The Mystery Woman, c. 1952

History has left the Mystery Woman a little fuzzy in more ways than one.

T.O.P. reader Stephen Edgar, from Ireland, recently encountered a mystery. He purchased a bag of old Kodachrome slides, and found to his surprise that most of them were pictures of the same attractive young woman, from more than fifty years ago.

Who could she be, he wondered?

As many snapshots do, the old pictures do have a certain amateurish charm. "Like most Kodachromes they've stood the test of time with little fading," writes Stephen. "I've dated the slides to 1952, using the mounts as guides. I wonder if T.O.P. readers would fancy a little detective work to see if anyone (particularly U.S. viewers) could give me any clues as to where this person might have lived, who she might be, and what happened to her. And how did these pictures end up in Ireland?"

Indeed...it makes you wonder. A divorce, with the pictures discarded by the ex? Theft, or some other form of loss? Or just a old person's memories, unclaimed by heirs? It's probably unlikely that the subject of these old pictures will be identified, but it's an intriguing mystery nonetheless.

"There is little to go on," Stephen admits, "but maybe someone could see something I can't. If nothing else they are lovely pictures—and that's what photography is all about."

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Down to the Wire (Blog Notes)

This is actually kind of exciting, in a totally pointless, arbitrary, time-wasting kind of way...last month we exceeded 300k hits (total page loads) for the first time, and this month I was wondering if we'd exceed 350k. That's the number I pulled out of a hat when I was writing the new Introductory Page a few weeks ago.

Well, here we are, down to the wire, 7:07 p.m. on January 31st, and the monthly total for hits this month stands at 397,549, only 2,451 away from the Big Numbah. It's already a record; but are we going to make 400k hits before midnight? Tough to tell, but it's entirely possible.

See what fun you can have with a blog?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

UPDATE: We hit 400k for the month with half an hour to spare—by midnight, the official number was 400,248 hits in January. Cool! (Yes, I know it's silly, because round numbers are just accidents of our base ten numerical system, dependent on the fact that we have ten digits on our hands. If we had eight fingers on each hand, we'd count in hexadecimal, and we'd understand binary better, and computers would have been invented sooner. As you probably know, there are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't. <*Rimshot*>)

Chocolatology

One of the side-developments of inkjet printing is that micro-industries have sprung up to print your pictures on anything from cakes to paper cups. Of all of them, this is arguably the most delicious.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, tip o' the hat to Oren

The 'Origami' Lens

Engineers at UC San Diego have built a powerful yet ultrathin digital camera by folding up the telephoto lens. This technology may yield lightweight, ultrathin, high resolution miniature cameras for unmanned surveillance aircraft, cell phones and infrared night vision applications. The Applied Optics paper is set to be published tomorrow. The first author is Eric Tremblay.

"This type of miniature camera is very promising for applications where you want high resolution images and a short exposure time. This describes what cell phone cameras want to be when they grow up," said Joseph Ford, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCSD's Jacobs School, and who leads the camera project within UCSD's Photonic Systems Integration Lab. Read more at the link.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON with thanks to Kevin

This Is Why I've Been Listening To Billie Holiday for Four Days Straight

If I've seemed crankier than usual lately, it's because of two things. First, I'm in the middle of having a lot of serious dental work done. This feels like paying dearly to be tortured, which makes it bad in two ways. Having more than one dimension to a bad thing makes it feel worse. Right now, for instance, I would really like to take a nap, but instead I have to go get a root canal. Somehow, the fact that I can't take a nap makes me feel even sorrier for myself than I would normally be feeling just on account of the root canal. The other thing is that, only days before I anticipate receiving my new computer, I reached irredeemable hard drive saturation and had to do a major reshuffling of files, and in transferring my music from one drive to another I managed to delete half of the music I own. I heard that gasp you just made. It wasn't even really my fault*: IDIOTIC iTunes decided that every folder with an identical artist name was a duplicate file, as if no one would ever own more than one album by any one artist. I hope this doesn't make me permanently bitter against iTunes. It might.

I'm going to keep backing up my photographs to actual disks. If this blog, and I, ever abruptly disappear and never come back, you'll know that I accidentally deleted my entire photographic archive and have been carted off to voluntary incarceration in an asylum somewhere. (Do they still have asylums? Or do all our mentally ill now live in cardboard boxes on city sidewalks?)

Adding insult to injury is the randomness of the accidental deletions...I lost most of my Jackie McLean, almost all of my M. Ward (I'm nuts about M. Ward), Zero 7, Cat Power, much Low, The Fiery Furnaces, all my Bass Communion and Muslimgauze (which I love), and just about every jazz record I've ever downloaded from eMusic...and yet, things that I'll never listen to again, like Kaada, Ciba Matto, and Thievery Corporation, are still insolently sitting there on my drive, perfectly preserved. Like being prevented from napping, this makes the disaster feel even worse than it was. And it was bad.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Of course, every computer failure that ever happens is the user's fault—that's the only reason why we put up with them.

Same Camera, Two Configurations

Many people regard a "Grip" on a DSLR camera less as an accessory than as a permanent modification, if not something that just should have been included in the first place.

I don't feel that way about it. I recall, back in the dark ages, when my primary working cameras for commercial assignments were Nikon F2's, I thought that the camera with grip/motor module, without the additional bulk of the separate battery pack, would be a much nicer package, if only it would work that way. I never equipped my Olympus E-1 camera with a grip, even though it could certainly have used the increased battery capacity. I preferred to carry two or three spare batteries in my pockets or a camera bag to get through a day of shooting in cold weather, rather than increase the size and weight of the camera itself.

So I didn't expect to like the grip that the elves at Pentax sent me to check out. But expectations are meant to become surprises. The K10D grip, once it's on the camera, doesn't feel like an add-on at all. You simply have a different and equally well-balanced camera in your hand. This reminds me of the Nikon F3, which was completely at home in its own skin either with or without the MD4 accessory motor drive. In a clever move, the Pentax grip has slots to store an extra memory card and a remote cordless release in the slide-out tray that holds the second battery.

Some DSLR grips use a different, larger, battery than the camera's normal one, while others hold two of the regulars. But all, as far as I know, put those batteries in the grip. To install the grip, you first have to remove the camera's battery, remove the battery compartment cover and stow it somewhere on the grip, and then marry the grip and camera. Pentax has chosen to do it very differently. You leave the camera's battery (and compartment cover) in place. You just uncover a set of electrical contacts, stow the cover on the grip, and screw the thing onto the bottom of the camera. Attaching or removing the grip takes five or ten seconds—about as long as changing a lens.

Anyone who thinks of the grip as a permanent item will immediately see a problem here. Every time you need to charge the battery in the camera, you're going to have to remove the grip to get at it. What the hell kind of idea is that?

Well, a pretty clever one, at least if you are in the camp that regards the grip as an accessory, not a permanent installation.

I'm playing with a 12–24mm DA zoom that the elves sent me. It is a monster. After a few weeks shooting with the compact prime lenses, this thing, especially with it's properly engineered (read big) lens shade, seems to be about the size of my new car. But my early results show it to be optically excellent, and while I was sure I would hate it the minute I laid eyes on it, when I pick up the camera with the grip and the lens mounted, it's all ergonomically perfect. This is no rig for inconspicuous shooting, but it is perfectly balanced in my hands. The combination of a zoom that covers the focal lengths I use for almost all my pictures with enormous battery capacity and a storage slot for more memory becomes a pretty universal axe. Just the thing to go out and spend a day with hunting for pictures.

But what if I need to spend the morning doing errands, taking packages to FedEx, and so on, and just want to have a camera along? Look at this:

Same camera, two configurations.

The camera on the right is not something to grab and sling over my shoulder when I'm not entirely centered on making pictures. The camera on the left is. The transformation takes less than half a minute. Good idea.

Posted by: CARL WEESE

Coincidoise

Talk about a pleasant surprise: My friend Bob Burnett was busy reviewing Tortoise's A Lazarus Taxon for our music site when he realized that he had been the cameraman for some of the sequences on the DVD. And in the review he talks a bit about the photography the band used for the packaging, and I realized we had blogged about Arnold Obermatt here on T.O.P. a while back. And when I say we I mean Oren.

What it signifies when you emblemize your band with pictures of car crashes, I don't really want to speculate about, but A Lazarus Taxon is a collector's item waiting to happen—if you don't know the band, really fascinating easy-to-listen-to instrumental music in beautifully recorded audiophile-grade sound. At less than $15 for three CDs and a DVD in premium packaging, it's all but free at the moment. Run-don't-walk recommended. Partly for the Obermatt, of course (gotta stay on track...). I bet it will be $150 on the used market in just a few years, if not more. What you call a window.

([Even more] shameless plug:) And while you're at it, check out my little essay on Billie Holiday. (It comes after the Tortoise piece.) Protect yourself from Satin ignorance! (Can you tell I have strong feelings about this?)

Tortoise, by Saverio Truglia

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

How to Read a Photographic Book

I fell into a habit many years ago that I think has served me especially well. Like the importance of a print-viewing area where you can comfortably display workprints to look at in a leisurely fashion, it's one of those major secrets that hides in plain sight—something many people might do as a matter of course but very few actually do.

What is it? Simply a method of paying attention to books of photographs. A quality and a level of attention similar to what you might devote to reading a printed book of text.

What problem does it solve? A big one, actually. It's called "closure." Closure is what happens when you're having a conversation with another person and you decide you understand what they're saying, so you stop listening and start thinking about what you're going to say. More generally, closure is what happens when you think you understand something well enough, and don't think you need to understand it any better—so you stop trying. You close down.

Unfortunately, photographs are among the things we reach closure on the fastest of anything. We primates are visually-dominant in terms of the sense we favor, and these days we're utterly bombarded with images—on some television commercials (adverts, for your Brits), the bombardment can come at the rate of five per second. Advertising photographs, which are often designed to be slick but simplistic—the better to be immediately appealing—are designed to be "gotten" quickly and easily. And of course many images don't deserve extended attention. All of this conspires to encourage our habits of early, often instant, closure. Like it or not, we can hardly help approaching pictures that way: scanning, appraising, closing down, moving on. We spend all day dismissing things.

Here's how I reverse that. When you get a monograph (a book primarily of plates—i.e., of pictures) that you want to "read"—that you really want to digest—first, page through it as you normally might. On that run-through, note where the bits to read are located. Then read whatever those things are—the essay, a preface, an afterward, whatever.

Then wait.

Wait a few hours until that evening, or wait a day or two. Set aside some time. Make sure you're feeling relaxed, rested, and that you're in a comfortable chair, in a place with decent lighting. Try to see that you won't be disturbed. Put music on if you want to, or not if you don't. And get an egg timer.

What?

Right, an egg timer. Something that counts off three minutes. (Preferably one that doesn't make any distracting noise, although a low reminder at the end of the three minutes might help.) Five minutes works too. What you do is to use the egg timer to help you spend time looking at each picture (or "spread" of two pages). During that time, let your eyes stay on the picture. Your mind can wander if you want, but keep looking at the picture. After the time is up, turn the page.

Keep at this just as you'd read a novel—for as long as you want to, or until you get tired of it. If you haven't "finished" the book, mark your place and come back to it later, and resume where you left off. After you've "read" a book like this, try coming back to it later, after a few days or a week or two, and either page through it again slowly or "read" it again.

While you're "reading" the book, don't think you need to be formulating language about it, or thinking large, "front-brain" thoughts. The eye and the brain are constantly working together to dismiss images—glancing, gathering in the gist, registering the information, appraising, moving on. Just keep your eyes on the pictures. Let your mind go wherever it wants to. Looking is enough.

And look at all the pictures. Don't be judgmental. Part of what the exercise does is to relieve you of your appraising, judgmental mode of approach—gets you over the idea of "I like this one, I'll linger here—nope, don't care for this, move on, move on!" If the photographer liked the picture well enough to put it in her book, maybe you should just take it in like all the rest of them.

If you'll just try this with one or two books, I think you'll be surprised how well it works. All it does it to enforce a different "pace" with images than the one you're used to all day every day. It just slows you down and lets you notice more. I find it helps me to "get" what photographers are up to in their work.

I'll bet it can open your eyes, too.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

The Latest from the Rumor Mill

A poster with the handle JTFOTO who claimed to have recently served as 5th assistant to Annie Leibovitz had this to say on the L-L forums on Friday:

"She has been shooting all her editorial work with Canon 1Ds MII bodies. These have been major jobs for Vanity Fair and various other mags and recently went on a major Ad job that will be worldwide.

"The TomKat cover was all Canon and the last two or three editorials were all Canon.

"The last shoot had a Canon rep come by with the new 22MP digi demo body. It is half the size of the 1Ds Mark II. They said they are hustling to make lenses that will work with what this body can resolve. They may even make a new mount again for an entirely new lens design. It won't be out before Phot Show East."

So there you have it, the latest uber-kam rumor, from the horse's mouth to the next horse to the next horse and then on to your ear. "Phot Show East" refers to the PhotoPlus Expo 2007, slated to be held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan on October 18–20, 2007. "The TomKat cover" refers to the recent, um, Leibovitz "homage" to Linda McCartney on the cover of Vanity Fair.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to K.P.

Random Excellence

This fine fellow, about to snag a stinger, is identified as "Scott of New York (NL)." Found him at the L. of C. website. Taken a little less than a century ago, in the late nineteen-aughts.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Homage en Lego

Marcos Vilarino

This is definitely one of the strangest things I've seen on the web.

It's even weirder than this....

Jno Cook, from the Robert Frank Coloring Book

I'm not saying I don't like it.

Still, it's good to remember all you really need....


Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON with thanks to Scott Jones

Nothing Wrong With That

One last thing about selecting a "pig printer" (thanks to S. Lallement for the image): you don't get any special Brownie points for optimizing your ink investment above all other things. It makes sense to me not to hemorrhage money through the ink carts, especially unwittingly. But, to get the cheapest ink price, is it worth it to buy a printer the size of a bathtub, for which a whole set of inks costs more than a month's mortgage?

You can go insane trying to calculate, to the last infinitesimal fraction of a centime, the cost of ink per square inch of printed paper surface. But why bother? Are you telling me you don't waste more money on useless purchases every day, or week, or month? After all, the best way to save money on ink is not to make prints at all, and that's no fun. There are other things way more important in choosing a printer: principally, how well you like the way the prints look. Oh, there are other things...does it take roll paper? How fast does it print (not an issue to me, but possibly to you)? How are the online reports of usability (i.e., does it have issues) and reliability (does it keep on doin' what it does without fuss)? Don't forget to consider how long you'll probably keep it—the last three printers I've owned are now festooned around my house doing impressive imitations of useless junk (for some reason I have a hard time discarding still-working, formerly expensive peripherals). Their current junkyard status was not factored into my decision to buy them in the first place.

In other words, my advice is to pursue the results you want, even if it costs you a little money. I'm keeping the HP B9180, and I don't care if the ink price per ml is not the best, because I love black-and-white, and I love the way the B9180 does black-and-white. Is it the "best" for black-and-white? I don't care: I like it best. So okay, the ink costs a little more. But paying a little less for inks when you don't even really like the prints you'll make is a pretty fair definition of foolish.

For me, photography is not a way to save money: it's what I save money for.

Then again, in the end you'll probably do your shopping like everyone else: judiciously consider all the pros and cons, and then go right ahead and buy whatever you want the most.

Nothing wrong with that.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Pig. Printers: More Info Needed...

A couple of commenters to the previous post have hit one nail squarely on the head, which is that when considering a pigment printer, you need to consider a number of factors relating to ink. For each of the printers listed, it would be useful to come up with the hard numbers for the following:

1) number of inks each printer uses
2) amount of ink per cartridge
3) cost per cartridge
4) ink cost per ml.
5) cost of a complete set of cartridges

For instance, I don't think the number is published, but I believe that the Epson Stylus Photo R2400 uses ink cartridges with 14 ml. of ink per cart. (I have a notoriously bad memory for numbers; I'm recalling a conversation with an Epson rep several months ago). The Stylus Pro 3800 uses carts with 80 ml. per cart. Looking up the cost of the respective ink cartridges on the B&H website, it's $13 for an R2400 cart and $55 for a 3800 cart. While that's considerably more money for the latter, the cost per ml. is 93¢ for the R2400 and only 69¢ for the 3800.

The HP B9180 uses $32 carts with 28 ml. of ink per cart, for a per-milliliter cost of $1.14.

The Canon ipf5000, a more expensive printer, uses carts with 130 ml. of ink per cart that cost $75, for a per-ml. cost of 58¢. Cheaper even than the 3800, but not by all that much.

Into that equation, how important it is that the HP B9180, for example, takes 8 inks, for a total cost of $256 for a complete set of inks, while a complete set of 12 iPF5000 inks costs $900? Presumably, you're going to get more mileage out of a set of inks with more carts per set, so you'll have to replace them less frequently. So these numbers aren't a direct comparison, and that difference not quite as dramatic as it sounds.

A complete 3800 inkset costs $495 (9 carts at $55 per cart).

Lastly, you need to consider how much printing you do. Presumably, the less printing you do, the more sense it makes to get a printer with a lower unit cost and a lower per-cartridge cost, even if the cost per ml. of ink is higher. After all, you don't realize the savings for larger carts if you're not going to use them up. Or maybe a better way of putting that is, the savings aren't going to be as significant if you only use a few sets of cartridges over the service life of the printer.

(However, apropos my main recommendation, it's a poor economical choice to spend an hour or two of your life making a beautiful print that's going to fade in a couple of years. My early dye inkjet prints are fading unacceptably already, and I wasn't a particularly early adopter. Pigment inks and good papers are where it's at.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Current Pigment Printers

Although I've endorsed specific products from time to time, I don't often come out in favor of one method of doing anything. My basic philosophy with regard to photography enthusiasts is that everyone is allowed to have fun with photography any old whichway they want to. If you like to make d.o.f. charts for all your lenses…if your goal is to collect profiles for every paper you can buy…if you cannot rest until you own every Photoshop book…if your thing is toy cameras…if you enjoy darkroom experiments designed to maximize film grain…if your life's work is shooting portraits of blond people…if you haunt flea markets looking for old Kodak Instamatic pictures for your huge and growing collection—I say, knock yourself out. (And lest you think any of these are unreasonable examples, I know of real people who pursue each and every one of these aspects of the photography hobby.) I don't advocate or condone hurting people or breaking laws. Beyond that, it's up to you—have fun, don't limit yourself, and don't feel beholden to conventional value judgments on what you personally prefer to do.

However, I really believe that if you're a serious photographic inkjet printmaker, you should use a pigment ink printer.

Again, you're free to interpret that key phrase, "serious printer," any way you please. If you're happy with your dye-based inkset and inkjet printer, no need to defend yourself to me—I'm happy to assume you know what you're doing and that only you know what's best for you. Walk on, bro. Live and let live.

But pigment inks have reached "mainstream" status. Their usability has improved greatly; their gamut is now more than acceptable; their early problems have been ameliorated by technical development; their advantages in terms of print life expectancy (LE) are undeniable; they look best (again, IMHO); and competition has provided end-users with an acceptable number of alternatives to choose from.

Here's a list of currently available pigment ink printers. I'm hoping if you see any mistakes or omissions, you'll let me know. I'll try to update this list with the number of inks each printer uses, too.

Epson

Epson R1800

Inkset: UltraChrome K3 pigment
Printers:
Stylus Photo R2400
(consumer, 13-inch wide, desktop, $760)
Stylus Pro 3800
(consumer/professional, 17-inch wide, desktop, $1,300)
Stylus Pro 4800
(consumer/professional, 17-inch wide, desktop, $1,655)
Stylus Pro 7800
(professional, 24-inch wide, stand-mounted, $3,000)
Stylus Pro 9800
(professional, 44-inch wide, stand-mounted, $5,000)

Inkset: UltraChrome pigment
Printers:
Stylus Photo R1800
(consumer, 13-inch wide, desktop, $450)
Stylus Photo R800
(consumer, 8.5-inch wide, desktop, $365)

Canon

Canon iPF5000

Inkset: Lucia pigment
Printers:
imagePROGRAF iPF5000
(consumer/professional, 17-inch wide, desktop or stand-mounted, $1,400)
imagePROGRAF W6400
(professional, 24-inch wide, stand-mounted, $3,555)
image PROGRAF iPF8000
(professional, 44-inch wide, stand-mounted, $6,000)
image PROGRAF iPF9000
(professional, 60-inch wide, stand mounted, $15,075)

Pixma Pro 9500
(announced, not yet available, inkset not yet determined)

Hewlett-Packard

HP B9180

Inkset: Vivera pigment
Printers:
B9180 Photosmart Pro
(consumer/professional, 13-inch wide, desktop, $540)
Designjet Z2100 24 inch
(professional, 24-inch wide, stand-mounted, $3,283)
Designjet Z2100 44 inch
(professional, 44-inch wide, stand-mounted, $5,493)
Designjet Z3100 24 inch
(professional, 24-inch wide, stand-mounted, $4,300)
Designjet Z3100 44 inch
(professional, 44-inch wide, stand-mounted, $6,631)


Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Flakphoto

Andy Adams has been working with Flak Magazine to develop its photography section and has been publishing a photography blogzine featuring work from an international community of photographers since November 2004. This summer—after a few months hiatus—he relaunched a redesign. Some thoughtful and well-chosen links.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Hammer of God

O.T.A.*: A piece of classical music every music-lover should own.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Off-Topic Alert

More Scoop on Lightroom

Marc Garrett's since1968 blog has just published a fascinating interview with Mark Hamburg, Adobe's lead developer for the Lightroom project. Among the many fascinating tidbits of information is that the best current estimates for Lightroom coming out of beta are wrong, and a frank acknowledgement that Apple's Aperture release "certainly raised the pressure to ship Lightroom." Recommended reading if you're at all interested in keeping up with the Aperture/Lightroom apps.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Best Comment Yet

Easily our most popular post ever, published way back in June—seven months ago almost to the day. Who would have guessed that it would take until today for it to get its best comment? Number 107, no less! Check it out, and thanks to "The Great Unwashed."

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Car Singers: Scott J.'s Solution

My brother called me yesterday. He couldn't see any reason why his picture appeared, twice, in the post entitled "Do Phototgraphy Websites Need to Grow Up?", so he figured I was testing him, to see if he means it when he claims he reads my blog every day.

Well, I wasn't testing him, but if I had been, he would have passed. A+, Scott.

So I figured I'd do a real post about him. As some of you may know, Dilbert (using the pen name "Scott Adams," but don't be fooled—his real name is Dilbert) writes a daily blog, and recently he posted an item about "Car Singers."

Scott Adams

Here's how to get back at car singers.

Wait until you have them in the passenger's seat on a warm summer day.

Ask them to roll down the window.

Wait until you come to a stop light with another car on your right that has its drivers-side window down.

Abruptly, lean across your friend, and scream, "BLEHHHH! LOOK AT ME!" then quickly turn away and look nonchalantly out your own window.

Invariably, here is what happens:

Your friend in the passenger's seat looks out his window to see who you were yelling at.

The person in the next car looks over at your car to see who was yelling at him—and assumes it was your passenger. Just as your passenger realizes this and starts to try to explain, the light turns green, and you pull away.

At least, that's how it used to work when my brother Scott used to do it to me.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

My Most Unforgettable Portrait Subject

By Ctein

About thirty years ago I was hired to illustrate an article on the big cats at Africa USA, a local theme park. This is the kind of assignment I love. I get along well with many animals (not all that fond of dogs, though) and I do especially well with both cats and birds (maybe I should get a job as a peace negotiator)—they both love me, just about without exception.

Here's the situation. Between rolls of film I'm sitting on a bench next to one of the trainers, making notes. A cheetah is there. Paper, pen, writing, cat deciding it's not the focus of attention (same old story). It lays down next to me, plops its head down in my lap and starts purring loudly. It's a pretty heavy head; think of your average house cat scaled up by a factor of 5–10. So to better distribute the weight, I slip my left hand under the head to cradle it and start scratching the cheetah behind the ears with my right hand. Cheetah is in bliss, and I'm pretty damn happy. This is all cool; it's found a new patsy, and I have a 70 lb. lap cat.

After fifteen or so minutes of this my left hand is getting a little tired holding up the cat's head; my right hand is definitely showing evidence of fatigue. Gently I lower the cheetah's head back onto my lap. It decides that is okay. I slowly ease up on the scratching behind the ears and after another minute take my right hand away .

Cheetah keeps purring for another 15 seconds, then stops. Thinks for several seconds. Then, without bothering to look up, the cheetah languidly raises a forepaw and goes SWIPE two inches from my ear. I hear the swoosh, feel the wind; it's a Kodak moment.

Cheetahs do not have retractable claws.

I resume scratching the cheetah behind the ears, the cheetah resumes purring, and order is restored.

Eventually I was rescued by the trainer. Otherwise I would still be there, scratching a happy, dominant cat behind its ears.

Contemplate this the next time you think you're having a problem with a portrait subject.

No, this is not my most unforgettable subject. Just a distant relative.

Posted by: CTEIN

Nasty, Nasty

Click on any of the pictures to see larger

This is Carroll Shelby's personal 1966 Shelby Cobra supercharged 427 "Super Snake," that yesterday set an auction record for an American automobile, selling for US$5.5 million after a wild and fiercely competitive battle between two determined bidders at Barrett-Jackson's 2007 Scottsdale "Event" in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"It's a special car. It would do just over three seconds to sixty [mph], forty years ago," the 84-year-old Shelby said. "I killed a buzzard with it. Nasty, nasty."

The 800-horsepower car once had a twin, built for comedian Bill Cosby but wrecked by a subsequent owner. Shelby said he drove this one around for years. It was purchased by collector Ron Pratt of Chandler, AZ.


If you can't live without one of your own, Superformance builds modern Cobras (minus the coveted name) under license from Shelby—in keeping with tradition, sold sans engine; shoehorn in one of your choice. (Lots of nice pictures at the link, too, if you like that kind of thing.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

Regarding the post "Do Photography Websites Need to Grow Up?", below, I should probably add that I'm only talking in the abstract. I'm not even remotely considering trying such a thing myself. I could never in a million years pull it off, and besides, the more I think about it, the more I like T.O.P. just as it is. I think it could be slightly improved in terms of its interface, and I might take a stab at that some day, but otherwise the only major change it could undergo would be if someone were to offer me a real job and I'd no longer have time for it. But that's all. For the foreseeable future, I suspect it will go merrily on just as it has been—free, and rather easy.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

The Book of 'Bokeh'

By Carsten Bockermann

This afternoon I found a book in a Cologne bookstore that is a must-see for all bokeh aficionados: All Day, Every Day by David Armstrong. All the pictures in the book are out of focus in a beautiful, painterly way (see here for some examples) and Armstrong shows an excellent sense for color. Definitely worth checking out.

Posted by: CARSTEN BOCKERMANN

Do Photography Websites Need to Grow Up?

TOP has been an online success story. Its popularity has grown and grown (although I'm aware that it's still a "little" site), and I actually derive income from it in about four different ways—not enough to live on, naturally, but enough to make me pay attention. It's gotten some very flattering press from around the internet, and enjoys many loyal adherents (you, that would be), for whose interest and support I'm grateful on an ongoing basis.

I have some doubts about photo websites in general, though. You may be aware that most of the professions—doctors, lawyers, accountants—went through a "sole practitioner" stage, maybe a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago, very roughly speaking. Each professional, trained as a generalist, rented an office, hung out a shingle, and took in clients off the street. Every individual had to do everything that needed doing, on the practice side and on the business side. Gradually, this evolved into the paradigm of professional groups, where handfuls, dozens, or even hundreds of practitioners banded together—in hospitals or medical practices, or law or accounting firms. There were numerous advantages to such arrangements: specialists could be supported, clients could always be accomodated regardless of their differing needs, business specialists could be hired to handle those aspects of the practice, equipment could be shared, and overhead and shared costs could be spread out among many earners. There are still sole-practitioner doctors, lawyers, and accountants, of course, but for "power user" customers the new model has taken over.

Professional photographers themselves have not really been able to move past the "sole practitioner" model simply because the product is so dependent on the one person's skills. If a client hires Joe Smith, they want Joe Smith to shoot their job—not some lackey from Joe Smith & Associates Inc. The business is dependent on Joe Smith's "eye," so to speak, and there's only one person who has that. This puts a stern limit on growth (as well as on other desirable things, like inheritability). Certain professional photographers periodically try to move on the "professional group" model, and a few have been able to beat the odds and make a success of that, but for the most part it hasn't become common.

My notion of photography websites is that we're still mostly in the age of the "sole practitioner"—the single, non-specialist jack-of-all-subjects who runs one little idiosyncratic website and remains king in his own kingdom. This suits the web, because viewers—who actually use things called "browsers," indicating what is ordinarily done with them—can flit about so easily from one place to the other, gathering tidbits from hither and yon.

And each "sole practitioner" eventually settles down wherever his or her own abilities and interests lead. So I go to Bythom for Nikon camera reviews, Luminous-Landscape for Canon camera and printer information, photo-i for printer and scanner reviews, photographyreview.com for user's equipment reviews, Steve's Digicams for digicam recommendations, dpreview for DSLR reviews, photoSIG or pbase to look at amateurs' pictures, the Digital Journalist for photojournalism content, a handful of my favorite blogs for entertainment, a couple of different industry sites for news, and so forth.

So far, it seems to me that only dpreview and imaging-resource (and perhaps to a lesser extent photo.net, which seems to keep trying but hasn't been very consistent about it) have made any real efforts to expand to become something more—that is, to expand past the sole practitioner stage.

While there's nothing wrong with the status quo, necessarily, there are disadvantages to it. There's no editorial coherence past the boundaries of one site (and sometimes not even within certain sites); there's a whole heck of a lot of noise you have to wade through to get the information you want (especially on forums); and needs are addressed haphazardly—some well, some poorly, some in-between. For instance, there are a lot more digital camera sites than there are options for traditional photography news, and there is almost no place to go for news about major museum shows and exhibits.

And, of course, the biggie: atomization encourages fractiousness. Years ago I got hooted off the LUG (the Leica User Group) just because I wasn't willing to swear undying, unquestioning fealty to the automatic superiority of Leicas over everything else (my attitude of "it's just a camera" got me burned at a virtual stake, guilty of heresy). As we've seen in many places, dividing forums according to brands of equipment is just a bad idea. It encourages parochialism, divisiveness, bigotry, narrowness of viewpoint, and an overall shallowness to the discussions that may be convenient in a limited way but is ultimately counterproductive to encouraging an interest in photography as a whole, and deleterious to finding and encouraging a collegial commonality amongst participants.

The ideal answer, it seems to me, would be for photographic websites to take a lead from—hate to say it, but—porn sites. In what way? By requiring a monthly subscription fee for access.

Before your knee jerks up and hits you in the chin and you cry out, "I hate pay sites!", think about the raw potential for a sec.

If the right group of complementary content providers banded together, we could create a "supersite" so good that it would be a mandatory hangout for anyone interested in any kind of photography. If enough people got used to the idea of paying a few dollars a month for access to such a site, the income generated would be enough to compensate each content provider for the loss of the income and control we each now have on our little personal-kingdom sites. We could each concentrate on what we each do best; we could hire an ad salesperson, like any self-respecting magazine; we could have translators creating mirror versions of the site in different languages; we could have an editor correcting our English, and a software genius attending to the interface. And so on.

For the web-using photographer, the advantages could be substantial. Imagine a site which cost you, say, about as much a month as a fancy coffee in a really good coffee shop, but that offered you a choice of RSS topic feeds; a lead blog posting all the best, most interesting news from all around the site; a reliable source of pertinent up-to-the-minute information on everything from software updates, to industry news, to current museum shows; correspondents from around the globe; multiple-expert reviews of equipment; tutorials; columnists; articles on who's who; exhaustive, well-groomed links resources; a database of enthusiast book reviews; and original portfolios and photojournalistic stories, actually commissioned by the site and posted on it (I've always daydreamed of the return of LIFE magazine, something The Digital Journalist comes closest to providing now). Want me to go on? I could—but I'm sure you're already thinking up other possibilities yourself.

A sort of super-magazine. As I say, I think the site that's coming closest to such a model so far is Imaging-Resource, and they're certainly doing an impressive job, but it's only baby steps compared to what would be possible with real resources to work with, the kind of resources that could come from hundreds of thousands of subscribers from around the world all continuously committed to supporting the same site.

It may never happen. Maybe photo websites, like commercial photographers as opposed to doctors or accountants or lawyers, will stay mired in the sole practitioner stage indefinitely; it's possible that it's just the nature of this beast. But I wonder. Possibilities are always fun to think about.

Posted by: MIKE ("king in a tiny kingdom") JOHNSTON

Both photos are of my brothers, for no particular reason....

Kacperczyk Takes On Fotopolis

A big congratulations to my friend and colleague Łukasz Kacperczyk on his promotion to Editor-in-Chief of Poland's Fotopolis.pl. (And although I don't know him, congratulations to Michał, too, on his own promotion.)

PRESS RELEASE: Fotopolis.pl is the biggest Polish photography magazine—be it on the internet or on paper. It features all the latest equipment news updated on a daily basis, extensive gear reviews, and regular columns by renowned writers, such as everybody's favorite Mike Johnston.* However, we cover not only the technical side of photography. We publish book reviews, artist interviews, critical essays on everything photographic. Extending our reach beyond the internet, we organize workshops and presentations of the hottest new cameras, as well as invite guest lecturers to talk to our readers. Fotopolis.pl is edited by practicing photographers for practicing photographers—amateurs, as well as professionals.

Łukasz Kacperczyk

For the last 12 months Łukasz Kacperczyk has been Managing Editor of Fotopolis.pl. This January he assumed the position of the Editor-in-Chief, replacing Michał Sułkiewicz, who moved into management.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*That's what it said, honest. I've been writing on Fotopolis for a number of years now.

Special Discount for TOP Readers

I'm pleased to report that Light Crafts is offering a 10% discount on LightZone 2.0 for any and all T.O.P. readers—all you need to do to take advantage of the offer is click on the ad on this page and use the code when ordering. LightZone was already inexpensive for such a powerful RAW converter with so many unique and useful image manipulation controls.

We've long been preoccupied with the distinction between how to do something and figuring out what you want to do, which are really two different problems. For me personally, where LightZone excels is in allowing me to explore my pictorial effects visually in ways I might never even think of trying in other programs. Recently, I've been working on two separate, very different pictures that both came alive only after I experimented with a variety of interpretations in LightZone. I was able to arrive at creative interpretations I would never have seen using other software.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Simon Griffee: Some features of Lightzone which I enjoy:

• The focus on working with and developing photographs and nothing else. Photoshop has become a behemoth with so many tools and effects for doing anything and everything—you lose your concentration on the image itself.

• The ease of creating masks and modifying their feathering so you can develop only certain sections of a photograph. Drawing bezier curves is much easier than in any other software I've tried.

• All your editing work on a photograph is saved in a small file (around 100 kilobytes) which is applied and linked to the original JPG/RAW/DNG file, which remains untouched. The harddisk space savings are substantial.

Lightzone has a more "tactile" feel to it, an intuitive, visual approach of working with an image. Hard to explain, but if you take a bit of time to try the software, and read a couple of tutorials (such as here and here), you will likely love it.

It's the most exciting photographic development software I've used in a long time, and certainly helped give me the confidence to launch my site this year. I encourage you to download the trial and check it out!

I also love The Online Photographer—thanks for writing, Mike!

Stephen Shore Movie

Don't miss Jay Cornelius's nice little mini-movie about Stephen Shore.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Conscientious

Print Offer: Wisconsin #5

Mike Johnston, Wisconsin #5

A small, quiet, dark picture that might appeal to anyone who has ever lived in the north woods, or might like to. The home pictured is an authentic woodstove-heated log cabin. Taken at twilight. The print is very small, less than 6x9, and I think it looks best with a broad, flat, plain, very dark wooden frame coming right up to the edges of the picture (I tried to mock this up in Photoshop to show you, but making it look just right was beyond my skills). This print makes use of a technique that obscures the finest detail without affecting subjective sharpness, but it's very subtly applied and not immediately evident to non-photographers. None of the individuals are recognizable. Richly printed with pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 100% cotton rag paper. Signed on the front and also the back (in case you want to trim it to fit in a flush frame as suggested).

Price $65 each for the first seven prints, or as many as are sold today before midnight. ($130 thereafter). Please allow up to four weeks for delivery, although it will most probably not take that long.



Wisconsin #5, $65

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

We Come Recommended

I'll have to do this quickly. I just wanted to say thanks to Thom Hogan for including us in "Recommended Web Sites" in his characteristically excellent new "Recommended Products" grid on his website bythom.com. There, okay, done, no more about that now.

Just kidding. Out of curiosity, do you agree or disagree with his one complaint?

And for the record, his website would make my recommended web sites list, too, if I had one. (I especially love his annual predictions, which we didn't get this year—there's an abbreviated "Nikon Only" version for Nikonophiles, though.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Thom Elaborates: My complaint is more nuanced than the short version posted on my Recommended Products page. I have no doubt that some will subscribe to the "more is better" notion of content for a Web site that they find central to their interests. But TOP is probably slightly tangential to the majority of the audience stopping by (and this is likely very true of someone who finds my site central), and thus the rapidity with which things fall off (or the fact that the page requires a lot of scrolling sometimes) can be problematic to them. Whether you agree with my complaint or not is most likely going to depend upon how often you visit the site. At present, it doesn't support once-a-week visitors well. And for those of us with large RSS lists, the volume of posts also tends to be too high, I think.

The issue for Mike is a tough one. Growing organisms are generally healthy ones, and contracting ones are usually unhealthy. Right now Mike is trying to keep TOP in the growing category, and that's where my complaint starts to become relevant: the number of folk that will read everything is likely very finite (and those tend to be the first responders, so that group may be near maximum size). The groups that are tangentially interested but don't want to wade through 10 articles a day are larger and more necessary to the long-term health of the site, I think. It's akin to what happens with magazine subscriptions, actually. You have the core who you can count on, and you have a group that you have to constantly attract and replenish. My complaint is applicable mostly to that last group.

One way of dealing with the issue is to "gather" the most recent major articles into a sidebar that always appears. Likewise the "print of the week." Leave off the stuff like the post that provoked this comment ;~) and the other "comments in passing" so that someone who's a casual browser hitting the site doesn't reject it because they see "too much filler." (A lot of stuff in quotes there--I'm not saying there's filler, per se, I'm trying to come with a way of describing the various pieces of material that appears.) By doing that, the less-than-daily site visitor will still see the last dozen or so "serious" articles that they might be interested in without having to wade through every last little post. Likewise, the prints that are still available would continue to be visible.

And Mike and Player are right in their assessment: when I criticism something, I try to make it a constructive criticism. I'm a perfectionist at heart (and not one in reality). You don't see me saying "that sucks" or some similar contentless criticism. I try to be precise in what I think can be improved. Sometimes, as in a one paragraph assessment in my Recommended Products, I also have to be concise. Hopefully this comment helped make my comment more clear.

Mike Responds: This (and the rest of the comments, for which thanks to the commenters) is of course very interesting to me. I really did "back into" becoming a blogger; I had been preparing a website (it never did get launched) that centralized and collated my photography activites, and there was literally one extra button that I didn't know what to do with. Oren Grad had suggested that I try a photo blog. I began TOP simply to have something to link to that last, unused button. I was as surprised as anyone when it took off.

Since talking to David Hobby at Strobist and now hearing from Thom, I've really just begun to toy with the notion of making it into a "real" website—that is, leaving the free Blogger UI behind, hiring a web designer to build a site to my specifications, using multiple pages, and so on.

Thus it becomes a design problem, which Thom alludes to. The questions of "What can the site be? To whom? How will they use it? What will encourage further growth and expand the site's appeal past its current core audience?"—all are really aspects of: what do we want to provide and how would it be arranged for optimal access? That stuff is fun to think about—the design aspect, I mean. I like design, even though I'm not the best designer. I like sketching house plans, for instance. So lately I find myself blocking out home pages, inventing ways to accommodate different kinds of content.

The question the whole "site design" thing begs is, of course, do I really want it to be any different? Could I handle it?

I'm actually already very concerned about posting too much and letting posts go on for too long, and I've been worried about it for some time now. I know people just don't have enough time to read and ponder over every thought that happens to come into my brain. Oddly enough, sometimes it has meant that I don't have enough room on TOP for my own posts. If I've got two or three great things written by other people all going up at once, I don't want to dilute them by posting some rambling little mini-essay of my own. So I end up wanting to write a blog post but not really having a place to do it—like I say, odd problem for a blogger to have, isn't it? Nice problem too, though.

The fact is, I could put up twice as much content if I wanted. There are plenty of interesting things out there. So it seems like I should do something.

I'll keep thinking about it. And I'll let you know.

I Like Music That Looks Like This

by Bob Burnett

Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come

Atlantic, 1959

When this album came out the jazz world reverberated---almost as much as the red on the album cover does. It was a line in the sand; no turning back with your rejection or support. Trumpeter Roy Eldridge famously said, "I'd listened to him all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving, baby."

And on top of the artistic drama, this album came out not as some standard fare black-and- white photo with utilitarian titles; it came out looking like this.

Start with the smiling, front-and-center-facing Ornette’s all-black outfit holding the stark shape of his plastic alto sax. In addition to the stark whitish object vibrantly punching through visually, the whole idea of adding to the insult of tradition by letting the world know he played a plastic sax was marketing magic.

Reminds me of when the B-52s put that ragged Mosrite guitar on the cover of their first album in the late 1970s.

The relationship between the red, black and white is a direct message of “Look out! You put this record on and you’ll hear these very colors in this group!” By namesake coincidence you do hear the colors—literally—the red cherry-rich background is pocket trumpet player Don Cherry, the black is Billy Higgins’ rich, deep, smoky rhythms and the white is the ghostly, more than likely junked-out Charlie Haden, a rail-thin white bassist from Missouri playing wildly punctuated lines.

This 1959 look links us to the Warhol to come.

The photographer, William Claxton, was known for shooting in Los Angeles jazz clubs with a 4x5 Speed Graphic. He saw shooting album covers as an opportunity to tap further into his love of jazz. On Claxton’s webpage, he reflects on his work from those days. “Photographing a jazz star in, say, 1955 for a record with a 12x12 LP format was a relatively simple and delightful experience. The cover concept would be discussed along with the artist’s wardrobe to be worn, the artist and I would meet at a suitable location and shoot the cover.”

When I worked in a used record store way back when, I’d occasionally see the older version of this album come in. The originals had heavy cardboard outer sleeves that had a layer of almost lacquered-on clear plastic. You’d hold it in your hands, the image would set-off against the strong white space and the font would hum in an almost electric way.

And the music inside---oh my. Some of my favorite listening moments have happened thanks to what’s inside this album. I am amazed that this music is almost 50 years old and remains completely contemporary. The playing demonstrates the hour upon hour of "woodshedding" it took to get to this level of interplay. You can trace the compositional style somewhat to blues forms that be-bop used, but with incredible twists within the genius of the melodies, in tandem with harmonic somersaults and wide-berth excursions taken in the mesmerizing solos. To me there is an amazing depth of understanding about how to advance tradition and fearless expansion upon the unspoken rules of jazz that were in place in the late 1950’s.

Do yourself a favor—get this. Play it and stare at it. Even if means squinting at a small CD cover.

Posted by: BOB BURNETT

You can read more of Bob's music review at our C60CD music site.

johnfriar.com

John Friar, Neskowin, Oregon I—December 2005

Photographer John Friar has asked for opinions about his new website. I imagine most anyone who reads this blog would enjoy a look at this assured, beautiful work; let John know what you think either in our comments or by contacting him directly.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Comment from John Friar: Thank you, to all those who have posted here as well as sent me messages via my website, for your kind words. A few have asked or made suggestions about the website and I'll try and address these now.

The website was built from the ground up and originally started as an experiment just to see if I could do it. Once I became more familiar with web technologies, I started to set some technical and design goals for myself. I wanted the site to be simple, fast, intuitive, and complimentary to what I was trying to show (my photographs). I didn't want to burden the viewer with any technical considerations. For me, that meant no plug-ins. This ruled flash out. I started this a few years ago and things have changed so it may be time to review these design decisions. (Thank you shadzee for your reference to autoviewer. I'll check it out).

In its current form, my website consists of HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) for the client-side (your browser). No flash, javascript, or java applets etc. The biggest problem in using CSS was browser compatibility. What worked in Firefox often wouldn't in Internet Explorer. I hope I've got over most of those problems! Please let me know if you discover something that doesn't appear to work in your browser.

On the backend (webserver), I've written some java classes and JSP's, and store information in a postgres database. I'm a java developer in my other life so this part was fairly straightforward for me.

Finally, the colours! Based on the feedback I'm getting, it seems that the colour that best works with the photos depends upon the viewer. The colour that I chose to default with (blue) is my favourite. But it's not to everyone’s taste. Therefore, the choice is provided. My original intent was based on wishful thinking..."I like this photo, will it go with my green walls?". Also, for this reason, I display the photos as if they're matted and framed (using CSS to achieve the affect).

Thanks again to all who have commented.

Yes. An Easel.

by Barry F. Margolius

An easel? I'm writing about an easel?

I'm the ultimate techie. I love gadgets; I love electronics; I love anything that makes the daily grind easier...even if it takes a lot of work to learn how to make that grind easier. My friends would call you a liar if you were to tell them that I'm writing a posting about a gadget that's not electric and was probably invented over a million years ago. Well, here's my easel story.

I'm not a "serious" photographer. I love it as a hobby, and I've been at it for forty years, and I've even been "serious" for brief periods of time, but I never stuck to it. I always lapsed into disinterest only to get re-excited at some later time. With the advent of digital photography, I've been on an interest-high for quite a few years now. A few years ago, digital printing really began to get interesting for the hobbyist. For well under $1,000 one could purchase a very nice Epson 1280 printer that printed really good quality 13x19-inch prints. I was hooked. I remember, when I was a kid, how I scrimped and saved for the $10 (in 1965 dollars) to get an 8x10 commercial lab print made. Now, for a couple of 2002 dollars, I can print a gorgeous 13x19 myself. Wow! Cheap instant gratification; who could ask for anything more?

However, it became clear that it was very hard to evaluate/enjoy these prints. One day they looked great, the next day they looked very flawed. In a moment of inspiration, I walked down the block to the art store and bought an artist's easel: black aluminum, not ugly but not particularly attractive. I just stood it up in the corner of my living room. Now I can easily (no pun intended) display my latest print du jour. Then I could live with it for a few days and decide if I liked it—and sometimes even why I liked it. The time allows me to decide if I like a print enough to frame it, and how I want to frame it, and even where I might want to hang it.

Recently I've purchased a couple of prints on this site from Mike. Once again, the easel is my friend. I put Wisconsin #7 on the easel for several days before deciding that I wanted to see it framed. I put it in a simple black frame I had lying around, and lived with it for a few more days. I'm liking the print more and more. I still haven't decided where to hang it, but I have the luxury of being able to live with the print for as long as I want to without actually driving a nail into the wall. I may even go out and buy a nicer frame for the print, although that plain black frame does seem to emphasize the wintry feeling of Wisconsin #7.

Anyway, all this is essentially a long-winded posting advising you to buy an easel. I think you'll be surprised at how much it will improve the "viewing" side of your hobby.

Posted by: BARRY F. MARGOLIUS


Mike Comments: Barry has hit on one of the great secrets of improving your photography: a secret that's hidden in plain view, and will continue to be no matter what we say. My teacher Mark Power told me once that the single most crucial piece of photographic equipment is a "viewing board," which in his case meant a 4x8' sheet of homosote, painted white, leaned against the wall with a bunch of push-pins in it. Some people—including Ansel Adams, for one—use a viewing rail: a narrow shelf running the length of a wall to prop prints up on. You can use a cork board. You can even use tape or Blu-tak, I suppose. An art-supply-store easel is a new twist on the old theme for me, but it's a good idea too.

Whatever you use, the critical thing is to look at the work. Your eyes have an intelligence that absolutely no amount of thinking and imagining can replace. It's incredible to me—literally unbelivable—how powerful a tool this is, and how few people know about it, and, of the people who do know about it, how few people actually take advantage of it. Do you?

The Afghan Girl

For collectors who might be interested, you can currently purchase a signed inkjet print of the famous Afghan Girl picture from the New York Times Store.

Steve McCurry's picture of Sharbat Gula originally appeared on the cover of National Geographic. A minor sensation was created, along with a television documentary, when Gula was found again after nearly twenty years and she graced the cover of National Geographic for a second time. (Fittingly, her identity was positively confirmed by using biometric matching on the irises of her eyes.) She is the inspiration for the National Geographic Society's Afghan Girls Fund, a charitable organization devoted to furthering the education of Afghan women.

The picture has continued to increase in fame and stature—National Geographic has called it the most recognized picture in the magazine's history—and it has become one of the iconic images of the era. If you can't quite afford the original, I've mentioned before that the best reproduction I've seen (suitable for framing, if you can abide bibliocide) can be found in Looking East.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

An Interview With Stephen Perloff

Editor, The Photo Review and The Photo Collector

By Michael Jason, Manhattan Arts International

Stephen Perloff is the founder and editor of The Photo Review and editor of The Photograph Collector. He has taught photography and the history of photography at numerous Philadelphia-area colleges and Universities and has been the recipient of two grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for arts criticism. His articles have been reproduced in dozens of other journals and he has been called on as an expert to comment on the state of the photography market for publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal....

READ ON

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

Photo of Stephen Perloff by Judith Harold-Steinhauser

Easter Egg Number Two: Pentax's Green Button

by Carl Weese

The Green Button, like Digital Preview discussed last time, won’t be new to long-time Pentax users, but it’s an interesting feature that addresses a larger issue that might not seem immediately apparent. The Green Button sits next to the shutter release on the K10D, and it performs different functions depending on which mode the camera is in. What I want to talk about is the way it functions in “Hyper Manual.”

First, a little background. 35mm cameras from the first Leica onwards have offered a shutter speed dial located near the shutter release, and an aperture ring on the lens. I grew up with this set of controls, starting with the first serious camera I bought back in 1964 (instead of using my Dad’s Speed Graphic and Rolliecord)—a Pentax H3. I moved on to M-Leica and Nikon cameras (F2, F3, F4). When automatic exposure came in with the F3 I experimented with it but found I preferred to stay with manual exposure. Same with the F4. My most recent Leicas are M6s which have a meter, but no automation, which is fine with me. With the “analog controls” of shutter dial and aperture ring, you can keep a tactile connection to the settings as you wander around, constantly adjusting for ambient light conditions almost as a reflex, often without even looking at the camera. Your hands learn how to open up two stops as you move from sun to shade. I wrote about this in an article for Photo Techniques magazine called “The Leica Mystique” back in 1995 that you can still get as a back issue.

When I first got a good DSLR camera, in 2004, I quickly found that manual exposure had become completely non-intuitive. The control was there, at least in theory, but you had to use two blank, unmarked control wheels that have no endpoints to their travel. The only way to know what you’ve adjusted is to look at tiny digital readouts of speed and f-stop on the top plate LCD or in the finder. It just isn’t the same. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, it just doesn’t work—except for controlled situations like studio lighting or tripod shooting. I decided I would have to learn to work in automatic modes, usually aperture priority or full program, with the camera’s custom menu set so that I could override the automatic exposure just by moving a control wheel, without having to hold down a second button.

After a few thousand exposures and analysis of them, I got pretty good at guessing when the camera would need to have exposure compensation dialed in with the front control wheel, or when the program should be shifted to favor fast shutter or deeper depth of field with the rear control wheel. I still missed manual exposure, though. In a situation with a long tonal range, if you want to make a number of slight variations in framing, using auto-with-override is a real pain because you may have to change the amount of override each time you tweak the framing.

The Naugatuck River, Waterbury, Connecticut, 1/14/07

(If the camera is set in any mode of automatic exposure, a different amount of override will be needed for even the slightest change in framing a picture like this. Here, –2/3 stop worked. But it would be easier to set a manual exposure that just holds the sky values. Then the framing could be changed at will without bothering about the exposure.)

Increasing a bright sky area from 15% of the frame to 20% can require 2/3 stop change in the override. If the camera had been set to a correct manual exposure in the first place (the most exposure that retains tone in the sky), you could change the framing all over and keep shooting at that correct exposure.

This is where the Green Button comes in. With the K10D in manual, it works as awkwardly as any other dual-control-wheel DSLR manual exposure system, until you invoke the magic green button. If you point at a possible picture and hit the Green Button, the camera momentarily reverts to Program mode and sets the shutter and f-stop as it would in program. Then it lets go and you have full control with the rear wheel running the f/stop and the front wheel running the shutter speed. (For some reason this is still counter-intuitive to me, though the Olympus E-1 I’ve used for several years also sets the wheels this way in manual. If I had my way I’d have the front wheel do the aperture and the rear wheel do the shutter.) Now, instead of overriding auto exposure for a particular framing, you dial in some up and down marks on the in-finder exposure scale to set an absolute exposure for this particular scene. If there’s time, use the Digital Previw to get RGB histograms to review, tweak as needed, then go ahead and shoot any framing changes you want without constantly fiddling to compensate for whatever error the automation would introduce with each new framing.

This is seriously cool. I don’t think it’s as good a manual system as classic shutter speed and f-stop controls, but it’s a really imaginative workaround that I’m finding quite useful.

Posted by: CARL WEESE

Carl's Pentax K10D Thought Process to Date:
Part I: "On Buying a Camera"
Part II: "Less is More"
Part III: "On Testing a New (Digital) Camera, Steps A and B"
Part IV: "Weese on Anti-Shake"
Part V: "Anti-Shake Pt. II, or, Shake Reduction as Virtual Tripod for Nature Work"
Part VI: "The Camera-Manual Easter Egg Hunt: Pentax Digital Preview"
Part VII: "To Delete or Not, That is the Question..."

To Delete or Not: The Coda

A brief metacommentary from Mike: we've gotten into some intense discussions in the comments to the "To Delete of Not: Computer Expert" and "OS Obsolescence: a Rant" threads, but I just want to direct people to Dave New's "ADDENDUM," which I just added to the former. There, he's summarized his recommendations for "best practices" concerning safe card usage.

Personally, I'd like to thank Carl, Dave, and Josh and the various other commenters who have weighed in on this issue of how best to handle flash memory use and avoid problems, both technical and procedural. It has forced me to re-evaluate my own practices and change over to a more disciplined, rationalized approach. I bought several new cards and will be following a stricter protocol from now on.

And an incidental note regarding that last sentence: when I first bought a Sandisk Extreme III 1-GB CF card, I bought it for $150—used. Granted the III is no longer the latest version, but the same cards now retail for $45 each, new.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Michael Kenna at the Banbury Museum

by Ailsa McWhinnie

Ailsa McWhinnie, Michael Kenna at Banbury Museum

What: Michael Kenna: A Retrospective

When: January 13th–March 4th, 2007, open Monday to Saturday 9:30–5; Sunday 10:30–4

Where:
Banbury Museum
Spiceball Park Road
Banbury
Oxon
United Kingdom OX16 2PQ
Tel. 01295 259855

How Much: Free

A number of black-and-white landscape photographers working today have a style that is characterized by gentleness and delicacy, coupled with minimalist compositions resolved within the square format. You’re also talking long exposures—sometimes up to several hours— taken either overnight or at the beginning or end of the day. The result can mean glass-flat seas and cotton-soft skies. Most of these photographers do what they do extremely well, and have rightly gained recognition for their work, but there’s one who stands head and shoulders above the others (not just because he’s immensely tall), and that’s because he pioneered this style. It’s Michael Kenna. And, until March 4th, 2007, people living within striking distance of Oxfordshire, in the U.K., have the all-too-rare opportunity of seeing a selection of his prints in person. There’s no better way of learning just why he's been so influential.

With the simple title, "Michael Kenna: A Retrospective," the exhibition comprises work that dates from the mid-1970s to the present day. Even his early photographs show strong indications of the signature style that was to develop so assuredly—not to mention the master printer he has become. A case in point is the quartet of pastoral scenes printed on the late, lamented Kodalith paper while Kenna was still a student at the London College of Printing some thirty years ago.

However, to my mind, it’s on seeing his most recent work from Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island—comprising such photographs as "Fifty Fences" against a snow-covered hillside, or "Sunflowers" (as you’ve probably never seen them before)—that you come to realize this is the place where Kenna and his camera were destined to end up. "I didn’t go there last winter, and I really missed it," he said at the exhibition’s private view on the evening of January 12th. That's why he is heading back there in early February—while the snow still lies thick on the ground—for a month.

When asked what he plans to do there, he replies, "Visit a few old friends—you know, trees…" and he laughs.

The Banbury exhibition has been produced in conjunction with HackelBury, the London gallery that represents Kenna’s work. Kate Stevens, director of HackelBury, says she hopes the exhibition will tour other U.K. venues, with a very definite aim: "He’s so well known in America, in Japan, in France and the rest of Europe, and yet few people recognize him in his own country."

There is a poignant coda to the timing and location of this exhibition. It was originally conceived in order to give Kenna’s elderly parents the opportunity to see his photography in a gallery near their home town. Sadly, they both died in the months before the exhibition opened.

Posted by: AILSA McWHINNIE

Random Excellence

Photographer Unknown: Union General W. H. French Standing
in Front of Tent, Bealton, Va., October 1863

I was going to try to make this into a print offer, until, too many hours past bedtime, the awful truth snuck up on me: nobody would want a print of this except me. Well, me and, perhaps, one Civil War buff from Poughkeepsie. Still, I think it's a charming old picture, of a pompous old fellow. I like how he stands there stoutly, swimming in that sea of bokeh, and I like the damaged edges of the plate, and that luminous hand. And by the bye, I don't think the idea of print offers as a regular thing is going to fly. I will still make one once in a while, however, when it seems like a good thing to do.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Everything the Eye Can See: 16-Bit Display Color

by Jim Witkowski

Having an interest in audio, I’ve been attending the Winter CES for several years. I rarely visit the "Zoo" floor, but since my companion was in the market for a video projector, we spend Thursday combing the circus at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

To get a free T-shirt, I voluntarily agreed to sit through a presentation sponsored by the HDMI consortium. Those are the people that set the standards for those cool little cables that go between your DVD player and your HDTV. At the show, they announced the new HDMI version 1.3 standards. Besides the higher transfer speeds there were a couple of items that should be of interest to every photographer working in color.

The first thing of interest is the standard’s support for up to 16 bits of color depth. That’s right, over a billion colors. That means that you’ll no longer have to put up with those moiré patterns that show up in images of the deep blue sky. It seems that the entertainment people have a problem with High Definition TVs displays exhibiting this behavior and wanted to fix it.

The other feature of interest in the new standard is a new color space with the unusual name of "xvYCC." This space covers the entire gamut of the human visible spectrum. Everything your eye can see will be shown in this color space. Traditional 8-bit RGB will be supported for backward compatibility, but to get the full advantage of xvYCC, all components in the display chain have to be HDMI 1.3 compliant.

Finally there's the agreement on a new mini-HDMI connector. Much like the small USB port used on cameras now, there is a small HDMI connector that can be plugged directly into cameras to take advantage of the new standards. There was a consumer point-and-shoot at the show that already had such a port.

Does this mean we need to run down and buy new video cards for our computers this afternoon? No. After checking in at several of the computer manufacture’s booths I learned that, at this point, none have monitors with HDMI ports. However, all have plans to incorporate HDMI into their equipment. If you’re in the market for a new monitor, try to hold out for a year or so. You’ll also have to wait for Microsoft and Apple to jump on board as well.

Better living through chemistry, eh?

Posted by: JIM WITKOWSKI

OS Obsolescence: a Rant

by Ctein

Consider yourself warned—I'm on a tear. I'm sick of software and hardware manufacturers forcing us into system upgrades and breaking our existing ones. I'm not talking about needing to upgrade single applications to newer versions. I'm talking out about the them breaking your whole machine. There are some very, very good practical and technical reasons for not upgrading an OS if you don't need to. Lots of professionals are a generation back in their OS's. I'm one of them.

My old PowerBook is running both OS9 and OS X 10.3.9 (the newest OS it can). Why did I bother even putting OSX on this pre-Y2K platform? Because I'm probably never going to be able to get rid of this computer, and there are some situations where I need OS X (like drivers for new peripherals). I've got "mission critical" applications that only run under OS 9, not diddly stuff but professional business applications. Up until a year ago, Apple built OS 9 backward compatibility into OS X. They killed it with the MacIntels. Which means even when I get my new Mac I'm going to be stuck supporting this one. Doesn't matter to Apple that 20% or so of Mac users are in my boat. They just said, "The heck with you all; your new computers are never, ever going to be able to run those apps."

Now Adobe announces Photoshop CS3 (hardly a major upgrade) and guess what? It'll only run under the latest Mac or Windows OS (that's 10.4 for you Mac addicts and XP for PCers). So my laptop won't support it and my PC desktop is stable at Win2K, thank you very much. I'm screwed again.

None of this was technically necessary. MacIntel OSX could support OS 9 apps. And the core code and functionality of OS 10.4 vs 10.3 and Windows 2K vs XP is similar enough that Photoshop compatibility for one generation back would be no big deal.

I understand how corporate profits drive this. Intentionally killing off acknowledgment of an older system, even if many people still use it, means that much less money spent to keep those customers up and running. Well, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. When I define my business and my pleasure by the enhanced profit margins of these companies, then I will care about them making an extra buck by inconveniencing me. Until that unlikely day, it's nothing but a posterior pain.

Posted by: CTEIN

Recommended in the Comments: Dynamics of Software Development by Jim McCarthy.

Hosing the Doris

Catchword: hose the doris

Part of Speech: v. phr. [British slang? —Ed.]

Quotation:
In photographers’ parlance it is an activity known as "hosing the Doris"—keeping the button pressed and taking as many frames as possible in the shortest conceivable time of any female celebrity.

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

To Delete or Not: Photojournalist

by Josh Hawkins (Staff Photographer, Wednesday Journal Newspapers, Chicago, Illinois)

I was never a fan of deleting in the field from the moment I went digital. I was told from when I first started photography to save everything. That wasn’t as successful when I shot slides, but, as much as possible, I saved everything. So the "save everything" philosophy of some of my colleagues when I went digital was a pretty easy sell for me.

A few years back I was asked to photograph a local camp-out night at a local park for the paper I work for. I went through getting shots of tents going up, and then on to the always-necessary shots of kids playing. I started shooting the kids and spaced out on adjusting my exposure settings for the first few shots. When I checked the LCD on my camera to check exposure and to see if I needed to get names, I saw that the images were over-exposed (flashing highlights all over the place) and motion-blurred—potentially usable shots wasted because I didn’t pay attention and set my camera how I normally would’ve. Or so I thought. I corrected my exposure and kept working my assignment.

The next day I was going through my take of this assignment, and came to my screw-up. With my computer in front of me I was able to take a closer look at the best of the images I thought I'd ruined. It was over-exposed, but not as badly as I had initially thought. And while it was definitely motion-blurred, it had sharp info in the one place I really needed it—the girl’s face.


The day before, I couldn’t see this. The Nikon D1h I was using as my main camera at the time has a limited zoom ability on the LED screen, so I couldn’t zoom in big enough on her face to see that it was the only thing that was sharp. While I was shooting, I had thought that the image was a total loss in several ways. If I had been in the habit of deleting in-camera, I would have deleted that shot, no question.

The picture certainly needed more work than normal in Photoshop to get it to a printable state, but it was do-able. The next Wednesday the paper went to press with it on page one. A few weeks later it was used for our four-color community guide cover.

Edit on the monitor
When that week was done I walked away with a reinforced belief that shooting and editing are different processes for different times—or, at least, if it has to happen at the same time, different people. One person (at least this person), doing both at once does neither well. And while I will certainly check what I'm getting in the field, final decisions I leave till a later date (unless an emergency comes up—then I’ll do in-camera edits as a bad choice among worse choices). I’m a big fan of good LCDs on cameras, but even the best are only half-decent for editing. A good monitor in a good environment is vital for making solid final choices. Editing in the field while trying to shoot just doesn’t work in my experience.

I’ve also discovered that I make my best editing choices after some time has passed—usually, in my case, a few months is ideal. The closer I am to the event I edit, the more emotion I still have involved in the event, and the stronger my memories. And while those memories are wonderful for me, they often don’t help me communicate my message better. A little time gives me some distance from the event and lets me look at it from a position more like that of my final viewer. That often helps me make better edits. I’ve found on more than one occasion the image before or after the one I first chose works a little better. Regardless, I like having the options available to me, and I like being able to change my mind.

Posted by: JOSH HAWKINS

Magazine cover reprinted with permission of Wednesday Journal Inc.

To Delete or Not: Computer Expert

by Dave New

The problem with in-camera deletion comes from the fact that given various combinations of reads/deletions/stores, there is an almost infinite combination of card file system state.

A good software tester can usually group a large number of those possible test cases using techniques like "equivalence classes," but that can be an inexact science (it depends on knowing sometimes too much about the internals of the filesystem code implementation), and it still typically leaves a lot of "unturned stones."

Consider, also, that actually testing a large number of those combinations may be prohibitive, because the card read/write speed becomes a factor. Most regression test suites aren't designed to take more than a day or so at the most to run. Executives that want products to ship don't have the patience for more testing, it seems.

The upshot is that a lot of potential end-cases probably don't get tested very well, except by poor consumers who end up losing images in the field when they hit the untested combination and uncover a bug in the file system software.

Bug-free
The two most buggy pieces of software traditionally are memory allocators and file systems. They are hard to get exactly right, and most companies that have what looks like good code in those areas will practically set up armed guards to keep newbie programmers from attempting to "improve" the code.

Not even Microsoft's file systems have been completely bug-free. Windows' FAT file system had a long-standing bug that surfaced when you filled a disk and still had pending data in the write buffers: it used to silently close the truncated file and discard the remaining data without reporting the data loss error to the application layer.

If you must delete, delete only the last image (or images, deleting the last recorded one first and working backward), rather than creating "holes" in the file system by pulling images out of the middle of a batch. Also, as a rule, I don't completely fill my cards.

Then, after transferring my images to two backups, I format the card in the camera. Doing a "delete all" in camera doesn't do any good—a format is the only reliable way to reset the file system to a given known state.

No sense tempting fate.

Posted by: DAVE NEW

ADDENDUM by Dave New: Most folks don't download through the USB cable, mainly because it is usually a lot slower than mounting the card directly in a high-speed USB or Firewire reader, or using a PC-Card reader, mounted in a PCMCIA slot.

That said, the rule of thumb should be to only let the camera format, write, and/or delete images.

It's particularly dangerous to format a card on the computer, and then write to it with another device. Likewise, it is dangerous to format or write files on a device, and then use the computer to delete those files.

When you format a card in the PC, it doesn't know the purpose that it is to be used for, and among other things, it doesn't set up any of the required "DCIM" folders, etc., that are used by camera devices.

The safest way to treat your cards is to assume they are "read-only" for all computer-based operations, and "write-only" for camera-based operations.

So, here is a summary of "safe" card usage:

1) Format the card in the camera you intend to use it in (not on the PC, nor in any other camera—you can delay doing this until you are about to use the card, so there will be no confusion as to which camera it has been formatted for).

2) Take pictures. Best practice is not to edit (delete) pictures in-camera in the field. There have been several good reasons given for this previously, some having to do with avoiding possible file system bugs, others having to do with accidental deletion (operator error).

3) To be really safe, don't try to squeeze the last shot out of a card. This is just pure paranoia based on past experience with file system bugs, but it certainly doesn't hurt to be conservative in this case.

4) Remove the card from the camera, and mount it in a card reader device. This really speeds up the download process, and conserves the camera battery. If the camera battery runs down during a USB cable transfer, you run the risk of corrupting images. Even if you ignore this advice, and download your images via a direct USB-to-camera connection, don't be tempted to manipulate images on the card from your PC.

5) Do not modify the card file system from the PC, period. Treat the card as read-only while it is mounted on the PC, and only copy your images from the card to the PC, preferably to two different locations for safekeeping.

6) Remove the card from the PC reader (I place mine upside down in my card case, to identify them as ready to reuse, but delay formatting them until I actually place them in the camera for use).

New Music Review Site

OTA*—If you're interested in new and offbeat music, I could use your help. I and a few friends have set up a new music site called CD Reviews by C60Crew, and we need help getting the word out. If you're interested in such things and you could blog the link, or share it with an online music forum you belong to, or just shoot it to a few of your music-lovin' friends—well, many thanks.

More content is being added every day, a little of it by yours truly, even. Most recently, don't miss Kim K.'s super little mini-essay on Nyahbingi music.

Right, then, back to regular programming!

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*Off-Topic Alert

Classic Photograph, Fine Reproduction

If anyone would like one of our high-quality "Migrant Mother" reproductions, I'm doing another run today. (The last of those currently on order will be mailed today.) Go here to learn more.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

What Are Your "Sidewalks" Stories?

By Ken Tanaka

I'm a mug for good, tiny-scale photo documentaries. Large bodies of work that cover wars, famines, floods, and hurricanes are usually interesting and informative. But I'll gladly temporarily set aside such big work in favor of a tiny piece that reveals something otherwise unseen about my immediate slice of world.

That's exactly the type of work that Chicago Tribune writer Rick Kogan and photographer Charles Osgood deliver in spades with their Sidewalks: Portraits of Chicago. Readers of the Chicago Tribune's Sunday Magazine will recognize this book as a collection of the long-running weekly column of the same name. Each piece looks at some small, and often unusual, Chicago topic. Each consists of just a few short paragraphs accompanied by one photograph.

I have two reasons for bringing "Sidewalks" to my fellow T.O.P. readers' attention. First, it's a well-done body of work that many people will find quite interesting. But, of course, long-time Chicagoans (like yours truly) will probably find it most interesting.

Beyond its local appeal, however, the format of "Sidewalks" serves as a terrific suggestion for people who want to pursue documentary photography but struggle to find inspiration beyond snap-shooting personal subjects. Each piece in the book deals with one limited subject by using only one photograph accompanied by a 2–3 paragraph essay.

This is an excellent framework for beginning to assemble a body of documentary work. Even the busiest of people can find time to prepare such a small piece on an accessible subject close to home. Forcing yourself to select one picture—and only one—to illustrate an essay demands that you hone your skills as an editor. Preparing a brief essay on your subject, while not part of photography, is an excellent way to devote some constructive introspective thought to your subject and your photograph. (Not to mention that it's a good way to practice your writing skills.)

So if you've resolved to make more use of your camera in 2007 but are having trouble getting traction, get a copy of "Sidewalks." Beyond being a great little book, it may give you some excellent inspiration and ideas for your own work. Once you've created one of your own "Sidewalks" stories, another will surely soon follow. Then another and another. Then larger essays and richer bodies of documentary images. Soon Magnum will call you to attend their annual meeting in Paris. Get it?

Posted by: KEN TANAKA

Point of No Return?

You may have already seen these, on flickr, where Hans says more than 120,000 people have viewed the pages so far. If you haven't, I hope you're not afraid of heights, or it may be too strong for the start of your day! Words and photographs by Hans van de Vorst, reposted here with the photographer's permission. —MJ

This is a case of photographer photographing photographer. The following photographs were taken by photographer Hans van de Vorst at the Grand Canyon, Arizona. The descriptions are his own. The identity of the photographer in the photos is unknown.

I was simply stunned seeing this guy standing on this solitary rock in the Grand Canyon. The canyon's depth is 900 meters here. The rock on the right is next to the canyon and safe.

Watching this guy on his thong sandals, with a camera and a tripod I asked myself 3 questions:

1. How did he climb that rock?

2. Why not taking that sunset picture on that rock to the right, which is perfectly safe?

3. How will he get back?

This is the point of no return.

After the sun set behind the canyon's horizon he packed his things (having only one hand available) and prepared himself for the jump. This took about 2 minutes. At that point he had the full attention of the crowd.

After that, he jumped on his thong sandals...The canyon's depth is 900 meters here.

Now you can see that the adjacent rock is higher so he tried to land lower, which is quite steep and tried to use his one hand to grab the rock.

We've come to the end of this story. Look carefully at the photographer. He has a camera, a tripod and also a plastic bag, all on his shoulder or in his left hand. Only his right hand is available to grab the rock and the weight of his stuff is a problem.

He lands low on his flip flops; both his right hand and right foot slips away. At that moment I take this shot.

He pushes his body against the rock. He waits for a few seconds, throws his stuff on the rock, climbs and walks away.


Hans van de Vorst's websites:
http://www.hansvandevorst.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hansvandevorst

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to John B.

UPDATE: As with so much that appears to be impossibly dramatic, it turns out that Hans—I will assume good-naturedly (he did link the picture below to his Flickr site)—is not being completely honest with his description. True, the depth of the canyon is many hundreds of meters at that point; but the fact that is conveniently omitted is that these two rocks are connected only slightly below the bottom edge of these pictures, and the jumper is actually risking a fall of only a few feet—which accounts adequately for his casual attitude (although the jump would still terrify me!). You can read more at a website that is absolutely essential for web surfers, and that I probably should have checked before posting this—snopes.com. (You can click on the photo below to see it bigger. The photo is from snopes.com, and should be attributed to Baumer1781.) Thanks to Matthew Miller, Jeremy Kezer, and others for revealing all.

'Darkroom' magazine launch

"Darkroom—written for professional photographers who want to get the most out of Adobe’s groundbreaking Photoshop Lightroom workflow application...published eight times a year by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Each issue features in-depth tutorial articles, innovative digital photography techniques, and timesaving shortcuts written by the creative experts behind Photoshop User and Layers magazines."

More info at Darkroommagazine.com.

Posted by: DAVID EMERICK

Mike Comments: Wow, if ever a new magazine were saddled with a disastrously wrong name, I would think this is it. "Darkroom" has a very distinct, defined, and time-honored meaning in the context of photography, and it is not the opposite of "Lightroom," nor will it have a meaning or a connotation having anything to do with digital imaging for most newsstand browsers. I wish these folks luck and success, but here's hoping that, somehow, there's a method behind the mad name.

To Delete or Not, That Is the Question...

by Carl Weese

To me it seems prudent to avoid deletion in camera, as mentioned in my latest post (below). I also reformat the memory card in-camera, after downloading and making two copies of all the files on either hard drives or optical media. Call it belt'n'suspenders.

Here are two more reasons not to delete on the street. The first is Murphy's Law. Anyone who habitually makes generous use of the delete key out in the field is eventually going to make a mistake and delete the wrong file. Mr. Murphy assures me that when this happens it's going to be a file that you really, really, really didn't want to lose.

Another reason goes back to something David Vestal said to me many years ago. We were discussing a project I was shooting with 35mm Kodachrome. David said he thought people working with color slides missed out on one of photography's most important tools: the contact sheet. Few photographers cut up their rolls of negative film to save only the shots they like best, but almost everyone shooting chromes edits the takes immediately after getting the slides back from the lab. Jay Maisel used to keep giant NYC wire trash baskets filled with rejected slides as decor in his lower Manhattan studio, to show how tightly he edited his work.

Vestal's point was that when you edit pictures immediately, you are bound to make some mistakes. I've seen this more than once while going back to look at work years after shooting. I dig out the contact sheets and start going over them. I see pictures that I selected to make exhibition prints and remember them as old friends. Then I watch a sequence of shots evolving on the contact sheet and suddenly think, "why in the world did I print frame #13 when #17 is clearly the peak? What was I thinking?" This was the experience Vestal was saying slide shooters will miss.

I've already gone back to my archived CDs or DVDs of digital captures made a couple years ago and found that I disagree with my earlier edit in some cases. So while I narrow down the folders on my working hard drive to a fairly tight edit, I do keep "everything" on optical disc archives. Of course even so we don't yet have digital storage solutions as permanent as real film and proof sheets, but maybe these discs will last until a better answer comes along.

Posted by: CARL WEESE

Anti-Shake Technology

There's a story I have heard more than once about training helicopter pilots to hover. Hovering in an unstable device like a helicopter is comparable in its technical challenge to balancing an umbrella standing up on your outstretched open hand. If a trainee has difficulty getting this necessary step, the instructor may offer to switch on the hover-stabilization control system, which has a large toggle on the central panel. This usually results immediately in a smooth, controlled hover for landing or taxiing. After a while, the trainee finds that he no longer needs this aid. The switch, of course, is connected only to the landing light.

Posted by: SCOTT KIRKPATRICK

Canon 5D Wide-Angle Night Photography

by Joe Reifer, from his blog

Joe Reifer, Flying Horse (Fenced)

Wide angle options
The image above is 11 minutes, ƒ/16, ISO 50 with in-camera noise reduction, using an Olympus Zuiko 21mm ƒ/3.5 lens on the 5D with a Cameraquest adapter. The center sharpness of this tiny prime lens is on par with Canon’s wide angle zooms, but the Zuiko walks all over the Canon 17-40mm ƒ/4L and 16-35mm ƒ/2.8L in the corners of the frame. The only significantly sharper lens at this focal length is the fabled Contax Zeiss 21mm Distagon, which currently runs $2500-3500 on the used market. Some people have also resorted to using the Nikon 17-35mm zoom on their EOS cameras with an adapter. Blasphemy!

If you use a 20D, 30D or other Canon dSLR with a smaller sensor, don’t throw your zoom on the junk heap quite yet. This problem is with the edges of the frame, which are not utilized by 1.6x crop cameras. But if you are a 5D, 1DS or 1DS MkII owner who has looked at your wide angle images at 50% or 100% in Photoshop, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Canon wide angle zooms show a loss of sharpness and smearing of detail near the edges of the frame, even when stopped down at ƒ/8 or ƒ/11. I would like to thank Mark over at 16-9.net for his extensive lens testing and comparisons. His site is a great resource.

Olympus Zuiko 21mm
Using aftermarket lenses on Canon EOS cameras can be an expensive and time-consuming rabbit hole to go down. Fortunately, the Zuiko lenses made for the Olympus OM system are quite small, light, and reasonably priced in most cases. The Olympus 21/3.5 usually sells in the $300–500 range. There is also a Zuiko 21mm ƒ/2 lens that will give you a brighter viewfinder image, and has an additional lens element for close focusing. This lens is usually $800–1000. Extensive specs and technical information on Olympus OM lenses can be found on the MIR website. The Olympus 18/3.5 and 24mm shift lens are both stunning performers that do not fall into the “reasonably priced” range.

The Zuiko lenses are manual focus, and the aperture needs to be stopped down manually. Manual focus lenses are great for night photography—unlike modern zooms and even high end prime lenses, most manual lenses have a decent manual focusing scale. Before shooting anything critical with manual focus lenses, I recommend taking test shots at different focus settings and analyzing the results.

Focus calibration
Do not focus by only using the markings on the lens, or with an online depth of field calculator. The old trick of setting infinity on the focus scale one aperture wider than you are shooting may or may not work. You’ll get the best results by taking test shots at different focus settings to calibrate how the lens focuses on your camera.

For night photography exposure calculation, it’s easiest to pick an aperture and stick with it. I usually like to shoot at ƒ/8, both for sharpness and exposure time.

Perhaps the night photographer’s addendum to the "ƒ/8 and be there" axiom is "ƒ/8 and be there for 10 minutes."

I tested the Olympus 21/3.5 in the daytime at 5 or 6 different focus settings and made notes about where the focus ring was set. After analyzing the results in Photoshop, I determined I get the best results by shooting at ƒ/8 with the focus set at 3 meters.

Night photographers, do you see where I’m going with this line of thinking? No more fumbling with a flashlight and praying that your wide angle zoom focuses where you want it to. No more having someone stand in the photo holding a cell phone so you have something to focus on. No more taking 4 test shots at high ISO to gauge your focus accuracy before shooting. I just set the lens to the 3 meter mark, stop the aperture down to ƒ/8, and take the shot.

This focus setting also works just fine at ƒ/11 and ƒ/16, which is useful if you need a longer exposure. I wanted longer star trails in the above image—due to strong tungsten street lighting, I stopped down to ƒ/16 to get an 11 minute exposure.

I realize after finishing this article that it really could be entitled "in praise of the Olympus 21mm lens." It really is the full frame wide angle shooter’s best friend.

For more information on Zuiko lenses, have a look at Gary Reese’s extensive Olympus OM System Lens Tests. Adapters to use Olympus lenses on EOS cameras can be purchased from Cameraquest or Fotodiox.

Posted by: JOE REIFER

The Camera-Manual Easter Egg Hunt: Pentax Digital Preview

by Carl Weese

A weatherproof DSLR is nothing new to me after working with the Olympus E-1 for several years, but I'm so fond of rainy conditions that weatherproofing is basically a must-have feature for me now.

Today’s DSLR cameras and camera systems are so complex, I doubt anyone can spend the time to research everything about each of the systems they might choose. What I did when I first bought into the Olympus E-1 system three+ years ago, and again recently when I decided to augment my digital equipment with Pentax gear just a few weeks ago, was to examine specific, pivotal features, then make an executive decision. Life is too short (and I’d rather spend it out making pictures) to understand everything about every possible option on every available camera. But, once you’ve made your choice based on major issues that will affect the work you want to do, be sure to read the whole manual. It’s an easter egg hunt.

"Digital Preview" won’t be new to those who’ve been using Pentax digital cameras, but it was a nice easter egg for me to find. When I got my first good DSLR system, I thought the luminance histogram was simply wonderful. I bought the system to do pedestrian commercial illustration, where in the past I’d always used Polaroid tests to establish electronic flash lighting and so forth. Now I could make a shot, wait a couple seconds for card-write, then view a histogram (I couldn’t care less about chimping the picture—I know what the picture is—I only want to know whether the sensor has captured the tonal range correctly). This was fantastic. My only complaints were that I had to do several button pushes to get past the picture view to the histogram, and that the histogram was only luminance, not RGB.

Well, the K10D has a plethora of options for you to bring up when you hit the "arrow-symbol" button after the shot (does this symbol have a standard name? I don't know of one). One of them is a full set of R, G, and B histograms, plus the luminance one, along with a tiny thumbnail of the picture. Just what I wanted.

It’s an easy matter to make this the default (one-button) choice. The easter-egg part, Digital Preview, is that you can get all this information without wasting card space. The shutter release button on these Pentax cameras is surrounded by the On/Off wheel, which has a third, Masonic-Temple-looking symbol which I take to be an iris lens aperture. In default mode, if you move the dial there, it is what we old timers understand as the stop-down lever. It closes the lens to the aperture that would be used for shooting, so you can squint at the proposed depth-of-field. I never found this to be especially useful with old-fashioned film cameras, so it’s no surprise that I’m much more interested in the alternate function.

If you go into the menu options and start Customizing, you can make that lever do something quite different. Enable Digital Preview, and if you make that same move, the camera will pretend to take a picture, and send it straight to the LCD screen without recording anything to the memory card. This is great. You get, almost instantly, your preferred Info view (rgb+luminace histograms, with thumbnail, as I have it set). Without wasting card space, you’ve got all the data you could want about the scene.

If the color seems strange, you can hit the Fn button and then ask for White Balance, at which point the non-picture appears as background behind the icons for standard manual white balance settings.
Click through them and find something that works better. Not good enough? Go in and fine tune the white balance. But realize that no back-of-the-camera LCD can really show color accurately, so this is only ballpark setting stuff. I always shoot RAW, but I still want the shooting white balance to be at least close. If your white balance is grossly wrong, your RGB histogram is also wrong, which is to say, worthless, which is why you want WB to be good even if you shoot RAW.

To be more specific, let's say auto white balance is much too blue (something that happens frequently with the K10D in overcast light). If the RGB histogram shows the red channel up near, but not at, the right edge (normally just what you want) when you correct the color temperature of the RAW file later, the red channel is likely to blow out. If the white balance is nearly perfect when you shoot, the red histogram would have shown that clipping and warned you to reduce exposure.

Of course, for anyone who really prefers to shoot JPEG this feature should be worth its weight in golden pixels.

OK, so what’s wrong with just shooting a test, then deleting it? My understanding is that there is a strong correlation between memory card failures and frequent use of in-camera deletion. I read about this before I began using a DSLR, and have never deleted anything in-camera. I have never had a card failure. Coincidence? How would I know? A friend who works for the nearest metro newspaper says “we don’t delete on the street” and that seems to get the point pretty well. I don’t care how much card giggage you can afford, but tests are useful, and you’ll probably do more tests if they don’t take up space on the card.

Posted by: CARL WEESE

Arche de la Défense

by Olaf Ulrich

The most stunning interpretation of a photograph I saw last year was on the German branch of Fotocommunity. There was a project a few months ago were the participants were supposed to choose one out of four raw files and process it. Any kind of image manipulation was allowed.

One of the four images provided as raw material was a wide-angle shot of the Arche de la Défense in Paris, France.

And here's what one of the participants came up with. I think the creativity, the effect, and the atmosphere of this (strongly processed) interpretation is mind-blowing. I stumbled across this image months ago, and it still keeps impressing me whenever I look at it. If you think it basically was only brightened up and simply has the converging lines straightened then just try to re-do this image from the original yourself! You'd be surprised how far from trivial it is!

Regarding Mike's photograph "Illinois #20"—I like Mike's version, I like Stephen's version, and I like advman's version, too. That exactly is my problem when trying interpreting my own images. I tend to like them all, I cannot decide which I like the best, and thus get lost in the overwhelming wealth of potentialities. So in the end I usually return to the first version (which usually was the least processed one)...which is what I'd do here, too. I like all versions of Illinois #20 but I think I like Mike's version most.

Posted by: OLAF ULRICH

Pentax K10D/21mmDA Autofocus

by Carl Weese

[Editorial Insertion:
Carl's Pentax K10D Thought Process to Date:
Part I: "On Buying a Camera"
Part II: "Less is More"
Part III: "On Testing a New (Digital) Camera, Steps A and B"
Part IV: "Weese on Anti-Shake"
Part V: "Anti-Shake Pt. II, or, Shake Reduction as Virtual Tripod for Nature Work"
End Editorial Insertion]

Two things to talk about today.

First, a clarification about what I’ve been up to here, which is not to do an in-depth product review in the mode of the several online sites, or ink-on-paper magazines, which do that sort of thing well. Nor to recommend any particular products to TOP's readers. The idea here is that some of TOP’s readers might enjoy following the thought process an experienced photographer goes through to choose and then learn to work with a new set of tools. There's no implication that what I chose will be right for anyone else, but rather that the process might help you find the right answer for your needs.

Second, a problem report with the equipment I’ve been talking about. Several readers who also have the Pentax K10D/21mm DA lens combination have written to ask whether I’ve encountered problems with the AF system. Yes, I have. I got in touch with the Pentax folks to tell them about the problems. I sent them JPEG files demonstrating the errors I was seeing with the lens I bought on the open market, and they sent me a fresh-from-the-warehouse second copy of the 21 to test. It worked exactly the same.

For years now I've been saying my wonderful 1989 Honda CRX would make it to 180,000 miles. It did, last week, and started coming apart at the seams. Mainly from being 17.5 years old rather than the miles. But it became hopeless and I had to get a new car. I lucked out and found a very hard-to-get Honda FIT (someone got tired of waiting and cancelled their order). It is a subject that might confuse an AF system if the sensor hits the plain metal instead of the wipers or other solid target.

Here is the problem. All AF lens/camera systems encounter situations—“focus problems” in the sense your math teachers used the word “problem”—that they can’t handle. Subjects with no detail or contrast, like the sky or the sky reflected in the paint on a shiny car, or a screen of winter shrubbery in front of a brick wall. In the first case an AF system can’t do anything at all, in the second, it can’t figure out whether you want the sticks or the wall, and depending on the distance, it may not be able to distinguish the sticks, period. In that case you get the wall, even if you wanted the sticks to be in best focus.

What I’ve found with the 21DA combined with the K10D camera—both quite new introductions—is that as long as the AF mechanism gets its act together the focus is correct. None of the back-focus/front-focus problems that afflict some samples of all lens/camera systems. When it’s right, it’s perfect, and that's with both samples of the lens on my camera.

What’s wrong is that simple focus problems throw the system for a loop. A six inch diameter tree trunk six or seven feet from the camera, placed squarely on the central focus spot, just isn’t seen by the AF system, which instead focuses well behind the target. Another problem, pointed out in an email from a reader who is working with the same equipment, is that at around 15 or 20 feet, the AF may miss the subject and jump not just to infinity, but actually past to the limit of the lens’s mechanical travel. I hadn’t found this before getting that email (thanks for the tip, Jim), but it did occur the next day when I used the K10D/21DA combination in very dim light. I’d like to test the lens on another compatible camera and I may do that soon, but I don’t have a different Pentax DSLR model handy at the moment.

Because I see the problems with both copies of the 21 and have reports of similar behavior from other peoples' camera/lens combinations, I don't think this is a sample defect issue. The 21 DA is too good a lens to give up on, so I’m continuing to use it, though playing it safe and using it only in manual focus. I’m neither a lens designer nor a software engineer, but my impression as a user of this gear is that what I’m seeing is a communication/compatibility issue that might be fixable, possibly even with a firmware update. I hope so. Maybe I’ll hear something about it from the elves in Golden, Colorado, as soon as they dig out from their second blizzard in less than a week.

Next time, we'll go on an Easter Egg hunt.

Posted by: CARL WEESE

Question from ShadZee: Are you having issues with your other lenses? I'm considering buying the 43mm Limited (and maybe the 31mm limited as well). I really hope the K10 would work flawlessly with these two.

Carl Responds: My 40mm (and a 70mm pancake Pentax sent me for testing) both work exactly as the AF should. No front/back issues, focus locks on quick and secure with the same sorts of subjects that fool the system with the 21 mounted.

13 Photographs and You're Gone

Lately I've been trying to learn a little more about blogs and how to optimize income from them (Rule #1, "Be someone other than me"), and one thing I constantly do wrong is to send people away from here to read something else someplace else on the web, something so interesting and so rich in tempting links that they never come back.

You know what they say: Oh, well.

Here I go again. I love reading brief little essays about single pictures—I keep threatening to do a book of 'em, but my day job as a ditch digger keeps me from intellectual pursuits. Anyway, the best example of this I've come across recently is a little blogentry called "13 Photographs That Changed the World" on Neatorama. It was pointed out to me by Todd G. in a comment. Thanks, Todd G. The byline states:

"The article...was written by Ransom Riggs for the Jan.–Feb. 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine, featured on Neatorama in partnership with mental_floss." I realize once you go to Neatorama/Mental Floss you will never come back; I've just lost you as a reader. 'Bye. Forget me not....

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Prints, Prints, Prints, Prints

Ach, I'm sorry, I spaced out again. I advertised on the Fine Print site that "Illinois #20" was going to be on sale for half price all day today, and then I forgot to change the price at midnight. I was up, too. No excuse. Sorry.

Anyway, it's changed now, and the news is that "Illinois #20" is half price just for today. The print really is a lot nicer than the jpeg—in my opinion, anyway. It is subtle, and I appreciated the comment of Vesa Lolkas, a reader from Turku, Finland, who said, in the comments to the "Post-Processing" post, "The 'bleak' original image is like a poem that slowly gets to you." I like compliments like that, that aren't written to flatter but that nevertheless get right to the heart of the matter. I continue to find the printed version satisfyingly poetic, if that's not claiming too much.

Also, if you've been mulling over whether to buy a print of Ancil Nance's Jim Bouton picture, now's the time! The price goes up tomorrow.

There isn't a new print offer for today. Well, there is, but I'm just not ready yet. I need the weekend at least to finish preparations, so I'll probably post it on Monday. Hope I haven't disappointed you, if you tuned in curious about what's new.

Older offers
In other news, all of the prints of "Wisconsin #7" ordered so far are now mailed (including the replacement for your damaged one, John A.), so if you ordered one and are still waiting patiently, you don't have much longer to wait. (The price of "Wisconsin #7"—which is, incidentally, the most popular picture I've ever sold—I mean ever, in my career—will reach its final resting place of $450 about a week from now. It's at $180 now.)

Many people who ordered "Migrant Mother" have now received their prints, and most of the rest will go out today, the orders placed most recently will leave here on Monday. (That's the plan, anyway.) I'm really gratified by the great reception both these prints have been getting from people who've gotten theirs already. Many thanks to those who have let me know.

I hope it's not too crass to mention that all of these prints are examples of what the new HP B9180 can do. I'm finding it to be a balky, cantankerous beast with lots of bad habits—I'll update you chapter and verse in these pages soon—but the results are so stunning I'm already flat-out dreading the time when it will have to go back to HP.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Post-Post Processing Post

By John Lehet

Here's some thoughts on a low-tech post-processing trick, maybe cheaper than any Photoshop book on LAB or sharpening, and quicker to implement than the time it takes to read a book. It addresses the problematic difference between an office and a darkroom, and how we see a print as we work on it. Beyond our calibrations and technical tricks and all our Photoshop chops, we need to use our eyes and our gut sense of what works. We need to do it in good light. You may say, "Duh!" But read on.

John Lehet, Waterlily Leaf

In the old days I'd spend hours in the dark working on a print. Sometimes a print would take more than a single full-day darkroom session. Ugh. I'd mess with my chemistry, turn out the lights, draw the pre-planned, evolving dodge-burn sequence on the back of the paper, expose it, take it through all the trays, and then the magic moment—turn on the light! I'd put the new print on the back of a tray or in an empty one and blow dry it for dry-down, and then the second magic moment; I'd turn on my evaluation light. I learned about using an evaluation light from John Sexton when I studied fine printing with him in '82 at the Maine Workshop. At the time he was working as Ansel Adams' technical assistant, so most of the techniques we were learning came from the master's master. He said to clamp a reflective light with a very bright bulb 3 feet from the print. It was there at the workshop, and I came home and did it at home too.

My darkroom was a utilitarian space, and all about dark and light. Clamping an ugly, utilitarian reflector lamp the designated 3 feet from the print was an easy and natural thing to do. I screwed a block of wood to the wall, and the clamp-light clamped right onto it. After I started doing this, I could see much more easily if a print was on target. I could see into the shadow areas, see if there was detail there and if the blacks I wanted were solid. I could see if the textures with highlights were holding detail. Of course before a print went from Work Print to Final Print status I'd carry the WP around the house and look at it in different light to see how it worked. To be a good print, it has to work in a variety of lighting conditions, not just some perfect ideal. But the perfect ideal light was really really important to see exactly what I had created. The new print in the good light: it was a clear moment.

Now in the digital darkroom, which is more often than not actually something like an office, we stare into a light bulb—LCD, CRT, or in my case both—for some time in our processing of the image. Sometimes for hours. The pixels glow. We do what we do, and then we click print and wait not-so-long. What I get is to me always a bit odd at that moment: a piece of paper that's reflecting light rather than emitting it. I often work with test strips, as I did in the darkroom, and what I hold in my hand in my dim office seems frail and weak and small next to the big, bright image glowing beside it. This is as often as not a muddling moment. Things are less clear than ever.

Next to the monitor(s) is an important place; I need to see how true the color and tonal values are compared to my on-screen work. Then I take it out on my porch and around the house; I do what I've always done—look at the print in different lights.

The print is of course a different thing than the glowing monitor. It has to live or die with its own reflective properties. We have to let go of the glowing pixels and move into the real world. Those of us who do this know that a glowing monitor and a reflecting print rarely hit us in the same way, and it's rather an odd thing. Partly we have to use our intuition on-screen to think about the pixels as a future print. I find I often have to go back to the on-screen version and change it—so it's less optimal on screen and better as a print. The difference between monitor and print is another post. My point here is that to start to make these decisions the old-style light might be more than a little helpful.

And to me, as someone selling prints that I represent online, the matter is more than academic. I want my print to have the same kind of impact and look and feel as the image represented in pixels.

After some years of doing this digitally I'm still evolving, and that doesn't just mean trying to keep up with the technology. It means I'm constantly trying to understand the subtleties of every step along the way as the technical sand shifts quickly under my feet. And I'm thinking that the for-me most awkward step, from pixels to paper, could use a bit of old fashioned bright light on it. I haven't yet screwed a block of wood to the wall of my office and clamped something ugly onto it. I need to do something. New Years' Resolution.

Posted by: JOHN LEHET

Post-Processing

Recently I seem to be getting a lot of questions from people about, and requests for information about, post-processing. (This probably came up because of my recent preoccupation with making and selling prints, and from posts such as "On Printmaking.") So I plan to do a few posts in the coming months on the subject, with some concrete examples.

The problem of post-processing is twofold: 1) What to do, and 2) How to do it. I tend to be a little too much interested in part 1 (my skills are a little too seat-of-the-pants), and most instructional books are skewed pretty radically toward part 2. But the two things really arise together. They also inform each other: what you know how to do influences what you do, and—similar but not the same thing at all—the effects you feel you need to achieve can drive you to go learn how to do it.

Illinois #20—Mike's version

I posted my picture "Illinois #20" for sale a couple of days ago (it's been selling like hotcakes*), and my e-friend Stephen Best of Macquarie Editions wrote from Australia to say he found it too "bleak," asking me if I wanted him to have a go at it. I happen to really like the print a lot—I'm sort of besotted with it right now, actually, in the way you get about the things that come along occasionally to "nourish your enthusiasm" (Ansel Adams's phrase). I keep wandering over to look at it. And one thing I like about it is its bleakness and apparent emptiness. But I'm never averse to learning—especially from people who know what they're doing—so I took Stephen up on his offer.

Illinois #20—Stephen's version

Here's what he came up with. He was working just with my posted JPEG, and he was also influenced somewhat by my interpretation, which of course he'd already seen. So it's possible—likely, even—that he would come up with something different if he were to start from the RAW file with no guidance from me and only his own taste to satisfy.

Stephen basically converted to LAB color and ran the procedure that Dan Margulis recommends in the first chapter of his new book on the subject. After converting to LAB, Stephen ran a Haze Reduction action to increase local contrast. Then, using a Curves layer, he first adjusted the L (luminance) curve to tweak tonality, and then steepened the a and b curves ("a lot," he says) to "bring out the latent colours in [the] flat original." Lastly, he added a gradient fill to the layer mask to stop the top of the image from blowing out. Once it was back on my desktop I reconverted it to RGB and, as Phil Davis never used to say, viola.

So what do you think? Here's what I think, provisionally: I think my version preserves the look and intensity of the light a little better—it was near dark and the light was murky—but Stephen's is actually more accurate in terms of color as I remember it. The sunset, behind hazy clouds, was behind my right shoulder, and you can see that in Stephen's interpretation.

So why "provisionally"? For the same reason that you only know what you think provisionally—I haven't seen prints side-by-side yet (and neither have you). To really decide, I'd have to try to replicate his effects on the RAW file and reprint it to his vision of it, and then live with the two for a bit.

There are two very basic lessons of post-processing that cannot be stressed enough: First, in interpreting a photograph as a print there is only bleh, fair, fine, better, better, better, and different: there's no best. (You can quote me on that. Please.) The interpretation an expert settles on will likely be better than the best interpretation a neophyte can come up with, but half a dozen experienced photographer/printmakers could conceivably come up with half a dozen different versions of the same file; it depends on how you think the particular picture works best, how you want it to communicate, and what aspects of it you like and wants to bring out. The second lesson is: You have to see it. Never skip the looking stage of the process. I think I like my version better than Stephen's, and I'll bet he believes the same thing in reverse. But unless and until we each actually see prints side-by-side, final judgment has to be reserved.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON with STEPHEN BEST

*Have you ever bought a hotcake? Well me neither.**

**See William's comment and my response.

Featured Comment by advman: Sorry Mike, I couldn't resist. Here is a version I just did. You may hate it, it is almost certainly not what you've seen, but that's what I think would sell.

I made this with Lab as well, only not so decent, and added three curves adjustment layers to adjust contrast differently for the forest, the city, and finally the top of the sky.

I have no idea how bad the effect on noise would be. That is always the problem with so drastic contrast adjustments, but you might well get away with it. It is only crucial that you don't use any noise reduction on the forest. Micro-detail in the forest and noise reduction, they don't go well with each other.

How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media

By Patrick McFarland

Ahh, I’ve been planning to write this one for awhile: an entire article on archival quality media. As I do professional software development as well as professional photography (what a weird combination), I need archival quality CD and DVD media to store my data on.

However, one of the hardest things to is actually find good media, or even understand why it is good media. This article focuses on the history of Compact Discs, writable CD/DVD media, and why DVD+R is superior to DVD-R. If you want to just know what media is worth buying, skip to the summary at the bottom....

READ ON

Posted by: JOHN LEHET

Book Review: 'Plastic Cameras: Toying With Creativity' by Michelle Bates

by Ctein

I'm not fanatically in love with the snapshot aesthetic. Most work done in this vein is a serious bore. Practitioners too often confuse artlessness with art, failing to understand that to produce art when you're standing that close to the edge of an aesthetic cliff requires exceptional clever and nimble movements.

I'm unenamored of "Lomographers" who think that copying the motions of Garry Winogrand make them artists. Garry was a genius and accomplished the near impossible. Not so the rest.

Uninsightful emulation of form just produces boring photographs; they're not even bad art. This is not a technique prejudice. I'm equally uninterested in the renderings of Orthodox Zonies, who think mechanically replicating the techniques of Adams and Weston produce work of comparable artistic merit. News flash: brilliant technique without soul is also boring.
Nothing wrong with fun (viz. my reviews of the $10 digital camera) but there's a big difference between fun and work of enduring merit.

Plastic Cameras: Toying with Creativity understands both the fun and merit of toy camera photography. It proves conclusively that not only can you produce wonderful art with these gadgets, along with having a great time, but that "plastic camera photography" has no more of a single, forced "look" than does Nikon photography.

Chapter 2, "Plastic Portfolios," is 30% of the book, and I wish it were longer (and that many of the photos were reproduced larger). If you thought cheap "toy" cameras were incapable of producing interesting and diverse art, it'll open your eyes. There's lots of amazing and unexpected work on display. I'm especially enamored of Pauline St. Denis' and Susan Bowen's intricate and brilliant panoramas, Harvey Stein's New York street photography, and Teru Kuwayama's documentary images. Convincing proof that folks are making a lot more than toy pictures with these toy cameras.

The rest of the book thoroughly covers the 5 W's (who, what, when, where, and how) of toy camera equipment and technique. It includes all sorts of cool hacks for extending the range of capabilities of these little cameras—that's half the fun of playing with them. Focus [sic] is on the Holga, but the information's of value across the range of toycams.

Plastic Cameras is published by Focal Press and has a suggested list price of $29.95. Although you could purchase it from Amazon at a discount, I recommend buying a signed copy directly from the author. Authors do a lot better when you buy books directly from them instead of through distributors.

This one's highly recommended.

Posted by CTEIN

Metacommentary

If you're interested in Photoshop technique, I've just posted a new Featured Comment to "T.O.P. Technical Book of the Year 2006" by David Mantripp, including a link to David's mini-review of the book.

And speaking of comments, I've closed the comments for "T.O.P. Photographer of the Year 2006," so anyone who comments further shouldn't be offended if it doesn't show up (it will show they didn't read the post all the way to the end, anyway).

I do tend to pay for it whenever I venture to post controversial things here. If something I say makes people feel bad, the bad feelings are magnified back on me, via comments. My little observation about Saddam drew fiercely unhappy complaints from both sides—the usual ones from conservatives objecting to what they see as reflexive Bush-bashing, and even more of them—about a third again as many—from people who provided copious links to evidence that Saddam was put in power by the U.S. in the first place, and to other sites asserting that Bush was simply eliminating a witness to U.S. complicity in the region. Then I had to deal with comments from people who were angry that I hadn't posted their first comments. I even got several examples of a quixotic type of response I've gotten before, namely, from non-Americans holding me personally responsible for U.S. policy. I hate to say it, but I have very, very little influence over my nation's government. (In effect, I just live here.) I vote, but that's about where the reach of my power ends. Believe me on this. I can't get Condi Rice on the phone.

The reason I ended the comments to the Jill Greenberg post was that I perceived that people who've already been immersed in this argument had linked back to T.O.P. and were coming here to contribute arguments they had already been involved in elsewhere; I was getting comments from people, in other words, whose views on the matter had already been radicalized, and seemed to have hardened that way. I don't think it's as big a deal as some other people do, obviously, but at the same time I'm sort of sorry I got into it. In any event, I don't think that T.O.P. is the proper place to hash out emotional issues unto exhaustion. We can argue all day—but why?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Blogging on a Beautiful Spring Day

SA*

The blogger is walking alone down the street. Let's say—my street: tree-lined, with older houses, modestly generous yards, street lamps. It's April, and new leaves are on the trees. The new leaves have that peculiar delightful green color, delicate yet bright. Musing aloud, the blogger says to himself, "My, that's a beautiful green."

Immediately, three people pop up at one side of the street (the virtual world is like that), cooing approval of the blogger's opinion. "It certainly is," says Coloratoora; "Right you are," agrees BornOnTheFourth; "You've very perceptive," chimes in Xtalk, "I wouldn't have noticed that if you hadn't mentioned it."

The three of them murmur to their invisible friends—"hey, come look at this"; "check this out"—who pop up alongside of them. Some offer their own opinion on the matter of green. NdlssLv tells a story of his own experience of green, years ago; Imjason recites his opinions on green, sleep, the evolution of beetles, and the proposed new one-dollar coinage. Before long, a warm knot of people have gathered, all united happily in their love of green, and, by association, their admiration of the blogger.

The crowd swells. The blogger feels good, and a little full of himself. Suddenly, attracted by all the hubbub, a lone individual pops up on the other side of the street. Everyone looks at her.

"What's wrong with blue?" she says. "I like blue."

Murmurs of assent from the blogger's left. Blue is nice. They like blue too. Blogger feels expansive. Yes, blue too! he thinks. Blue and green! Look at me—I'm all about blue and green!

Two more people pop up on the blue side. "Look at that sky!" exclaims Jean2U. "It's a beautiful shade of blue."

"Your blue shirt is nice," someone says.

MainMan, on the green side, unbidden, begins a long disquisition on hue. "Blue is monotonous. Green can vary in hue. The blue of the sky is actually always the same shade, just lighter or darker...."

"Pardon me, but that's wrong," comes a voice from the blue crowd. There is a grumble of agreement.

MainMan pauses. "Are you calling MainMan wrong?" asks MainMan, sententiously. "How could you be so rude? MainMan is not wrong, MainMan is a KING, sitting in his Kingdom, surrounded by his mighty peripherals blinking and flashing like the cockpit of a Jules Verne submarine. You've assaulted MainMan, is what you've done, and I'm very close to MainMan, for MainMan is me...."

"We were talking about green," says L8rJ, from the green side.

"Yeah, shut the hell up, MainMain," says Nordus.

"Nobody tells me to shut up!" cries MainMan. "I'm leaving this blog and never coming back!"

"Blue is nice too! Everybody agrees blue is nice!" interjects LuLufromOz, hysteria in her voice.

"Blogger's post said nothing about blue," several people say, their voices rising. "We can quote him! Look, here it is, he said, 'My, what a beautiful green,' emphases ours...." "Yeah, GREEN," adds Nordus. "No," says another, "he said THAT'S a beautiful green, not WHAT a beautiful green, you insipid cretin. Can't you even cut and paste?!?"

At this point, sensing tension on the rise, the blogger assays his own comment, feeling (without, actually, a whole lot of justification) that he must somehow still be in control of the matter, since he brought it up. "We all agree, and we can all get along," he says soothingly. "I like the green of the new leaves; I also like the blue of the morning sky. The green of the new leaves and the blue of the morning sky go together, and are both nice." Nods from many individuals.

The street is very crowded now. Expectancy is in the air, although of what it's hard to say. More and more people are popping up on both sides. Suddenly, a large, truculent-looking individual looms up from the back over the heads of the admirers of green. "You know, I never fuckin' liked you blue jerks. Blue people reek. Bugger off, blue buggers! This was a thread about green!"

"Hey, it's my thread," says blogger weakly—but he's shouted down from the blue side. "Who says we can't talk about blue?" "Green makes me sick to my stomach!" "Don't you know green is evil? Here are eight links that prove it!" "Who died and made you the thread policeman?"

"I'm with TrucuL3nt!" screams coatolder, from out of the mass on the green side. "This was about green! Green! Blue people go to HELL!" "GREEN—GREEN—GREEN," chant the green people.

Shouting becomes general. Off to one side, green people are beseeching blue people to abandon blue and come over to the green side. A commenter named Zizzyman jumps from green, to blue, and then back to green again, welcomed with open arms each time he switches sides. Even the formerly peaceful people are angry and unhappy now.

The blogger never sees who throws the first rock.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Rocks pop into the hands of many of the more vocal individuals on both sides (you can find anything on the internet). Before he knows it, rocks are whizzing back and forth past blogger's head. One smacks into his shoulder; another hits his leg. "People! People!" he cries, his voice drowned out by the melee. "Keep your sense of perspective! It's just a nice Spring day!"

"Shut up, idiot!" comes the chorus. "You knew this was going to happen—you knew it would bring traffic to your blog when you started militating for green in the first place!"

"Yeah! That's why you did it!"

"Yeah! This is all your fault!"

"OW!" cries blogger.

Inexplicably, a lull—and the blogger is aware that the already huge crowd has suddenly achieved a whole new dimension; it has magnified exponentially. Behind him, an enormous mass of people have materialized. They are armed with cudgels, verbs, spikes, bricks, epithets, all sorts of things. And they are looking menacing. A wave of fear travels up his spine.

"Who are you?" says the blogger. "What do you want?"

"We don't much care about that whole crowd of stupid cool-colors people," growls the burly ringleader of the new mob. "We're more concerned with bastards like you who go around deliberately promoting green...."

"But who are you?" says the desperate blogger.

"You've been linked over at Red.com, HotColr.org, pinkladies.net, RedPartisans.blogspot.com...all over the place...and nobody is happy about you!" comes the answer. "If this isn't obvious to you yet, we're the red people...."

Posted by: MIKE ("It's Just A Nice Spring Day") JOHNSTON

*Satire alert

Illinois #20

I've just posted a new print for sale. This one is probably not something that I should even try to sell—I love it, but it's going to appeal to very few people. It's called Illinois #20.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Peace

Richard F. Man, Peace

The picture was taken at dawn on the solstice; Richard did both the photography and the calligraphy (which says "Peace").

Happy New Year to everyone!

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Richard