Photographs, Photographers and Photography

February 29, 2008

Raphael and advertising

Filed under: Paintings — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:35 am

The Renaissance lives!

The Great American Corporation has many herd instincts, including mind-numbing group get-togethers and a love of flying that probably accounts for $100 per barrel of oil. Two of the many things I am delighted not to have to do, having left this kind of organization years ago.

However, I got a haunting reminder of those horrid days a couple of months ago when Delta Airlines’s computer mailed me a reminder that my remaining 12,000 miles of frequent flier time- and oil-wasting miles were about to expire. Well, 12k gets you nothing other than magazine subscriptions, so I signed up for a bunch. Who knows, the advertisements may provide fodder for photographic ideas.

As I was shaving this morning, and idly flicking through the pages of one of these (my mailman probably hates me as I got a dozen subscriptions, all told!), I came across a real corker. A double-page ad In ‘Men’s Vogue’ for the aptly named Renaissance Hotels (Marriott) which is nothing more or less than a very amusing recreation of Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’.

Here’s the original:


Raphael. School of Athens. 1511. Papal Rooms, Vatican

And here’s the advertisement which I stitched together as best as I could in PS CS2:


Advertisement for Renaissance Hotels, 2008. Artist unknown.

The brooding figure slumped at the desk (Heraclitus acted by Michelangelo) has been replaced with the slumped businessman (another victim of frequent flying), Diogenes (to the right on the steps) has become a young woman clutching a cellphone. Plato (Leonardo) and Aristotle, entering through the portal, have morphed into pair of amoral (is there any other kind?) lawyers. The floor inlays in the foreground are identical. The boy on the far right is delivering tax deductible booze at the taxpayers’ expense.

And so on.

Great fun and thanks Renaissance Hotels. Maybe next time you would like to actually credit the team which made this fabulous recreation?

More information about who-is-who in the Raphael can be found here.

February 28, 2008

Lightroom soft proofing and printing

Filed under: Lightroom, Printing, Software — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:23 am

Soft proofing in Lightroom is easy.

I do not propose to address image cataloging and developing in Lightroom at any length in this journal as there are lots of tutorials and blogs out there that know a thousand times more than I ever will. Adobe even has a couple of video tutorials out there though they are really poor compared to Aperture’s slick offerings. While presented by real photographers, rather than blackshirts, Adobe opts for a folksy, joking style. The last thing I need in technical instruction materials, Adobe, is someone’s idea of what passes for humor. Just the facts, ma’am. You want humor, you read my blog, OK?

What I want to address here is soft proofing of your Developed Lightroom picture.

You do not need Photoshop for soft proofing if you use a Mac.

‘Experts’ will tell you that Lightroom does not offer soft proofing of the image, meaning the ability to preview the photograph on the screen with the relevant printer drivers invoked to show how the printed picture will look. (Aperture has soft-proofing built in, as does Photoshop).

A soft proof can look quite a bit different from the regular screen image as a print has a much narrower dynamic range than the regular screen image and also has its own color characteristics conferred by your printer and paper of choice.

If you are taking studio portraits then you really must use soft proofing as the eye is especially critical of accurate skin tones. The color differences are significant and easily noticed when switching between regular and soft-proofs.

Profiling your monitor:

The first problem is that monitors are rarely properly profiled – do this right and what you see in Lightroom is what the printer will print, allowing for the lower dynamic range of a print compared to a monitor.

Here’s how to properly profile your monitor:

1. If you can afford one, get a really good colorimeter like the Eye-One Display 2. If not, go to Apple System Preferences->Displays->Color->Calibrate. You must profile the monitor in the same light as you use to compare it to the print. Use daylight – artificial light will give erroneous results as it is missing many colors in the natural light spectrum.

2. In Lightroom, make your adjustments to the image and make a test print. While there are two ways to work with printer profiles – Lightroom Managed or Printer Managed – I find that Printer Managed gives marginally truer colors – there’s little in it. So when in the Print module of Lightroom, you need to set the program up for Printer Managed colors, like so:

3. When you click on Print, set up the printer to use Colorsync, Apple’s color management utility.

Make your test print (use a familiar person as a subject with flesh tones) after checking that you have chosen the printing paper you are using – this forces the application to use the relevant printer driver. The printer cannot know which paper profile to use if you do not tell it. That is what Lightroom means in the previous picture when it states “When selecting ‘Managed By Printer’ remember to turn on the printer’s color management in the Print dialog box before printing”. (Frustratingly, Lightroom defaults to ColorSmart/sRGB and I can find no way to permanently save the Colorsync choice in a Print Template – meaning you have to choose Colorsync every time you want to print).

4. Now compare your test print to the image in the Lightroom Print module. They will not match.

5. You must now fine tune your monitor color profile. The printer is doing what Lightroom is telling it, but the monitor is not properly profiled for your environment. It is still not displaying colors correctly. Go back into the Apple System Preferences->Displays->Color->Calibrate tool, making sure to choose the display profile you saved in step 1, above, while keeping the Lightroom screen display unchanged. Now work through the Apple software again until what you see on the screen matches the print you just made, wrong as it is – hold the print up to the screen. Doing this at night with incandescent lighting is a complete waste of time.

The key adjustments are Target White Point and Target Gamma. Forget everything you have read about setting your screen to a specific color temperature or to a gamma dictated by some academic. Academics do not make prints. Use your eyes to get the best color match. I ended up with a Target Gamma=1.75 and a Target White Point =6707K. Whatever. Meaningless numbers.

Save the revised profile – you have now matched the monitor profile to the test print.

6. We are done with the test print. Discard it.

Soft proofing:

a. Now go back to Lightroom, choose the Develop module, and adjust the tones to your satisfaction.

b. In the Print module choose Print->Preview. Check the Soft Proof box at the lower left of Preview. This refreshes the display in Preview, forcing the image to use the printer paper profile you elected earlier (see #3, above). To confirm you are using the right paper profile, hover the mouse cursor over the words “Soft Proof” and the driver will be disclosed as in the following screen picture.

You are previewing a soft proof of your photograph which shows what the printer will print.

c. If you don’t like what you see, re-Develop the picture and try again. Do not even think of changing your monitor profile.

d. Make the final print. No need to return to Lightroom – just click on ‘Print’ at the lower right of the picture in Preview.

* * * * *

I get a ner perfect match using this technique, and have no need of a colorimeter to effect proper display profiling – my eyes and Apple’s built in tools tell me what I see. In fact, I have found this method to be so powerful that I am going back and reprinting several 18″ x 24″ prints hanging on the wall which simply were not quite right with regard to color fidelity, contrast and brightness. Spot on results every time from originals of widely differing tonal and contrast ranges.

The monitor I use with my MacBook? No, not a mega-bucks Apple Cinema Display – a dirt cheap ($235 at the time of writing) Samsung 216BW, 21.6″ diagonally and with 1680 x 1050 pixel definition. Heck, the articulated wall arm I use to mount this on the wall ran me almost half the cost of the monitor.

Want to read more? Check this excellent document by Apple on how Colorsync works in Tiger (OS 10.4.xx). Migrated to Leopard? Revert to Tiger – Leopard (10.5.2) is still messed up in this regard. And you thought Microsoft’s Vista was bad?

The print module in Lightroom is really well implemented in most other respects, not least in its ability to support multiple disparate pictures on one sheet of paper (Command-click non-contiguous images to select them in grid view, then go into Print view, electing, say, the 2×2 template).

Bear in mind that Lightroom is just one year old and is still in its first commercial iteration at v1.3.1. And it’s not as if I am the first person to note the absence of soft proofing within Lightroom, so you can bet Adobe knows of the issue. I would expect them to offer soft proofing within the application in the next major release. But it is not essential if you adopt the approach above and it’s not like it’s a big deal if you use Colorsync.

Now all I will need PS for is to correct lens distortion (Adobe may even add that in Lightroom) and for de-fishing fish eye snaps – though Comment #8 here suggests CS3 can do this. As I use the ImageAlign plug-in in CS2, I’m happy to save my money. A round trip to PS CS2 from Lightroom takes 60 seconds.

And if you think Adobe will cut the price of Lightroom by $100 to $200 like Apple did with Aperture, don’t hold your breath. Apple’s move smacks of desperation. Adobe has no need to cannibalize its pricing if it’s the only game in town and selling like hot cakes, though if they do drop the price all photographers will cheer. Investors may not.

February 27, 2008

HP Designjet printer head cleaning and repair

Filed under: Printing — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:47 am

Two years of use

This article is of use solely to those using or contemplating purchase of one of the Hewlett Packard 30/90/130 DesignJet dye ink printers. Actually, even if you do not have one but enjoy pithy comments, read on in any case, as it gives me a chance to unload on a brilliant engineering company that couldn’t organize a drink-fest in a brewery when it comes to diagnostic information.

It is now two years since I placed the HP Designjet 90 printer in service, and I remain delighted with this device. Sure, it only uses six ink cartridges compared to eight or twelve found in more recent printers, but there’s no arguing with the quality of the prints this fine machine makes.

I’m on my second or third set of print cartridges (depending on color) and when reprinting one of my pictures I ran into a snag.

Here’s the problem:

Doubly irritating as I had just wasted a 24″ x 18″ piece of paper – I had set the job to print while taking a shower and this is what rewarded my return. I thought it might be a glitch in Aperture 2.0 so I printed from Photoshop CS2 and everything was pink, so suspicion fell on the printer.

The DesignJet series of printer (30, 90, 130) include a useful status panel telling you about ink levels:

The vertical black bars denote ink level and the symbols that look like a felt-tip pen tell you about the status of the print heads – one head per ink color. If one of these is blinking it means the head is faulty and needs replacement. Or not – read on. They don’t cost too much in the US – $35 – but it’s not the sort of thing you stock as a spare if you, like me, are an amateur low volume printer.

However, the status screen on my DJ90 showed all the ink levels were fine and none of the ‘felt tips’ was blinking, so I checked the HP web site. Now HP, you must know, is an engineering company which means they have one of the worst web sites imaginable. It wouldn’t do for great engineers to write clear instructions now, would it, (real men do not need instructions and God help women) and the HP Systems Maintenance Utility resolutely refuses to run on my MacBook. Eventually I came across HP’s printer head cleaning instructions and applied these rigorously.

First, open the printer ink cartridge flap then open the cover for the printer heads when they have ceased moving. Pull the power cord now, then remove all the heads. They are color coded so no mix-up is possible. I believe they are actually identical but, once loaded with dye, you don’t want to switch these!

Using a coffee filter (these are lint free) and distilled water (not dirty tap water) wipe each head.

You want to keep wiping with a moist (not wet) filter until you get two clean ink streaks from the base of the head – the part that goes down into the well. That denotes good dye flow. You can see the twin tracks from the Magenta head in the picture above. Then wipe the contacts on the rearward facing (when in the printer) part of the head.

Next, wipe the receptor contacts in the printer as shown below.

A lot of gunk comes out. I would guess I have made one hundred 13″x19″ and thirty 18″x24″ prints since I bought the printer, to give you an idea of the use it has had. I was actually surprised to have this failure as HP keeps the heads warm even when the printer is off (as long as it’s plugged into the mains) and I have not had any of the repeat clogging that I experienced with the Epson 1270. This is important as I tend to print in batches and with this last print run the printer remained idle for three months. (I was working for the US Government, filling out income tax returns and sending them 50% of my 2007 income the better to feed the losers who increasingly dominate our once free country, hence the inactivity).

A first print test showed a repeat of the problem (the print was as sharp as can be) but after a second cleaning the problem persisted. Additionally, I got three blinking head errors second time around, but removal and reinsertion of the relevant heads fixed the problem.

Don’t make my mistake and let the ink dry on your fingers. I couldn’t get it off with isopropyl alcohol and had to resort to an abrasive Scotch pad. I now have no fingerprints, a status that equips me for a life of crime. Maybe I should run for Congress?

Head alignment and diagnostics

OK, so despite manual cleaning of the heads I was still having the ‘pink part way through the print’ issue.

Once Apple’s OS X Tiger (10.4.x) was introduced HP failed to properly update its System Maintenance Utility for Mac OS X, meaning that when you fire it up you will get an error message. (But see ‘Follow up’, below). Don’t even think of calling HP for help. First, they will charge you for fixing their errors and second, the chances of finding someone who has the answer is slim to none. Don’t believe me – check their chat board. A lot of unhappy Apple users there. Maybe HP hasn’t heard that creative people use Apple computers?

However, you can do everything that’s needed using the three buttons on the control panel by referring to this document. Though it says it’s for the 100, 110, 120 and 130 printers, it also works fine with the 90 model I have. And I’ll bet it works for the 30 model, too, as the 30/90/130 range share the same ink cartridges and print heads. Too bad HP does not know about it!

Using this document you can run usage and information reports, clean the print heads (in addition to the technique illustrated above), lock the heads for transport, align the print heads and – wait for it – switch off that piercing end-of-job buzzer which has irritated me from day one of ownership.

So by holding the Power button down and pressing the OK button thrice, I aligned the heads. Then, holding the Power button down I pressed the Cancel button twice to force a ‘Soft’ Printhead Recovery (HP speak for flushing the heads). Sure enough, the printout disclosed that the Light Cyan head was not performing properly (the color bars were either discontinuous or completely missing and came with a big black ‘X’ at the bottom right on the all three pages of the report). So I ran the ‘Hard’ Printhead Recovery cycle by pressing both the Cancel and OK buttons sequentially twice while holding the Power button down. Now all was well. You are looking for a cyan check (UK: tick) mark on the bottom right of the report and continuous tone in the test patterns. You can run these reports on regular 8.5″ x 11″ letter size paper – save your photo paper for pictures. The process takes several minutes, so be patient.

In case some yo-yo at HP deletes it, here’s what you need to know for future use:

The ink use report is far more accurate than the one provided by the LCD status bars on the front panel of the printer.

Mine is not a network-capable version so the last choice is inapplicable.

Interpreting test print results is addressed in this very poorly written document on HP’s site. Have patience – they use some of the slowest servers in the world and the page takes a while to appear. That’s when their servers are not down, which seems to be much of the time.

Yes, I do have an engineering degree and, no, I do not have dirty fingernails (just dirty fingers after this job), facial hair or an inability to communicate clearly. Let’s leave the last three to HP’s engineers.

Follow-up:

Well, my ‘repair’ lasted a couple of prints then the problem resurfaced. I determined the Light Cyan head was at fault and ordered a replacement. Now all is well. No thanks to HP and it’s poorly documented diagnostics. Hopefully this will help others using this fine printer who run into problems.

To run color test prints run the HP Designjet System Maintenance utility going to Calibarte Color>>Image Quality on the web page that will load (if you are lucky; if not, reboot and try again).

Here are the ‘Before’ and ‘After’ test prints – the second after installing a new Light Cyan print head. As you can see, light cyan is largely missing in cell D3 and the Green has trended to yellow in cell C3, leading me to conclude that the Light Cyan head is at fault. Not that you can divine that from HP’s on line ‘diagnostic’ illustration.


Before – faulty Light Cyan cartridge diagnosed


After – faulty Light Cyan cartridge replaced

Had cell D1 been flaky, I would have replaced the Light Magenta head. The other cells and their respective error conditions are addressed in HP’s referenced diagnostic document, which largely seems to forget about its six head printers. I don’t know but I would bet that the 100, 110 and 120 models they reference use four heads and inks.

Once the new LC head was in place the printer ground away for a good five minutes before being ready to print, with the hour glass displayed on the LCD screen on the front panel.

Making Systems Maintenance work on a Mac:

I finally got the HP System Maintenance Utility to run on my MacBook. I first erased all the HP files in MacBook->Library->HP and in User->Library->HP, downloaded the utility and reinstalled it. If your Mac fails to respond to this approach the hard key method described above is every bit as good and a lot less frustrating as you are not confronted with HP’s constant page errors caused by mistakes in their code. The only thing that will not work is the firmware upgrade, but then we Mac users are just so much scum to the brilliant engineers at HP, no?

After changing the print head it is necessary to run the HP System Maintenance->Calibrate Color utility for each type of paper you propose using. If you cannot get the HP System Maintenance Utility to run you are out of luck. I did this for HP Premium Plus Photo Satin Best (bi-directional printing) and for HP Premium Plus Photo Satin Best Maximum Detail (mono-directional printing – slower). HP Premium Plus Photo Satin is the only paper I use in this printer as it looks great when mounted and has a slight sheen which allows retention of a decent contrast range without the specular reflections of glossy paper. The utility uses the HP’s built-in spectrometer to maximize color accuracy by comparing a test print to what it ideally should be – a feature generally found on printers costing several times as much – like the new, and very costly, Z3100 series. Each calibration run takes some 10-12 minutes and you must not mess with the printer while it is doing this. You must use test sheets (letter size) of the paper you are calibrating the printer for something, amazingly, that HP’s on-screen instructions never mention.

Conclusion:

Suffice it to say that all ended well, and the 18″ x 24″ annual birthday snap of our son is ready for mounting and framing, after a 24 hour drying period to let the inks firm up nicely. Oh! and one other thing – it was printed out of Lightroom, Aperture being softwara non grata in the Pindelski household.

Despite HP’s lousy diagnostic instructions I still remain over the moon delighted with the DesignJet 90 printer.

Update – 4/2009:

Another head gave out – the banding in cells C2, D1 and D2 pointing to a faulty Light Magenta printhead. It’s nice to have HP’s good diagnostic tools, even if the instructions are so poor.

Here’s the full troubleshooting table for printheads in case you cannot access the web-based utility offered by HP:

February 26, 2008

Paint Job

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 7:21 am

Always carry a camera….

I remember hearing that advice when I was still wearing short trousers.

“Always Carry a Camera”.

Often I have thought that it’s like the English invocation to always carry an umbrella. Whenever you do, nothing happens.

Then again, sometimes you come across a little bit of magic and it all seems worthwhile. Sometimes it actually rains.


Paint Job. Lumix LX1, 1/200, f/4, ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom in Widescreen format

Always carrying a camera became a lot easier with today’s pocketable digital marvels. No one could accuse my street shooter of days past, the Leica M, of being pocketable. And you certainly do not want to try this with a DSLR. As Mae West might have said: “Is that a Leica in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

The Leica lens (so some continuity there, I suppose) in the Lumix LX1 suffers from red chromatic aberration (visible in large prints), easily removed with Lightroom’s built-in controls. That and a tad of noise reduction to counter the small sensor’s interference, does the trick in seconds. Another three seconds and the picture is in JPG on the desktop, ready for uploading.

February 25, 2008

Lightroom on an older Mac

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 6:07 am

It still cooks!

You can read about how to migrate from Aperture to Lightroom here.

Given the great speed and smoothness of Lightroom on my MacBook (1.83gHz Intel Core2Duo, 2gB RAM, Intel GMA950 graphics card, OS 10.4.11) I thought it might be fun to try it on my old iMac (1.25gHz IBM G4 PPC, 1gB of RAM, OS 10.4.11). This is the elegant ’screen-on-a-stick’ design after which the iMac’s ergonomics went downhill – the poorly thought out stands on the current crop (G5 and later) need a couple of thick books to raise the screen to the right height. We keep that old Mac around in the living room primarily as an email and Internet browser for guests. The screen is superior too – far less color change occurs as you move your head. Needless to add, Aperture will not even run on this machine which uses a GeoForce FX5200 graphics card. Finally, it’s further distinguished by having a proper, horizontal disk drive which not only accepts 3″ discs (put one of those in your MacBook and it’s toast) but also burns DVDs (an option I avoided, to save money, on my MacBook). Unlike the disc slot in my MacBook, which refuses to read discs 50% of the time, this one really works. So much for progress.

Therefore I loaded Lightroom on the old Mac and tried to access my library of pictures by neworking the two. Well, Lightroom reported that it does not support networked volumes, meaning the drive has to be hard wired to the computer running Lightroom. No problem. I plugged the hard drive with the Lightroom database into the old Mac and fired her up. Loading the largest picture in the database – a 100mB TIFF file – was a snap. It takes a few seconds longer than with the MacBook but thereafter the processing controls that so dog Aperture – spot retouching, cropping, horizon levelling – were every bit as smooth as on the MacBook. The dead reliable iMac is some five years old, the MacBook has but a few months (and one repair already) on it.


The wonderful G4 iMac

So anyone running a machine of this vintage and thinking of using Lightroom should be just fine. If your Mac is even older and you are running Lightroom on it, I would be interested in your comments. There are many fine G3 Powerbooks still in daily use out there.

So, finally, a proper break with the incessant, money wasting, perennial hardware upgrade cycle dictated by Apple’s software design. And now I have total redundancy (hardware and data back-up) if my MacBook breaks down again – I wouldn’t be betting against that given my recent experience with Apple’s poor quality control.

Note that both machines are running the last version of OS Tiger (10.4.11). I have not upgraded to OS X Leopard (10.5) as I try never to buy ‘first of breed’, preferring to let others act as Apple’s unpaid guinea pigs. Indeed, there are many comments out there on chat boards that suggest that Adobe (or Apple – much finger pointing here) has work to do to make Lightroom render colors properly with Leopard. Additionally, all this user sees in Leopard is glitz and gloss, with little improvement in the way of function. Just like Aperture 2.0, in fact.

Aperture on a G4 machine? Fugghedaboutit! Neither that graphics card or the G4 CPU are even supported.

For those photographers out there looking to migrate their Lightroom application from Windows to a Mac (a trivial process requiring copying of your picture files and installation of the Mac version that came on your disc), there are some superb, lightly used, bargains to be had out there in G5 iMacs, Powerbooks and MacPros. A great way of fighting back against hardware upgrade tyranny. The LCD screens are reputed to be better than those on many current models (my G4 iMac testifies to that) into the bargain.

February 24, 2008

Migrating to Lightroom from Aperture

Filed under: Lightroom — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:03 am

What a shame and what a waste of time.

This article is very long, very detailed and very important if you want to migrate from Apple’s Aperture (any version) to Adobe’s Lightroom. Oh! boy, does that sound pompous or what? As far as I know these are the only two applications which integrate all the aspects of managing, editing and printing/outputting digital picture files in RAW or other common formats. That level of integration saw me as one of the earliest users of Aperture 1.0 and although that experience was worthwhile, it is time to move on.

Thus, I have commenced the process of exporting (File->Export->Master) my master images from Aperture 2.0 to Lightroom.

Life’s too short to live with Aperture’s fragility, slowness, constant costly hardware upgrade needs and sheer unreliability.

Further, the biggest issues for photographers with regard to Apple’s and Aperture’s future are:

  • No visible sign of succession planning for the ‘rock star’ CEO. What happens to the ‘vision’ at Apple when Jobs moves on/gets run over by a bus/whatever? Remember the cancer scare? How about politics of envy rearing its ugly head upon the forthcoming change of administrations in Washington? Remember the option cheating scandal at Apple? Easy for a ’soak the rich’ populist politician to revive, no? What happens to product enhancements and upgrades when the rock star is no more? What about that 175 foot yacht Jobs has commissioned? Early retirement?
  • The economics of Aperture to Apple compare very unfavorably with the complaint rate. Read the chat boards. Why continue increasing your reputational risk when the path of least resistance is to simply drop Aperture? Apple probably sells more iPods in a day than they sell Aperture packages in a year. So Aperture may well not survive.
  • Apple has had a famously testy relationship with Adobe for many years. Recall that at one time Adobe ceased to write Mac software because of disputes. Now the relationship issue is coming to a head once more over the possible use of Flash on the iPhone. So let’s assume that Adobe gets miffed, again, if Apple develops its own version of Flash. What then? No more Lightroom or Photoshop enhancements for the Mac?
  • Check Apple’s discussion forum on Aperture. More horror stories of lost photos than you can shake a stick at. I can pretty much tolerate most faults, but not the risk of permanent loss of my images. That pretty much put me over the top.

Here’s one of the beauties of Lightroom – you can run the application, with all your edits, on either a Mac or on Windows. Now hell will have to freeze over before I revert to Windows, but if it becomes the only game in town, migrating my files to work with the Windows version of Lightroom (both Win and Mac versions come on the installation disk) is a trivial matter. My pictures mean more to me than my dislike of Windows. Roy Hammans has confirmed that the Lightroom database works with both Mac OS X and Windows operating systems. The Aperture user, of course, is dead in the water as Aperture is Mac-only.

Following up on Roy’s thinking, I see no reason why you shouldn’t keep both the Windows and Mac versions of Lightroom on your external disk drive, together with your Lightroom library and related files. That makes for a portable and executable library which you can run on most computers out there – very useful if there’s not a Mac in sight. I do not know if Windows PCs have Firewire connectors but a portable drive like this, which has USB2, FW400 and FW800 connections, would seem to be the answer.

After trying out the Lightroom trial I have decided to import all my images and bang away at it for a month to see if matters improve. The current version of Lightroom offers greatly improved functionality over the Beta 1.0 test version I tried before Adobe released the product. And credit is due to Aperture here – the two competing products push one another to excellence. In much the same way as the elegant user interface in Aperture (now some 3 years old) pushed Adobe to develop Lightroom, the wonderful image editing sliders in Lightroom (which is just one year old) for highlight and shadow recovery have been added to Aperture 2.0. My previous reluctance to try Lightroom reflects a dislike of having to learn yet another application as well as my general disgust with the user interface of Photoshop. Enough carping – on with the conversion.

The migration process is laborious and must not be rushed. It is made no easier by the fact that Aperture’s export function is unreliable.

Lightroom can emulate the directory structure of Aperture so I can mirror the file layout in Lightroom, but there is a lot of manual work involved. Many files never make it and have to be re-exported. Of course all edits are lost though IPTC metadata and XMP sidecar data can be optionally exported from Aperture 2.0 – I elected to do so by checking the relevant boxes in the Aperture 2.0 export dialog. These functions are not available in 1.5.6 so it actually makes sense to convert to Aperture 2.0 before moving on to Lightroom if these things matter to you.

The Lightroom file structure is dead simple – you can see all your files in their native format in the database, to which Lightroom adds a set of separate compact reference files. I keep the database in an external Lacie Firewire drive and by moving the ‘Lightroom Catalog.lrcat’ and ‘Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata’ reference files from their default internal disk drive location (the ‘Pictures’ directory on a Mac) to the external drive I can have all Lightroom files on the one external drive.

The first time you start Lightroom after this move, do so by dropping the ‘Lightroom Catalog.lrcat’ file from the external drive onto the Lightroom application and, thereafter, Lightroom will save all its reference and preview files on the external drive, together with the photo database. The preview file can get quite large, so this makes sense. More about previews later.

I decided to bite the bullet and do this now while Aperture is still manufactured and while the number of pictures in it is manageable. All told Aperture reports 4,056 images (which includes stacked copies so it’s not a meaningful number). Because this is a tiring process I am doing a few projects each day – there’s much to be said for breaking up your work into manageable chunks in this manner.

Before going further, just look at how bloated the Aperture application is becoming:

Aperture 1.5.6 – 193.5 mB
Aperture 2.0.0 – 305.5 mB
Aperture 2.1.4 – 315.1mB

Lightroom 1.3.1 – 69.4 mB
Lightroom 2.5 – 87.2mB
Lightroom 3 Beta – 91.1mB

Little wonder it’s not getting any faster. There is an incentive for writing tight code – things run faster – unless you are in the business of selling hardware, I suppose. And let us never forget that is the business Apple is in.

Now let’s compare the library structures.

Here’s Lightroom’s – the files are in their native format and could not be easier to find if that is ever needed:

Now here’s Aperture – all the overlay data thoroughly mixed in with the files in hundreds of sub- and sub-sub-directories – fancy finding your file here?

That, dear reader, is what is known as locking in the customer into your product. Reprehensible, not to mention lousy database design. Note that you can separate image files from previews and edit data in later versions of Aperture by using referenced files but that is not the default so who would know?

Here is the conversion routine to move files from Aperture to Lightroom:

In general, I find most of the writing on both Aperture and Lightroom seriously commercially conflicted, often being little more than hype for the photographer’s latest book or services. Accordingly, I have written the following instructions. As this routine worked fine with a ~3,000 picture database you may even conclude that it is solid.

1 – Make sure you have a good, working, current copy of your Aperture database on a separate drive. In Aperture, open all your projects. You want to do this project by project as Aperture’s Export function is unreliable and you want to be able to take bite-sized chunks to permit verification of the export.

2 – Close all stacks in the project. (Update: refer to the second comment by Nikos Bournas, below, on electing stack picks)

3 – Take a screen picture (Command-Shift-3) and print it from Preview. Select all the pictures (shift-click on the first and last picture) in one project. The purpose of the printout is to allow you to check off each project as it is exported.

4 – Click on File->Export->Masters and direct the export to your location of choice. If you are using Aperture 2.0 you will be asked whether you want to export IPTC and XMP data (camera,lens, etc) – do so. Make sure that destination for your exported files has sufficient room. If your Aperture library is 50 gB you will need an additional 50gB to store the Lightroom library – the database sizes are very similar.

5 – In Lightroom go to Library-Folders and create a new folder (+ sign) and name it the same as the exported project.

6 – In Lightroom click File->Import Photos from Disk, point to the exported Aperture masters and hit Enter. If Lightroom asks you to elect Preview size, elect ‘Initial’ for now. You can set Lightroom’s Preferences to alert you with a tone when an import is finished. Handy.

7 – If your Aperture project contains sub-folders, create sub-folders in Lightroom by highlighting the new Project folder you just created, then hit + to create each nested folder, naming it accordingly. Multiple layers of nesting are permitted but I would discourage this approach as locating files gets geometrically more difficult. Keep it simple. One enclosing folder for multiple sub-folders works best for me and largely reduces the need to enter lots of metadata for each picture in the hope of making it easier to find.

8 – In Lightroom drag and drop (shift-click for a contiguous range, Command-click(s) for non-adjacent files) the relevant files from the Aperture export to each nested folder. Lightroom will issue a warning message that moving files may take a while. With a speedy external Firewire drive the process takes no time at all, and I urge you to opt for Firewire over USB. Despite claims to the contrary, FW tests faster than USB2 every time. USB1 is a complete dog. Click to proceed. Once the import is done, check your files against those in Aperture visually and, if OK, mark off the project on the page you printed in #3, above. I actually ran Aperture and Lightroom simultaneously on my 1.83gHz, 2 gB MacBook (Intel Core2Duo CPU) and did get some spinning beach balls when switching between applications – hardly surprising when you look at the sheer computer horse power needed to run these things. However, the time spent is worthwhile in the interest of maintaining database integrity for Lightroom. I found that Lightroom’s import was approximately twice as fast as Aperture’s export.

9 – If your Aperture project has many folders, export masters from each folder in turn to make cataloging/rearranging easier, but do make sure that all the files in the Project have been distributed to subordinate folders. This is one of the biggest design errors in Aperture. You can have a master in the Project, or in the Folder or in both. Lightroom will automatically place any file in a folder to the containing project, which is the right way to do it.

10 – Files over 10,000 pixels on either dimension will NOT be imported and Lightroom will alert you how many exist in the directory you are importing from. This is very well implemented by Adobe – normally the source directory from which you are importing is deleted on completion of the import. However, files which are too large will be left behind with their directory. I have a few like this, all of them scans from medium or large format film, 175-225mB in size. I simply roundtrip these files through Photoshop (Image->Image Size) and reduce the file size to manageable proportions (100mB) – the original enormous size adds no functionality in any case and Aperture chokes if you try to print them. The reduced files are then imported into Lightroom.

11 – When you are done, make sure all the files I illustrate are on your disk drive (move them over if needed) and immediately back-up your Lightoom database and related files to a separate drive. These are the files you need to back-up:

I would advise against using Apple’s Time Machine for the back-up. The storage format is proprietary to Apple. Do a proper clone back-up using something like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner – you will then be able to see the backed-up files just as in the original. If your primary drive goes down all you have to do is repoint Lightroom to the back-up – no restoration of files is required.

My 50gB Lightroom Library resulted in a 1.5gB Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata file. That’s where the Initial previews I elected reside. The Lightroom Catalog.lrcat file is a scant 38mB but will likely grow as I create more edits to my pictures. All the versions in Aperture will be lost unless you go back and export them – I did not as it’s simply quicker to re-edit pictures than to go through the agony of yet another buggy export. There is one exception – if you roundtripped an Aperture file through Photoshop, Aperture erroneously thinks it is a master so ‘Export Masters’ will export the PS version – that’s actually a nice bug in this case, as most of my round trips were to use Photoshop’s stamp and clone tool to remove dust, given the near useless tool in Aperture 1.5.6. To Apple’s credit, the stamp and clone tool has been improved and speeded up in 2.0, but too late for this user. Within Aperture the bug is serious – go to delete the PS version and Aperture will warn you that you are about to delete a master – completely wrong and not at all consonant with breeding trust in the product. This bug persists in Aperture 2.0.

Previews:

An understanding of Previews in Lightroom is key to smooth processing operation and avoidance of delay and irritation.

By electing ‘Initial’ previews when importing your files from Aperture you are telling Lightroom to create small thumbnail previews. These average 50kB in size (surprisingly large for their intended purpose) and are used to present the Grid view in Lightroom, thus:

You can see my nested directory structure in the left pane – it is identical to the structure in Aperture. Numbers like 10/12 indicate 10 masters with 2 additional versions – Aperture only reports the higher number. The snag with the Initial previews is that if you click on a thumbnail for a full screen or a 1:1 (actual pixels) view, Lightroom will pause (several seconds on my MacBook) as it generates the full size preview. Thus it makes sense to generate 1:1 previews for the whole database if you access your pictures often and have the disk space to store these. You need full size previews to edit a picture, check sharpness, etc. Stacked files are denoted by the white rectangles in the top left corner of the previews. Lightroom has the same stacking feature as Aperture, which is nice for aggregating versions when these are created. Shift-click to select, then Command-G to stack.

You can decide whether you want to generate full size previews for the whole library or just for selected folders or even for selected images. That’s nice. Highlight the library at the appropriate level. In the following illustration I have highlighted the whole library and executed the key strokes shown:

Note that if file bloat becomes an issue you can delete 1:1 Previews – all, some projects or just for individual images by choosing the delete level appropriately before executing the command.

Now my library includes a mix of Canon 5D and Lumix LX1 RAW files (10 to 15mB each) and a bunch of TIFF and PSD files (30-90mB each – mostly from film/scanner days of yore) with the scans outnumbering the digital originals by a factor of 2:1, so I cannot give you a rule of thumb for how long this process will take, but it is not fast. For my library, stored on an external Lacie 250gB Firewire drive the process took 198 minutes or 3.7 seconds per image. As the process is very CPU intensive, I exited all other applications and left the MacBook to cook while this was going on. Adobe thoughtfully provides a progress bar to let you know what is happening, together with a small thumbnail picture of the file currently being processed:

One great advantage of doing preview generation on a laptop computer, in contrast to a desktop, is that if the power goes down your machine will continue working (assuming you are connected to mains power and that your battery is charged). A strong argument for a back-up battery power supply for a desktop machine. I have no idea whether the preview file would be corrupted in the event of a power failure but something tells me the results would not be pretty and you really only want to do this once.

Your Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdat file will swell, reflecting the increased size of the preview files – here are my statistics:

With Initial Previews only: 1.5gB
With 1:1 Previews added: 6.3gB

The main catalog file does not change in size as it contains original picture files only.

I say ‘added’ as the original Initial previews will be retained, as they are required to service the Grid view.

As I get very irate when the spinning beach ball shows up – a major driver in my decision to dump Aperture where version 2.0 is significantly worse than 1.5.6 – I will elect 1:1 previews with future file uploads to the Lightroom library. The last thing I want during a processing blitzkrieg is any pauses or delays. When you choose 1:1 previews on import you will see that Lightroom displays two progress bars at top left. The first reports picture import, the second preview generation. The latter takes some four times as long, but you can work on imported pictures right away as the grid view previews will already have been generated and a 1:1 zoom will force immediate generation of a large preview for the picture in question, albeit with an attendant delay if such preview has not yet been generated.

Suffice it to say that Lightroom has crafted this background processing in an elegant manner and Aperture 2.0 has emulated this approach – which probably explains why Aperture 2.0 file uploads are so much slower than in 1.5.6. Anyone telling you that Aperture 2.0 is faster in this regard is not comparing like with like as they almost certainly have preview generation switched off while doing the file upload. Doing an apples-to-apples comparison I have found that Lightroom 1.3.1 and Aperture 2.0 take the same amount of time to upload files from your camera’s card. For Lightroom that works out to 2 minutes for importing RAW files and another 4 minutes to generate 1:1 previews, using a 2gB Sandisk Extreme III card with 140 images on it.

Phew! Enough about previews.

Lightroom in use:

Whatever you say about Aperture it has one of the most elegant user interfaces in the software world. So objective comparisons are hard, especially as I have some three years with Aperture and just a few days with Lightroom.

I will comment further on Lightroom in use in subsequent articles, but my first efforts with Lightroom, which included a four hour heavy processing session with lots of retouching, use of sliders, printing, roundtrips to PS CS2 (for lens distortion correction mostly as Lightroom does not yet offer a plug-in to do this natively), disclosed none of the bugaboos that continue to haunt Aperture:

  • Lightroom did not slow down after a period of use. This happens in Aperture and dictates a reboot of the application – the bug has been there since version 1.0
  • No spinning beachballs – not a one! Try that in Aperture where’s it’s even worse in 2.0 than in 1.5.6.
  • No jerky, hesitant sliders in the processing controls. A worthwhile change for this aspect alone – not to mention a great deal of money saved on not having to buy Apple’s latest and greatest computer. I have read that Lightroom runs nicely even on G4 PPC Macs, and I’m inclined to believe it. So I tried it – read this. Don’t even think of doing that with Aperture.

And that’s just with the trial version with occasional reference to the on line (and quite horrid) instruction book. If anyone out there knows of a good aftermarket book which addresses Lightroom version 1.3 and which you have used please drop me a line (see my profile for the email address) or post a Comment to this piece. (Update September, 2009: Check out Martin Evening’s excellent book on Lightroom 2).

On the downside:

  • You cannot properly use dual monitors with Lightroom. No matter to me as I do fine with one big one. (This has been fixed in Lightroom 2).
  • The workflow approach is much more structured in Lightroom (Catalog-Process-Output), compared to the more free form approach adopted by Aperture. Engineers will like this and artists will not. Then again, how does a struggling artist afford a $5k 8-core Mac tower to make Aperture run half decently?

RAW conversion quality? Lightroom uses Adobe Camera Raw so it’s state of the art. Aperture 2.0 is great too. No complaints on either count though their respective track records suggest that Adobe will release RAW conversion support for new cameras far faster than Apple.

And now, finally, for some photography.


WW2 fighter. Speed Graphic 4″ x 5″, Vericolor, 135 mm Schneider Xenar. Processed in Lightroom

The original is a 100mB TIFF file – JPG Export took just three seconds. Spooling this enormous file to make an 18″ x 24″ print to the HP DesignJet printer took exactly 20 seconds. Try either of those in Aperture ….

Finally a bit of fun, because after going through this hell I need it.

For the digital snaps in my library (about one third of the total – the scans from film obviously have no data) here’s how my lens use breaks down (the 17-85mm is on my wife’s Digital Rebel and it looks like data for the Lumix LX1 are missing, so your are mostly seeing 5D data which exclude deleted files):

Neat, huh? Numbers testify louder than words to the quality – or lack thereof – of the Canon 20mm.

Snow Leopard update – November 2009:

You think things are getting better with Snow Leopard for Aperture? Think again:

One of the most read and commented Aperture posts on the Apple Discussions board

February 23, 2008

A cheap remote for the Canon 5D

Filed under: 5D — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:11 am

Guess from where!

A wireless remote shutter release is a handy thing to have. I use one with an ancient Olympus 5050 for the Christmas family snap. That Olympus has more shutter delay than you want to know about, so it’s an exercise in frustration. Further, I would guess the much used Oly’s years are numbered (the plastic focus and zoom racks are the first to go in these P&S digitals) and whenever I want to include myself in a landscape picture it means resorting to the delayed action on the 5D (hell to find with all those buttons) and run for it to try and get my Olympian physique placed just so in the frame.

I ruminated about a Canon 5D remote but once I saw the price a beeline for the vodka bottle was called for.

And that one is wired! OK, so it has a timer and will probably make your breakfast, but at that price I’ll eat at MacDonald’s, thanks. I seem to remember they listed a wireless version for some $500 and if you read on you will cease wondering why it’s no longer available.

I remember thinking about the interminable delay of the Olympus when taking this year’s family snap (it’s been bugging me for years), and checked ePrey shortly after. Well for $10.99 and $11.99 shipping from Hong Kong I decided the risk was acceptable and as I have had nothing but success with the incredible studio flash remote I bought a while back, so I pressed the ‘Buy It Now’ button and forgot about the whole thing.

Well, it arrived today and I must say the gadget is totally awesome! It’s radio frequency, not line of sight, which translates to tremendous, non-directional range. And if interference is an issue (your brand new BMW starts itself and goes off the road, say) you have sixteen radio channels (16!) to choose from.

A CR-2 Lithium battery (provided) goes in the remote and the camera-end receiver comes with a 23A battery installed.

With the antenna extended the range is quoted at 320 feet! I gave up at 105 feet which is the length of my hallway (it’s raining outside so a longer distance was … out of range). With the antenna retracted, which makes the transmitter easily pocketable, I got 75 feet.


A couple of small pieces of Velcro keep the receiver attached to the LCD shade on the back of the 5D.

So if you need a wireless remote for your DSLR because you want to avoid shutter lag or you don’t want to risk a coronary while running into your landscape snap, blow $22.98 on one of these. I have not checked but I would bet that this device is made for most DSLRs out there. Heck, the DSLRs are made in China anyway, no? The picture on the box shows the receiver attached to a Nikon D200 and, if it helps, the inventory check-off tab on the box provides options for five different connectors, though I must disappoint you by disclosing that my Chinese is not up to snuff to make sense of these.

When you press the button on the transmitter, the first pressure gets you a green LED on the transmitter. That means the transmitter and its battery are working. This changes to red to on further pressure to indicate activation but be warned that it changes to red whether you are in range or not. To make the camera end functional, you do have to press the button on the receiver, one of whose LEDs will glow red when you do that. Fear not. The instructions state that the stand-by life of the receiver’s battery is 1,000 hours if you forget to switch it off. Based on my experience with the strobe remote, I tend to believe what they write. Further pressure on the transmitter button will make the second LED on the receiver glow red, indicating it has received the signal to fire the shutter.

Further, by pressing the button on the transmitter for 3 seconds with the camera set to bulb, the camera’s shutter will open and remain open until you press the transmitter’s button again. Use mirror lock-up and we are talking minimal vibration here.

There’s more. Set your camera for continuous shooting, hold the transmitter button for 3 seconds and the 5D (or whatever) will bang away until you press the transmitter button again. Maybe there is an option for making your breakfast after all?

It’s OK, you are not taking a job from an American by buying Chinese – the American can (and does) make more on unemployment.

Next year I get the wife to take the family snap and I get to tickle our son to make him smile. How’s that for pressure?

And yes, every time you try to open that wretched rubber flap on the 5D you will wonder how long it will take Messrs. Canon to Fix That Flap.

One final thought and a word of advice from the instruction sheet, and I quote: “When monitor light glitters, the battery will be vanished, change new battery”. You have been warned.

February 21, 2008

A slice of LIFE – by Peter Solmssen

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:09 am

LIFE photographer Peter Solmssen writes.

On the the most satisfying aspects of this journal is that I get to exchange correspondence with some great photographers. Today’s column is guest authored by one of those – Peter Solmssen.

Peter Solmssen was a photographer with LIFE magazine during the golden era of photojournalism. Here is his story.

* * * * *

Lessons from life and at LIFE
By Peter Solmssen

My photographic career probably began before I was born. My family has been fascinated by photography since it was invented; my great grandfather ordered the first family portrait (a Daguerreotype) in the early 1840’s.

He and his son, my grandfather, commissioned hundreds of photos in Germany during the 19th Century. My grandfather hired a wonderful (and now unknown) photographer, Joanna Eilert, to record every aspect of his life. Here, an image of his house, car and family – my mother is on the running board.

The first family members to actually take photographs were the women. My father’s mother made glass plate stereo images at the beginning of the 20th Century; I still have a few, and have had fun digitizing them so that we can view them on the HDTV (with colored 3D glasses). Here (necessarily seen in 2D) she has recorded her family taking off in a chartered Zeppelin. Her images remind me of the wonderful pictures by that talented child, Henri Lartigue.

Inspired by their mothers, my father’s generation were all avid photographers. My father was an early adopter of the Leica, his brother the Contax and his cousins the Rolleiflex, so I grew up in the presence of great machines.

I went off to college at 16. As the youngest editor on the Harvard Crimson, I thought that I should lend weight to my position by using a Speed Graphic, but I soon returned to the familiar Leica. It was very fortunate for me that my mentors on the Crimson were mostly returning veterans of World War II, and thus much older and wiser than I. With their help, I was able to expand my work by shooting for the rotogravure section of the Boston Globe and as staff photographer for Radcliffe College – all very heady stuff for a teen-aged undergraduate. I was also named campus correspondent for LIFE magazine, that Valhalla of photojournalists.

The first, and possibly most memorable, lesson I learned during my association with LIFE came during that early campus period. I was assisting LIFE photographer Burt Glinn in covering the re-enactment of a famous children’s book, “Make Way for the Ducklings”, in which a family of ducks cross a busy street and waddle into the Boston Common pond. Glinn had chartered one of the Boston Common swan boats to carry us out onto the pond with the ducks, but when we and the ducks had waddled to the edge of the pond, there was no boat in sight. Glinn, dressed in his typical LIFE photographer outfit of snap brim hat, Burberry trench coat and Brooks Brothers suit, marched right into the pond behind the ducks. When he came out, he handed me some soggy money and said: “Peter, go buy me some dry socks and never be afraid to get your feet wet”. The thought has stayed with me for over half a century. If you are a writer, you can stand back and observe your subject. If you are a photographer, you have to get right in where the action is. (Thomas has quoted Robert Capa to the same effect: “If your picture is no good, you weren’t close enough”).

After graduating from college, I was hired full-time as a photographer in the LIFE New York headquarters. There I was privileged to sit with the Gods during the golden age of photojournalism. I worked with and learned from the likes of Alfred Eisenstaedt, David Douglas Duncan, Andreas Feininger, Yale Joel and a long, distinguished list of others. Everyone passed through the home office at some point. Unfortunately, I never met Margaret Bourke White, but I did hear the darkroom guys moan and groan about her. Beautiful as she was, she could get whatever she wanted from the military, and that included a K-20 aerial camera that shot enormous 500 exposure rolls and became her favorite toy. She didn’t have to develop the rolls!

Thinking back over those days of long ago, the conversations I now recall were the lengthy debates over whether 35mm was “good enough” (just like the recent debates over digital) and the excitement over the Japanese lenses that David Duncan was lent in Korea when his Leica lenses were broken. The people at Nikon acknowledge that this was the breakthrough for quality Japanese photo gear. My most popular photo for LIFE was the picture of a diver, waiting to be called in an emergency, his helmet to the side and his eyes shaded inside the suit. It was titled (by LIFE) “No Neck On Deck”.

Strangely, as much as I admired the LIFE staff, the photographers who have inspired me the most over the years were not part of the regular staff. Over the long haul, the images that have stayed with me the most forcefully were by Arnold Newman, Yousuf Karsh and George Hurrell – the three great masters of the portrait. I had the pleasure of giving Arnold an honorary degree when I was a university president, and of becoming his friend. The charming Karsh and I met to discuss the possibility of an exhibition, which unfortunately did not take place before he died. I have kicked myself many a time for not looking up Hurrell, greatest of the Hollywood still photographers, because I stupidly thought that he must have died. In fact, he was re-discovered by Dinah Shore and had a second career into his nineties.

My own decision about a career in photography was much influenced by an assignment I worked on together with Alfred Eisenstaedt. We were an hour away from New York, and Eisey was saying that he was really anxious to get home to his family after a long time away, when the phone rang and he was told to get on a plane to Alaska. It really struck me that here was a guy at the absolute pinnacle of his profession who had no control over his own life. Much as I loved photography, I decided to find other ways to earn my living. This was undoubtedly the right decision, since I was not nearly as good at it as my famous colleagues, and photojournalism and photo magazines coincidentally went into a big slump at just about that time. As it turned out, the Navy during the Korean war and a quarter of a century as a diplomat provided other wonderful opportunities for photography and film. Some examples from Brazil:

Happily, the family tradition continues into the fifth generation; my daughter is a professional photographer in New York. Some of her work can be seen here.

* * * * *

Thank you, Peter, for that wonderful remembrance and for your fine photography.

February 20, 2008

Ludwig Schricker – Photographer

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:31 am

A forgotten name

From its post-war inception in the late 1940s, the German Leica Fotografie magazine, under its founding editor Heinrich Stöckler, profiled much that was best and most banal in European photography.

I subscribed in the 1970s (mostly because I wanted to get published there!) and managed to find most of the back issues to those from 1952, the first to come with an English translation. Stöckler was strictly a pictorialist, meaning he loved the worst kind of schmaltz which typifies the German love of all that is bourgeois, but even he saw the writing on the wall as expressionism raised its (to him) ugly head.

This pretty much came to a turning point with the 5/1958 issue – the magazine was published bi-monthly. Stöckler had the courage to publish a selection of photographs by Ludwig Schricker, publishing also their exchange of letters where Stöckler made it clear that he had no love for the young Schricker’s work. Where was the fabled German countryside and its buxom blonde lasses? Nowhere to be seen in Schricker’s dark work.

I have been thinking of publishing this piece for a couple of years but could not find any of Schricker’s work on the web to illustrate my writing. He is non-existent on the web. So I finally dug out that old issue and scanned four pictures for reproduction here.

Schricker’s is a dark vision of a nasty, cruel world. I hope you find his pictures as memorable as I do. They are scanned unretouched here and, as the magazine is now 50 years old, some yellowing and fading has occurred.

Stöckler finally retired in 1973 at which point the magazine was far more skewed to expressionism than pictorialism. Therafter it went off the rails and now seems to be published once or twice a year as little more than an advertisement for the latest overpriced and already obsolete Leica toys. But I did learn mightily from its pages in the 1970s.

February 15, 2008

Winston and Vermeer

Filed under: Paintings, Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 3:35 pm

Our boy is six

For the annual portrait of our son Winston, I decided to try Vermeer lighting this year. There is little new under the sun when it comes to portraiture. Winston is six years old.

Vermeer used window light often in his portraits, with the darker side of the face rotated towards the viewer. As I prefer the control that comes with studio lighting, I used umbrella flash to emulate the effect. Here’s the result:


5D, 85mm, 1/180, f/5.6, ISO 50, two Novatron flash heads with silver and gold umbrella reflectors


Vermeer. The girl with the Pearl earring, 1665.

The black background Vermeer used would be too harsh for our young subject, but for contrast I opted for Winston’s karate outfit. The gold-coated umbrella was used on the shadow side, the silver, one stop brighter, on the bright side. I moved the dark side light far enough to Winston’s right side that only one flash reflects in his eyes – the main light on the left. Aperture 2 (Trial version) was used to process the RAW original.

Read more about my highly portable studio flash outfit here.

Obviously you know which subject I find to be the most beautiful.

February 14, 2008

News and Standard!

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 2:38 pm

Some street portraits

When I was a student in London it was unheard of for any but the wealthiest to have their newspaper delivered. Rather, you simply bought it from the corner vendor on the way to work and the evening paper on the way home. Delivery actually cost more!

You could have your choice of any number of dailies across the political spectrum, from the stodgy and boring voice of the establishment, The Times, the typo-prone Guardian (its left leanings meant most of the journalists there could not spell, hence the paper’s moniker ‘The Grauniad’), the solidly socialist Daily Mirror (where the masses forever read that they had been robbed of something or another by the government of the day) and the paper beloved of the horse and hound set, The Daily Telegraph, though they bought it more for appearance, given their dedication to killing God’s innocent animals. The loony left got the Daily Worker, and the thinking man could be seen with The Economist, a weekly paper with a perfect grasp of history but zero ability to see tomorrow. That’s economics for you. City snobs read The Financial Times, ever so self aware that it was printed on pink paper – a color unconnected to its political leanings. Amazingly, all of these, and more, survive to this day.

One day it struck me that the street vendors from whom I bought the daily paper were far more interesting than the contents of anything they sold, so I took the tube to Charing Cross Road and proceeded to walk west across London to my home in Kensington, with the simple goal of snapping a few of these characters for fun …. and posterity.

It’s not like equipment choice was difficult, as I had nothing to choose from, so Leica M3, 35mm Summaron and one roll of TriX it was.

Now these street-aware characters are very sharp people, always ready with a joke or some political or sports snippet of news. Can you imagine a more people-intensive job than selling papers on the street? So capturing them unposed was a challenge, and it was a setting in which the ultimate street camera of the time, the rangefinder Leica, was just the right tool. And forget rangefinding. Set the lens at f/5.6 and 7 feet or so and bang away. No time for that fancy focusing stuff.

All of these were taken on one day – something you can see in the originals. September 24, 1974. And, yes, everytime I pop these onto the screen, I still find myself retouching dust. There is something to be said for digital imaging ….

The headline to this entry refers to the two evening papers of the day – The Evening News and The Evening Standard. The vendors’ cries – “News and Standard” – still ring in my ears.


Charing Cross Road


Oxford Street


Regent Street


Knightsbridge


South Kensington

Walking across London was about as much fun as you could have for no cost in those days. I suspect it’s no longer quite the same in a western Europe each of whose wonderful capital cities is now a target for some nutcase with twisted values. As for the headlines, as the French would say “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.

February 11, 2008

Sharp and unsharp

Filed under: Photographs, Technique — Thomas Pindelski @ 12:10 pm

A little glow can make the day

My piece on some of Irving Penn’s early work with a small negative got me thinking about how to emulate the effect using an all digital approach.

Aperture does not have the horespower to do these things, as we forever wait for plug-ins that do more than import and export files. So you have to resort to Photoshop, into which I roundtripped the file from my Aperture database. Thereafter, I applied Dave Beaman’s Ethereal Glow action. Download it, click on the downloaded file (this is for Mac users; Windows users will probably need some arcane incantations to make things work) and the action will become available in Photoshop’s Action menu which you can display from the Window menu. Click on the action, click the right arrow at the bottom of the Actions palette, wait a minute and you get the original transformed to the ethereal glow effect. Back into Aperture with the file and add sepia toning and you are done. Sure, you can mess with doing the glow effect in PS manually, but why bother when it has been done for you?

I did not add noise/grain as it did not work well in this example, but you get the idea. The effect is actually quite a bit more dramatic on a large print. Some parts of the resulting image are etched, some are glowing – not too far from Penn’s effort applyying re-photographing of the original and use of the point-focus enlarger, and a lot less work of course.


A corner of the estate. 5D, 50mm, 1/350, f/5.6, ISO 250


With glow and sepia toning added, plus a light crop

I’m not that keen on picture manipulation, but if that’s your thing there are dozens of actions to be found on that click-through page above.

February 9, 2008

About the snap: Balloon seller

Filed under: About the Snap — Thomas Pindelski @ 3:06 pm

Balloon seller


Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX

Date: Easter Day, 1974
Place: Battersea Park, London
Modus operandi: Enjoying the Easter Parade
Weather: Lovely
Time: 2 pm
Gear: Leica M3, 35mm Summaron
Medium: Kodak TriX/D76
Me: Glad the balloons were helium filled
My age: 23

The Easter Parade at Battersea Park, then a fun, working class area in London (now doubtless replete with overpriced, cardboard condominiums), was always a good source of street snaps. This macho-attired balloon seller gave me a mouthful of the best four letter words seconds later but, then again, what could he do? Give chase and lose his balloons? Anyway, with the 35mm lens I was pretty close, it’s true, and this was one of those rare occasions where I simply stuck the camera in an unsuspecting stranger’s face.

I have always enjoyed the comic contrast between the seller’s attire and his product offering, and hope you like it too; God help anyone trying to sell balloons decorated with golliwogs today in our uptight, bigoted world.

February 7, 2008

Early Penn

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 9:58 am

A special technique makes for special pictures

I may have grumbled about Irving Penn’s love of darkroom technique before, but there’s no denying the originality of the results. So it’s no surprise that some early pictures of his, taken with a Leica, and published in Leica Fotografie 2/1955, have stuck in my mind. Penn was mostly using large format and 6×6 film in those days, but he was not past messing about with 35mm film on his vacation.

But he did not stop at just taking snaps. These were made on color film with the originals cropped and rephotographed in monochrome and printed with a point light source condenser enlarger. It’s worth adding that most 35mm and 6×6 film users enlarged their negatives using diffuser enlargers, meaning that the light source was a coated neon bulb which naturally softened the image, obviating the worst of the grain. They were also inexpensive, thanks to the simple optical design. By contrast, the high intensity, uncoated, focused, point light source Penn used in his costly professional enlarger (complete with a exhaust fan to stop things melting) magnified every detail and line in the print, an effect Penn used to startlingly good effect in these pictures from the Arabian desert.

Note the etched appearance and the startling effect of the stripes on the running boys’ clothing. No less striking is the composition here, with everything but the main subject sharp – shades of Parkinson’s red hat picture. Or was it the other way around? Yes, I rather think Penn got there first.

I have never seen these reproduced elsewhere and hope you share my excitement on seeing these images. The original magazine is now over fifty years old, so please pardon the yellowing and fading.

February 6, 2008

Leitz Trinovid binoculars

Filed under: Photography — Thomas Pindelski @ 10:51 am

A useful accessory for outdoorsmen

A good pair of binoculars is a useful tool to have along in the countryside – a fine discovery tool for those photographers enamored of long lenses.

I struggled along with any number of numbingly awful ones as a kid until, some twenty years ago, I finally acquired the ne plus ultra of binoculars, the Leitz Trinovid 7 x 42B. These remain the only piece of Leitz equipment in the family unless you count the lens on the Lumix LX1, allegedly made by Leica (their involvement was probably limited to design only).

These are distinguished in several aspects of their design. First, as is always the case with products of Leitz Wetzlar (those made through 1965 or so, that is), are the optics. Raise these to your eyes and Wow! You will never look through another binocular again. Second, the large inlet glass, 42mm in diameter, is a boon in poor light. Third, the field of view is exceptionally wide making finding subjects that much easier. Fourth, the 7x magnification is just right – not too high (shakes!) not too low (useless). And finally the construction is like they used to make them. Leatherette covers a light alloy chassis, special prisms constrain the bulk and the feel is like nothing since that 1960 Leica M2 I used for many years in film days of yore. A sensual delight. The ‘B’ designation means that the exit pupil is very large. Stated in English, if you wear glasses, as I do, you will be delighted.

Leica makes binoculars to this day. For all I know they even focus automatically – yeccch! They are ugly to look at, with all that fake machismo effect created by ridiculous rubber casings serving only to cheapen the aesthetics. I haven’t tried a pair nor will I. I already have the best. If you are in the market for a pair of binoculars, try and search out a good used set of these. Mine are not for sale!

February 4, 2008

Edward Quinn – Photographer

Filed under: Photographers — Thomas Pindelski @ 8:42 am

A man of grace and beauty

Mention Edward Quinn’s name today in photography circles and you will get puzzled looks. Partly that’s because he was a quintessentially European photographer, meaning that maybe the US saw less of his work. Part is that his work is just too refined to appeal to modern tastes.


Grace Kelly by Edward Quinn

Yet Quinn (1920 – 1997) was the first among those who plied their trade on the Côte d’Azur, where his subjects were the rich and famous, much of his work gracing the pages of Paris Match or Life magazines.

I first came across his work in the English Edition of Leica Fotografie issue 4/1966 (I was published there in 1974, by the way, back when I cared about such things). His picture shows a rather formal, slightly over-dressed tweedy individual, holding an M3 with the 35mm Summaron I knew and loved so well. He looks to have come from central casting for a movie on the British Raj. While his subjects are invariably famous they are clearly at ease with this ‘Master of the Leica’ as LF styled him.

Take a look at his web site which, while a bit of a mess organizationally, shows his work well.

His book Riviera Cocktail is available from Amazon. Sadly the text seems to be in German, but the pictures are timeless.

February 2, 2008

A welcome winter visitor

Filed under: Photographs — Thomas Pindelski @ 11:33 am

A dash of beauty during the most miserable time of the year


Click the right arrow above for a recorded sound version of this piece.

There is very little good that can be said about the winter, even in lovely California. The days are short, the lighting drab, the vines lonely, denuded and miserable.

So at this time of the year that house guardian and all around good egg, Bertram the Border Terrier, adopts a winter routine. After hopping off the bed he makes a quick trip to the outdoor toilet, then spreads himself out on the big sofa in the living room. How a small terrier manages to claim all of a three seat sofa beats me, but I know my place.

Anyway, aforesaid Border was seen to raise a questioning eyebrow this morning as his guide and master, doing his best Rambo imitation, crawled along the carpet with camera and honker lens attached. I had replaced the obligatory head strap with a pair of woolen pajamas, you know, the ones with the classy paisley design, but the whole ensemble attracted little more than a sigh of disgust from the four legged one who wrote the whole episode off as just so much more eccentricity on the part of his guide and master.

The family manse is some 22 miles east of the Pacific and is guest to many fine animals. A couple of rabbit families have burrows in the vineyard, much to Bertram’s dismay, and the bird boxes see swallows, finches, bluebirds and other relatives at various times of the year. Hummingbirds do a number on the star jasmine on the north patio, with their high pitched chirps and wonderful flying. Red tail hawks provide an unceasing vigil, with ground squirrels being a particular delicacy while the turkey vultures, with faces only a mother could love, teach one and all what effortless flying is about. Once the grapes ripen, the flocks of starling feast on our crop with no intent of payment (just like Bubba on my taxes), accounting for no less than a ton of grapes last year. Greedy buggers!

But back to the Rambo bit. The object of my attention was a rare visitor indeed. A magnificent egret was perched on the little bridge over the pond. He had been dropping in for a couple of days now and any sign of movement in the home would immediately spook him. Hence the all fours bit. The moment I spotted him early this morning I did my best commando imitation and high tailed it (OK, grovelled on the carpet), to the office to slap the 400mm honker on the camera.

Gradually sliding open the sliding glass wall on the south side of Chez Pindelski, I had time for just two snaps before the Great White Egret made off. I was all of seventy feet away. What brings him so far inland I have no idea, as you usually see him and his kin hanging out along the coast in marshland. The little pond used to contain magnificent carp which I had raised over a couple of years, but the sushi-loving racoons put paid to that. Maybe he just liked the clear well water that feeds the pond?

Anyway, here he is in all his splendor. I had to really crank up the contrast when processing the picture, owing to the horribly flat light. No matter. A visitor of this distinction is always welcome at the estate. Check out those legs!


Great White Egret. 5D, 400mm Canon EF ‘L’, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 500. Processed in Aperture.

Ordinarily these fellows are to be found at the coast in reedy surroundings, like here:


Great White Egret. 5D, 400mm Leitz Telyt, 1/500, f/6.8, ISO 800. Processed in Aperture.

This was snapped just off Highway One a couple of years back.

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