Yearly Archives: 2011

365 in 365

Photographs

A wonderful year of street snapping.

Click the picture to view a video commentary on some of the favorites among the 365 pictures I posted to my companion site, Snap!, during 2011. The video is just over 11 minutes long, so give it a while to download – a minute on a 10mb/s broadband connection.

Click the picture for the video.

I turn 60 today. Not since 1971-77 have I had a year of snapping to compare, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that either my critical faculties are shot, or I am senile.

The author at 60. Snapped by my son, Winston, on the iPhone 4S in Carmel, CA.
At The Grill on Ocean Avenue. One of the rare occasions where I was not the one pressing the button.

Tiffany’s at Christmas

Photography

A subtle and powerful ad.

I love good advertising but it’s not something seen too often, so it was a particular pleasure to spot this in the December, 2011 issue of American Vogue:

There is not one iota of reality here. The chap would be freezing with no coat on, his beloved flat on her rear owing to those ridiculous heels and I suppose they flew to their location given the absence of footprints in the fresh snow.

But the message is powerful – the upward view to some mythic destination, the intense effect of the famous cyan Tiffany box, the vicarious thrill the viewer shares at the moment that is about to be. Wonderfully well done, even if he overpaid by 40% ….

Vogue Archive

Photographs

An impressive undertaking.

Vogue has scanned and archived its US issues since 1892, some 120 years of the magazine. The scans include advertising, which is an essential part of understanding changing fashion.

What a resource!

Click the picture for details.

Click the picture for details.

The funny picture is by Arthur Elgort, one of Vogue’s finest, whose interest in ballet is clearly visible. You can see more at his web site.

No more cover-ups

Paintings, Photography

Too funny.

This has to be one of the funnier examples of the overreach of regulations.

Could it really be true that cosmetics makers use the one ten thousandth of one percent of the world’s most stunning women, heavily made up, superbly coiffed, expertly lit, photographed by top dolllar image makers, to sell their make-up to the rest who are really largely beyond help?

Surely not?

What is even funnier is that the companies making these products feel they have to further enhance the results in post processing. Photoshop may be a no-no when it comes to news reporting, but in anything else I say “Have at it”. If the result sells more product or makes for a more striking picture, why not? What happened to caveat emptor? Every painter in the history of art has been a putative Photoshop user by editing at the creative stage. These modern digital artists simply do it in post production, just like Ansel Adams did it in the darkroom. (“Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships”, though what God had to do with it beats me).

You really think that Raphael was telling it like it was to Julius III?

Raphael. Julius III, 1512.

My, but the old boy aged well. No liver spots on his pristine white hands, no syphilis sores.

Raphael wanted to get paid just as much as the photographer, art director and Photoshop maven responsible for the Cover Girl number.

Buttercup

Photographs

At the loading dock.

G3, kit lens @34mm, 1/2500, f/5/5, ISO320.

While the most useful focal length for street snaps is 35mm (on full frame – that’s 17mm with an MFT sensor or 24mm with APS-C) sometimes you don’t have the time to get in close, meaning you need something longer. Such was the case here where zooming in to 68mm allowed proper framing. The subject was gone two seconds later, obscured by a delivery truck.

The old Leica rangefinder film days’ outfit, sufficient to take you around the world and miss no more than 1% of picture opportunities, was comprised of three lenses – 35mm, 50mm and 90mm. Today all of that can be had in inexpensive kit zooms with their lack of speed more than compensated by excellent, sensitive sensors, and there’s no time wasted or lenses dropped from incessant changing of the optic on the camera’s body.

Here are the lens statistics from my Lightoom database for my use of the Panasonic G1 and G3 – these are post cull, but it’s reasonable to assume that cull rates are much the same across optics:

Combining the first two (the disastrous Panny 20mm was returned after one outing) gives 80% on kit lenses, with 8% and 12% on long and very wide ones, respectively. Even though their light weight means it’s no big deal to carry all three, I generally carry the kit lens only.