Photographs, Photographers and Photography

aka Michelangelo Merisi.

No painter has so influenced photography and photographers as has Caravaggio, whom NPR amusingly and accurately refers to as the first of the “Bad Boy artists”. An exhibition in Rome is celebrating the 400th anniversary of his death and you can read more of this master by clicking the picture below.

I prefer the version that has him dying in a sword fight as it seems so in character with the man. Brawler, debauched party goer and totally original genius. His use of light and shade is as fresh today as it was four centuries ago.

On of the best episodes of Simonn Schama’s ‘The Power of Art’ illustrates Caravaggio’s life with some stunning recreations of his signature pieces, not least ‘The Calling of St. Matthew’. You can rent it from Netflix. It’s clear that while his commissions came largely from the Catholic Church (who else had money back then?) his art is about as secular as it gets. Another reason to adore his work.

The first snapshot artist.

While Spaniards may have hated Napoleon for the invasion of their nation and the destruction of the ruling Bourbon dynasty they should, in fact, have been grateful to the French dictator. By hastening the end of monarchical rule, Napoleon effectively put a simultaneous end to the power of the Catholic church in Spain and ushered in a secular constitution with representatives elected by the people, not by Rome. Poor Spain. We think nothing of damning modern religious dictatorships while conveniently forgetting the cruelest of systems which denied citizens even the basest rights. That system, of course, was the Spanish Inquisition.

Nations of all stripes continue to use similar tactics today to deny people their rights – torture and execution in the name of the state – though the excuse is now national security rather than exorcism of witches. And the actions of our rulers are no more representative of the will of the people than were those of the Bourbon kings of old.

In the thick of all of this back in the days of the Inquisition was the Spaniard Francisco Goya (1746-1828). He was lucky to have died in his bed. While he took on a number of church projects – who wouldn’t when trying to put bread on the table – he was the most secular of painters. In his powerful etchings and sketches of the horrors of war and the Inquisition he documented, as never before, the evils committed in the name of a ruling power. His anti-war work reached a peak never before scaled by Western art in his painting of French soldiers executing loyalists on May 3, 1814. This snapshot-like vision was conjured up from his imagination, as he was too old and too deaf to be traipsing about the streets of Madrid while its citizens were waging guerilla war against the French enemy,

Goya – May 3, 1814, Madrid

Modern times make it far simpler to record the horrors of armed conflict and that fact takes away much of the power of the message. We are numbed by so much of this that it no longer gets through. While the most famous picture of the Vietnam war undoubtedly speeded America’s defeat and exit, few remember it now. It is Eddie Adams’s picture of a Viet Cong having his head blown off.

Unlike Goya’s snapshot, Adams had no need of imagination. He just had to be there. There’s a newsreel of the same event so it’s not like he was the only photographer there or the only one to see this ‘photo op’ coming. And, to his lasting surprise, he helped end a war in much the same way that Goya’s snapshot put paid to the Spanish peoples’ prosecution by church, state and invader. The difference is that Goya was recording with intent whereas Adams was just another guy with a camera.

And while Adams’s picture, in its own way, is no less powerful than Goya’s, I need not ask which you would rather have hanging on your wall.

A fascinating subject.

Some three years ago I wrote a brief piece on Aspect Ratios after acquiring my Panasonic LX-1 which came with a widescreen 16:9 picture option.

While 30 years with film Leicas has me pretty much convinced that 3:2 is the best for me (and that’s what I use most often on both the LX-1 and the G1; the 5D is, of course, 3:2, take it or leave it) a recent email from reader and photographer Peter Solmssen got me thinking about the subject again.

Peter writes:

A subject that has annoyed me forever is the disconnect between common print and frame sizes and the aspect ratio of the most broadly used cameras.

The most common size for enlargements and frames is still 8×10. What percentage of photographers do you think are still using 4×5? How obscure is 11×14?

The move from 5×3.5 to 4×6 took hold just as digital was coming in at 4×3. And why 4×3? Because cathode ray tubes for TV were that size and could be used for early computers. As a fan of 16:9, I pretty much have to crop anything that needs to be printed.

Peter, by the way, typically views his digital pictures on a large screen LCD TV which, of course, is 16:9, consonant with the widescreen format used by most moviemakers today.

Rather than dwell on photographs, I thought it might be fun to pull twelve favorite paintings from memory and take a look at their aspect ratios, so here they are, in no particular order. These have been in my mind’s eye for, what, 45 years (I am 58)? With the sole exceptions of the Raphael and Uccello, both of which are carefully posed, all the others share an almost photographic snapshot vision, never more so than in the two Degas examples. No surprise, really, as that’s the way I tend to see things. To keep matters simple, I show the aspect ratios in the order longest side: shortest side, regardless whether the format is portrait or landscape:

I learned some interesting things from this little exercise. 4:3 and 3:2 dominate in my choices. Had you asked me what ratio Noli Me Tangere or La Grenouillere or The Bather or Baignade were, for example, I would have sworn up and down that they are 16:9 or even longer! Turns out nothing could be further from the truth. And, indeed, when you look at vast canvases like Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (Louvre, National Gallery, Uffizi) their unusually broad aspect ratio for the times – 16:9 and the only ‘widescreen’ painting here – is an awful lot to take in.

So maybe 16:9 is really largely a modern development, one of the movie age, because classical art uses it rarely. I realize that a dozen selections hardly constitute ‘Classical Art’ but I doubt you will find too many widescreen paintings ….

Thanks for those thoughts, Peter.

And as I’m dying to answer the question “Which of the above would you like on your wall at home?” let me say there’s no contest. By a huge margin it’s that magnificent Botticelli work at the beginning of this piece, prosaic as its 4:3 format may be. It’s in London’s National Gallery and once you enter the large gallery in which this very small painting is exhibited you will understand why.

Amongst the great benefits of a 1970s higher British education was the complete laxity shown at my school (University College, London) about attendance. Given that I was a mechanical engineering student and realized early on that there was not a living to be made in the subject, I naturally spent most of those three happy years (1973-76) in the art galleries and auction houses of London. As my net worth was my Leica M3 and one pair of jeans, I wasn’t exactly a bidder at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but they let me in anyway and I managed to luxuriate in some of the greatest art works never to see the inside of a museum.

Of all these great works that became formative influences none surpasses Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’. It didn’t hurt that it was owned by the Courtauld Institute which just happened to be across the road from my college.

Manet. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. 1882

This is the most intensely photographic of paintings. The use of reflections, the amputated Kermit-like legs of the trapeze artist at top left, the action in the mirror, the sad ‘decisive moment’ look on the barmaid’s face – it’s all there. Best of all, the Courtauld exhibited it under a skylight, meaning that you had a 33% chance of catching the picture at its best (it was raining the other two times) when a beam of sun would illuminate the canvas. The result was magic. You could hear the unruly crowds, smell the booze and sweat and generally revel in the sheer reality of it all.

The most photographic of paintings.

And British beer aficionados amongst you will recognize the red triangles on the bottles on the bar.

An established brand for a few hundred years now

As for my grades, magna cum laude was a perfect ROE (Return On Effort) – three months’ work beating the three years’ worth which a summa dictated. A gentleman’s degree!

No, not the planet.

Everyone knows this one:

Botticelli. Venus, 1486. Uffizi, Florence.

And here’s today’s version:

Towel advertisement, 2008

Maybe not as powerful a rendition as with that Raphael but a good effort nonetheless, the towel replacing the hair. Notice how the towel has been cleverly sculpted to imitate the shell in the original.

And if you are wondering where you saw that backdrop before, look no further than Hearst Castle’s pool:

Canon 5D, 14mm ‘L’ lens.

A painting that would not exist without photography.

In 1980 I had just moved to New York. Dead broke. But that didn’t stop me from making my first visit, the first of many, to the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street with but one goal in mind. To see the greatest anti-war painting ever created.

When Franco’s fascists recruited the Nazi war machine for a trial run in killing innocent civilians in 1937, it was a photograph in the Times of London that spurred a famously apolitical painter to action.

Even the isolationist Times, which was the appeasement mouthpiece of British Prime Minister Chamberlain, couldn’t hush the story up, and was forced to run pictures of burning buildings and general mayhem in the paper.

Pablo Picasso saw the pictures and read of how one quarter of the town’s 7,000 inhabitants perished in a couple of hours.

After the bombing, April 26, 1937

June, 1937

MoMA did a pretty poor job of displaying the work, given its enormous size – some 23 x 11 feet. Only later did they add space but, by that time, Guernica was gone, back in Spain where it belongs. Picasso had sent the painting to New York for safe keeping until such time as Franco died, a happy event which finally took place in 1975. MoMA tried mightily to hang on to the piece – it was, after all, a huge money maker for them – but lawyers prevailed and it moved back home in 1981. Sadly, Picasso, who died in 1973 saw neither the death of the tyrant or the return of his work.

It remains the single greatest anti-war work ever and, had it not been for those photographs in the Times, may never have been painted.

Picasso, ballsy as ever, spent the war years in occupied Paris, with postcards of his master work in his apartment. When the Nazis harassed him, asking “Did you do this?” he replied “No, you did”.

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.

A great and erudite teacher.

I had the most extraordinary case of deja vu the other day, having indulged in the DVD set of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. I mention this as I have frequently maintained that there is more for photographers to learn from the art of the Renaissance than in any other field of visual rendering. Click on Paintings for more.

The nature of this strange flashback was that, as Lord Clark was extolling the insane abstraction to be found in Giotto’s faces (Giotto died in 1337, so hardly a Johhny-come-lately) I found myself rooting for something on Giorgione and, suddenly, Clark is talking about him. Now I want some Caravaggio and sure enough, up it comes. Then Donatello, Veronese and Michelangelo. What was going on here? My every wish was Clark’s command!

Then it struck me. Civilisation was released by the BBC in 1969, when I was 18 and just getting serious about the Renaissance. Until then I had been fixated for years on the Impressionists, later Cezanne for his nascent cubism and Degas for his perfect sense of line (until Seurat chanced on the scene, that is). The Old was not for me. All those stuffy oils, over framed, in big galleries. Well, the reality is that, unknown to me these 40 years, Lord Clark had been my teacher. So perfect was Clark’s taste, so beautiful his mellifluous use of that most gorgeous of languages, English (it has fallen out of use since) that I sat entranced and overjoyed at this journey of artistic and spiritual discovery.

As a photographer you are interested in images. As a photographer, your education remains incomplete without an appreciation of the Renaissance and there is no better way to gain that than with this series. Sure, Clark doesn’t affect polyester clothing or make any effort to conceal his patrician leanings. On the other hand, he has no cynicism or snobbery in his make up and the whole is simply a delight. I guiltily admit to having put in the first DVD last night and found that I had sat through four episodes before it was time for bed.

I think you may have the same reaction.

No, not the one by John Berger.

One of the books on art I enjoyed most was John Berger’s About Looking which went on to become ‘Ways of Seeing’ when the BBC filmed it. What was especially interesting about the piece is that it is cast in the author’s Marxist viewpoint of the world, where every object or possession is examined through the eyes of society rather than seen as the thing itself. That is no bad thing. After all, are we not told that small minds speak about people, middling minds talk about issues and great minds cast about for concepts? Berger is all about concepts.

The only snag with this thinking is that just because the author addresses concepts does not mean that his frame of reference is sane.

But, for much the same reason that I sometimes read the New York Times or watch Fox News – a recheck of reference points on the loonie left and the psychotic right – it is always an education to read the works of a Marxist as it serves to freshen one’s ideas about freedom, personal responsibility and the sanctity of the individual. So far, my belief in these attributes has only been strengthened by digesting the claptrap put out by these media.

Just think. In a perfect Marxist paradise there would be no music – you might, after all, enjoy it more than I, and we can’t have that. There would be no art – we all look alike and dress alike and live alike, do we not, comrade? And, worst of all, there would be no photography. That is the purest form of subversion. You want my likeness? The Ministry of Truth will not like this, you know.

Crazy? Ever seen any good snaps of Mao’s totalitarian China?

No. I didn’t think so.

No photography. Just think.

Horst and Hoyningen-Huene would never have made their homo erotic-tinged masterpieces. Mapplethorpe’s illustrated history of perversion would never have been seen. Newton’s jejeune dirty pictures would not have been published.

Hang on. Maybe Marxism would not be so bad for photography.

Just a minute, though.

That means we would have never been afforded the chance of seeing the guilty confections of Beaton. The just-so elegance of Cartier-Bresson. The soaring aristocracy of Blumenfeld. The gay abandon of Doisneau. The passion and sophistication of Parkinson. The guts of Bourke-White. The vision of Evans and Weston. The courage of Adams and McCullin and countless others. And, yes, even the second rate candy box tripe of Ansel Adams.

So maybe Marxism is not such a good thing.

I was reminded of all of this on reading in the Wall Street Journal (centrist mostly, loopy right on the OpEd pages) of the Met’s exhibition of no fewer than 228 pictures from its Dutch collection. Thank heavens for the robber barons. They provided labor for all and bequeathed great art collections to the Met. Works for me. And that got me thinking about the differences between religious art (meaning ‘Vatican-religious’) and secular art (being the Dutch and Belgian schools of the 17th century and their British and German forbears).

While painters of both schools were working on commission, the Vatican types enshrined their subjects, whether biblical or Papal, in halos and angels, the better to hide the foul stench underlying their accession to power. The Dutch chaps surrounded their clients with the attributes of wealth, perhaps never shown better than in Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ (OK, so he was a German painting in England. The point is he adopted a secular rather than religious tone). And the stench? There is none. As my grandfather used to remind me, pecunia non olet. Money does not smell.

Holbein. The Ambassadors. 1533. The National Gallery.

The fine cloaks, the tools of navigation, attributes of wealth like the lute, are all seen large. These people are rich and successful. Of course, most photographers care not a whit for that. All they can fixate upon is the elongated skull in the foreground which, viewed obliquely from the lower left, shows itself in full splendor. You can interpret it as you like but I have long preferred to think of it as the ultimate statement in secular art. It is there because the clients wanted it there. It’s as spontaneous as, say, a White House speech or a politician at the site of an airplane disaster.

That’s not to say that the Vatican types didn’t try to subtly subvert the system. Take a look at Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ – the one in the National Gallery is the corker, not the one in Milan.

Caravaggio. The Supper at Emmaus. 1601. The National Gallery.

At first it is what you want to see. Christ surrounded by fawning apostles on his resurrection. I first saw it on the obligatory school outing, short trousers and all, when I was maybe 10 years old. And, like every misbehaving schoolboy, I stuck my nose in the canvas and all I could see was the imperfections. (OK, so my mother was Germanic and demanding. Leave it.) The tear in the sleeve. The worms in the fruit. The ravaged and bloated faces. Years later, the secularist in me acknowleges how smartly Caravagggio has hidden the stigmata, despite their being the object of focus for the two at the table. He isn’t buying it! In every possible way the painter is saying “Screw you and your religion” and I fell in love with him there and then. Even if my original admiration was for the worms. And even if I was having to go to mass three times a week.

Another guy who got it really right, meaning he got paid though his clients didn’t notice his work was no less subversive, was Mantegna. In his Death of St. Sebastian (I am reproducing it in a large size here as the detail in the painting merits it) you must agree at first glance that, surely, this is the proto-religious picture. The martyr is well and truly martyred, and true to form, is saving his dying gasp for the one true God, with that damnably condescending look of forgiveness for his killers. The only snag is that Mantegna, like some latter day cartoonist, has neatly insinuated two of the shooters at the lower right. And what do you think the one is saying to the other? “Nice shot, Ernie?” “Fancy a couple of quick ones at the pub?” “Did you catch the thing at the Coliseum last night?” It is a superbly crafted piece of subversive, secular propaganda.

Andrea Mantegna. The Death of St. Sebastian, 1480. The Louvre.

Now do you see why Sebastian’s expression gets my goat? Don’t you think a guy who just got one through the privates would at least admit to some pain? And the painter was Spanish. Can you say Spanish Inquisition? Catholicism’s version of modern Islam. Whoever painted this had real courage. Viva Mantegna!

So great painters were making ‘photographs’ 500 years ago. The Decisive Moment was there – it just took a while to place it on canvas. No 1/60th @ f/8. Their genius in reducing imagination to canvas gave us works like those above. Not being as good, we needed Kodak and a button to press. And by the time real photography came along the religious had disappeared. The world, as western hemisphere photographers know it, was secular. And hooray for that. May all our photographs be as subversive as those of Holbein, Caravaggio and Mantegna.

The painter who taught Monet leaves an indelible impression.

Eugene Boudin (1824-1898) is more famous today as having been Monet’s mentor than as a painter in his own right.

Yet reading John Rewald’s definitive book The History of Impressionism (unreservedly recommended) some 30 years ago, I found myself drawn to Boudin’s subtle art enough to explore it more. And, as happens, the impression his work made on me must have planted a deep seed for when I started getting serious about taking beach pictures again a couple of years ago I was shocked to realize just how much Boudin’s work had permeated my way of seeing.

His canvases are invariably small and frequently in what we now think of as widescreen – a perfect match for the infinite horizons a beach offers. And while the great English photographer Tony Ray Jones saw the English at the beach in his book A Day Off with a familiar air verging on the satirical (pink skinned Anglo-Saxons rushing out for a spot of sun with handkerchiefs on their heads, the corners knotted just so, trousers rolled up to the knee for a quick paddle, no sunblock in sight), Boudin’s fascination was not so much with individuals as with how people at the beach were part of the greater landscape. His elegantly dressed ladies with parasols speak of an earlier era, true, but their placement in the canvas is what makes the painting great.

Boudin’s vision was not limited to these somewhat formal arrangements. He could really let fly when it came to man made things – take this example:

Even in his desolate landscapes, the magic is there. Subtle, it does not shout at you like some Monets may, and there’s less technical exhibitionism on show.

So here’s a small sample of some beach snaps I have taken in the past couple of years, Boudin everywhere doing his thing with my grey matter. I hope you enjoy them.

Sunhat. Pismo Beach, California, 2004. Leica M2, 50mm chrome Summicron, Kodak Gold 100.

Dune Buggy. Oceano Dunes, California, 2004. Bessa T, 21mm Asph Elmarit. Kodak Gold 100.

Umbrella. Cayucos, California, 2006. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm fisheye, ImageAlign.

Not quite as new as it sounds, but much easier today.

Stumbling the ten yards down the main drag from bedroom to office this morning, I tripped on not one but two border terriers. Which is strange as, last I checked, the Pindelski estate was the proud owner of just one of these fine beasts. So either there was some serious hanky panky in the night or something else was afoot.

Now, come to think of it, yesterday was Friday night and it happened to coincide with a presentation of Steve McQueen’s superb film, Le Mans, on the big screen. Anytime one sees a brute Porsche 917 race the gorgeous Ferrari 512 is an occasion for some serious medication to calm the nerves and suffice it to say that the gin martinis were flowing freely.

Which probably accounts for the presence of that second border terrier this morning.

Sitting down at the computer and erasing all those email suggestions that I could not possibly satisfy my woman without a horse’s dose of Viagra, my first reaction was to do something more exciting like paying the bills, but I gave one of the HDR links in a clean email a passing click only to come across this page from Photomatix. When the first thing I saw was their exhortation ‘Increase the Dynamic Range of your Photographs’ I wondered whether this was some sort of spam, and that in fact this was yet another attempt to sell me performance enhancing chemicals. Look, I know I grew up in England where the average male prefers a hot water bottle to a cuddle with his girlfriend, but this was going a bit too far.

Anyway, I scrolled the little wheel on my Genuine Apple Mighty Mouse down the Photomatix page and, well, saw a revelation. What their application does far better than Photoshop can (no surprise there) is to combine three photographs, identical except as to exposure, to create a result with huge dynamic range. You now see the highlight and shadow details that were missing before. The revelatory aspect of this is that the Photomatix software does this with one click, even working on RAW files. All the photographer has to do is take three exposures, 2 stops under, correct and 2 stops over, then let the software work its magic.

Not that this is all that new. Unknown to me I have been an HDR devotee for most of my photographic life. With black and white prints it meant overerexposing, underdeveloping, then printing on a contrasty grade of paper with lots of burning in using the hands over the easel. Then for a long time, having migrated to color film, it was either displaying the slide on a screen using a projector, which confers tremendous dynamic range, or living with prints which either opted for burned out highlights or dungeon dark shadows. Once those slides could be affordably scanned in the 1990s they took on a new lease of life as dynamic range could be restored to some extent with software. Plus, while a computer screen cannot compare to a projected image for dynamic range, it’s a lot better than a print in this regard. The way I would do it is to simply use the Highlight-Shadow slider in PS, later the far better one in Aperture, and bring back the details. For example, take these two snaps of a shaving shop on St. James’s Street in London, taken in 2000 on Kodak Gold 100 negative film:

The original, scanned using a Nikon Coolscan scanner.

With Highlight-Shadow correction applied using Aperture.

There’s life in those old pictures yet!

With more recent pictures, taken using RAW in the 5D, the manipulation range is far greater. In this example, I underexposed by a couple of stops to preserve details in the exterior, then corrected exposure and used the Highlight-Shadow slider in Aperture to balance interior and exterior lighting. The Aperture RAW converter was used.

This suggests that, if I do indeed have two border terriers, one was away at the time this was snapped.

So maybe HDR isn’t so new after all. Indeed, look at what chaps like Canaletto did when lazing around Venice trying to make some coin from his oils:

Canaletto has a go at the Grand Canal

A latter day Canaletto from the Photomatix web site.

It’s little wonder that modern HDR photographs tend to look like oil pantings, as they recreate the great dynamic range that the old masters were creating intuitively. I sort of doubt that Pope Julius II would have ponied up the lira had the ceiling of the Sisitne Chapel been delivered with blown out highlights.

Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel, 1512.

So Michelangelo was into HDR some 500 years ago. Clearly, he did not use Windows or he would never have finished the job.

In my early experiments with Virtual Reality photography, I mentioned the challenge posed when it came to correct exposure. To permit seamless stitching of the panorama, the camera has to be set on one fixed, manual exposure while all the pictures are taken. To do otherwise is to ask for trouble. The issue, of course, is that means the likely huge dynamic range of a panorama will results in exposure problems in some of the frames. Now it seems that the automated approach offered by products like Photomatix would cure that. True, you have to take at least three pictures for each frame and there’s a little more work to do in assembling the panorama, but cameras like the 5D allow automatic bracketing at two stop intervals – press the button in burst mode and the camera takes three pictures in one second.

So now it looks like my return trip to the redwoods will call for some burst mode under and over photography. More when I have the pano head in my hands. Which probably means my own head will be in my hands shortly thereafter.

By the way, here’s another picture where I used HDR. I wanted a picture of our home theater in daylight, to show the environment and photographs on the walls, but I also wanted the screen filled with a movie picture.

The Home Theater. Canon EOS 5D, 24-105 at 24mm, PS CS2, RAW

I simply exposed for the room, reckoning the fabulous sensor in the 5D would preserve data for the screen image, even if it would be washed out. After converting the RAW file to PSD in ACR, I used the Lasso tool freehand to highlight the screen area then used Levels to bring back the detail. Hey presto!