Monthly Archives: March 2008

About the snap: Marion Campbell

About the Snap

A memory of the Island of Harris, Scotland,

Date: September, 1977.
Place: Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland.
Modus operandi: Enjoying the finest hospitality.
Weather: Sun to rain every few minutes.
Time: 2pm.
Gear: Leica M3, 35mm Summaron.
Medium: Kodak TriX
Me: Looking forward to becoming an American.
My age: 25

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Just before setting out on a new life in the New World, I made a visit to the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.

My eldest sister had graduated from Dundee in the sixties and, as a schoolboy, I still fondly remember a visit to that old Scottish city where my youngest sister and I were presented with a Scottish Terrier. I also remember the people – dour, hard to get to know and not a fake in sight. Just like that Scottie. There’s an awful lot to like about the Scots – a nation we have to thank for single malts, Harris Tweed and golf. Well, two out of three’s not bad.

I took the ferry to one of the more southerly islands, South Uist, home of that peaty single malt scotch named Laphroaig, and gradually wended my way north by bicycle and ferry, getting soaked seemingly every 15 minutes as clouds scudded by, dropping their loads en route to the mainland.

The Scottish Tourist Board had this arrangement where, for 50p ($1.20 then) a night, you would get bed and breakfast and use of a local bicycle. One evening I was asked by the aged proprietors of one such B&B to join them and listen to old Gaelic songs on big 15 inch shellac 78s. Sad wailing sounds in perfect keeping with the desolate beauty of these islands. The next morning I recall coming down to eat with another young lady tourist and was dismayed to find that my plate was loaded up with twice as much food as the young woman’s. That impugned my sense of fairness. Questioning the proprietoress I was told in no uncertain terms “You’re a man, lad. You have to work the fields”. Blood pudding, rashers, sweet corn, potatoes, fried tomatoes, liver. No more questions from me. Just a full belly, set for the day.

My last stop was Harris, the northernmost island of the Outer Hebrides, shared with Lewis. Home of Harris Tweed. Truly a cottage industry. The hard wearing tweed is made in cottages and though power looms have now taken over, I asked around and found one of the last practitioners of hand loom weaving. More. This artisan had her own sheep from which she would shear and dye the wool then spin the yarn, before weaving it on the loom.

Marion Campbell
Address: Plockropool 8, Harris. Scotland.

The hospitality accorded me is still different from anything I can recall. The reason is simple. Ms. Campbell had very little in the way of possessions or wealth, yet insisted that I stay and enjoy tea, a delicious mix of home made scones, tea and other delicacies. Ever so tentatively I asked if I might take her picture at the loom and, of course, she agreed. This was after I explained to her that, accent notwithstanding, I was anything but English. That broke the ice! There’s no love lost between the Scots and the English over the past millennium or so. And as I was the son of refugees from an oppressed nation, a bond was formed.

I have been trying to process this snap for thirty years. Every decade it gets better as processing technology improves. Oh! if only I had had a fill in flash with me. Anyway, I now have the burned out highlights largely recovered and some vestige of detail in that wonderful, craggy face.

Marion Campbell, Harris,
Outer Hebrides, 1977.

I can still hear the clack of the shuttle as she threw it first one way, then the other. The memory of that afternoon’s wonderful hospitality will never fade.

Two months later I left London for good, a one way PanAm ticket in one hand, the Leica in the other, and made my new home in America. This is my fondest memory of what I left behind.

Innovation is not invention

Cameras

Those brilliant Japanese.

Talk of warranties requires that I point out that Joseph Juran died the other day at the grand age of 103. With W. Edwards Deming he taught the gospel of quality control to Japanese management and workers after World War II. Why the Japanese? Because when he tried to teach Americans he invariably found the bosses stayed away and sent only low level workers to his lectures. To this day Detroit has not learned the lesson that quality starts at the top.

Today ‘Made in Japan’ is a touchstone of quality whereas ‘Made in Detroit’ is what ‘Made in Japan’ was in 1945.

But it isn’t just quality that distinguishes Japanese products.

It is also innovation.

Yet you still hear that old saw that the Japanese are mere copyists and incapable of innovating.

Never mind that while GM’s CEO just stated that he is going to devote more time to lobbying (read – going to Washington with his right hand out, the other in the taxpayers’ pocket), Honda is test marketing a hydrogen powered car in Los Angeles. It comes complete with a device that plugs into the natural gas line at home and makes hydrogen for the car. Washington will doubtless try to quash this innovation as there go all those gasoline taxes. Much the way in which Detroit destroyed rail travel in the US. For all its talk of free competition America still loves monopolies and cartels. Can you say Microsoft? A company which never learned the meaning of quality and which could learn a lot from the likes of Juran and his followers.

Look at camera gear. The last innovation out of Germany was the wonderful view/rangefinder in the Leica M3 -1954, though designed in 1938 or so. No need to dwell on the reasons for the delay. No, it had nothing to do with quality.

The Japanese? Look at some of the functions in cameras which they have perfected. The SLR instant return mirror, auto diaphragms, auto-focus, matrix metering, all sorts of viewfinder displays, linear focusing motors, affordable aspherical lenses, miniscule motor drives, eye controlled focus (beats me why Canon ceased offering that – the camera would focus where the eye was looking – sheer genius), image stabilization, face detection, smile detection, tiny mass storage devices, LCD screens. Amazing stuff. Great innovation.


The elegant and affordable Pentax Spotmatic – the camera whose maker made the instant return mirror a reality.

Innovation is not invention. Innovation is bringing the invention to market in quantity at an affordable price with a guarantee of quality. Juran knew that. Anyone can invent.

So next time your neighbor tells you the Japanese are copycats, just purr away in your hydrogen powered car, your magical Japanese DSLR in the glove compartment, leaving a trail of water droplets in his driveway while he ponders the challenge of a refill at $10 a gallon to drive his Detroit steel to the repair shop.

But there is hope. It seems that NASA gets it.

René Maltète

Photographers

A fine French photographer.

A reader writes:

Thomas,

You often make reference to great or at least famous photographers. I am French and when I was a child (I am 56 now) I used to flip over my uncle’s photography books. There was one French photographer I loved and I would like to share it with you, here is the link.

You may have to brush up a bit your French to understand certains images, they were taken some 40 to 50 years ago.

Cheers,

Michel

Thanks, Michel. I was not familiar with René Maltète’s work and I’m grateful for the reference.

Most enjoyable!

At the Moscone Center

Photographs

Sterility makes for opportunity.

The Moscone Center – named after the assassinated mayor – in San Francisco is probably best known for hosting the annual love-in where Steve Jobs previews the latest in Apple toys early each new year. It also hosts a playground which may be the most sterile I have ever seen, but that’s not all bad. It makes for interesting photo opportunities.


Moscone playground, 2000. Leica M2, 50mm Summicron, Kodak Gold 100. Contrast enhanced in Lightroom.

I was very much thinking of the work of Ludwig Schricker when snapping this.

No, I wasn’t there for an Apple love-in.

Importing into Lightroom

Lightroom, Software

Automating sharpening on import.

One of the first things I have to do when processing images imported from my Canon 5D (or the Lumix LX1 for that matter) is to sharpen the RAW image. This is standard operating procedure for digital cameras and has nothing to do with poor native image quality. The process simply negates the effect of the anti-aliasing filter, used in nearly every digital camera. Apple’s Aperture is really smart about this and does it automatically, detecting the camera used and applying Apple’s pre-set adjustments. Lightroom is less smart but can be taught to make the adjustment automatically on import.

Here’s the process – I have enlarged the screen shots for legibility, hence the poor definition – if you want to see aliasing take a look at the ‘jaggies’ in the pointers!

Here are the Lightroom defaults for sharpening in the Develop module.

Leave them like this and you will have to sharpen every picture once imported. A waste of time.

Here are the settings that work best for me – and I have large prints made on an HP Designjet 90 printer as my goal. For the small images used for the web it really does not matter what you do. A large print, on the other hand, is the most demanding output there is.

Having made those adjustments in the Develop panel I then create a new User Preset by clicking on the ‘+’ sign in the Preset area in the left panel and naming the current settings Canon 5D. No other defaults have been changed in the Develop module at this time nor do you want to make any changes:

Then when prompted which settings to save with this new User Preset, I choose ‘Check None’ then check only the Sharpening box. This will limited changes made whenever this User Preset is chosen to Sharpening only. Were I importing from a small sensor camera with inherent image noise (not an issue with the 5D) I would consider including Noise Reduction when creating the User Preset and would check the related box, below.

Next I insert a CF card containing images to be imported into the card reader and the import Dialog pops up. Under information to Apply: Develop Settings I click the drop down box and point to the Canon 5D preset just created:

Now my preferred sharpening settings will be applied as the pictures are imported and 1:1 Previews are generated. As is always the case with RAW files, the original file is never changed – it’s just the Previews that are managed.

You can make User Presets which are specific to a camera serial number, if you want, but as Your Truly owns just one 5D (a status unlikely to change) and one Lumix LX1, that’s a luxury I do not need.

One size does not fit all:

Now the above approach is camera specific, not lens specific.

It doesn’t mean that you just merrily import every image without the need for any additional sharpening adjustments.

Even in my small set of Canon lenses there are noticeable variations. The 85mm, 200mm’L’ and 400mm ‘L’ optics are pretty constant when it comes to sharpness at all apertures. Indeed, the 200mm generally needs a small reduction, it’s that good. On the other hand, the 24-105mm ‘L’ and the 50mm f/1.4 at full aperture both need a little more and the 20mm needs more all the time. It’s a mediocre piece of glass at best.

And it’s not just sharpening you have to worry about. There are other lens aberrations.

It would be pretty neat to be able to automatically adjust for Chromatic Aberration (color fringing), Distortion based on the lens used and Vignetting, but that feature is not available, yet. CA and Vignetting would be especially tricky as they vary with aperture. Distortion is no walk in the park either as the distortion levels in zooms vary with focal length. That’s not to say that Adobe couldn’t do it (we are talking simple look-up tables here, although a lot of them, and a presumption of low sample variation) and I, for one, would love to be able to have the fairly pronounced barrel distortion in the 24-105mm ‘L’ zoom automatically removed when this otherwise fine optic is used at its wide end.

DxO Optics adopts this exact approach in a plug-in for Lightroom. They should be applauded for their efforts. The list of cameras and lenses they automatically adjust for is set forth here. I have not tried the product and, at $300, I’m not about too, but it may make sense to some. It looks like the latest Mac version is not yet available so I could not try it even if I wanted to blow the coin. Their video suggests the product is bog slow (a couple of minutes to adjust just five images), and you can bet they are using the fastest possible hardware to put a gloss on things, so a pinch of salt is recommended before you lay out your hard earned cash.

Does any of this really matter with small images – like those reproduced on the web or in snapshot prints? No. But once your prints sizes get large, it can make a significant difference to the appearance of the picture. And a little bit of automation to reduce the drudge of processing is always a good thing.