noise to signal:
Photography

In which I return to an old love

I finished a roll of film this morning.

It's funny how unremarkable that statement would have been even three years ago. Or — to be more precise — before mid-October, 2005. In early October I was shooting on three cameras: A Canon 10d dSLR, a Canon G3 digicam (point and shoot), and my beloved Leica M7 (film, nearly always Kodak Tri-X).

In mid-October of 2005, I bought the then-new Canon 5d, and everything changed. Suddenly I had a digital SLR that delivered higher quality image files than I could get out of 35mm film.

To quote myself from that month:

I have *never* gotten prints like this from another 35mm form factor camera ... I'm not sure what all of this means. I doubt I'll use the 5d to shoot on the street (it's still too big for me to feel comfortable using it that way, and I still love the texture of tri-x for that work). But for anything else... I think I've crossed over completely, now.

As it turns out, I answered my own question. After getting the 5d, I've shot exactly two rolls of film, and developed... none. Every time I thought about shooting with my Leica I thought "oh, geez, $20 a roll for film and processing, plus the trip to the lab to drop it off, and the trip back to pick it up which has to be while they're open, and then the scanning, and the dust spotting..." and I'd pick up my 5d or the G9 instead.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I was at a work retreat and got to play with a corporate VP's Leica M8. A couple of minutes with that camera reminded me exactly why I've never loved another camera the way I love my Leica. Instead of trying to explain here, I'll point you to a good essay from the New Yorker on the Cult of Leica.

This sent me into an annoying swarm of circling thoughts — how shooting on the street just doesn't work that well with the 5d or the G9 — maybe I should bite the bullet and buy an M8 — holy crap that's six thousand dollars, I could buy a second 5D and still have money left over for all three of us to have a great trip to Italy — but dammit I haven't been happy shooting on the street — that's because the 5D and G9 don't work that well on the street — what about an M8 — $6K — that's 300 rolls of film and processing — but all the money and processing — 5D and G9 not so good on the street — etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.

That lasted a few days and I was getting pretty tired of the circling. Finally, in the shower one morning, I had two insights that made everything more clear.

First, and most important, I realized that I had been penalizing the moment of capture in favor of ease of processing. That is to say, instead of using the tool that made shooting on the street the easiest, when split-second timing and getting into a good flow is key, I had been using tools that made it easier to process the images, when I was sitting at my computer and had plenty of time to deal with the images.

Second, I realized that I don't really shoot that many frames when I'm shooting on the street. Even at a roll a week, that works out to almost six years of shooting before I hit the cost of an M8.

So I loaded up my Leica with Tri-X, put the 50mm lens on it, and started carrying it with me. I've returned to my old habit of taking the bus downtown, skipping the next bus to work, and photographing in the 15 minutes or so that gives me between busses.

Will I keep doing this? I don't know. I haven't developed the film, after all, and I haven't scanned any of it. Maybe the hassle will prove to be too much.

But for now... oh, it's such bliss to be shooting with my Leica again.

Some thoughts on the G9 and classes of cameras

I was going to write a longish essay about how great the Canon Powershot G9 is, and how it does have some drawbacks, but none of them significant, and that overall it's pretty fricken awesome, but then Ken Tanaka wrote it for me: It might be... It could be...

The only thing I'd add is the point I've made to several people over the last couple of weeks, that this isn't trying to be, nor should it be, the same level of quality as a digital SLR. There's a long history of photographers trying to find the magic combination of film, developer, and lens that would give them medium format quality out of a 35mm camera, and the reality was that 35mm film can only hold so much data.

In the digital world, the same holds true, although at this point in history everything's moved down one in size. I'd put photos that come out of my Canon 5d against any 6x4.5 medium format image without a second thought. Photos I shot at ISO 3200 in near darkness are no more grainy than ISO 100 images I've shot on film, and the amount of fine detail captured is much greater.

The G9 isn't going to perform at that level. And that's totally fine. It's not meant to. In my mind, the 5D is now my medium format camera, and the G9 is my pocketable 35mm camera, with all the inherent limitations of the smaller form factor — but all of the benefits, too. It's small. I can put it in my pocket. I can carry it everywhere and not notice. The shutter is, it pains me to say, quieter than my Leica.

Of course, there are things I don't like, but most of those are pretty idiosyncratic, or at least more dependent on the way I shoot. I'd honestly prefer if it had fewer features. The number of options and shooting modes and customizations one can do is overwhelming. I'm glad the optical viewfinder is there, but I wish it was more usable.

Those are nits, though. I've shot with nothing but the G9 since I got it, partly because I wanted to force myself to learn to use it, and partly because, you know... it's a fun little camera.

This morning on the street

I'm photographing on the street. Out of the corner of my eye I see a rentacop. You know the exact type, with the pseudo-official uniform, utility belt dripping with gear that acts as the equator to his globe-like shape, surly look, bad close cropped haircut. I ignore him until he inevitably approaches me.

"Hey, you can't take pictures of people like that."

I'm not at all in the mood. "Actually, I can." I keep walking.

He follows me. "It's against the law."

I sigh. "Actually, state law, national law, and a recent New York supreme court ruling all affirm my right to be doing this. Now, it is illegal in Canada, where a person's right to their image is more protected. But perfectly fine here."

His face is turning purple while I say that. "Well! You can't take pictures of our building. I should confiscate your camera."

I smile. "Now we're getting somewhere. First, again, state and national law affirm my right to shoot whatever I want while I'm on a public thoroughfare. Second, it's illegal for you to exceed your authority or impersonate a police officer, and arguably by threatening to confiscate my camera you're doing just that."

He sputters. "Well! Well! Stay out of our building, I'm warning you."

I smile pleasantly. "Thanks, I will."

It always pays to do your homework.

• Bert Krages' excellent Photographer's Rights flyer


• Popular Photography on The War On Photographers


• The New York Supreme Court ruling in favor of Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Photographer shout-out: John Lok

Despite my feelings about the Seattle Times' editorial quality, they're lucky enough to have several terrific photographers on their staff.

This morning, one of them knocked it out of the park with two very different photo essays. John Lok has a great series of photos about people living the Iraq war here in the US:

And in the "Gender: F" insert, he has a very different series of photos of women finding the perfect bridal gown:

It's always great to see photographers getting more interesting photos into a daily paper. In the first image, he's using a Holga "toy camera" with a crappy lens and light leaks to beautiful effect. In the second image, he's at the other end of technique, with a tricky-to-do-well combination of flash on the bride (to keep her sharp) plus a slow shutter speed and a bit of camera pan to add some motion to the background and a little glow to the bride.

Nice work, John.

For more on either technique: Michelle Bates has a new book out on toy camera photography which I've heard is very good. I'd be remiss if I didn't also include a link to the Strobist site here — if you want to learn more about the kind of technique John's using in the second photo, I can't think of a better place to start.

(Both photos copyright John Lok and the Seattle Times, of course)

This is how it's supposed to work

How do you get prints in shows? By submitting them to shows.

It's a pretty simple equation, but one that's eluded me for quite some time... never quite getting it together to get photos submitted, which means a steadily growing backlog of images that people only ever see, if they see them at all, at 600 pixels wide on a computer screen.

Once you actually submit photos, on the other hand... Remember my street portfolio I started posting back in August? I was pleased to hear on my voicemail tonight that one of the photos from that series was accepted into the Photographic Center Northwest's juried Member's Show, which will run from December 1 through January 15th -- coincidentally timed to end at the same time as my time home with The Kid.

Which is very nice indeed.

Photosynth

It's always exciting when I can finally talk about, and show people examples of, something that our research team has been working on for a while. In this case, the very cool Photosynth.

From the Photosynth site: "Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space."

One of the interesting things here is that images of any resolution or angle are useful as part of the data. Crappy camera phone image of a detail? That might be more detail than is contained in any of the other photos, so it might be useful for zooming in. Accidental shot of the ceiling when you bumped your shutter relase? Also a valuable part of the data set.

Shooting action to convey motion

Doug Plummer has a terrific post today about shooting action to convey motion, which is a terrible five-word summary for a post that covers not only technique but also how to watch, how to see, and how to shoot in that kind of situation.

I am not looking at the LCD every time to decide if I’m done. That screen is too seductive. You want to examine every shot, but it’s crucial that you don’t or you’ll take offline the part of your brain that is engaged with the moment and seeing the photo.

A short note on technique

As a demonstration of my philosophy about "prime" lenses, I wanted to mention that all of the photos of Montreal I'm posting this week were shot with the same lens -- a 50mm f/1.4 prime -- which was the only lens I brought with me.

It did, of course, limit my choices, but it also meant that every time I saw a picture, there was one less decision to make about how to capture it. I never had to change lenses, and my camera kit was as light as it could be while still capturing the level of quality and amount of information I feel I need to have.

And, as you can see already, it wasn't that limiting.

Still at it

Here's one of Six Flags for Joe.

Update: Vince suggested that a less blurry version might be better, and he may be right.

Fake real model photography

Remember the super cool aerial photography I linked to a couple of weeks ago?

One of my co-workers found a great article talking about how to do the same thing in post: Fake Model Photography.

And since we're all enjoying the Bird's Eye imagery in Windows Live Local, it seemed a natural step to use that imagery to experiment on.

My first attempt, with this set of little boxes, worked pretty well:

But my second attempt, using this tasteful little place, worked a lot better:

Greg is doing some fun ones, too: Lady Liberty and a super awesome Doughnut.

Update: Here's a nice image I did of Columbia University.

How about some neat smokestacks? (NYC folks -- any idea what they are?)

Don't talk to me about megapixels... this is a real camera.

THE MAMMOTH CAMERA OF GEORGE R. LAWRENCE

Early on a bright spring morning in 1900 a large horse-drawn van arrived at the workshop of Chicago camera builder J. A. Anderson. His most recent construction, the world's largest camera, was ready for delivery and it required 15 men to load it into the van. They took it to the Chicago & Alton Railway Station where it was laboriously transferred to a flat car and moved to Brighton Park, some 6 miles from the city. There, they carried the 900 lbs camera a quarter of a mile to a suitable location in an open field. Under the direction of the camera's designer, George R Lawrence, it was set up and pointed at the brand-new train standing in the distance. The Alton Limited was the pride of the Chicago & Alton Railway and the company had commissioned Lawrence to make the largest photograph possible of it, sparing no expense. Lawrence obliged by designing and overseeing the construction of a camera that could utilize glass plates 8 x 4½ ft in size. On that day he made a successful photograph of the train and with it he also made photographic history.

(via The Online Photographer)

Found photos

The anonymous owner of this site collects old cameras, which sometimes have film still in them, from years and years ago. If he's lucky he's able to develop the film. And then we're lucky enough because he posts his Lost Films for us to see.

Fantastic stuff. Go check it out.

Super cool aerial photography

I need to go to sleep, so I won't give any more description than to point you to this selection of Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs.

Remember: These are real. They aren't models.

The WhiBal

One of the great things about digital photography is how many choices it's given us that we didn't have before. A good example is film speed: With film, unless you're shooting with certain specific kinds of cameras (or you're willing to suffer tiresome workarounds), once you put a roll of 100 speed film in, you're basically stuck at that speed until you've finished the roll. With digital, if you go from a bright situation to a dark one and back again, you can switch film speeds to your heart's content.

You can do the same thing with color balance, too. Briefly, for those of you who don't know about color balancing: light comes in different colors. Straight sunlight is white; sunsets obviously are more orange. Cloudy days are much more blue, indoor (tungsten) lights are very orange (which you've noticed if you've taken pictures on film indoors without flash), and flash is slightly more blue than daylight. Professional photographers doing "color critical" work on film will use an elaborate system of color meters and filters to balance the light before it gets to the film, and work hard in the darkroom to make sure the color is exactly right (or, in my case, as right as I was willing to spend the time for).

In digital, you can do the same thing with color balance you can do with film speed. Outside? Set it to daylight. Inside? Set it to... uh... whatever inside is. A little lightbulb, usually. I can't remember. I don't really pay attention much because I always shoot in RAW mode, rather than JPEG, which means that I can easily change the white balance after the fact. I open the RAW file in Photoshop, choose the color balance I want, and... it's still not quite right.

This is a fundamental problem with color balance: the presets are never quite right. Tungsten lights change color over their lifetime. Fluorescent lights are all over the map. Sunlight with a bit of cloudyness is going to be slightly blue. And so forth. Now, in Photoshop, you can tweak the color balance to your heart's content, but that takes a long time.

The solution, and the point of all of that long, overwordy introduction, is to have a neutral reference point to balance off of. And the excellent tool I've been using for that for a few months is called a WhiBal.

You can follow that link to learn everything the manufacturer wants you to know about it, watch the video demos, and find ordering information -- it's about US$40. I'm just going to show you some examples of how much of a help it is. And no, I'm not getting a kickback from them, although I've sold enough of these for them I should (hint, hint, Michael :-)

Here we have a scene lit by sodium vapor lamps, which may look vaguely familiar. On the left is the original scene; on the right is my reference photo of the WhiBal card.

And here are the corrected versions, sampling off of the WhiBal card.

Now, I could have corrected it by hand to get that color -- but this is so much faster and easier that there's really no point.

Here's another example. These daffodils were on our kitchen counter, under our tungsten lights that have yellow glass shades. On the left, obviously, the uncorrected one. And remember, the entire process was "open both files in Adobe Camera RAW, sample off of the WhiBal card, click done." It just about took more time to type that than to do it.

One point I want to make clear is that this isn't just for extreme situations like the tungsten and sodium vapor lights in the previous examples. Here's a picture of Rusty I took outside our house. On the left, the uncorrected one looks OK, really -- a little blue, maybe, but still basically fine. The corrected image on the right, though, is a much richer and more accurate image.

So, go check the WhiBal out. It's a huge timesaver and a great tool.

A peek behind the curtain

The title could describe the photo I'm posting today, which I realized only after I wrote it, but what I really meant is that I thought this would be a good picture to use as a another demonstration of what a photo goes through here at Noise to Signal before it gets posted.

I have what could be described as a manipulative printing style — what we might have once called "heavy on darkroom technique". (And yes, that sentence was designed to make my friends still working in the darkroom cringe, because I'm a bad person.)

Nearly all black and white printers manipulate contrast and burn and dodge to some extent, but more manipulative printers treat the original image as no more than a basis to start from. This doesn't mean that we use it to cover for poor technique at exposure time — in fact it's much easier to be a manipulative printer if you're starting with a pefectly exposed image. As Ansel Adams (himself an extremely manipulative printer) used to say, "the negative is the score, the print is the performance".

My own printing style is heavily influenced by a photographer named Roy DeCarava, who is a master of getting beautiful, rich, expressive detail in the shadow areas of his prints, with very few light values in the photo.

So, on to the demo. Let's start with the raw image, straight out of the camera with a default conversion applied. You can see that it's pretty bland, with none of the richness I'm looking for in a final image. Plus, hey, it's in color, which isn't what I want for this photo. (There's a whole discussion here about how I still see mostly in black and white that will have to wait for a future post) There are, however, the bones of an interesting photo here.

A default conversion to black and white looks a little better — it's starting to get more graphical, which is what I'm looking for — but it's still pretty gray overall.

Increasing the contrast while converting it to black and white with The Imaging Factory's Convert To BW Pro brings it closer to what I envisioned when I saw the photo originally, but it's still not quite right.

And here's the final version. I've increased the contrast on the flag in the window, increased the contrast on the bricks on the left side of the image, and added some edge burning to the left, right, and bottom edges. In the web image the detail in the shadows to the right of the flag seems to have disappeared, but there's plenty hinted at there in the print version.

And, because I can't resist, here's another "that 5d captures so damn much data I can't stand it" crop. What's that in the window below the one with the flag in it? Why, it's a dancing Shiva (?) and an elephant tucked in the corner. I could probably extract a bit more sharpness out of these, but I don't really want them to call too much attention to themselves in the final print.

A peek behind the curtain

The title could describe the photo I'm posting today, which I realized only after I wrote it, but what I really meant is that I thought this would be a good picture to use as a another demonstration of what a photo goes through here at Noise to Signal before it gets posted.

I have what could be described as a manipulative printing style — what we might have once called "heavy on darkroom technique". (And yes, that sentence was designed to make my friends still working in the darkroom cringe, because I'm a bad person.)

Nearly all black and white printers manipulate contrast and burn and dodge to some extent, but more manipulative printers treat the original image as no more than a basis to start from. This doesn't mean that we use it to cover for poor technique at exposure time — in fact it's much easier to be a manipulative printer if you're starting with a pefectly exposed image. As Ansel Adams (himself an extremely manipulative printer) used to say, "the negative is the score, the print is the performance".

My own printing style is heavily influenced by a photographer named Roy DeCarava, who is a master of getting beautiful, rich, expressive detail in the shadow areas of his prints, with very few light values in the photo.

So, on to the demo. Let's start with the raw image, straight out of the camera with a default conversion applied. You can see that it's pretty bland, with none of the richness I'm looking for in a final image. Plus, hey, it's in color, which isn't what I want for this photo. (There's a whole discussion here about how I still see mostly in black and white that will have to wait for a future post) There are, however, the bones of an interesting photo here.

A default conversion to black and white looks a little better — it's starting to get more graphical, which is what I'm looking for — but it's still pretty gray overall.

Increasing the contrast while converting it to black and white with The Imaging Factory's Convert To BW Pro brings it closer to what I envisioned when I saw the photo originally, but it's still not quite right.

And here's the final version. I've increased the contrast on the flag in the window, increased the contrast on the bricks on the left side of the image, and added some edge burning to the left, right, and bottom edges. In the web image the detail in the shadows to the right of the flag seems to have disappeared, but there's plenty hinted at there in the print version.

And, because I can't resist, here's another "that 5d captures so damn much data I can't stand it" crop. What's that in the window below the one with the flag in it? Why, it's a dancing Shiva (?) and an elephant tucked in the corner. I could probably extract a bit more sharpness out of these, but I don't really want them to call too much attention to themselves in the final print.

George Lange

Nancy pointed me to George Lange's portfolio site. Great portraits.

Don't fall over or nothin'...

... but I've finally updated my portfolio site.

I was malingering, and avoiding, and not getting around to it, and then I discovered Bill Wadman's very cool Flash app, PhotoFolio, which makes the job of creating and updating a portfolio site -- or indeed any kind of photo gallery -- trivial.

It's probably not what I want as a permanent solution, but:

• in the short term, I've finally updated my site
• in the medium term, it'll be super easy to throw new images up there
• in the long term, if I don't like this site, it'll give me more motivation to build a real one

Take a look, let me know what you think: David Adam Edelstein Photography

The Noise to Signal holiday print sale!

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, out of the goodness of my heart I'm here to help you with your holiday shopping.

Here's the deal: For US$40, I will send you a beautiful 8x10 (that's 20cm x 25cm) print of any of my photos on this site, postage paid. This obviously works out to be a better deal for those of you in other countries. Remember who loves you, baby.

Sale prices are good for the month of November, and will be sent out in plenty of time for you to get them to your loved ones for Chanukwanzmas, even if those loved ones are, say, someone other than you. Although these would look equally lovely on your own wall, don't you think? You're right. You'd better get an extra for yourself.

Do you love the ladies of the circus? Maybe you're more interested in the colors of the fall? Or maybe you'd just like to get dirty.

Today's project

Scan. Print.

Next steps: Edit. Send out portfolio.

Possibly too much data

Canon's begun shipping a new camera, the 5d, which I'm seriously thinking of upgrading to. I've been reading reviews and looking at samples, and recently I found some samples from the 5d on Canon's site.

They're the usual weirdo sample pictures that camera manufacturers post. Generally they're designed to show off some quality of the camera -- for example, the nice rendition of the subtleties of the whites in the dress, below.

I noticed something when I opened them up in Photoshop, though. Once you're talking about 13 megapixels, with a great lens at it's sharpest aperture, you may see detail that the grain structure in film, or a lesser lens, might have obscured before.

For example, this model in a bridal gown looks lovely, and the whites are rendered nicely indeed...

... but she also needs a little more cover on her chin.

Another model shows off how nice the out-of-focus areas look ...

... but the in-focus areas show that the tip of her nose is dry, and her pores could be a bit cleaner.

The Imaging Factory's Convert to BW Pro 3.0

I'm not much in the habit of recommending photo tools, but for those of you doing black and white work in digital more than occasionally, I have to recommend The Imaging Factory's Convert to BW Pro 3.0.

Now, normally I don't go in for most of the filters and whatnot that are available to do stuff to digital images -- either I find them effects tacky, or I'm good enough of a Photoshop jockey to find the redundant, but this is an exception. I had been happy with the techniques I was using to convert color images to black and white -- pure channel mixing by hand, or Rob Carr's excellent method he developed for Greg Gorman. And I'm not sure that I couldn't get the results I'm seeing in Convert to BW Pro using those techniques -- but this is a lot easier, and works a lot more like the way I think than those other techniques do.

By way of an example, here's an image you've seen before, in the original and converted using their tool. I did no burning or dodging; the only thing I did outside their tool is to apply a bit of a split-tone effect. Like I said, it's not impossible that I could have done this without their tool... but it was much faster and easier. It's definitely worth the $99 to me, and definitely worth the 30 day trial to you to try out.

Check them out: The Imaging Factory.

(And thanks to Michael Reichmann for pointing me to it in the first place)

Split-toning in Photoshop

This is another one of those techniques that I was sure everyone knew about, but given that I've gotten a couple of questions about this picture of Rusty, I figured I should talk about how I did it.

The term split-toning comes from the wet darkroom. I'll quote the excellent description in this article on split-toning from Handcolor.com:

Split toning is when the toner acts only on certain areas of the print, the middle or low values, while leaving the rest of the print with no color change. The old Agfa Portriga (particularly in the matte finish) would often turn a beautiful purple-brown in the low values, while the rest of the image would remain unchanged. This resulted in prints with much greater apparent "depth."

I'm starting to really like the digital equivalent when I post black and white photos, for much the same reason. Pure black and white images are often a little washed out onscreen, especially when they're shown in context with color images. I suspect this has something to do with the way images are displayed on computer screens, but I don't really care enough to investigate. Also, prints (whether silver gelatin or inkjet) are never truly black and white -- they all have a little tint based on the emulsion, paper, and/or inks.

This technique would also work well for those of you printing black and white images on color printers.

OK, let's get to it. First, here's our regular black and white image. I've deliberately chosen one with strong contrast, to make the samples more obvious, but you can get beautiful results with much more subtle images.

The way I like to add color to a black and white image is to create a new color layer, fill it with the color of my choice, set the blending mode to multiply, and drop the opacity of that layer down. Here I've used #FF9000 and an opacity of 16%. I like the way it looks in the shadows, but the highlights look a little tacky to my eyes -- like they're behind a sheet of yellow glass or something.

Dropping the opacity of the layer to 6% makes the highlights look better, but now I'm not getting the richness in the shadows I liked before.

This calls for a special technique. First, let's bump the opacity of this layer back up to 16%. Now, on the layers palette menu, choose "blending options". In Windows, you can also find this on the right-click menu if you right-click on the name of the layer you want to affect.

Down in the bottom-right corner of the dialog box that comes up, you'll see a pair of sliders like these:

We're interested in the bottom one, here. What this slider does is change the transparency of the current layer based on the layer below it. Any gray tone that appears between the sliders is opaque; any gray tone that appears outside of the sliders is transparent. It's easier to understand if you fuss with it yourself, but here's an example: I've dragged the highlight slider to the left, so anywhere the layer below the current one has a gray value brighter than 140, the current layer is transparent.

As you can see, this gives kind of a patchy effect, but I'm getting closer to what I was looking for: the shadows are getting the tones, but the highlights are being left alone.

Now let's get tricky. Take a close look at the slider we just moved. Notice how it's got a line down the middle? Almost like you could, oh, I don't know, maybe... split it in two? Bingo.

Hold down the alt or option key, click on the right side of the white slider, and drag it to the right. Zout alours! The slider has split in two.

What happens when you split the slider is that it smooths out the transition between opaque and transparent in the current layer. Where before the pixels were either on or off, we now have a nice gradient: pixels below 106 are opaque; pixels above 170 are completely transparent; and between those two values the pixels are some intermediate step. This gives us a much nicer looking image:

Instead of the abrupt jumps between toned and not toned, we now have nice smooth transitions. My highlights are largely untouched, and my shadows have the richness I was looking for. Success!

You can, of course, use this same technique to end up with an image that's much colder in the shadows, too:

Here's the original again so you don't have to keep scrolling back and forth to compare:

I hope that turns out to be useful for some of you.

If you want to get really tricky, you can tone the shadows one color, and tone the highlights an entirely different color... but I'm going to leave that one as an exercise for the student.

Before and After, or, Destroying the Magic

A few of you have asked why it takes so much longer for me to get through the black and white shots than the color shots. Since I've also wanted to have an example online to show what I do to a negative in the darkroom (wet or digital), I figured I'd post a before-and-after of a typical image.

The original scan (top) is a little washed out -- none of the blacks are maximum black -- and it's a little gray overall.

In the finished (or nearly finished) one, I've increased the contrast in certain areas, darkened others, and I've brought the boy's face up a bit to focus the viewer's attention on him a little more. Overall the edited one has more of the luminous quality that I'm looking for in a good photo.

Rambling commentary:

There's constant (and largely boring) debate in the photographic community now that comes down to "how much manipulation is too much?" The thesis some traditional photographers is that you can "just take a photo into photoshop" and (here's where it gets sloppy) either it's way too easy to make a great photo, or it's way too easy to make a vivisected horror.

On the first point (and despite the fact that this has been hashed out again and again) I'd say that it takes just as much craft to make a great image digitally as it does traditionally -- but it's different skills. It's certainly much easier for me to adjust very detailed areas. For example, if I wanted to brighten up the whites of someone's eyes in the digital darkroom, I can just zoom in until their eyes fill my screen and I have plenty of control over fine details. In the wet darkroom, I could use a dilute potassium ferricyanide solution and a 0000 brush, but I'd be working 1:1 with no "undo"... so I'd probably just skip it.

On the other hand, there are a pile of things I don't have to think about in the traditional darkroom, like image resolution, bit depth, and contrast curves, which may alienate traditional photographers but is inarguably another set of skills that require a high level of craft to apply usefully.

This is why I've long argued that neither digital nor traditional photography are better than the other -- they're just different brushes, or different tools. No, a print from my Piezography inkjet system doesn't look like one of my selenium-toned silver gelatin prints on Ilford Multigrade or Agfa Classic -- but it doesn't look worse than them, either, just different.

Where traditional and digital come together is in the artist's eye, making decisions about what kind of look they want to end up with, what kind of manipulation to do, and how much is enough -- and this is where we get back to that issue with the vivisected images. Instead of getting pointlessly specific, I'll just say that photography now is where the Design profession was 20 years ago when new digital tools made it possible for anyone to format their headline type with bold+italic+underline+shadow. A small minority used the new tools with taste, delicacy, and grace, and another small minority is doing the same thing now with digital photography.

My personal aesthetic is to only do what I would have done anyway in a traditional darkroom. I never had much interest in changing the reality of my photos, either by blending two photos together or by using elaborate gradient filters, or fog filters, etc. etc... but not because any of those are Wrong: they're just not my aesthetic.

And even then, there are exceptions where I'll use a combination of highly manipulative techniques on a photo because... I want to.

It's an artistic decision.

My advance publicity team is working hard

Over a month before our planned sojourn di Bella Italia, my advance publicity team is putting out the word on the street, yo.

No, really what happened was that I got a beautiful e-mail asking me if I would be interested in participating in this beautiful, noisy, free one-sheet magazine that's distributed in Italy -- they were going to do an issue on circuses, and of course my weirdo friends at Circus Contraption popped up, and then I popped up, and they wanted to use some photos and include a little interview with me.

I was naturally tremendously flattered and said yes. They wrote back with some interview questions, I wrote back with some goofy answers, and here they are a few weeks later: Stirato Circus.

The menus are a little confusing, and the English version isn't up yet, but here's a direct link to the 830kb PDF of the Italian version. Don't miss the PDF of the poster that backs up the magazine, though -- it's a lovely circus image.

A meditation: shooting on the street

Shooting on the street is an odd way to experience the city -- the side effect of trying to be perfectly aware and open to everything that's going on around me is that I end up not actually taking in that much. On the best days, I'm responding on such a pure visual level that I don't really parse what I'm seeing until I'm past it.

Blocks later, I'm suddenly asking myself, "Hey, was that woman trying to get a dog to ride on her back?" Sometimes that doesn't happen until I'm looking at the proof sheets, days later.

Those are the best days -- totally focused, responding before I see, subconscious in control of the camera, with the conscious mind desperately trying to hang on with one hand while the other hand clutches its hat. It's pure perception, total responsiveness, better than any drug.

The other days, when the conscious mind takes over, are... less great. It's much more of a struggle. I'm responding on an intellectual level, not an emotional one, and it shows. The images tend to be better composed, but often cold -- I'm not feeling it emotionally when I shoot, so the picture ends up with little or no emotional content and don't "work" as well.

This continues to be one of my biggest struggles in photography. Partly I think it has to do with my design training and experience. Composing a photo comes naturally to me, and as a result it's easy to fall into the trap of composition without really considering the content. Sure, the relationship between the guy and the wall sets up a nice dynamic, but nothing's going on in that space -- he's boring, the wall's boring, nothing interesting is happening.

The final decisive moment

Photo legend (and personal hero of yours truly) Henri Cartier-Bresson has passed away.

French photo legend Cartier-Bresson dead

PARIS (Reuters) - Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, widely regarded as one of the great photographers of the 20th century, has died aged 95, LCI television reports.

The publicity-shy Cartier-Bresson, a founding member of the Magnum picture agency in 1947, died in the south of France, the private channel said on Wednesday.

The cause of his death was not immediately announced.

Cartier-Bresson made his name partly by being in the right place at the right time, a knack that enabled him to develop his talent for capturing on celluloid what he called the "decisive moment".

During a career in which he travelled to 23 countries, Cartier-Bresson documented the Spanish Civil war, the liberation of Paris during World War Two, the death of India's Mahatma Ghandi and the fall of Beijing to Mao Zedong's forces in 1949.

In 1954, the Frenchman also became the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union after the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin the previous year.

Thirty years later, Cartier-Bresson packed away his Leica camera and switched to the other passion in his life -- drawing.

Last year, the national library hosted a retrospective of Cartier-Bresson's work, grouping 350 classic shots and drawings almost 30 years after he gave up photography.

More than anything else, Cartier-Bresson taught me that there was a connection between my interest in Daoism and Zen, and my interest in photography, and that there were deep mysteries to explore in both.

He also taught me not to take that crap too seriously.

In a rare interview a few years ago, he famously exclaimed that "There is no mystery, no magic, nothing to photography except this! [wiggles his index finger]"

One of the funniest photo essays ever

I just read Mike Johnston's latest "Sunday Morning Photographer" column, Uses and Applications of 35mm Lenses, and laughed my way through the whole thing. An excerpt:

Fisheye: No known uses, except to illustrate fisheye effects in photo how-to books.

[ . . . ]

Fast 300mm: Fashion, catalog, runway, sports, nature, air shows. Important lens for pros, also for nature photographers. Tough for amateurs unless shooting surreptitious faces in crowds or critters. Status symbol. As fashion, looks grand when accessorizing a photo vest.

I've left the best stuff out of my excerpt, as extra enticement to follow the link for those of you who laughed at the above excerpts. For those of you who didn't, be happy, it means you're not a fricken' photo geek.

At least they credited me in the print edition

But they didn't, darn them, online.

Anyway: The Stranger reviews Circus Contraption's new show (last two paragraphs) and uses a very bad black-and-white conversion of this very nice photo (if I do say so myself).

Slides from digital files

Despite the seeming ubiquity of digital imaging these days, there's one annoying necessity that crops up every now and then: Slides. Juried shows often want them, you need them for Polaroid transfers, many galleries still prefer them, and so on.

The thing is, no matter how good your Epson or Canon printer is, you're not going to get slides out of it. There is of course the obvious workaround: Print pictures, shoot slides of prints. That annoys me, though: Digital, to me, is all about removing steps from the process of photography. Adding in a couple of generations of quality loss just doesn't make sense.

Fortunately there are machines that print digital files to slides, and service bureaus that run them. Unfortunately, they're (nearly) all exorbitantly expensive. Locally, I haven't been able to find any place that would do it for less than $10 or so, and up until two weeks or so ago the best I could find online was around $9.

Nota bene that's $9 per slide. $180 for a sheet of 20 slides? $360 to have two sets? I don't think so. Hell, I can get a good used film recorder for $1000. Five sheets of slides and I'd be money ahead.

This question gained urgency for me this last month, when I was working on a project for the new Circus Contraption show. They're a refreshingly low-tech production, but part of what that means is that these images are going to be projected with a slide projector. Which means I needed to deliver slides. Forty of them. Which I sure as shit wasn't going to do for $9 a slide.

Faced with the awful prospect of having to print the images, borrow a film SLR body (remember when I sold my Nikon gear? I don't own a camera that works well for shooting copy slides any more), set up lights, and go through the slow, laborious prospect of shooting copy slides... I hit Google again.

This time I hit pay dirt! I found Replicolor, a service bureau in Salt Lake City. Their price for 48 hour turnaround is (as of this writing) $3.75 per slide, which is much more reasonable. Heck, their price for four hour turnaround (which means, basically, next day service via FedEx) is $7.50 a slide -- less than the 48 hour turnaround price anywhere else. And to make it even sweeter, they offer a 20% discount for first-time customers, for a grand total of $3 each for my 40 slides. Yeah, I was all over that.

My only concern, of course, was the quality, but when the slides arrived today all worries vanished. The slides were crisp, color-accurate, and nicely mounted.

So here's how it works. Upload your files to Replicolor via your browser, e-mail, or their FTP server. Enter your order in their system. Sit back and wait.

Their main digital slides page lists the file formats they can accept, and mentions that you can also FedEx them a CD with files on it if you don't want to wait for your enormous files to upload to their server. The one piece of information missing is the pixel dimensions they can use, but an email asking for more information was answered very quickly (Thanks Scott!) with the details:

The largest size is:

4K - 4096x2732 Pixels - 33.5 Megabytes

8K - 8192x5460 Pixels - 135 Megabytes

The film recorder uses bicubic sampleing to size the file up or down. If files are larger than 30 Megs we run them at 8K.

So there you go. Skip the $9 a slide and up crowd, and go with a much more appropriately-priced choice. Replicolor is going to be my source of choice from now on.

Lensbaby baby!

For many photographers, switching to digital has no downsides: it's faster, there's no ongoing expense of film, etc. etc.

However, for those of us who like, perhaps, a slightly more "interpreted" image, there are many things we miss about film. Film grain is one -- with the option of either still shooting on film (which I do) or adding it after the fact in Photoshop (which will send you to hell, not that I have any opinions on it).

Another is the option of shooting with a Holga, which is a Chinese-made plastic camera with a beautifully crappy lens. Michelle Bates has some particularly good examples of what that camera allows one to do -- soft, surreal images that are photographic and painterly at the same time.

One option would be to try to mount the lens from a holga camera onto a body cap from a digital SLR, which I've spent some time contemplating, but never got up the gumption to do.

Even better, though, is a new option that Barbara Stewart-Thomas pointed me to a couple of days ago, called a Lensbaby. I'll let you go to the site for the full explanation, but briefly, it's a crappy lens mounted on the end of a piece of flexible plastic tubing, which is in turn mounted on a digital SLR body cap (see, I wasn't so crazy). It has the same kind of weirdo focus characteristics of a Holga lens, but goes the Holga one better by allowing the photographer to move the sweet spot around while shooting.

So of course I had to order one ($96 + shipping, from Portland so it got to me in two days), and of course I had to try it out this morning. Here then are five examples. The first one just shows off the weird depth of field. The next two show the "sweet spot" moving around. And the last two show the same image in color and black and white. I'm probably going to be using this mostly in black and white -- I think the look is more effective that way -- but it's interesting to see the almost impressionistic color effects.

The lens comes with several different "aperture rings", from f/2.8 to f/8, with f/5.6 the recommended "most versatile" aperture; I'm using the f/2.8 one here, because I wanted to see what the most extreme effect was.

Shooting with it is a very weird and cool and organic experience, especially at this wide aperture -- it's like hunting around in 3-d space for your subject.

Mark Tobey on artistic craft

I've been reading this great book Janel lent me, called The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, & the Wicked Witch of the West. From the back of the book:

As a young artist and musician Wesley Wehr became a friend and often a confidant of many of the painters, poets, and musicians who lived or worked in the Northwest in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on his journals, Wehr provides an engaging, intriguing, and informative series of vignettes [of many of these people].

Yesterday, I ran into two comments from painter Mark Tobey that I particularly enjoyed:

"My friend Takesaki used to tell me, 'Let nature take over in your work. Get yourself out of the way when you paint.' But, as it is wisely said in Zen: 'You must be prepared before the fire can take over.' This is what I mean when I say that an artist should concentrate on his technique, so that he has a mastery of his craft. Then, when inspiration arrives, its expression will not be hampered by some lack of mastery of craft. Unless you know how to move your fingers on the piano, how to play the notes, how can you make music? But, mind you, you should develop your technique expressively."

"You must have roots. You have to care about things and be excited by them. Young artists want to be 'original' too soon, so they're afraid of being influenced. What they end up with is a few gimmicks, which they call their style. I was interested in everything when I was young. You can waste yourself trying to be original -- that comes later. And don't squander your life trying to be your hometown's most fashionable painter! You just have to work and work and work until a real personality emerges."

Final camera gloat

... I promise.

I was just going to post the following photo as a photo, celebrating the return of the azalea buds at work, but when I zoomed in I noticed things I had never seen before.

On the right is the whole picture, with the area of interest indicated.

Note also that this was shot hand-held, with the shutter speed a bit too low for a confidently sharp image.

Now, the crop.

Who knew azaleas had little hairs on the ends of their leaves? Not me, that's for sure.

So, how sharp is that lens, anyway?

A couple of people have asked me for an example of why I'm so gaga over the new camera/lens combination (Canon 10D and Canon 24-70 f/2.8, for those of you visiting from Google).

So, anxious as I am to please my public, here's a sample. Remember this image from a couple of days ago, when I was at the UW trying out the new gear?

Here's a 100%, pixel-for-pixel crop from the "lower middle" of the image, if that makes any damn sense to anyone not currently occupying my skull, moderately sharpened to bring out the detail inherent in the image. Note the bit o' spider web in the corner; compare it to the full image, above.

This, my friends, is a sharp fricken' lens.

Update: Miz Becky just pronounced this an "above medium boring" photography-related post. Well, imagine my thrill. :-)

No more whingeing

... about digital cameras, at least.

For a while.

Probably.

Anyway... this is bound to be painfully boring for most regular readers of this site, but if you're not endlessly fascinated by the minutia of equipment decisions, just skip to the photos at the end.

To recap, here's where we've been.

• The Leica Digilux 2 was announced. I was tempted.


• Leica announced they were actually going to build a 10 megapixel digital "M", which is the digital camera I've wanted since, well, I started shooting digitally at all.


• But it's going to take two years.


• Suddenly the Digilux 2 is less exciting. It's inherently noisier and less flexible than the digital M will be, or a digital SLR.


• So maybe I should just get a new Nikon D70 when it comes out, since I got all them Nikon lenses.

To cut to the chase -- since even I'm bored with this story -- I made a radical choice and bought a Canon EOS 10d. Why? Here's a few random notes:

• I don't really like Nikon's digital SLRs. They work fine, sure, but they're just not up to the image quality of the Canons. They're n