Yearly Archives: 2006

Finally, a good HDR image

Technique

I think I’m getting the hang of the HDR technique.

After the indoor and hand-held tests documented in this journal over the past few days I ventured forth to the hinterlands with 5D loaded with Optimism, rated at 400 ISO. I have always found that to be a particularly effective film stock.

As before, I set the Canon to record three exposure bursts, with the second and third 2 stops over and under exposed compared to the first. A legacy of the street shooting school, I do not much care for tripods, but those great Manfrotto QR plates made everything go very smoothly, I must say.

I’m trying to learn how to maximize reproduced contrast range without stepping over the line to garish. Easily done with this technique.

So now I know the camera is stationary, but what I did not realize is that any movement in the subject is a matter for concern. As you are combining three or more images, things that move do not look so good. Witness the many translucent gulls shown in my pictures at the beach. Someone once asked Hitchcock how he managed to get all those birds to stand still in his movie to which he cryptically replied “I paid then well”. Seems like I have to get those birds on the payroll.

On the way to the beach I did come across this charming pastoral scene off Highway 46, near our home. The farmer had left the gate open so I shot in, Linhof tripod in one hand, the 5D in the other, and proceeded to bang away, hot footing it before the local pit bull made lunch of my backside. Let me assure you that a good QR head beats a pit bull any time.

Anyway, the clear appeal of this scene was the golden color of the freshly harvested land, contrasting with the trees, sky and that standby for us farmers, the John Deere tractor. God, America, apple pie and John Deere, because America and apple pie would be in short supply sans John Deere. As a wine grape grower I can attest to the discovery that a couple of hours on a Deere beats $250 to the local shrink any time. Lots more fun too. And the engine is made in Japan, so it starts first thing, too!

Taken at noon (bad time for landscape work) the contrast range was, predictably, extreme.

Making Hay. Canon EOS 5D, 24-105mm at 100mm. RAW converted to JPG in Aperture. HDR processed in Photomatix

The next step was to fire up the HP DesignJet 90 printer for the acid test. How sharp is this combined, processed picture when printed to a decent size? On a side note one of the unheralded features of the DJ 90 is the way it keeps the print heads warm even when nominally switched off. I assume this is to prevent ink clogging and, indeed, after some six weeks of non-use (like you, I spend 40% of my year working for the IRS) the first print out is perfect, with no need to run magical routines to clear the heads. The moral of the tale being that if you want to keep your DJ heads ready to go, by all means switch the printer off (the fan noise gets tiresome anyway) but do not pull the power plug.

The result is great. Definition equal to a traditional one negative print and dynamic range to blow your head off. All at 400 ISO.

Bertie the Border terrier testifies to the size of the print:

Bertie guards Making Hay.

After all this banging away on the tripod, I couldn’t resist just one opportunity to take a real, live action shot, so apropos nothing, here it is:

What’s a guy got to do to get a drink around here? 5D, 24-105mm. 400ISO

When all else fails, change your logo

Photography

Fuji takes a page out of the Kodak playbook.

Here’s the business philosophy statement from Fuji’s web site:

“We will use leading-edge, proprietary technologies to provide top-quality products and services that contribute to the advancement of culture, science, technology and industry, as well as improved health and environmental protection in society. Our overarching aim is to help enhance the quality of life of people worldwide.”

Yet Fuji, when it’s not busy making the world a better place, continues to call itself Fujifilm and seems to think that changing its logo – like the folks at Kodak did recently – will cure all that ails it. Still, I suppose a 95% share of a dead market sounds good to some bean counter somewhere.


Fuji’s thrilling innovation – a new logo

Well at least they were honest. The red bit they added speaks to the results of their film division and looks about to fall off.

Where do businesses get these money wasting ideas?

This just in from Reuters

Photography

Better get rid of that black and white film in your refrigerator, racist pig.

From Reuters today:

“Reuters reports this morning that a PlayStation Portable billboard campaign featuring a black-and-white photograph of a lady in powder-white makeup and clothing, grabbing the face of a darkened black lady, is being discontinued by Sony in the Netherlands. Apparently, there were complaints that the imagery – which was designed to show ceramic white, the new color of some PSP models, as competing with jet black – had racist overtones.

…The ad campaign riled California Assemblyman Leland Yee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a youth civil rights education project called Sojourn to the Past.

Those critics condemned Sony’s use of the racially charged photo to sell a product and said it recalled an age and time when black people were portrayed in minstrel shows.”

Anyone found using black and white film will be pursued by the Bicultural Interdiction Group Offfice Trackingforce (BIGOT), a joint arm of the US and EU governments, and will be subject to prosecution. BIGOT has also requested that all image software manufacturers revise their applications to remove any ‘convert to monochrome’ capabilities, owing to the racially charged nature of such conversions. Those refusing to comply will be subject to penalties which will include being forced to listen to jazz music eighteen hours a day as part of the cultural assimilation process, in addition to the usual monetary fines.

Separately, Apple Computer is expected to voluntarily agree to discontinue both the black and the white versions of its new MacBook laptop computers and will henceforth issue these clad in grey and pink only, the latter for homosexual and lesbian consumers.

Diane Arbus – fake.

Photographers

A cruel, exploitative photographer without a shred of decency.

Diane Arbus, of course, is famous for having killed herself at the age of 48 in 1971. Since then, this unknown photographer’s work has sky rocketed in fame and value. Proving that nothing so much enhances the value of your work as suicide.

Which is not the same as saying that her photography is either good – it is not – or genuine. Indeed, few photographers have produced more shamefully contrived work than Arbus, which qualifies her instantly for the Hall of Fakes.

Arbus was smart. She cottoned on to the fact that the photographic intelligentsia was buying It, It being her cruel, exploitative view of a world seemingly filled with monsters, freaks and the deformed. There’s not another photographer who so cruelly mocks his subjects, distorting them this way and that, ridiculing them at every turn, without the least indication that she had either a heart or a conscience. It’s as if one of those poor fools who photographs beggars on the street suddenly acquired a taste for the bedside manner of the IRS and proceeded to put it to work in the local mental institution with a camera as a weapon.

Her work, then, is the antithesis of class, of decorum, of decency.

But face it. The intelligentsia, the taste makers, goodness help us, believed the exact opposite of what her pictures represented. Where there was poor taste, they saw insight. Where there was cruelty, they saw sympathy. Where there was depravity, they saw honor. Or said they did. She got away with it, until her lack of conscience eventually caught up with her, culminating in a miserable ending of slashed wrists and a drug overdose.

The best example of her fakery is perhaps seen in the contact sheet of the seemingly crazy child holding the hand grenade. Robert Frank, you cannot help thinking, would have pounced on this subject as an example of American depravity. Anything to knock the country that is his adopted home. At least his picture would have had some class. But taking a look at Arbus’s contact sheets you see, to your amazement, that this is in fact a very ordinary little boy playing with a toy. It’s just that in this one accidental shot he is grimacing just so and the whole thing takes on a look of insanity. A sweet, ordinary child, rendered crazy for the ages by the lying, dishonest vision of a supreme fake.

Don’t believe me? Then let me quote her for you and you be the judge:

“Freaks was (sic) a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

You can find her garbage on the web as I’m damned if I’m reproducing it here.

May we not see her like again.

Fast landscape

Photographs

The decisive moment exists in landscape pictures too.

Working on my beach series yesterday I was rambling along Grover Beach and idly eyeing the yellow Jeep wondering if something could be crafted aound it. True, I had noted a flock of some two hundred or so Common Tern minding their own business on the dunes nearby, but thought nothing of it. Fish eaters, these, so likely pretty smart, what with fish being so good for the grey matter. Known to attack marauding humans, too, so I kept my distance. A lovely bird – pure white with a jet black head and yellow beak. Quite the designer’s dream.

I am not, as a rule, the type who composes in the viewfinder, preferring to visualize the scene with my (not so great) eyes then administering the coup de grace with a quick raising of the camera to eye level and a pressing of the button. A legacy of years of street photographing, I suppose. Auto focus and exposure makes that approach even easier than in days of yore.

I found myself wondering about the tranisent lighting effects that can so quickly change a landscape. The times when the clouds open just so and you miss the shot because of some malfunction with the tripod. Landscapes are anything but static subjects.

But this one was, let’s face it, not going anywhere. The waves were rolling in on a fairly predictable schedule and the jolly yellow Jeep was parked. So I just sort of stood there, taking in the view on yesterday’s cool morning, glad I had remembered to pack my wool pullover, for it was but 58 degrees. (14 Celsius for those of you who follow the allegedly Beautiful Game of soccer, where he who gets away with the most fouls, and pays the officials most, wins).

Then for some reason known only to this gaggle of fish eaters a communal take-off took place and the magical moment was just that. A moment. Seconds later the tern had left and the little Jeep had driven off. Who said landscapes are static subjects?

Tern and Jeep. Canon EOS 5D, 24-105mm, 400 ISO.