Photographs, Photographers and Photography

No, we are not talking about the great Hungarian composer/pianist

Humans love to make lists. Whether they are Democrats (win election, raise taxes, claim credit for economy), Republicans (win election, lower taxes, claim credit for economy), shoppers (butter, eggs, blame politicians for prices) or photographers (blame anything and anyone when the picture does not come out). Lists can aid failing memory or can force fulfillment of commitments. They can educate, cajole or just nag.

My list, as a photographer, is mentally revised from time to time, and focuses on The Most Important Inventions in Photography. It’s more fun, though, to write the list down as that makes for amusing reviews years later, generally accompanied with statements like ‘Boy, how dumb was that?’ and ‘What was I thinking of?’. So, as of now, here’s my list in attempted chronological order which, I’m sure, you will correct where errors are involved. Because list entries must have reasons, I have appended those also.

1 – Roll film, especially once unstable, combustible nitrate stock (great for making fuses for Molotov Cocktails) was replaced with inert modern plastics. Roll film made the camera both easily portable and capable of recording many images in quick succession, though you might argue the latter attribute was its biggest drawback, especially when you contemplate Gary Winogrand’s work. Credit George Eastman, Kodak’s founder, with that one, in 1888.

2 – Modern multi-element lenses that rendered most optical aberrations insignificant. Small film (see #1) means big enlargements, so optical magic was called for to allow reasonable enlargement of the images on the roll. Hard to date this one, but multi-element lenses were available well before roll film. You might argue that ‘modern’ really did not apply until anti-reflection coating (later ‘multicoating’) came along, or zooms, or aspherical surfaces, but I would disagree. By the time the Leitz Elmar and the Zeiss Tessar were commonplace in the 1930s, little was left for optics to improve, whereas film was continually improved until its demise a couple of years ago. So maybe circa 1900 for this one?

The personification of the 4 element, 50mm lens. After this improvements were marginal

3 – The coupled rangefinder. Now you could focus your small camera accurately, leaving only camera shake and bad exposure to mess things up. The idea came, like many good things in our lives, from the military, who used rangefinders to shoot at people more accurately, but some genius came along and linked the device to the focusing ring on the camera and everything was suddenly in focus. Probably around 1915, but it took until 1954 for the device to be perfected – meaning parallax adjustment and a super sharp delineation of the rangefinder patch which was finally integrated into the viewfinder. Contax had tried it in their 35mm cameras with mediocre execution. Leitz Wetzlar got it dead right in the Leica M3, then added perfection where improvements seemed impossible in the M2 a few years later.

4 – Kodachrome. A quantum leap in technology with an exceptionally fine-grained, fade-free emulsion. Make that Color Film. This one made big color prints from roll film cameras a possibility. While the product is all but discontinued, it can still lay claim, in its final iterations, to being the best color film ever. 1939 saw the first rolls for sale. With entrepreneurial insight that they sorely lack today, Kodak put up the cash for that one and it took two Jewish musicians to do the job. No one ever said that God apportions grey matter evenly across the world’s peoples.

5 – Automatic exposure. Search me who invented this but I do recall that one of America’s very early manned space shots saw the astronaut John Glenn take an automatic Minolta Himatic 35mm rangefinder point-and-shoot with him, so all he had to do was focus. Now only focus and camera shake remained to ruin a snap. No idea when this came about but I’m guessing in the 1950s or so.

NASA’s space camera before they realized how easy it is to milk the taxpayer for Hasselblads

6 – Autofocus. Now only camera shake remained to spoil the picture. My memory is poor on this one, but Leitz messed about with their Correfot system, originally invented by Honeywell, some time in the seventies, before ceding primacy to the Japanese. An invention of sublime subtlety, it may have caused as many wrongly focused pictures as ever there were before but at least the lens was focusing on what it was pointed at. Operator error remained a foe which modern face recognition technologies are trying to address. Never overestimate the intelligence of your customer.

7 – The digital sensor. Kodak again, in the mid-1980s. Though digital sensors predate Kodak’s first 1 megapixel sensor of that year, Kodak’s was the first practical use of the technology which would go on to kill its annuity income stream from one hundred years of film sales. I doubt this was the sort of creative destruction they were thinking of at the time. A few years later and most written communication would be obsoleted by image sharing.

8 – Anti-shake cameras and lenses. Now you had no reason for a bad picture. Other than your native talents. I have no idea who invented this but it sounds awfully like something the military (meaning the US military) would have built into its aircraft spy cameras. Now given our predilection for invading the wrong place at the wrong time, quite why the military felt it needed the attendant level of detail that anti-shake conferred upon its images is lost on me.

Canon’s 24-105mm L lens with IS

9 – Minituarisation. This one just sort of happened over the last one hundred years until we are now at a point where cameras cannot get much smaller owing to the finite size of our hands which, at least for now, we need to operate the camera with. The point and shoot pocketable digital camera is infinitely superior in every way to the 1901 Kodak, yet fits comfortably in your (designer) jeans’ pocket. Why, it’s almost as small as the Minox which predated it by some fifty years.

The palm-sized Minox spy camera

10 – The Internet. Well, I know who didn’t invent that one – that guy currently cleaning up on global warming. Call it the early-1980s. Now the audience for your pictures was expanded from those close to you to the whole world. And that may just be the greatest photographic invention ever.

Can you think of a better use for photography?

Now it’s no great secret that I graduated from the same college as Colin Chapman of Lotus Cars fame – University College, London. Indeed, while I shared the education of Mechanical Engineering with that inspired genius, I never practised as an engineer. Not only was I far from Chapman’s class, it was just too hard a way of making a living, and too fraught with risk. In my case, I suspect, that risk would have gestated in the guise of serious injury to users of my designs. No, the engineering world became a safer place for my absence from it.

However, none of this in any way dilutes my interest in one of the only two sports I care about (the other is cricket), which is Formula One auto racing. The near senseless pursuit at vast expense of solutions to problems no one ever imagined has a certain perverse appeal, I must admit. Sort of like an expensive woman. You know you should know better. But you get involved anyway. When it comes to photography and Formula One racing, it has largely been a desert strewn with forgettable detritus. How many snaps of cars at speed and babes in tight tops do you really want? OK, I can do with fewer of the ones of cars at speed.

With the honorable exception of photographers like Jesse Alexander, little great photographic work has been done in this sport, despite the fortunes expended on motor drives and extreme telephotos. However, watching the 2007 season opener in Melbourne, in the fair land known as Australia, I was captivated by the new Honda car, which is devoid of stickers and sports a magnificently applied picture of the earth. The picture is from Honda’s web site, God bless them.

It gets better. Honda has offered to pixelate the names of the first two million donors on the car, so that you can honestly say you support the racing effort. And the money goes to saving the world. That’s a twofer. Rest easy, the boob who was one heartbeat away from the presidency a while back isn’t going to be stealing it, as he is not involved. Anyway, he’s too busy with cinema ticket sales.

I have always greatly enjoyed the huge pictures of produce on those delivery trucks and now Honda has gone one better. By the way, I’m totally conflicted, rejoicing every time my wife reminds me of the 48 mpg (60 mpg in the UK) she just got on the last tank of regular gasoline in her Honda Civic Hybrid.

Huh?

Who remembers Kodak Super XX film?

I loved it as a kid – it was the predecessor to TriX, though I used it long after it was discontinued. That would be in the 1970s. The main reason I used it was that Kodak still made it in bulk 35mm rolls for cinema use, so you could pick up fifty or a hundred feet (the latter good for over 700 snaps) for a song. It’s speed was 250 ASA, the grain sharp and tight, like TriX and the speed could be easily pushed to 500 ASA with a bit of extra time in the developer.

And 250 ASA (or 25 DIN to the Europeans amongst us, the Britain of my youth, of course, not being a part of Europe any more than it is now) was a speed that was just right. Not so fast that you had to stop down excessively, but fast enought to permit short, blur free shutter speeds. Your lens, as often as not, was set at f/4 or f/5.6 where pretty much every lens is at its best, and affords just the right degree of background blur to liven things up a bit.

DIN? Deutsche Industrie Normen or something. Only the Germans could concoct a system so perfectly ridiculous that you had to be a Doctor or Professor (which every German is, of course) to understand it. You see, it was a logarithmic system such that an increase of 3 represented a doubling in speed. So 24 was twice as fast as 21, which happened to be 100 ASA. As for 25 DIN being 250 ASA, well, let me tell you that much time with a scientific calculator was needed to figure that one out, my memory of logarithms not being what it once was. Go figure. Still, it kept enough consumers confused for long enough that camera stores (remember those?) thrived. A confused consumer is a repeat customer, often as not.

So, in a strange flashback to days of yore, I find myself setting the ISO (what?) on my Canon 5D to 250, often as not. Right there between Regular (100) and Fast (400). Then of course there is Very Fast (800), Super Fast (1600) and Bloody Fast (3200). Come to think of it, why don’t manufacturers simply mark the speed dials S, R, XX, F, VF, SF and BF? Now those I can understand.

A fool and his money are easily parted

No sooner do I go on about Solutions looking for Problems than along comes this dusie (that’s short for Duesenberg, if you really care) from Logitech, a company which actually makes some fairly decent peripherals for iPods and the like:

Yes, it’s none other than the Logitech Aperture Keyboard, which gets my first annual SLOP (Solution Looking for a Problem) award. As you will see, the pristine clarity of Apple’s keyboard has been obliterated with what can only be droppings from a passing bird, purportedly in the interest of helping you remember which key does what in Aperture.

Now, given that the hot keys I use for Aperture are limited to a handful – Z for Zoom, H for HUD, ~ for the Loupe being the dominant ones – you expect me to buy this excresence because I struggle remembering three keys? Probably ideal for all those US public school graduates who never got to the Reading part of the syllabus (you know them – they are the ones with risk free government jobs and inflation-weighted pensions which we all pay for), preferring instead to listen to their iPods.

Let’s see, what could you do with $99? How about driving 1,000 miles in search of that great picture instead? Put it towards a proper tripod so that you can finally see what your lens can do? Make a few big prints for friends?

Nah. Get that keyboard instead. Guaranteed to make you a better photographer.

They abound.

A few dollars having been made the past week in the market, I rewarded myself at a newly opened local family restaurant named Applebees, a nationwide chain whose stock trades publicly. What has all this to do with photography, you ask? Bear with me.

The enthusiastic young order-taker (’waiter’ would be overstating things in this case) produced a PDA from his pocket and started tapping out my order. I asked to see it and saw that it was a color display device with a touch-screen, activated with a stylus, much like a Palm PDA. (Remember those?).

“How well does it work?” I asked.

“It’s just horrible,” came the quick response, “try to find anything in the sub-menus when people ask you to add this, hold that, and it’s hopeless; still it uses WiFi to communicate to the kitchen!”

And, sure enough, my burger and fries were delivered to the table next to me, though my order was stock – ‘hold nothing’. Maybe Applebees, one of the many US businesses justifiably under attack from private capital, would do well to revert to pen and paper for order taking? Can you imagine the arcane BS that was used by some finance guru to sell this silly idea to the management of this chain? Or worse, the lack of common sense displayed by those same people in accepting this nonsense and blowing shareholders’ money on it?

But look, the California sun was doing its thing, the almonds are in flower everywhere, the birds putting out a few bars now and then and, well, even this minor hiccup in the road of life could not upset one of my mien. Plus, as I mentioned, it had been a good week in the market.

However, this little episode started me thinking about how often engineers and marketers (OK, probably marketers) find solutions to non-existent problems. And when it comes to photography, there are more examples than you can shake a stick at.

Some are easy targets, of course. Digitalia sees to that.

• LCD screens replacing viewfinders. You cannot see them in bright light, you cannot hold the camera against your forehead for steadiness and you have little idea of what you are photographing. Daguerre had a better idea of what he was pointing his camera at 150 years ago.
• A seeming average of five billion useless menu items on the average DSLR camera when all you need is RAW or Jpg, ISO and …. well, that’s about it. And both can be moved to mechanical dials human beings can understand.
• Camera straps, of course. I have yet to encounter a good OEM camera strap, but boy, the ones that the manufacturers of digital wonders emblazon with their names sure look nice, huh? Then again, if you are sufficiently insecure to emblazon the rear window of your car with the name of the university you attended, I guess I can understand that. You need one of those straps.
• Face recognition technology. You mean you haven’t even the meanest intelligence to learn to pre-focus on the face of the key person in a group? This is reminiscent of that awful 1980s manifestation, the Kodak Photo Spot. You go to the Grand Canyon to commune with nature and what do you find? A placard saying “Stand here and press the button. Brought to you by Kodak.” Only in America.
• 99% of the menu selections in Photoshop.
• Cameras so small that regular humans cannot make out what all those buttons are for. They look chic, though.
• Camera cases. When I was a lad these were laughingly called ERCs – Ever Ready Cases. They were about as ready as our government.
• Lens hoods in the age of multicoated optics. A fool and his money are easily parted. $50 for a two cent plastic moulding.
• The DSLR. 95% of its users probably distribute their content on the web, where they would have been almost as well served, definition wise, by a $199 point-and-shoot. Heck, lots of lousy drivers own Porsches, too.

So now I don’t feel so bad about that ordering experience, even if the hamburger confirmed that someone needs to speak to Applebees’ CEO with a baseball bat.

And the burger at McDonald’s, at 50% of the cost, is way better, too, by the way. Then again, I do own the stock ….

With the latest iTunes you can see cover art again.

No sooner do I grumble about the demise of the LP record and the resulting loss to the world of photography, than Apple revises iTunes so that you can now look at your album art in Coverflow on a full screen:

On my 17″ iMac screen that center image is 6″ square – not the 12″ of an LP, but it’s a start. Now on a 30″ Apple Cinema Display, that would really be something, though definition would be marginal – at 6″ the image is just beginning to break up.

Still, it’s a start. Download the latest 7.1 version of iTunes free from Apple.com.

Cover art for your ripped CD missing from the iTunes store? Very common for classical music fans, given Appple’s predispositiion to catering to the south central LA crowd’s musical tastes. Go to Widget Foundry and download their Amazon Album Art widget, which will allow you, once you have highlighted the item(s) in your iTunes library, to search any number of Amazon international sites, in addition to the US one, for cover art.

The latter is for Macs only, but then again, what sane person uses a PC for aesthetic pursuits anyway?

…. was not sound quality. Modern media and machines equal and regularly surpass vinyl as regards sound quality, and of course convenience is not up for debate.

Yes, yes, I know, nothing sounds like an LP. Keep using film and drinking the Kool Aid.

No, the saddest loss from the demise of vinyl was the loss of a large outlet for great photography, reproduced in a size that could be properly appreciated.

Compare the cover of an LP to the small CD box or the even (ridiculously) smaller iPod screen.

For thse interested in these things, I use classic 1970s gear to listen to my two hundred or so LPs – Shure V15/III in an SME 3009 S2 Imp. arm on a Thorens TD150 turntable, thence to a Quad 33/303 pre/power amplifier and Bowers & Wilkins DM3 speakers in my small office. Truly international and look how times have changed: American/British/Swiss-German/British/British. Hmmm, lots of British. Now it bears adding that I have only owned two machines which surpass an early M Leica for build quality and for stunning aesthetic appeal. (Weapons hold no interest for me when it comes to beautiful machines). That British SME tone arm you see pictured above is one – a unique merging of sublime form and superb function. A very, very beautiful machine. The other is my Patek Philippe, which molders, unused, in a box. (We farmers have a pretty relaxed sense of time, measuring more in seasons than in minutes. If ever a return to Wall Street beckons, well, the Patek will be resurrected. One must be well dressed, you know).

That’s the great Polish pianist (why not the best?) Krystian Zimerman tinkling the ivories in an all Chopin disc (I ask again, why not the best?) and, by golly, I must say his magnificent instrument, a giant Steinway Grand, sounds …. well, as I know it to.

It is a fine photo of a young God on that cover, pensive, apprehensive even. Not the lionine gaze of Richter or the charm and confidence of Horowitz. All of this is clearly visible from the large picture that is the LP’s cover.

So shed a tear with me for the demise of that pain-in-the-rear-click-sizzle-pop-twenty-minute-a-side LP which was such a fine gallery for the photography of the world’s greatest talents.