Wishing everyone all the best for 2007.
2006 was a banner year for this photographer, seeing the abandonment of film, the disposal of a ridiculous accumulation of gear, and its replacement with a couple of digital cameras and lenses and one piece of insanely great software. As a result, productivity soared and the sheer joy of taking pictures returned. It’s like being a kid again.
I wish you all the same for 2007.
A little slice of life
For those of you into that most civilized of games, cricket, the boy on the wall appears to be bowling a particularly mean googly.
Spotted in San Mateo, CA on Christmas Eve.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit subway in San Francisco is fast, not too costly and sometimes clean. It’s a great way to get around in a congested city and offers lots of picture opportunities, assuming some bureaucrat doesn’t apprehend you and try to confiscate your camera.
Once in the city center, the magnificent hanging light display in the Hyatt Hotel is something to behold:
The best and worst of a (mostly) great year
Never mind the fact that the free world is threatened by despots vying for nuclear weapons, what does that exemplar of American trash writing, Time magazine, give the Man of the Year award to? Why, to ‘You’. The related garbage prose goes on to laud people who make videos of their pet iguanas and post them on file sharing sites on the internet. So when that suitcase bomb destroys fifty blocks of a major American city, we can be secure in the knowledge that our videos of domestic pets are safely backed up in a remote location. Circulation beats integrity yet again at Time Warner. Well, at least they had the good taste to put a Mac on the cover.
Anyway, as this is the season of holiday cheer, lets get the Worst of the Year over and done with right away. You know – the ethically challenged who sadly pervade our society. The Love America or Leave it candidates.
So don’t expect this journal entry to award any prizes to journalists or photojournalists. Indeed, this year has been marked by the lack of integrity in photojournalism, as I have written about 1 – here, 2 – here, 3 – here and 4 – here.
Further, there’s no obvious candidate for best photographer of the year as I increasingly come to the conclusion that there are no more Great Photographers.
However, the Book reviews section of this journal has looked at many books profiling Great Photographers over the past year and my award goes to Dan Normark for his splendid and heartfelt Chavez Ravine, 1949. No mention of Great Photographers can exclude Elliott Erwitt and maybe the finest book yet on Henri Cartier-Bresson is the outstanding The Man, The Image and The World. Expensive? Yes. Essential? Absolutely. If nothing else, it shows clearly that Cartier-Bresson’s best work was also his earliest, for the most part. Erwitt, by contrast, remains as fresh today as he was fifty years ago.
On the gear front, in the context of technology as the great enabler, there has been a lot of good news. For this photographer who, for the most part, dislikes grain, likes big prints and hates darkroom work, the highest quality image has become par for the course thanks to the wonderful Canon EOS 5D. Still overpriced, owing to a lack of competition, and yes, the LCD screen is next to useless, yet the large, grain free image sensor in this camera has obsoleted the very best film had to offer in 35mm and medium format, with a considerable saving in bulk and clutter owing to broad focal length lenses like the 24-105mm zoom.
The back end, meaning processing and printing, has been equally well served with two newcomers on the scene, Apple’s Aperture, which finally banished Photoshop to the cupboard under the stairs where it belongs, and the dead reliable and economical Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 large format dye printer with stable inks and great print quality.
Next year I hope there’s a small, fast digital camera with a wide angle, non-zoom lens and a proper optical finder to give the street snapper the instrument he really needs. Meanwhile, the capable Panasonic LX-1, suitably adapted with an accessory viewfinder, gets the Runner-Up prize.
Meanwhile, thank you Canon, Apple and Hewlett Packard.
RIPs? Well, just two. Film, in general, and Kodak, in particular. Seldom has technological change so overwhelmed a medium or a company so quickly. There’s no saving either.
They get the best landscapes
It pays to get up early!
f/1.4 is fast!
I have never owned a lens faster than f/2.
That said, the f/2s I have owned have invariably said ‘Leica Summicron’ on them, whether 35mm, 50mm or 90mm. Which is sort of like saying that all your sports cars have been Porsches, meaning the best of breed. At 90mm, that was an apochromatic, aspherical element lens and suffice it to say that the aperture ring on this lens only did two things – it changed the amount of light striking the film and it changed the depth of field. Definition at any aperture was the same, which is to say superb.
So I got to thinking what something faster might be like. Now f/1 is available from Leica only, and that means a second mortgage, so forget it. The f/1.2 lenses out there from Japanese makers have generally poor reputations, being more exercises in marketing, or keeping up with the Joneses if you prefer, so they are of no interest to me. But guess what? Canon just happens to make an f/1.4 for very little money and it’s auto-everything and a nice match for the 5D body. Plus, having grown up with film Leicas, I simply like the 50mm focal length.
So a couple of clicks on the B&H web site and the 50mm Canon f/1.4 was on my doorstep.
The lens is well made, if not as solid as the ‘L’, meaning the extending focusing mount has a bit of play at the closest focus distance. Auto focus is every bit as fast as the ‘L’ and, strangely, the viewfinder image does not appear much brighter than with the f/4 L – certainly not three stops (8x) brighter. Naturally, as a fixed focus 50mm, it is much smaller and lighter than the L and the absence of Image Stabilization further reduces bulk and weight. The feel, with the lens on the 5D body, is just right – a smaller lens would not feel as good in the hand. The focus ring, if you elect auto-focus override, is a bit blah – it’s geared down approximately 2:1, making for slow manual focusing.
Surfing the web, comments about this lens vary from ecstatic to disappointed, the latter writers damning the optic for soft images at full aperture. How much of this is poor Canon quality control (how much can you expect for $300, after all?) and how much is poor technique I have no idea, but my first ever f/1.4 snap suggests this is a special piece of glass.
At any rational enlargement ratio, the above snap shows critical sharpness on the right front nails and the eye, which is how I wanted it. The nose, the crowning glory of the Border Terrier, is clearly unsharp, being a few inches closer to the lens.
I took three precautions to avoid definition robbing issues. First, I used a reasonably fast shutter speed of 1/60th second. Second, in the very low lighting in which this was taken, I cranked up the ISO on the 5D to 800, knowing that grain would simply not be an issue with the 5D’s sensor. The aperture was, of course, f/1.4. Finally, and I suspect most importantly, I used Canon’s spot focusing center rectangle to place focus where I wanted it, using a partially depressed shutter buttton to lock in the selected focus point. I wonder whether many users are using the default multi-point focusing feature of Canon’s DSLRs and ending up with the wrong focus point being selected? How on earth can the camera know what you want to focus on using this technology? Optimal auto-focusing depends on a focus point with contrast and detail, as those variables drive auto-focus accuracy. Point your auto-focus camera a a white wall and just watch the mechanism hopelessly try to establish optimal focus. Selecting the nails on Bert’s right front paw satisfied the dictates for accurate focus.
So this inexpensive optic seems like a nice addition to the 5D and some more extended work will disclose whether my first positive experience is borne out over the longer term. If not, I’ll just sell the lens for eighty cents on the dollar and put the loss down as the small cost of a worthwhile experiment.
Some of the best pictures are one hundred yards from your doorstep. Or less..
Given how much time we spend in our homes, it’s surprising that many photographers feel they have to journey to remote, exotic locations in search of picture opportunities. They arrive tired, are in a strange location which they have no time to ‘learn’, and leave frustrated. You must make the return flight and have to make do with whatever weather is around at the time.
By contrast, the circle centered on your home, with a 100 yard radius, provides some of the best photographic opportunities. You know the area, are rested and have no deadlines. There is no return flight. And you can wait for the weather to come to you.
Here are a couple more snaps, taken over the years, all within 100 yards or less of where my bed was the previous night. Today’s entry concludes this five part series.
For more on this theme, please click here.
It makes for a lot of photographs.
When the Gutenberg Bible was printed in 1455, it was the first book printed on cheap paper using moveable type. At the time there were maybe a hundred thousand books in print in Europe. Fifty years later there were twenty million. A similar tidal wave is sweeping over photography through the proliferation of web sites.
A couple of weeks ago the U.S. Census Bureau reported that America’s population had crossed 300 million. Even given Government magnitudes of error, meaning the number is 300 million +/- 100 million, that’s a big number.
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published a piece on how sales of digital SLRs were booming as photographers wanted something perceived to be better, or at least something without picture destroying shutter lag or camera shake. They mentioned that the percentage of ’serious’ photographers in the US was 2%. While I have no idea where that number came from, let’s assume a 200mm population of age capable snappers. At 2% that makes for 4 million serious photographers.
Of those four million, lets dismiss 75% as equipment fans who couldn’t take a good picture if it hit them. Down to 1 million.
Of that million, let’s be charitable and say 10% can see rather than just look. 100,000.
Half of these will be mired in old ways, denigrate modern technology and think a web site is a place where ducks with big feet gather. 50,000.
Of those, 50% are passionate enough to show their work. 25,000 real photographers. Why ‘real’? Because if you do not show your work you are not a photographer. No artist can claim the title if no one sees his work as, by definition, photography/art must be seen to be appreciated. By others, that is.
So 25,000 web sites. Now add 25,000 for Europe and 25,000 for the rest of the world and you have 75,000 web sites of good photography, each containing some really good work.
Now add the Gutenberg effect as the populations of China and India and Africa get digital cameras and you have a quarter of a million photography web sites in twenty years.
Which brings me back to the theme of my entry the other day, No more Great Photographers? The individual has been buried by the very technology that makes his work accessible in the first place and the chance that you or I come across one another’s work in a lifetime are very remote indeed.
Technology as enabler has destroyed the significance of the individual.
So while I love how easy it is to make a picture today, I also rue the lack of fame, or even the prospect of fame, that dooms my work.
And yours.
Enough mounting, framing and hanging for a while.
The goal for my one man show in April, 2007, is to have thirty, framed and glassed large prints on display, maybe supplemented by a couple dozen matted but unframed ones in the saw horses in the gallery.
The first fifteen have been shown here before.
Once the QuickTime image loads – click below – cursor over any of the pictures on the walls and the cursor will change to a finger pointing to a globe. Click and you will be take to a high quality image of the picture. Click the ‘back’ button on your browser to return to the panorama.
I ran out of conventional wall space in the home and the theater so I had to resort to hanging the final fifteen, now that they are framed, in the garage, which offers lots of unused white walls. Not the greatest display space, perhaps, but it beats having the framed pictures standing up against various walls, waiting to be accidentally kicked.
Here’s a fish eye snap of the ‘gallery’ – not high quality but you get the idea:
The production line process I mentioned in my piece on framing made this a reasonably efficient proces, fourteen steps in all, viz:
Cut the mounting tissue* (30 minutes)
Mat* (30)
Name and sign all the prints* (15)
Build frames (33)
Install glass (7)
Clean glass (60)
Install print/mount/mat sandwich* (7)
Insert framing points (15)
Drill holes for wire eyes (15)
Install wire eyes (30)
Install hanging wire (60)
Mark wall at standard heights – 70″ for the landscape prints, 73″ for the portrait format ones (30)
Knock in hangers (15)
Hang prints (7)
* Cotton gloves are worn in the asterisked steps, all of which involve print/hand contact.
Aggregate time for each step is shown in parentheses, above. The total of three hours and 21 minutes does not include the time taken to make the prints – reckon on 15-30 minutes per print. Excluding the printing time, the time per mounted and framed print is around 21 minutes with this production line approach, which is not as bad as you would think, considering that the final product is a professionally mounted and framed print with real glass. (Lucite or perspex may be lighter and less fragile, but attracts dust horribly and just looks cheap with large prints).
Each step is done 15 times before moving on to the next. Phew! It may be tedious but going through this process print by print would take infinitely longer. If you need to make a lot of exhibition prints, I commend this approach to you.
Why all this focus on time? Because time spent framing is time not spent taking pictures.
To some extent, we are all guilty.
If you accept the modern definition of a zealot as one who advocates the use of a specific technology regardless of its suitability, then I confess I am guilty.
Until digital came along, I was a Leica zealot. Once disgust with Microsoft came to bear, I became an Apple zealot.
I would argue my motivation was simply that something better had come along.
In the case of Leica, superior point-and-shoots – which is what the M Leica is all about – came to market at a fraction of the cost with far greater capabilities.
With Apple it was far easier. The Mac worked. Windows did not.
And now I am a fan of both digital image making and Apple computers. To the exclusion of all else? Not a bit of it. If something better comes along for my purposes, I will move on.
Some Leica film users stick with their old cameras because it’s in their comfort zone. I have no issues with that. It may be that they are limiting their options but that’s not my business. Whatever works for you and makes good snaps possible, have at it.
But here’s what works for me – that sweet little pocketable Panasonic Lumix LX-1.
So, apropos nothing, here are two snaps taken the other day. One is at a favorite restaurant in San Luis Obispo named Novo on Higuera Street, which has a gorgeous patio setting over the river. I asked for the ’special’ and this magnificent production, halibut on a bed of spinach with that exotic pink mushroom, subtle in size (a rarity in corpulent America), sublime in taste, was presented:
Then, wandering down to that great sausage shop on Marsh Street in this lovely Victorian town, what did I come across?
This great old car company is run by an Englishman named Peter. An American success. He came here some 25 years ago as an illegal immigrant, employs 10 people, now has legal status and works on the finest English machines you could dream of. And it simply does not get any better than an S1 Bentley. We will forgive the missing hubcap and those frightful whitewall tires.
Always carry a (pocketable digital) camera.
Falling attention spans and video are the cause.
When I was a teenager gazing at photographs some forty years ago, the ‘Great Photographers’ I knew then pretty much remain the ‘Great Photographers’ I know today.
If you want to know their names, just click on Book Reviews and many of those profiled fall in the list. Cartier-Bressson, Sudek, Callahan, Evans, Capa, Ray Jones, Frank, Snowdon, Erwitt, Brandt, Brassai, Kertesz, Penn, Avedon, Porter, Beaton, Blumenfeld. The list is not long. You could add maybe another dozen names and the whole collection would represent 90% of content in photography shows in art galleries and museums.
Journalists do not feature in this list. They never will. Capa comes closest to that description but his pictures transcend journalism and become works of great humanism. Of the other well known photojournalists they are, for the most part, One Shot Wonders. Most remember the picture of the Viet Cong being shot in the head by the Vietnamese, one or two know it was Eddie Adams who took the picture. That’s it for Adams. The American Flag raising on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima? Why Joe Rosenthal took that one – something most learned when his obituary was published the other day. Matthew Brady and all those dead soldiers in the Civil War? Who has any interest in these drab works today?
No, I’m afraid photojournalism is about as much respected as an art as it’s twin, journalism. Journalists award one another the Pulitzer Prize as no one else will reward them, for theirs is a transient art, good for the moment, forgotten tomorrow.
The list above include five photographers who made their living in the world of fashion (Penn, Avedon, Snowdon, Beaton, Blumenfeld) yet each reached to greater heights with their art and reportage work. Beaton’s searing pictures of London in the Blitz are more than mere photojournalism and his work in the Far East approaches Cartier-Bresson’s best. Penn’s fertile mind rendered art of everything about him. Snowdon’s work, the touchstone of sensitivity, ranks as one of the greatest photo-portraitists. Avedon was incapable of being ordinary in any work he did, be it fashion or social commentary. Blumenfeld simply changed the way we see.
And what of the others? To a man they were great photographers of man and his environment. From the cubism of Cartier-Bresson to the expressionism of Walker Evans, the beauty of Kertesz or the sublime passion of Sudek, they simply saw more clearly, in a fresher vein, than anyone before.
But how about since? Why is it that most of these ‘Greats’ are long gone? Has the world stopped making great photographers?
No, not a bit of it. Surf photographs on the Internet and you will see photography every bit as good as that of these masters. But the problem is, we no longer care. The age of the still photograph as a Great Photograph is over. On the one hand, still photography has never been so ubiquitous, or so easy to do well, if only from a technical perspective. Focus, exposure, sharpness – they are all pretty much guaranteed today. Results? Instant, obviously. So while it is finally true that Anyone Can Take a Photograph, and certainly many good photographers can take a great one, the audience is, in large part, gone.
And while I, for one, find that sad, I know better than to deny history.
Today’s attention spans, in Western civilization at least, are simply too short for the still picture to make sense. Who is going to stop and gaze and think and wonder just what was going on when Cartier-Bresson pushed the button and why he chose that moment to push it? You and I, maybe, as I doubt you would be visiting here otherwise. But the consuming public needs 24 images a second to hold its attention, even if the visual content is execrable, the message beyond banal. Maybe our brains have become so attuned to, nay, drugged by the need for constant change, that we prefer moving pap to still literature?
And that is why, except for a few devotees of the art, there are no new Great Photographers any more in the world of still photography.
Some of the best pictures are one hundred yards from your doorstep. Or less..
Given how much time we spend in our homes, it’s surprising that many photographers feel they have to journey to remote, exotic locations in search of picture opportunities. They arrive tired, are in a strange location which they have no time to ‘learn’, and leave frustrated. You must make the return flight and have to make do with whatever weather is around at the time.
By contrast, the circle centered on your home, with a 100 yard radius, provides some of the best photographic opportunities. You know the area, are rested and have no deadlines. There is no return flight. And you can wait for the weather to come to you.
Here are a couple more snaps, taken over the years, all within 100 yards or less of where my bed was the previous night. More to come over the next few weekends.
For more on this theme, please click here.
A 2 gB CF card joins the Canon 5D.
When I first got my Canon EOS 5D I opted for two of SanDisk’s fastest 1 gB cards, the so called Extreme III, costing $103 each in February, 2006.
As digital tends to result in more pictures being taken, and as I shoot only in RAW on the 5D, given the ease of processing RAW images in Apple’s Aperture, I found myself running out of space on these cards more frequently than I like. Each holds 58 RAW images.
CF card prices continue to come down apace in price so I have added one 2 gB Extreme IV card, $91.95 after rebate to my CF card collection. Twice as much storage for less than a 1 gB card just 9 months earlier!
SanDisk claims the Extreme III can write data at no less than 20mB per second; by comparison, the Extreme IV is rated at ‘up to 40 mB per second’. Now ‘up to’ probably is some sort of ideal scenario and I have no idea if the card is faster as, with the 5D’s huge internal buffer I don’t need to care, but there’s no denying the capacity increase.
Now 120 photographs in one session is a lot for this photographer, but not having to change cards in ‘mid roll’ is one less thing to worry about. Further, these cards are so reliable in use that I am far less concerned about data loss than when I first got the 5D – the argument being that it’s better to store images over several cards to reduce loss if a card goes bad.
The largest card on the SanDisk web site is a 16 mB Extreme III which would store no fewer than 960 (!) RAW images, albeit at a punitive cost in excess of $1,000. Which, I suppose, means it will be $200 in twelve months’ time. Maybe I will be writing this piece again in a year, extolling the virtues of a thousand image card….
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