Yearly Archives: 2006

Chavez Ravine, 1949

Book reviews, Photographers

A fine book of pictures by Don Normark.

Click the picture.

This wonderful book, published in 1999 and available from Amazon, showcases the pictures taken by Don Normark when he stumbled upon a Hispanic area of Los Angeles near what is now Dodger Stadium. Little was he to know that one year later the slums there would be condemned to be replaced by a public housing development. Characterless slums replacing charismatic ones.

Only many years later did Normark realize what he had; he tracked down the former residents of Chavez Ravine and documents their recollections here – a place with vibrant memories illustrated with his superb photographs. That this tightly knit community of Latinos allowed a white boy into their midst is wonder enough. But his photography makes it clear just how blessed his many visits would turn out to be.

Mercifully Normark avoids the trait of most ‘photojournalists’, who somehow think their training in darkroom chemicals qualifies them to be political commentators. In much the same way that Hollywood actors and singers suddenly conclude their fame empowers them to pontificate on geopolitics, once that Oscar is on the mantle or the platinum selling CD is on the wall. Hey, it’s free publicity, no?

None of this sort of nonsense is to be seen here. What you do see is a sensitive, no, more than that, dignified, portrait of a vibrant community of tightly knit people, shortly to be cruelly replaced by a development crafted in a smoke filled room by corrupt politicians and their paymasters, corrupt developers.

This is a very special book which deserves to be on every photographer’s bookself.

Mounting Really Big Prints

Printing, Technique

Some practical hints.

Every year, a couple of months before Christmas, I invite a few friends to select a couple of prints from a small web presentation, asking that they elect 13″ x 19″ or, now that I have the HP DJ90, 18″ x 24″.

So as this year’s print ‘orders’ came in, I thought it might be instructive to share my technique with readers. Those who see obvious errors are encouraged to set me on the straight and narrow and those contemplating the self-abuse that is print mounting might like to see what they are letting themselves in for.

First, I should point out that I do not accept the apologia proferred by many for ‘hinge mounting’ where a print is held to a backing board with a few pieces of tape at the top in the purported interest of archival permanence. The moment the humidity changes, the print cockles and you have a throw away print. It’s just another excuse to cut corners masquerading as technique. Don’t believe them when they tell you ‘curators insist on this’. Sheer Rot. I have prints which I dry mounted thirty years ago (using a domestic iron, no less), before we knew about acid free this and pH neutral that, and they remain perfect and unfaded. So when people tell you dry mounting is no friend of permanence, look elsewhere.

Key dimensions:

I typically mount both 13″ x 19″ and 18″ x 24″ prints on 22″ x 28″ boards. The HP DJ90 and 130 leave a 1/4″ border top, left (long side) and right (long side), with a bottom border of 9/16″ (short side). For the HP Designjet 90/130, after allowing another 1/8″ for safety,the mat openings are as follows:

  • 13″ x 19″: Opening is 12 3/8″ x 18 1/16″
  • 18″ x 24″: Opening is 17 3/8″ x 23 1/16″

These openings will leave 1/16th of an inch of printed image to work with on all sides, for alignment purposes. Matboard & more will custom cut these for you. Stock mats which come with 12 1/2″ x 18 1/2″ and with 17 1/2″ x 23 1/2″ openings will not work, leaving white borders on the matted print.

Archival issues:

My goal is a print which will outlive me and here’s what is involved:

1 – A printer with fade free inks. The DJ90 uses dyes, others use pigments. Both are great. Most modern ink jet printing inks are fade free. Look for them when making your printer selection. Older designs will fade in as little as a year in bright light.

2 – Cotton gloves. Yes, I do advocate delegating the drudge of routine printing – meaning anything under 8″ x 10″ – but when it comes to show prints I am not about to let the clerk at the framing store, who has just feasted on a Big Mac, cheese and fries, get his hands on my print. Grease is the last thing I need. Not to mention that ten of these will pay for that overpriced Seal press. The cotton gloves are used from the moment the printing paper is removed from the box all the way through final placement of the mounted print in a protective glassine bag for shipping. Cheap insurance.

3 – Acid free mounting board. I use the 3/16″ thickness – it costs little more than the 1/8″ and is more robust.

4 – Acid free mats cut by Redimat. Their machine cutter is incredibly accurate. As Apple’s Aperture leaves a 1/2″ border around the print with the DJ90, my 18″ x 24″ prints get a 16 7/8″ x 22 7/8″ cut out, while the 13″ x 19″ ones use 11 7/8″ x 17 7/8″. That way I have 1/8″ to play with when positioning the print on the mounting board. Color? Anything your heart desires. I mostly use black. Simple. No distractions.

5 – Seal Bienfang RC Colormount tissue. This seals at 185F and is intended for RC paper. Its low sealing temperature is ideal for ink jet prints. Go much over 210F and these start to fry.

6 – A Seal mounting press.

7 – A Seal tacking iron to tack the mounting tissue to the print and the print + tissue to the mounting board.

8 – 3M two-sided adhesive tape to attach the mat to the mounted print.

9 – Release paper for tacking and heating in the press

10 – Bert the Border Terrier to keep me company. These are very hard to find and, in my opinion, essential.

Strict cleanliness throughout this process is key. Any dirt or grit and your print is shot.

The tissue is precut using a sharp knife and a granite counter.

The Seal tacking iron, set just below ‘Med’ and no higher, is warmed up.

Using a small piece of release paper betweeen the mounting tissue and the back of the print, the tissue is tacked to the print – count for 10 seconds – remember those darkroom days? “Elephant One, Elephant Two, Elephant Three….”

Hold the tacked part down for a couple of seconds to cool.

Get one mounting board and one mat – the latter will be used as a positioning template.

Having positioned the print + tissue on the board using the mat (the mounting board and mat must have identical outside dimensions), tack the print to the board, protecting the print with the release paper:

Once more, hold the heated area for a few seconds to ensure a good ‘tack’.

The print is now tacked to the board.

Heat the press to 170F.

Place the print + board in a folded over piece of release paper.

The press must be adjusted so that reasonable hand pressure on the lever closes it. Too much and you will have creases in any print that needs multiple passes. In my press, an 18″ x 24″ print needs four passes. This is where you put the Border Terrier in play.

The red light indicates the press is on, and the orange light to the left will extinguish once the set temperature is reached. Once the orange light goes off you are at the set temperature. I do not bother to preheat the print or board to get rid of moisture as both are stored in a dry, heated home.

Each heating cycle must be for at least 90 seconds – pull out that 60 year old Kodak analog timer, the one you can read from across the room. Overdoing it is not a problem – I sometimes let it run 4-5 minutes while I do something else, but if you are in a hurry, less than 90 seconds is a no-no.

My press makes its home in the wine cellar, but yours does not have to.

Once the heating process is complete, pull out the Scotch 3M double sided tape dispenser. Do not economize by using something cheap.

Place two inch strips in the center of the board on all four sides of the print between the print edge and board edge. Now place the mat on the print, aligned edge to edge, and press down on these four points. The goal is to lightly glue the mat to the board – the framing process will ensure the two stay together.

Do yourself justice – sign the bloody thing. Wilting violets …. wilt. I use a white ink pen from the art store.

Sticking with the cotton gloves, insert the ‘sandwich’ into an acid free, sealable, glassine sleeve for storage and transit.

Stand back and admire your work.

Finally, pray the post office does not bend your prints in transit.

Framing is addressed here.

Aspect ratios

Cameras

How things change

The addition of the Panasonic Lumix LX-1 to my equipment earlier this year, replacing my rangefinder Leicas, brought with it something new and exciting, over and above the superb overall capability of this pocketable digital camera.

An exceptionally wide image aspect ratio, meaning the ratio of height to width. The Panasonic uses a 16:9 sensor, which is identical to the format of most contemporary movies or, stated differently, 1:1.78.

Looking back over the past century but a handful of aspect ratios have dominated photographic images, or at least in-camera originals. None has been this wide.

Early plate and large format cameras used 3 1/4” x 4 1/4” film or 1:1.31. The 4” x 5” format, 1:1.25, popularized a whole range of printing papers in like ratio – contacts, 8” x 10” , 12” x 15” and 16” x 20”. Until digital came along most photographic prints were made in these ratios, because that’s how the paper was sold and that’s how frame and mat manufacturers made their products. In other words, close to square.

The story has it that when Oscar Barnack, the Leica’s inventor, was ruminating on how best to transition from a hernia-inducing field camera to something pocketable (boy, would he have loved modern digital point-and-shoots or what?) he decided to make the film frame 24mm x 36mm, or 1” x 1.5”, to reduce the grain effect of the movie film stock he had decided to use. A movie frame was a scant 18mm x 24mm and old Oscar decided, rightly, that that was just too small to permit a decent enlargement. So he doubled the size and thus was the famous Leica format born with an aspect ratio of 1:1.5, in contrast to the far squarer 1:1.33 of the movie original.

Of course, his efforts were, for the large part wasted, as printers were stuck in the 1:1.25 rut, so 17% of Barnack’s negative area was thrown away through cropping at the printing stage. Too bad he didn’t elect 24mm x 30mm, thus increasing the number of shots on a roll to 43 from 36, rather than wasting all that film.

Some photographers, most notably Henri Cartier-Bresson, made a fetish out of necessity, insisting that the composition of their originals was so perfect in every way on that long Leica negative that any French printer who would dare even think about cropping the negative would be deported to England, there to suffer a life sentence known as English cuisine. Truth be told, if you look at any book of Cartier-Bresson snaps and hack a bit off the long dimension, the picture loses nothing at all in power. Hey, don’t knock the artifice, it worked for him, no?

Brassai, extroverted Hungarian that he was, threw convention and aspect ratios to the wind and thought nothing of cropping one good picture into two or three even better ones. Viva Brassai!

So Cartier-Bresson’s and Leitz’s predilections notwithstanding, 1:1.25 pretty much ruled the roost for most of the twentieth century. Add television, which adopted much the same ratio for its first fifty years, and you have a critical mass hard to overcome. Shame, really, because it’s a really boring look. Too bad few photographers learned anything from that great nineteenth century beachscape painter Eugene Boudin who though nothing of painting on canvases which were 1:2 or even longer in aspect ratio. He was doing nothing more than using a shape to fit the subject.


Boudin does Boudin

Towards the end of the twentieth century, home ink jet printers became affordable in even fairly large sizes, and for whatever reason someone decided that the carriage would allow a paper width of 13” and someone else came up with a paper length of 19”. That just happens to work out to 1:1.46 so I like to think that inventor was a Leica man or the spirit of a much put-upon French printer had inveigled itself into the design process, because now the loss from a Leica negative was a mere 3%. HC-B could rest in peace, and given that a well printed ink jet print is indistinguishable from a wet process one, everyone was happy. I love the 13” x 19” format, finding it large enough to hang on the wall and long enough to afford the option of keeping everything in those many years of Leica negatives. It has become my default print size, replacing 8″ z 10″ for proofing purposes.

Before we segue to the current millennium it would be unfair to make no mention of the square format, beloved of Rolleiflex and Hasselbald users. Of course they never printed square prints, but take away the decision whether the camera should be held this way or that and you have one less variable interposed in the creative process. So, I suppose, that’s a good thing. Nonetheless, hack it down to 1:1.25 and the 56mm square Hasselblad negative promptly lost 20% of its surface area as the cost of this flexibility, though it was still more than 3 times the effective surface area of the Leica. So, for the most part, printers at Vogue and Harpers Bazaar hacked away, but at least one photographer decided to transmute this limitation and make of it an affectation. That photographer is Michael Kenna, and he resolutely prints most of his work in a square format. I’ll leave it to you to decide about his work, but if 1:1.25 is boring, then 1: 1 is near catatonic when it comes to visual interest.

I’m not sure what possessed Panasonic to adopt the 1:1.78 in the LX-1 (16:9 in common parlance, Europeans and Japanese preferring to put the long side first), but Hollywood had been transitioning to like-format widescreen movies for years and, guess what, Panasonic happens to be a major manufacturer of television sets. Visit your high street big box store today and you will find that more than half the TV sets are 1:1.78 and, making a virtue out of necessity, the ads scream ‘Widescreen’. Five years earlier the only widescreen display you could find was limited to megabucks home theater installations with overhead projectors. ‘Pan and scan’, where movies are chopped or scanned to fit the 1:1.25 or 1:1.33 screen is butchery indeed and a 1:1.78 screen fits the new sets perfectly, at the expense of black bars on older 1:1.33 movies. A good trade. Just try watching Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West on a regular TV and you will wonder why this is considered by many to be the greatest Western ever made; switch to Widescreen and all is clear.

And for me, the widescreen format in the LX-1 is simply a revelation. I’m finding that I have to relearn how I think about pictures, just as I have to when making circular QTVR panoramas. Now I have no idea how to describe the aspect ratio of a QTVR 180 degree x 360 degree panorama, but it sure as hell isn’t 1:Anything!


Pindelski does Boudin

I’m beginning to learn to photograph and print in widescreen and my next order of mats and boards from the wonderful people at Documounts will, you guessed it, have some 18” x 32” and 13” x 23” mat openings. They will cut any size you want, though these custom sizes command a small premium to all that 1:1.25 stuff. More of that later.

For this photographer this seemingly small change in aspect ratio has opened up new vistas indeed.

Studio Flash

Technique

Money far better spent than getting yet another lens or camera.

I have always been a fan of the great state of Texas. In addition to providing drivers with cheap oil in any number of distillations concocted by corrupt state politicians earning their kickbacks, any state that has a predilection for frying bad guys rather than giving them three square a day, air conditioning, free bed and board and color television for upwards of fifty years, has to deserve the respect, admiration and gratitude of the taxpayer.

The addition of another fine product from that great state, a Novatron studio flash outfit, to my small equipment cache a few years back, only served to confirm my love of things Texan. The flash heads in that kit proudly proclaim ‘Novatron of Dallas‘. Go Cowboys!

Who needs studio flash? Well, anytime a portrait beckons or a still life has to be just so and heat is not to be a factor in the equation, studio flash is the ticket. Your Coke-bottom lens, well stopped down to cope with the powerful light output, suddenly becomes a Summicron, Planar or Canon ‘L’ – and the flash outfit will likely run you far less than any of those magnificent optics. Camera shake is a thing of the past. The light duration is very short, after all.

Too bulky, you say? Don’t have studio room, you grumble? Nonsense.

Here’s my kit, with that sophisticated man about town, Bertie the Border Terrier, providing scale. (Modeling fee? 1 cookie).

What you see, in addition to that fine canine specimen, is a transportable case containing three Novatron 500 watt flash heads, three tripod stands, the power pack and some long flash synchronization cables, as well as two silvered umbrellas which attach to the flash heads when shadowless lighting is called for. I used to pack an electronic flash meter also, but that is no longer needed with digital. Pop off a couple of snaps, check the LCD screen in the camera and correct exposure is assured.

The 500 watt-second heads in my kit are discontinued, replaced by 600 watt-second ones and, as with mine, these include ineffectual modeling lamps to purportedly help you assess the effect of the lighting. Once again, that LCD screen in your digital camera does a superior job. Better still, tether your Canon EOS digital using the Canon EOS Capture utility (maybe Nikon and others make something similar – I don’t know) to a laptop and you will really be able to judge your lighting. That estimable vendor of photo gear, B&H, lists a three head 600 w-s Novatron kit for some $900. A bargain and all the power you need for the home studio.

The heads on mine have three position power switches and I usually use them on 1/4 or 1/2 power, which gives a recycling time of some 2 seconds when all three are in use. One is a main light, the second a modeling light and the last a background or hair key light. For the latter, a small tripod/boom-arm made by Manfrotto, suitably counterbalanced with a sand-filled sack, (high tech at work), is suspended above the apprehensive subject’s head. You too can make out like George Hurrell – he even managed to make Judy Garland look attractive!

Now while more modern units integrate the power pack and flash tube – thus unnecessarily increasing bulk and cost while trading both for looks – you still have to run power cables with either, so what’s the big deal? Further, some seek to add to the cost by using a wireless connection between camera and power pack. There’s something in that as it obsoletes one cable, meaning one chance less to trip, but there are already so many of those I have never been tempted by the additional outlay.

If your camera is an older Leica, like an M2 or M3 with those superb sturdy flash contacts, there’s no need to compromise with a cheesy adapter to take the standard 3mm coaxial connector that bedevils the flash reliability of cameras thus equipped. Just go to Paramount Cords and get a cable terminated with the connector of your choice. The other end? The Novatron boys, bless ’em, use a simple, cheap and very sturdy household ‘H’ plug! Must be all that experience they have in Texas with high current loads in their correctional institutions. I wouldn’t bother with those coiled cord wonders either – a problem waiting to happen. As for choice, well how about the old Nikon push lock, Koni Omega (remember them?), old Leica M (tip #30 if you must ask), Rollei locking (great for that 3.5F or 2.8F), and many more?

Users with modern digital cameras with fragile internal flash contacts worry about trigger voltages – the amount of voltage transmitted through the camera’s flash contact when the flash is triggered. Most recommend that 9 volts or less (the Canon EOS 5D allows a whopping 250 volts!) is the safe way to go. Well, you can measure the trigger voltage of any flash unit with a voltmeter and two fine tipped probes. Charge up the flash and touch the probes to the two flash contacts. My ancient Novatron kit comes in at 6.4 volts, falling to 2.5 volts if a Wein Safe Synch is fitted between power cord and power pack. By the way, my fairly recent (Chinese) Vivitar 283 portable flash unit comes in at 10.1 volts, though I understand some of the earlier Japanese ones could really fry things. Motto? Check your camera’s instruction book and use a voltmeter first, to be on the safe side.

Now $900 may seem like a lot – about the cost of one more unnecessary lens for your camera – but I have found the utility value and payback from my Novatron to be excellent. Whenever I wanted to take some studio portraits I would rush to the local pro-dealer, leave half my net worth and Border Terrier behind as collateral for the loan and pay a weekend fee which was invariably over $100. A few of these trips and several things dawned on me. First, I was wasting time and gas on all those trips. Second, it was getting expensive. Third, my credit card record was getting messed up because the clerk in the store had an IQ in single figures. Fourth, I missed my dog! Finally, I was restricted to weekends, as the weekday rate was ruinous and things far too rushed.

Thus, I reckoned, the first nine times I used the Novatron now in my hall closet, it had paid for itself. And my credit score improved too.

For still lives it’s a killer set-up, for you know your lighting is cool and constant, nothing fries and all is repeatable as you concentrate on composition.

As for studio work, you be the judge.

When a plain background is called for, by the way, I use a Photek Background-in-a-Bag. You crumple the cloth and separate the poles, stashing the lot in a small canvas bag for transit, placing the background cloth in a clothes drier for a few minutes before use, to get the wrinkles out. Some $120 for the 6′ x 7′ model, which is more than adequate for head and shoulders portraits.

So my two cents’ worth on the matter are that a studio flash outfit should be a serious consideration for anyone seeking to make quality studio portraits, picturing interiors or doing still life work.

And if the only flash connector your camera sports is a hot shoe, no problem. Just splash out $20 on a Nikon AS-15 hot shoe adapter and your point-and-shoot has just become a studio camera. I use the AS-15 on my Canon EOS 5D rather than messing about with that silly flap that stubbornly refuses to disclose the coaxial socket. B&H continues to list this great little gadget.

Finally, if you are concerned about obsolescence, my twenty year old Novatron outfit, for which parts continue to be abundantly available (though it is as reliable as it gets), works every bit as well with my EOS 5D as it did with my 4″ x 5″ Crown Graphic. I bought my kit used some ten years ago and have had no problems with it. When they go out, replacement flash tubes are cheap and heavy, professional use will likely dictate new capacitors in the power pack now and then. It’s not about to go out of fashion, until the folks at Apple work out how to pass vast amounts of current through the air without connecting cables.

An update addressing use of an inexpensive radio remote trigger may be found here.

Pages for books

Software

Another dynamite Apple application for photographers

Now before questionable grammar in the title of this piece suggests that I am a recent graduate of the taxpayer fraud that goes by the name of the California Public School System, let me put you on the straight and narrow.

What I’m talking about is Apple’s Pages application, now in its second iteration and included as part of the software suite sold under the name iWork ’06. When Apple upgraded Aperture to Version 1.5 they conferred minor upgrades on iPhoto and Pages (and lots of other iLife applications) to permit easy interchange of files.

Pages, typifying the ‘think different’ (now that was penned by a CA school grad) philosophy at Apple, is a template driven page composition tool. That sounds pretty grand, but wait. Much more than a word processor, it dictates that you set up templates for various sections of a document or book, then insert text, graphics and pictures into the appropriate template. I don’t know, but I imagine that’s how professional typesetters and bookmakers do it. Like Aperture, the approach takes a bit of getting used to but once it clicks you wonder how you ever lived without it.

Here’s a screenshot of Pages 2.0.2 showing the integration with Aperture and iPhoto albums – part of the Aperture album is shown.

To the left you can see thumbnails of the pages in the document, which happens to be a book of photographs I am working on. Like Aperture, Pages is no Ferrari on my iMac PPC G5, but it’s OK. Meaning sometimes you have to wait a second or two before things load. So why bother with the learning curve and the modest performance?

Simple. Once you have established your template – say one for the cover, one for the title, one for chapter separators and one for the body/contents, it’s a matter of seconds to drag and drop a picture onto a template page.

Having stored the 125 or so pictures for the book in iPhoto albums (the higher quality available in Aperture is wasted on an 8″ x 10″ book) and having set up my contents template by modifying one of the many included with the application, (a process which took 10 minutes for this less than expert user), it took me but twenty minutes to drag and drop no fewer than 100 pictures into 100 new pages in the book document.

Here is the drag and drop process in practice – you can see thumbnails of the iPhoto album in the ‘Media’ panel (Apple calls it the Media Inspector – not very intuitive); additionally I have pulled up the ‘Adjust Image’ panel now available in Pages, giving me control over contrast, sharpness, tint, etc. in the Pages version of the photograph without affecting the source image in iPhoto.

Reordering the pictures is a drag and drop exercise.

Then you hit the ‘Print to PDF’ button and you have a perfect PDF file ready for distribution, formatted exactly as shown on the Pages screen.

How I ever managed to compose my first book in that horror that goes by the name Microsoft Word I shudder to recall. Pages is a superb application for photographers wanting to create brochures, books and the like. It may not be fast, but then it’s net speed that matters. Try making a 100+ page book with any other application out there in like time.