made my nephew a happy camper.

Newegg (http://www.newegg.com/) - where I got the additional memory for the iMac G5. Thanks, Apple, but $200 vs. $400 for the additional effort of undoing three screws is the sort of remuneration rate I can live with. One of the ‘sticks’ (that’s what we hip dudes call memory, you know) I ordered was the wrong type (my fault) and exchange was easy with no questions asked.

Wow! That’s a lot of very good experiences - big ticket and small cost items represented. I wish I did have an interest in these businesses and could tell you that my recommendations are conflicted. Sadly I do not.

The Bad:

But, of course, there has to be a stinker, and this one’s a real Gorgonzola.

It’s called Light Impressions (http://www.lightimpressionsdirect.com), or Dark Depressions as I have come to think of them. Suffice it to say that a simple test order for five mats (standard sizes, not custom - quite why they accepted the order when they did not even have the goods in stock in the first place I have yet to determine) took seven weeks, cancellation of my payment, unreturned emails, and, when it finally arrived, was wrapped by some druggie in the sub-basement who determined that using two miles of Scotch tape should do the trick. Try to open that without damaging the fragile contents. To add insult to injury, these yo-yos use the USPS for deliver, who in typical fashion, managed to hold the package in their Bell, California center for two weeks. Presumably they then found it behind the radiator in the back and deigned to ship it. Another business giving my money to the government. And before you tell me that the USPS is a private corporation, dear reader, who do you think will be on the hook when they go bust?

Anyway, just to complete the picture, here’s the feedback form I sent Dark Depressions when I finally received the goods - a cross in the right hand column qualifies the vendor for the IRS Bedside Manner Award:

But there’s good in such bad experiences. Dark Depressions’s pretty catalog, shipped with the mats, clued me into lots of neat framing tools and supplies which I can find elsewhere on the web at 20% less.

At the printers

2005-08-19T07:46:00.000-07:00

Deciding to better market my photographic art work, I determined to make a simple brochure to distribute to prospects. After all, getting your work seen and purchased is impossible without marketing. “Make the product and they will come” could not be more wrong.

So, eschewing the foul products of Microsoft on principle, and not wishing to spend a few years learning any of the complex page processing products like Quark Express or Adobe Illustrator, I splashed out the vast sum of $99 on Apple’s iWork which comes with a slide show presenter named Keynote and, more importantly, the page processor for the rest of us, Pages.

Here’s a product that makes melding of words and images a simple process, avoiding any technical words in its menus (job protection at its worst) and using a system of templates into which you insert your content, whether words, pictures or both. While the product can get a little sluggish and is clearly a work in progress, it has yet to lock up and does not make a beta tester of the user unlike any application from the Beast of Redmond.

So, in not much more time than it took to write this piece, I had a nice tri-fold brochure, properly spaced and laid out, in gorgeous color, ready for submission to the printer.

That’s when the trouble started.

I took a CD with a PDF version of the brochure to a press printer and airily placed my order. “Is it CMYK?” the ink stained fellow at the counter asked. “But of course” I replied, in cavalier manner, wondering which mental institution he had escaped from. It’s a PDF file, I’m thinking. Doesn’t that mean What You See Is What You Get? Anyway, he calls back in a lather saying that it’s not CMYK at all, I’m a liar, and it is, dammit, all RGB. You would think I had accused him of membership in the Communist party, he was in such a state. Or maybe the Republican Party, in his case. Oh! dear, says I, let me fix that.

So I run and consult the oracle, AKA my nephew, who knows about these things. Well, he says, presses use four passes applying each of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Something Else (I forget what the K stands for but I know it’s not Kodak) so they can only accept files whose colors are saved in that format. By contrast, color laser printers accept RGB (probably converting to CMYK on the fly), thus the standard format you save colors in, say, Photoshop - Red, Green, Blue - is a walk in the park for these devices.

I go back to the Ink Stained One having converted the pictures to CMYK in Photoshop and assure him all should be well. Not so. “Did you convert the colored text?” Did I do what? There proceeds a ten minute lecture on vector graphics, raster graphics (which I thought was something you get on Bob Marley albums) color gamuts and lots of other words you wouldn’t want your mother to hear. Anyway, I leave the file with him to mess about with and go down the road to another printing house to try my luck. Always good to have a back up, especially when you are dealing with those seeking to protect their jobs through obfuscation.

No problem, the knowledgeable lady responds, after I warn her that if the words vector or CMYK so much as pass her lips I will be out of there quicker than a tax refund leaves the wife’s bank account.

So here’s the scoop if you want letter sized, two sided color printing, from someone who wants your business and speaks in English (a dying language formerly used in America and still, it is rumored, common in the better public schools in England where it is taught by Indians), take heed of the following:

Two sided color laser printing is cheapest up to 500 copies
Any more and it’s more economical to use press printing
Use a shop that automatically converts your PDF content from RGB to CMYK, no questions asked
Don’t waste time with complex software unless you like that sort of thing
Refuse to do business with people who speak gobbledegook
Ask for a proof copy before putting down your money
If you are doing tri-fold brochures, have the printer do the folding, or get out the Band Aids

Now I am anxiously awaiting my tri-folds, ready for distribution to the world, and have learned more about the printing process than I ever wished. The moral of the story is simple - delegate stuff like this to those better equipped to handle it and only work with people whom you can understand.

Pseuds Corner

2005-07-31T10:12:00.000-07:00

The English satirical magazine Private Eye has long published a column named Pseuds Corner where pretentious nonsense is reprinted in all its glory. For example:

“The sheer courage of these pieces is breathtaking. The space inside, the gap between the walls, narrows, widens, breathes in and out (if you can speak of massive iron “breathing”, which in Serra’s work you can) and eventually rewards you with an inner chamber, from which you have to follow the same route out…each emphasizes the ancient Greek philosopher’s Zen-like adage: hodos ano kato mia kai hote, “the way up and the way down are one and the same”. A maze would be fussy; it would interfere with the stupendous directness and logic of Serra’s spatial language.” ROBERT HUGHES on the Richard Serra installation at the Bilbao Guggenheim.

Phew!

Well, I never cease to be amused by the vast volume of Pseuds Corner prose that the world of photography attracts.
Here are some recent examples - the names of the authors and publications have been supressed to protect the pretentious.

“After a small quantity of test rolls (about 25 in all), both my regular Tri-X, some Lucky 400 made in China and Fuji Acros my personal feeling is: If you already have a later version of the Summicron 50 (and who doesn’t) or a clean 50DR Summicron you would not see much difference on your negatives (from pictures taken with the lens under review).”

From a a self-proclaimed Leica ‘expert’ whose claim to fame seems to be ownership of dozens, if not hundreds of lenses for his Leicas (such fame is certainly not based on the quality of his photographic output).

“As W became better known, he was forced to try to explain in words matters that he knew could not be explained at all, but that might with luck be demonstrated in pictures.”

From the introduction to a book of photographs of a vastly overrated machine gun shooter whose demise caused many a moist eye in the accounting department at Kodak.

“Dualities have always been a feature in M’s life and work. He speaks of a “dark Manichaean flavor” in his earlier urban subjects, but that is not an element in his landscape work.”

From the notes to a book of M’s landscape photographs which prove without a shadow of a doubt that he should have stuck to street shooting.

“E’s affection for photography began at the time when he was starting a new life of sobriety, It is almost as if photography, with its directness, truth, and poignancy, became symbolic of this new life.”

From the introduction to a book about a manic collector of seemingly every famous photograph under the sun.

“Michael works in a special place; on the edge of darkness and light. His images hold a mirror to each viewer’s soul and conscience”

From the introduction to a book of photographs by a darling of the collector set who has basically taken the same photograph a thousand times over the past twenty years.

“For his simplicity and his unbridled passion for his art, for all that has gone before and for all kinds of other reasons, a lot of which have nothing to do with photography, but a lot to do with art, and for never knowing when to stop chasing rainbows, B is a hero to his own generation and beyond.”

Introduction to a book of photographs by a famous fashion photographer.

“Technical fetishism also has its theoretical counterpart, namely the art of photographing”

Introduction to a book of one of the most famous street photographers.

* * * * *

I didn’t make these up. Honest. I just went to the largest photography books in my library. The larger the format of the book the more of this sort of clap-trap is to be found in its pages. That does not mean you should stop buying large format books, only that you should look at the pictures and disregard the turgid prose. And remember - no Pseud ever took a good picture.

There’s nothing quite like mounting.

2005-07-29T18:21:00.000-07:00

Years ago when I was serious about monochrome photography (and unable to afford being serious about color), I used to mount my best prints on thick card and matte them for display in frames. The difference between a loose, flimsy print and the finished, framed one was night and day. The mounting press I used was straight out of the tool box favored by the enforcers of the Spanish Inquisition. A massive acme screw on a cantilever placed immense pressure on the print while the hot platen helped melt the adhesive. Heat setting was, well, basic, as in ‘On’ or ‘Off’. The same press was used to confer high gloss on prints, before the days of RC papers which came with their own, not very good, bluish sheen built in. You squeegeed the print onto a high gloss metal plate, hoping all the air was out, and heated it in the press. The nauseating smell of the formaldehyde which conveyed the gloss is with me to this day. I forget where I got this obscure instrument of torture, but I do recall it cost me all of five British Pounds back in the days before devaluation. That meant $14 in 1973 money, or $67 in today’s (2005) money. Not a lot, in other words, though I had to rewire the thing and generally mess with the wonky switch. But it worked.

This was, by the way, well before the days of Acid Free Boards and Archival Prints. Strange how those ancient monochrome 16” x 20” prints look fine to this day....

The Spanish Press moved on to its eleventh owner when I left the United Kingdom, as the former Colonies neither recognized 220 volts mains power or looked too kindly on a poor immigrant lugging Torquemada’s 50 pound favorite to the shores of the New World. And so it was relegated to the dusty recesses of memory, that foul press and its revolting formaldehyde odor.

Now my default print size, 8” x 10”, was not too bad when it came to handing prints around and asking ‘Do you like this one?” But when I got serious about once more showing my work, or at least giving it away to others in a presentable format, memories of the Torquemada Special came flooding back. (See the piece titled ‘Really Large Prints’ where the author standardized on 13 “ x 19” prints for his best efforts, below). So I did a bit of shopping and discovered that the heated press situation is even worse than that for gasoline. The latter provides the consumer with an oligopoly, a few vendors pretending to compete but, realistically, fixing the price in a smoke filled room. By contrast, the photographic heated press world, an altogether smaller economy, has no competition whatsoever. In the United States you buy a press from Seal, aka Biengang, or you do without. When you come down to it, a heated press is nothing more than a couple of slabs of cast iron, one of which contains a heater element, a foam pad, and yes, you guessed it, a massive lever (the acme thread has finally moved on), a couple of springs, two light bulbs - ‘on’ and ‘heating’ - a thermostat and a cord and plug. So why does this nineteenth century piece of engineering crudity come with a price tag of $1,100 and up, you ask?

Tried to buy a cheap ladder recently? Same deal. It’s called liability lawyers. The members (a suitable description if ever there was one) of the tort bar have made sure that the finished product sells for four times its intrinsic value. Every time some twit falls off the ladder or burns himself using the mounting press, there go the legal - and product - costs. Add greedy home grown labor which spends its ‘sick leave’ watching aforesaid members of the bar advertising their wares on television, and you have a prescription for an overpriced product.

So I did a bit more research. Seems that the Seal presses made back in the first 80 years of the twentieth century came with asbestos wiring. Now, bad memories of Torquemada’s Special dancing in my mind, I realized I did not particularly want to rewire a Genuine Seal original, attractive as it may be, for lack of full body armor and breathing equipment. So I sniffed around on ePrey, that home from home for liars, cheats and thieves, and determined that the current (as in 30 years old) line of Seal presses, distinguished by the suffix ‘M’ in the model number (don’t ask, it stands for Masterpiece. Can you believe that?) as in 160M, 210M, etc. can be found now and then for under $500. That’s still eight times in today’s money compared with the cost of the Torquemada Original, but it beats paying $1,100 for the original cardboard packaging. So I waited patiently and a 160M joined the household, safely stored out of the way in the workshop some fifty yards from the main home. Cast iron being what it is, the UPS man used a dolly rather than risk a premature hernia. No use in tempting fate. Another $50 saw me as the proud owner of a used Seal tacking iron for attaching the mounting tissue to the print and mount.

So now I’m into this dry mounting exercise for some $450 when my nephew comes along and asks if I could print him a couple of pictures for a competition while he gets his Epson printer working the way he likes. “No problem” I insouciantly intone. “Would you like those mounted, by the way” I throw in for conversation. Pretty macho, huh? “Mounting?” the boy expostulates. “What’s that?”

Well, like the old pro that I am at this game, still trying not to gag at memories of those formaldehyde fumes of 30 years ago, I suggest in my best, bored ‘doesn’t everyone mount their prints’ tone, “But my dear boy, a print is not a print until it is mounted!”. “Oh!” he reacts. “OK then”.

So now I’m stuck with mounting the prints and have absolutely no clue or recollection how to do it. I run to the Internet, read fifteen conflicting accounts, abuse some alcohol, only to find definitive instructions in the packet of mounting tissue by .... you guessed it .... Biengang. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the lack of competition. Phew! You would think that the guys who make the press and the tissue know their stuff. And indeed they do. Things go without a hitch and three lovely 8” x 10” prints (my nephew is a fine photographer) are even now winging their way to him in time for his exhibition. No question he will win. Two identical prints, one held up with thumb tacks, the other nicely mounted, is no competition.

The moral of this tale? Well there are two. The first is that a properly dry mounted print with a decent mat is THE way to showcase your work. No, not one of those poncy things where you stick one edge to the back of the mat to let it ‘breathe and expand’ only to cockle in two weeks, using the excuse that the ‘Art’ world accepts no less - mainly because the Art world is broke. We are talking heat sealed here.

The second is that you should copy this piece to anyone you know involved in Chinese manufacture of basic equipment and get the price down from $1,100 to $99.99.

All photographers will be in your debt.

Storage is cheap - and I don’t mean hard copies

2005-07-27T16:52:00.000-07:00

When the digital darkroom came along, in the guise of quality scanners for negatives and slides, I was an enthusiastic adopter, if not an early one. It took a while for the scanners to deliver decent affordable quality and now, as film is dying quickly, they are very inexpensive indeed and have never been better. As I caught up with a large backlog of scanning it became obvious that storage would be something to address carefully. While a quality scan of a 35mm original took only 5 megabytes (mB) or so, a like scan of a medium or large format original would typically be some 225-250 mB in size. That’s a lot of storage. Mercifully, storage becomes cheaper daily.

Further, as I committed early on to use electronic cataloging of content, fast retrieval using key word searches was deemed essential. That dictated hard disks rather than slow and unreliable CDs or DVDs. They may be cheap but I have found time and again they cannot be trusted. It’s not that they suddenly lose data - I doubt they do - but rather that alignment variations between disk drives will frequently make a CD or DVD unreadable on machine B where machine A was happy as could be. Assuming my mix of film originals would continue for a while to be in the ratio 10:3:1 between 35mm:medium format:large format, I reckoned that translated to an average file size of some 40mb. Stated differently, a 250gB hard drive would allow storage of some 6,250 good photos, which is more than I am likely to take in this lifetime. Notice I said good. That’s 3 days shooting for some digital users, but I doubt they take any more good pictures than the film crowd.

Given the inevitable shift to 100% digital work flow in the near future for most serious photographers, or at least those who place a premium value on their time, I also reckoned now was the best time to get familiar with the issues surrounding digital storage. To cut a long story short I purchased a couple of $180 250mb hard drives of good repute and proceeded to move all photographic CD content to one, duplicating the work to the other. This still allowed me to preserve all the keywords I had created over the years for each picture using Extensis Portfolio software (iView is another alternative) with near instant retrieval with a drag-and-drop interface with Photoshop. For those with less sophisticated searching and retrieval needs, iPhoto which comes with every Apple computer, is perfectly adequate. What’s that you say? You use Windows? Well, you have my sympathy. You need to read my pieces entitled ‘Stop Wasting Time’.

So for a grand investment of $360 in hard drives and $200 in software, I can instantly recall any one of thousands of photographs based on entering a few key words. Now obviously the retrieval is only as good as the key words, but whenever you have a spare moment, let me suggest you keep adding these to your catalog as the mood strikes you. You will discover that this iterative process is incredibly powerful and will serve to enhance your retrieval accuracy. If you use a laptop, why you can even do this while watching the comedy show known as The News on any of the major networks. Or the BBC for British viewers.

What of the life of those drives? Well, the average modern hard drive has a life expectancy of 50+ years which, of course, is poppycock. Realistic life expectation, given technology changes, is maybe 5 years. The chances of both main and back-up drives failing simultaneously are near zero and it is very important to have the back-up owing to the large amount of your most precious commodity invested in the scanning and cataloging process. Your time. You want to redo all that horrible work to save $180? Pass on that new gadget and get two drives.

I have to say that what really got me writing this is my recent experience with Apple’s music retrieval and storage application named iTunes. As of July, 2005, over 500 million (million!) songs have been downloaded on a paid basis using iTunes from Apple’s music store. Clearly, the software is here to stay. Now realistically I have all the music I will ever want on CD. Having attended more concerts than I have purchased CDs, and the latter number over 300, my conviction is that the great classical music performances have been recorded. Yes, there will be the occasional stand out down the road, but we will not hear the likes of Horowitz, Richter, Bjoerling, von Karajan and the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras of the 1950s through 1980s again. There’s no longer any money in it and last I checked, performers like to eat. So, until now, iTunes and its ability to download the latest and greatest pop tune held no interest for me.

Then one evening, feeling pretty self-satisfied about my photo cataloging with Extensis, I started thinking about the intense frustration of trying to locate a piece of music in my CD collection. Sometimes I want to listen to a specific performer. At other times Chopin’s Nocturnes intrigue me. At yet others it’s an orchestra’s rendering of a specific symphony that fascinates. Whichever route I opt for, i still have to squint at those impossibly small spines on the CD boxes. In other words, no matter how you file your music, it will be wrong. An extended look at iTunes disclosed that it has very similar capabilities to Extensis in the photography world. A few seconds of math disclosed that the lossless compression used by iTunes would require some 70 megabytes of storage for 300 CDs, so I purchased two 80 mb hard drives for the music collection at $110 each and am now in the process of storing all those CDs to hard disk. I do ten or so a day while working in Photoshop, so it’s a minimum effort proposition. And in a month all my music will be on one, portable, paperback-sized hard disk. Quality? Side by side comparison of output from the Apple lossless encoding on hard disk against the original CD, an A-B test no less (something our fiber-based photo printing bigots might do well to try with ink jet prints, though as they are blind in the first place that may be a waste of time) discloses no discernible difference on a wide range reproducing system.

So storage, being as cheap as it is, makes hard drives a very real proposition for photographs....and music. And before you say, ‘Oh! yes, but it will only last five years’, just think. In five years I will copy over data to newer, better, cheaper drives overnight while you are still trying to find that elusive negative, orange mask and all, amongst all those prized originals.

My CD collection? It’s for sale to the highest bidder. $1,000 for 300 pristine discs. and it’s your. That’s 75% off the original price. Heck, I’ll even pay for the postage.

The Photographer-Mule migrates up-market.

2005-07-26T19:24:00.000-07:00

So you thought the nation with the largest contiguous border with the most successful, the most powerful, nation the world has ever seen, not to mention the most altruistic, had nothing to offer but cheap prescription drugs and cold winters?

Well, think again.

Dialing up the foul eBay the other day in search of a better price on a used LowePro Omni Trekker bag the better with which to carry my magnificent fifty year old Crown Graphic and its many film holders and accessories, I came across a Canadian vendor selling new versions at half the price of the ones available to those of us who count ourselves blessed to be Americans.

So I splashed out my $119 (US) and no less than five days later the new Omni-Trekker, or at least a very good rip off, tags and all, was on my doorstep.

My dog was happy, as it meant a cookie from the UPS man. I was happy as someone from Canada had actually shown some business acumen (we need all the friends we can get) and geopolitics was happy, reassured that maybe those neighbors of ours were not complete losers after all.

The point of this preamble, of course, is that humping the Crown over California’s magnificent landscape, rugged as the camera is, in an old LA Rams gym bag, the Linhof tripod carelessly slung in insouciant manner over the other shoulder, was not a prescription for longevity of either the equipment or the operator.

So on my 140 mile round trip trek to that Top Secret Highway One Location today, the casual observer would have spotted a rather well dressed gent, yes, Harris Tweed cap and all in deference to Her Majesty and our northern neighbors, sporting nothing less than a magnificent LowePro Omni-Trekker bag (or cheap imitation thereof - you decide) in backpack manner with Linhof tripod prominently displayed. Thank goodness for quick release straps.

It has to be said that this huge investment in carrying capacity and function paid dividends. First, in reducing the stress caused by its predecessor, the LowePro earned its keep right there. Second, in spreading the load over the body, sternum and waist, it made a damnable trek into something more resembling sheer bloody hell. A whole lot easier, in other words.

But. most importantly, this Canadian import made it possible to reach places heretofore unknown and that’s what makes for great photographs.

So if you don’t care how you carry your equipment, think again. Canada is not just a haven for those favoring socialized medicine. You can also get cheap camera bags there.

Good Photographs and Car Accidents

2005-07-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

Good photographs are like car accidents. Most happen close to home.

At first that sounds trite but a moment of reflection on the simple mathematics of travel discloses that most of our lives are spent close to home. We spend more time in the garage starting the car and waiting for the door to open than at any other point of any journey. Over many trips, a greater percentage of time is spent one mile from home than two. Travel five miles and you have to travel mile one. Travel a thousand and you still travel mile one. And so on. That is why most car accidents occur close to home, because that is where you spend most time.

That, too, is why most good photographic opportunities are close to home. The harried tourist, trying to find his way around Paris with a guide book, poor French and the ever helpful Parisian to guide him, arrives at the Eiffel Tower stressed and late. He is also tired, having lugged his gear a considerable distance in search of that once in a lifetime snap, aware that the chances of revisiting this location are remote. So to add to the newness of the environment are the additional pressures of failure (“I only have one chance to get this right”), time pressures (“Must not miss that flight”) and equipment concerns (“Did I pack that ultra-wide lens?”). The lighting is new, the length of daylight is new, the feel of the place is new. In other words, there are so many environmental changes that the chances of taking a well thought out, skillfully composed photograph are remote. As remote as the location.

Now compare that to the situation back home. You know the area within a five mile radius of your home like the back of your hand. If you don’t, well then you lack the curiosity to be a photographer. You have photographed it often, seeing new things every time, looking through ever more inquiring eyes, varying the time of day and enjoying various weather conditions. It matters not whether home is the Bronx or Brighton, there are as many photographic opportunities close to your home as anywhere else. No, there are more because you have time to see and think, luxuries not available to other than the most affluent tourist who can afford a month’s stay at a remote location of choice.

When I compiled my book Street Smarts, most of whose content is comprised of street shots in London in the mid-1970s, it dawned on me that over ninety percent of those pictures were taken within five miles of home. These were areas I knew and loved and had visited many times. The wonderful words Alan Jay Lerner placed in Henry Higgins’s mouth in My Fair Lady come to mind:

I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face
She almost makes the day begin.
I've grown accustomed to the tune
She whistles night and noon.
Her smiles, her frowns,
Her ups, her downs
Are second nature to me now;
Like breathing out and breathing in.
I was serenely independent and content before we met;
Surely I could always be that way again and yet
I've grown accustomed to her looks;
Accustomed to her voice;
Accustomed to her face.

And that is exactly how I thought of the London I was photographing. Our relationship was a continuum, having good days and bad, great weather and foul, exhilaration and despair.

And that, whether you love your location or hate it, is how, I suggest, you feel about it too.

So the best pictures are to be found on your doorstep as no one knows it as well as you. The following snap is of an olive tree on my California estate, outside the window on my left as I write. It was taken last November from my front porch, with the photographer splendidly attired in paisley pajamas and that dashing terry cloth robe which gives me the looks of a movie star. A foul morning, foggy and damp. But second nature to me now.

The best photographs are to be found close to home.

Forget Technique

2005-07-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

My learning experiences with my newly acquired large format Crown Graphic 4” x 5” camera have reminded me what a bore technique really is when it comes to photography. Or, more accurately, the job of learning a new technique. The most intrusive aspect of this learning experience is that it really gets in the way of taking pictures, and the more I find myself thinking about technique the more distracted my picture taking becomes.

I suppose there are many analogies to the bother that is technique in everyday life. Driving a car smoothly, making a perfect mortise and tenon joint in two pieces of wood, learning your way around some new piece of software. Heck, remember the first time you made love? Your major concern was not enjoyment. It was technique, assuming you were sober enough to remember anything. In these, and innumerable other examples, once technique is mastered, enjoyment begins. So I tend to see technique as an obstacle to enjoyment or, in creative pursuits, to creativity. Which is the same thing.

I started taking pictures and being serious about it - meaning I wanted to produce good work - when I got my first Leica at the age of eighteen. Up to then picture taking had been nothing more than dilettante dabbling. In realizing that fewer variables made for less to worry about, I standardized on one lens (well, it’s all I had in any case), one make of film (TriX) and one developer (D76). Over-exposure, I quickly learned, was the death knell of definition, underexposure playing havoc with shadow detail and dynamic range (though we didn’t call it that in those days). So the first technical lesson was to get the exposure more or less right. Then memorizing which direction the controls had to be turned to focus and adjust exposure was critical. As my avocation was street shooting, no time could be spent thinking about these. Finally, the chemical darkroom (ugh!) required learning how to black the room out properly, get the foul, smelly chemicals at the right temperature (68F in frigid London was not always that easy) and then exposing the paper properly. Of course, unlike modern digital back ends, making two identical prints was more a case of luck than judgement, but after a while, and not a few sheets of wasted paper, 8”x10” prints started to roll off the old Gamer enlarger like GM makes cars, if maybe not as quickly. At least the quality was better than Detroit’s.

It really showed in the negatives. A few years ago when I got my first decent negative scanner and printer I could see how the early monochrome work got consistently better, the success rate higher, after the first few dozen rolls of film. In those days you submitted pictures for publication as prints in the mail, so they had to be good prints. A good print, it seemed, put you in the 10% pile immediately - the non-rejects. Those many years later, learning ’darkroom’ technique again, as applied to those old TriX negatives, was trivial compared to what the chemical darkroom called for. You could scan at high or low definition but a simple, high resolution unmanipulated scan allowed you maximum flexibility in Photoshop. Sadly, the scanning software could not apply its dust and scratch reduction to the silver based originals, reminding me how bad my drying technique for film had been all those years ago. At least retouching was now a one-off prospect, and not something to be done on each print. Can you imagine a worse use of your time than retouching dust and scratches? I cannot.

I have not had a chemical darkroom for over 25 years now. First, I realized that I was adding no value to my pictures by developing my own film. So I let labs do it. Their volumes assured consistency and the better ones guaranteed quality. Never mind black and white, think of the complexities added when you process color. There is simply no earthly justification for processing your own film. Period. In other words, I delegated that aspect of technique to those more competent than I. And as my time saved was worth more to me than the incremental cost of delegating the task, I made money into the bargain. Not bad.

Then in the 1980s through the mid-1990s, before scanners and printers became affordable, I delegated all my printing to labs also. Same reasons. Just a question of finding one you liked. No one, but no one, has ever asked me whether I printed a picture myself or whether a lab did it. Except, that is, for equipment geeks, whom I try to avoid at all costs. truth be told, something was lacking in the prints however, for dodging and burning was not something easily delegated. But mostly the results were good enough.

Then, when really good printers and scanners became available for home use, I could recapture the creative side by doing my own scanning and printing using Photoshop with just those tweaks to the image I wanted. After learning the technique (if, indeed, anyone can ever claim to have learned Photoshop), control was reestablished over the creative process. For some, back end manipulation is 90% of the creative process. Ansel Adams for example. Mediocre photographer, great darkroom technician. For others, back-end technique is 10% of the process. I’m at the 10% end, mostly. But the point is that the technique, once learned, is subsumed to the creative process. The technique, in other words, becomes invisible and ceases to be an obstacle, as it has become second nature.

When I got my first wide carriage printer, I set the simple technical goal that any scanned original - whether 35mm or medium format, and now large format - would yield a sharp, 13” x 19” print of broad dynamic range, by default. Not by accident.

So as I find myself struggling to master the new aspects of technique of large format photography, I am making strenuous efforts to make these techniques second nature. Some are trivial. It is, for example, very difficult not to take a very sharp picture. A 4” x 5” negative does not need much enlarging! Anyone can make huge, crisp prints from large format originals. Hardly something to set as a goal. But loading those blamed film holders, packing that heavy gear, messing with swings and tilts and clumsy controls, and not letting all that process get in the way of seeing, that takes some learning.

So my advice to you is the same that I follow - work hard, work fast to get that technique down so that it becomes second nature, then forget about it and get on with the creative side. Your pictures will immediately be better and it will show. And don’t let anyone tell you it takes years to learn this or that aspect of technique. It does not. Those who would tell you otherwise are trying to safeguard their not so precious secrets. Avoid them.

My second 4" x 5" photograph. Technique is getting there....

More large format adventures

2005-07-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

I finally got the first 4”x5” negatives back from the processor and began making some 13” x 19” prints. Amazingly, I had managed to load the film in the right way around and all the exposures, using my highly refined Modified Zone System (see June 25, 2005, below), were spot on. It probably did no harm to use negative film with its enhanced latitude for error even if the orange masked-negatives are harder to evaluate than transparencies.

My first reactions on getting the 13 negatives back was shock – those are really large pieces of film – and satisfaction when I saw just the very high level of definition they possessed. The mask in my flat bed film holder is actually 3.7” x 4.7”, so a 13” x 19” print works out to an enlargement ratio of only 4x so it’s hardly a surprise to see that sharpness and detail are the order of the day.

On my first outing I had taken just four pictures, constrained by the fact that the Crown Graphic camera came with just two film holders. One of those four was double exposed. Don’t ask. What with all the rushing water and beauty of nature going on, I couldn’t hear the shutter trip so tripped it….again. Now if I had been using a Holga or similar toy camera the result would have immediately qualified as Art, but I instead consigned it to the round file.

On my second outing I had taken 12 more pictures, using the six additional film holders I had since acquired. Well, that turned out to be 11 pictures as I had inserted one of the film sheets incorrectly and had to pull the holder out of the camera without its dark slide, the latter proving impossible to replace. There I am, standing in the middle of the street, struggling with a sheet of film, more than a tad over-exposed, hoping no one was witnessing this debacle. Indeed, I found out that I have to do a good deal more practicing with film loading as a couple of my other shots were less than centered on the sheet. However, the film is so much thicker than 120 roll film that handling it is a joy and no cotton gloves are needed as it does not buckle when held by the edges.

Scanning on my flatbed was very simple, if slow, at 2400 dpi – I reckon that will give me the requisite 300 dpi at an 8x enlargement ratio, which is a print sized no less than 32” x 40”. Now that is really large! I found there is no need for a glass film holder, once more thanks to the high rigidity and flatness of the negative. The scans in PSD or TIFF format come in at 280 megabytes, give or take, and that takes a while to load on the computer.

Over the past week I had finally bitten the bullet and decided to upgrade my outstanding Apple iMac G4 (the one that had locked up once in thirty months on, you guessed it, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet) to an iMac G5. My nephew had reported how his dad was loading large files in no time, so it wasn’t just the mildly enhanced CPU speed at work – Apple must have done something to upgrade image processing. By way of comparison, as 250 megabyte medium format scan which would take 90 seconds to load now loads in 10 (yes, 10!) and all related actions – like rotation, levels, sharpening, etc in Photoshop are similarly faster. The time savings really add up, for 90 seconds is too short to leave the computer to do something else and too long to be fun.

Once I took a hard look at the scans I could see that the four element Schneider Xenar lens – probably single coated given it’s 40+ years in age – is a tad prone to flare into the light, so I will have to watch that, but covers with high resolution to the edges of the frame, although I should add that I have not used any swings or tilts to really test edge definition.

Anywhere, here is a much reduced version of my first every 4” x 5” photograph in one of the magnificent redwood forests off Highway 1 in California – 4 seconds at f/32 if you must know:

On my second outing I had decided to use the Crown as a hand held rangefinder camera and while this occasioned more than one questioning look from passers by (they did at least give me generous space on account of my presumed lunacy), it turned out to be wonderfully engineered for just this purpose, even if film changing is a bit of a challenge if you only have two hands. The New York street photographer of the 1940s, Weegee, knew what he was on to.

Here’s the first hand held shot in one of those many broken down old towns in central California:

So, all in all, this Crown Graphic experiment has all the makings of a beautiful friendship, once I learn to load those film holders correctly.

Is it enough if you just enjoy it?

2005-07-12T17:56:00.000-07:00

It was the height of the tech boom. 1999. A close friend of mine, maybe the person I care more for than anyone I know, had hit it big. He's a modest man, not given to self-aggrandisement. But he had had a tough childhood, he had married the woman of his dreams relatively late in life and he had had made a son of whom he was justly proud, even though the making had come rather late.

So for the first time, he had said 'What the heck!. I'm going to get a beautiful place, the better to see the wife and child grow'. And because the wife, at her not-so-tender age had expressed an interest in the piano, something very close to my friend's heart, why, he went out and got her the very best he could afford, to be installed in the place of honor in his splendid, new estate in America's most hallowed zip code. Not only was this piano imported directly from Germany but it came replete with the maker's signature, no less.

I will never forget the look of sheer delight on his face the day it arrived. 'Thomas' he called excitedly, 'You have got to see this thing'. Now while my friend was endowed with something akin to perfect pitch, he couldn't play a note if you paid him. But he knew the instrument of his choice was capable of great things. Indeed, the sound was beyond compare. My friend had invited a classical pianist to put the instrument through its paces and some four of Chopin's Nocturnes later you new that heaven was close indeed.

For a while there after that magical evening I lost track of him and his wife, the pianist in the making. He survived the fallout in the markets in 2000, moved on to better things and took the wife with him. Then we happened to bump into one another again and wiled away a pleasant evening over a couple of bottles of Napa's finest with the food prepared just so.

"She cannot play to save her life", he said, once well into his cups. "Come now", I responded, "let's not be so cruel. After all, you cannot fault the effort she puts into the thing". For try she did. Twice weekly lessons, endless practice, scores by the....well...score. If effort correlated with results, the woman would have surpassed Horowitz. Sadly, she was proof of just one more example that you cannot put in what God leaves out, and that fateful evening, my friend had realized the truth of the matter, cruel as it may be. His piano was nothing more than a piece of beautiful furniture. It was a Leica in a glass case. There to be admired, but if the aesthetic senses of the world were to be saved, never to be used.

So is it enough if you just enjoy it? Does it matter that you have spent the earth and accomplished nothing except, maybe, a blip on the manufacturer's bottom line. Do you grin and bear it and say, well, I tried?

The economic reality, of course, is that without consumers like my friend there would be no economy. Ferrari owners who cannot drive. Steinway owners who cannot play. And Leica owners who cannot take a photograph. But it is not fair to denigrate these folks. They are, after all, a source of cheap supply of the world's finest equipment to those of us who dare not, or cannot, buy it new.

An exchange of shared values

2005-07-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

The UPS driver was getting used to the routine.

Every Friday there was a delivery to the estate from B&H in New York. Place your order for film or paper or printing inks on a Sunday and the following Friday, as sure as the Government wants your money every April 15th, UPS arrives at your door with the supplies.

A First Class Business selling First Class Products delivered by a First Class Business.

Now this little haven in the undiscovered central coast of California, has much to recommend it. Beautiful landscape, vineyards as far as the eye can see (not least the few acres of Zinfandel we pride ourselves on, affording isolation from all and sundry, and looking gorgeous in the process) and fine, honest Americans.

So we got to chatting, every Friday, our UPS man and I. There’s something about UPS that encourages that sort of relationship. FedEx doesn’t have it. Too harried, no time for civilized discourse. The grandly named United States Post Office obviously does not. Are you going to trust someone who takes your tax dollars? But no one refers to the UPS man. It’s always our UPS man.

So after a few months of this routine, and after copious quantities of Portra, Gold and Epson paper and inks had been delivered, it was natural to graduate to first name terms. I’m Marty. Hi, I’m Thomas.

And thus it went for a few more months. Ice is hard to break and these UPS chaps have it in their veins in abundance. As is well known, every one wants a UPS man of their own.

Then, the other day, Marty opens up with “I’m giving a concert at Castoro this Sunday at 3 p.m.”

Let me start by saying that Castoro makes the second best zinfandel on the Central Coast. Needless to add, Chateau Winston, named after my son, a.k.a. the family abode, is superior. Both reside in that small area of paradise known as the Templeton Gap, west of Highway 101 and south of Highway 46. The world’s best Zinfandel grapes make their home there.

Before I could ask 'What do you play’ Martin Paris proferred a CD with a picture of him on the cover, acoustic guitar and all. Without thinking, after profuse thanks, I offered that I was a photographer and could I please inscribe a copy of my book for you? The thought of commerce did not remotely enter my head. After all, it hardly needs saying that playing classical instruments or taking art photographs are two of the least commercial enterprises on this God’s earth. So we made an exchange. Marty’s Spanish guitar playing, all of his own compositions, is simply wonderful. His generosity of spirit and basic sense of American decency unsurpassed. My book of picture is....well, you be the judge.

So we exchanged good wishes. Marty signed his CD “Thomas - All My Best” and I reciprocated with “For Martin - with thanks for the beauty you have brought us”.

This little episode, seemingly insignificant in the grand panoply of life, brings us back to the central beliefs of these essays. Show your work and you will be rewarded. The rewards may be psychic rather than financial, but they are deep and lasting.

Publish a book. Now. Have something to exchange.

The vines doing their thing on the estate, framed by a cottonwood.

Anonymous writes

2005-07-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

Now and then Anonymous soils these pages with his Comments. Or detritus, more accurately.

He is always Anonymous.

After all, would you want anyone to know that your grammar is that of the mean streets, and your mental capacity somewhere around Second Grade?

No problem. Clean up of Anonymous's leavings takes as long as is required to hit the 'Delete Comment' button and life goes on unsullied by life's losers.

However, now and then, old Anonymous writes something so completely inane, that his nonsense rises out of the field of tragedy and migrates to the truly hilarious. Here, for your amusement, are some of Anonymous's best:

On my piece about Cartier-Bresson: "All his pictures were posed anyway".

On 'Film is Dead' (Anonymous had lots of foul mouthed company on this one - the truth hurts): "All digital photographs look alike, anyway, which is why I use film". "Just because you have gone all digital, don't expect real photographers to".

Anonymous, predictably gets tired after two minutes of reading. It's something he does so rarely, after all. Had he spared a third minute of his worthless time here he would have divined that I do not use a digital camera, none of which blinds me to the reality that Film Is Dead.

On 'Make Mine Monochorome': "Yes, color is hard, which is why I use black and white".

On 'Losing my (large format) Virginity', where I refer to my Harris Tweed cap and Tartan tripod bag, both purchased when I was one of Her Majesty's loyal subjects some 30 years ago: "Harris Tweed cap and Scottish tartan tripod bag. You Americans make me laugh".

On 'Throw away your lens cap and case': "Unlike you, I keep a lens cap on my pristine Leica at all times to avoid having the sun burn a hole in the shutter". (No, I'm not making this up). Guess how many great photographs this one takes.

On 'Rot' which debunks all the silliness about Art poseurs using plastic cameras: "If you weren't such a bigot you would get a Lomo, a fine (sic) made Russian camera and take some really good pictures".

So, Mr. Anonymous, keep 'em coming and we will be pleased to add to our list, allowing all and sundry to join us in a good laugh.

Stop wasting Time - Part II

2005-07-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

My time is worth a great deal to me. Every day, like you, I have less of it left. So, accepting that we were placed on this world to work, and to work productively and hard, I seek every opportunity to waste as little time as possible on the mechanical aspects of life that can be delegated.

Success in life, whatever your sphere of endeavor, is highly correlated with your ability and willingness to delegate. It frees up your time to do greater things. There is no greater fallacy than that old saw that believes ‘If you want a job done well, do it yourself’. The right answer, of course, is ‘If you want a job done well, find someone who can do it better than you’. Then spend your time on a higher value added task.

Now sometimes the economics of the equation make delegation impossible, so your alternative is to find the most efficient tools for the job and throw in some sweat equity.

These rules are broadly applicable, every bit as germane to the world of photography’s more dreary mechanical aspects as they are to your many unrelated fields of endeavor.

Accepting that no rational person makes traditional darkroom prints, as discussed above (see 'Stop wasting Time - Part I'), your lightroom technology, whether you use film or digital, will include a computer and an ink jet printer. As you progress, your computer will grow many appendages, including scanners if you are a film user, back-up hard drives to keep your data safe, CD drives, digital card readers, tablets for outlining areas in Photoshop which you wish to creatively alter, and maybe wireless boxes to permit you to process and print from any room in the home.

In other words, before you know it, you will have a lot of stuff attached to your computer. And this is where your decision is made for you. The operating system software made by Microsoft, Windows, is fundamentally unsuited for the photographer who cannot afford substantial support staffs to keep it running. It is inherently unstable. Replete with bugs, patches and fixes it is open season for the bad people out there looking to steal your time and money, using a variety of viruses, worms, spyware, you name it.

The alternatives, of course are few. Unless you are technically skilled in Linux and its variations, the non-technical user only has one alternative and that, of course, is Apple.

‘Not an economic proposition’ you immediately respond. ‘Why, I can get a great PC for $500. So I’ll run some virus checking software now and then’.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

You have relapsed to your darkroom days and once more placed no value on your time.

I made the transition to Apple from the PC three years ago, tired of blue screens, interminable reboot cycles, jobs lost half way through, mysterious lock ups, endless bug upgrades, the list goes on. Over the 5 years of using a Windows machine, I would estimate that daily reboots probably wasted an aggregate of 100 hours annually as I tried to get things to work. That’s 500 hours of my life wasted. For an average wage earner making $50 per hour, that translates to $25,000. Twenty five thousand dollars! To say nothing of the opportunities lost for doing other things. So the PC is simply not an economical proposition.

Now after three wonderful, trouble free years with my iMac G4, I am having to upgrade. During that time, the iMac has locked up once. Once. Predictably, it was running a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet at the time. No, the upgrade will not be to a Windows machine. Rather, it will be to an iMac G5. As I still use the dead medium of film for much my work, though digital is almost there, my scanning technology has improved over the past three years to a point where scans from medium and large format originals are simply too large for the G4 to work as fast as I like. When I eventually transition to 100% digital work flow, large files sizes will remain the order of the day.

This harks back to the reason for this piece, of course, namely that time is precious. Do not waste it. With my nephew’s help - he has forgotten more about technology than I will ever know - we ran some comparison tests loading a large file, some 250 megabytes, into G4 and a G5 iMacs. Mine took 80 seconds to load in Photoshop, his 20. So a minute saved for every large file, multiplied by 5 when you take into account file rotation, application of curves, sharpening and print spooling, translates to over 30 hours saved a year if you process just one picture a day. Now add whatever amount of time is needed to debug your Windows PC, run virus checks, upgrade Windows monthly, and so on, and you have just paid for your Mac. Three times.

Stop wasting time with bad tools. Get a Mac for your photography. It’s the cheapest computer there is.

Stop wasting Time - Part I

2005-07-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

You need some woodworking done in your home. Two laborers show up bidding to do the work. One brings with him only hand tools. Not a motor or power source in sight, save his well developed biceps. The other comes with an assistant and every power tool known to man. Both come recommended, so you know the quality of the work is not an issue.

Which do you choose? The romantic aspects of the craftsman with the brawny arms notwithstanding, you obviously choose the man with the power tools and the assistant. He will be faster, his work more dimensionally accurate and less of your precious time will be taken up with the sawing and hammering that ensues. Plus it will cost you less.

In that example the value of your time is irrelevant as you are not doing the work in either scenario.

Now translate the problem to one of making photographic prints. You pride yourself on traditional darkroom techniques, you set up your darkroom, prepare the quickly aging chemicals and potter about in the dark, shading here and burning there, never quite sure how it will turn out, the while praying that little Johnny will not come into your miserable, smelly work area and destroy yet another box of printing paper.. You are automatically constrained to monochrome, of course, because it is beyond any rational person’s effort to home process color prints using traditional chemical means. So right there you have excluded 99% of your audience. When all is done and the print fixed, you pray it will look something like what you want when the light is switched on (you did put the unexposed paper away first, didn’t you?) and luckily, even if it does, your are still faced with the task of washing the prints in an attempt to render them permanent, drying, glazing, and on and on. You have retained the artisan with the hand tools.

You and the artisan have failed to notice one key thing about life. Technology has moved on. Both of you have unconsciously placed a very low value on your time.

The power tool photographic worker, meanwhile, having established a well rehearsed routine, has used Photoshop or whatever his application of choice is, done what dodging and burning is needed, removed dust spots (he only needs to do this once, ever, while the artisan must do it on every print) and spooled out twenty print jobs to his computer and left it to print while getting on with other more important things. Like taking more photographs.

The power tool worker’s level of retouching and corrections is infinitely superior and his prints are all identical. Exactly, you say, see, they are all identical. No two of my prints are ever alike. Obviously not. Your are technically incapable of making identical prints as your technology is inept. Making prints that look different is nothing more or less than a statement of your incompetence and refusal to recognize that times have changed. And they have changed for the better.

You tell yourself that none of that makes any sense, of course, as your traditional darkroom print is so much better. Of course, it is impossible for you to make that statement, as you have never mastered the modern technology of the computer print, but it makes you feel self satisfied and happy. Your time, in other words, is worth very little.

The reality is that not only is your print not better than the ink jet worker’s, you produce one for every twenty or thirty his modern machinery outputs. His artistic output is thus many times yours, his chances of acceptance and success commensurately greater. Worst of all for you, the artisan, is that the consumer cares not how the print was made. He just cares about the result. Unless you are showing your work to those sad souls who collect equipment and cannot take a picture to save their lives (why would you waste your time doing that?), believe me, no one will ever ask you what camera you used or - I mean how comical - inquire whether this is a chemical or ink jet print!

You already have a computer or you would not be reading this. Supremely competent ink jet printers are available for under $100. Photoshop Elements retails for a similar amount unless it happens to come free with your printer.

Then, when you become supremely successful, the resulting tripling of your time for photography certainly enhancing your prospects greatly, you can delegate all printing to some poor toad who does this for a living and get rid of the printing drudgery for once and all.

So what’s your excuse?