Yearly Archives: 2011

David Hobby

Photographers

The power of the web exemplified.

Perhaps the greatest change wrought by the internet on commerce is the destruction of the middleman. That mostly means the high street retailer. From tires to books to eyeglasses, no store is required. Just a warehouse, a good web site and UPS.

One example of this is in the work of the photographer and lighting expert David Hobby, who levered his redundancy pay into a successful website which addresses photographic lighting and is now making good money from taking his lecture show on the road. Congratulations! Embrace change or be killed by it.

For more from Slate click the picture and be sure to view the embedded slide show.

Click the picture for the story.

Silentuk – Urbex

Photographers

Simply outstanding.

A friend in the UK sent over a link to the Silentuk blog which specializes in urban exploration. The sort of work featured here recalls earlier efforts by a US master of the genre, Jonathan Haeber, and does a wonderful job of creating a record of man’s creations which are otherwise lost to his fellow man.

The reportage they have just done on the defunct Royal Mail underground railway is to die for. An extraordinary effort just to access the system, the high risk of detection and the accompanying superb photography all speak loudly to why we take pictures. They write that the system was originally built in 1855 before the days of electricity and was pneumatically powered! Shades of Dante’s Inferno. Electrification of the system illustrated was undertaken in 1915 and speaks to the great age of civil and electrical engineering.

Click the picture for the story.

There’s one photo in the large collection which speaks to the quintessential English delicacy. Tea. Here it is:

Be sure to visit the Silentuk blog.

Glossy paper

Printing

The touchstone of the photographer’s art.

Its been quite a while since I made glossy prints. In the darkroom days I would squeegee the print, face down, onto a high gloss sheet of chrome-plated steel then heat the thing in a press. If you got things right the resulting print would emerge with an indescribably high gloss (this was before awful RC papers ruined traditional printing) which was also quite incredibly fragile. Any moisture or fingerprints and the surface would be ruined. But the definition afforded the image was beyond compare.

This was not all good, of course. Every imperfection in the image was disclosed, every grain of Kodak’s unbeatable TriX emulsion revealed. Sometimes you wanted that. Sometimes not. And the whole process was a real pain in the nether regions but once you saw an unglazed, normally dried glossy print you never wanted to go there again.

Nearly all the many prints I have made on my HP DesignJet 90 dye ink jet printer have been on HP-branded Premium Plus Satin paper. This paper has a semi-gloss finish, retains detail well and is very easy to use. It has a swellable surface, meaning its pores open when sprayed with ink to absorb the dyes. After a few hours the swelling subsides and the print is less fragile and can be handled easily. Until then the surface is quite fragile. I always handle paper using cotton gloves because any grease from fingers on the surface can result in poor ink absorption, blotchiness and reduced life. Done carefully, HP’s Vivera inks are certified by Wilhelm Research for some 80 years longevity.

Well, take a look what arrived on my doorstep the other day:

Nice things happen to nice people.

The buyer of a hefty chunk of my Canon 5D outfit found several goodies in the shipments I made. A few CF cards, a wired and wireless remote, an LCD protector, a CF-to-SDHC adapter and so on. He had been a pleasure to deal with, none of the usual game playing or nickel and dime nonsense so beloved of buyers of even fairly priced gear, that I felt it was the least I could do. Well, Barry B. dropped me a note saying that he no longer made prints and would I like some HP Glossy? Is the Pope a Catholic? It gets better. The small fortune in printing paper is not only the swellable type specific to my HP DesignJet, it was shipped to me at no charge! There are decent people left in the world …. thank you, Barry.

On receipt the first thing I did was to download the paper profile from HP and make it available to Lightroom. Then I took an image which would really benefit from the ability of glossy paper to render fine detail and ran a test print. In this image I had retouched some overhead wires using Photoshop CS5 and Content Aware Fill and it looked just fine on my Dell 2209WA display. But, oh! boy, the test print clearly displayed my retouching so I had to go back into PS and try harder. That’s glossy paper for you. Every imperfection, every pore, every blemish, is writ large to the world.

A second print – I have no fewer than 125 sheets of 13″ x 19″ to play with so I’m feeling a tad profligate – put all to rights and the quality is simply breathtaking. And this from the Panny G1’s poncy little MFT sensor!

A warning. Before these swellable papers dry, a matter of a few hours, they will show a mottled surface reflecting (!) disparate ink absorption across the surface. Give them a few hours and the surfaces returns to normal, meaning a high gloss almost as good as those monochrome prints from ages ago, but a lot easier to make.

Glossy is not for everyone. It’s hard to display, attracting reflections as it does. It’s fragile and really needs mounting behind glass. It’s unforgiving when it comes to the photographer’s technique. And it needs to be handled with kid gloves …. OK, cotton gloves. But, done right and displayed right, a glossy print remains the touchstone of the photographer’s art.

Why do you think that nice Mr. Jobs insists on those dumb glossy screens on all his computers? Because they plain look better on a casual acquaintance. That’s fine for prints. Not so good for computer screens.

HP Glossy is anything but water resistant, so keep it away from rain drops and the like:

Two minutes under a tap and the emulsion starts to run.

The Fuji X100 – time to wait

Fuji

Not ready for prime time.

I have been reading David Pogue, the New York Times’s technology columnist, for ages. What he lacks in sheer technical knowhow he more than makes up for in his ability to get to the point of the real world user. Sort of like Consumer Reports. Neither may know exactly how fuel injection works, say, but both will tell you straight whether the car can be guaranteed to start when the ignition key is turned. That’s what users need.

So while his review of the Fuji X100 is replete with a howler or two which will make ‘experts’ cringe (he describes it as a great portrait camera, despite the short lens, etc.) he does hit the nail on the head in disclosing what is now a worryingly frequent complaint on chat boards from those lucky enough to have got an example of this rare beast. And as I am more likely to believe Pogue than I am the average chat board aficionado, here it is, plain and simple:

“You should also know that the camera doesn’t focus quickly, especially in low light.
It does have an autofocus assist lamp that comes on in dim rooms,
briefly providing enough illumination for it to focus,
but time is going by meanwhile.”

First, forget using an autofocus lamp. This camera is meant to be stealthy, not a walking advertisement. Next, with my jarring experience with the 20mm Panasonic for the G1, which I returned almost as soon as I bought it, I am super sensitive about fast autofocus. The Panny was simply unable to focus fast enough for street snapping, delivering a 30% focus failure rate in the almost 500 exposures I made with it, and I don’t propose to relive the experience with the X100. I suppose you could use the camera for landscapes or whatever, but fail to see what it adds compared to the regular DSLR in that regard. The fact that the X100 is small, has a real optical finder and is quiet and unobtrusive, is what turns my crank, and street snaps are what I mostly do.

Yes, there are several other quirks in the design which can be cured by Fuji tweaking the software (button assignments, menu layout and the like), but speeding up the focus operation is not, I would guess, one of them. Your focus motor is either fast or not. In this case, it increasingly seems not.

This is not the low risk prospect that buying the iPad on Day One of availability was. Apple had several years of touchscreen development under its belt with the iPhone so screwing up the iPad was not a big risk. By contrast, what we have in the Fuji is a camera with a massively complex EVF/OVF eye level finder from a low volume manufacturer not known for making like products. That’s high risk in my book. The X100 Mark II will likely get it right, and I’m also hoping that the likes of Panasonic come out with something as good or better by then, at a saner price.

So, for now, I will either cancel my X100 order or flip the camera on eBay if it still commands today’s 50-100% black market premium at my date of purchase. Free money is never a bad thing. The latter option will, at least, allow me to try it for myself.

City Lights

Photographs

An icon.

Go to any American bookshop, if such a thing still exists in your area, and you will find some 10% of the shelf space dedicated to what is collectively referred to as ‘Self Help’. Billions have been made from telling others how to do it, enriching the authors and publishers but must certainly not the readers. How to Make a Million, How to Sell Real Estate, How to Find a Spouse, How to Use a Computer, How to Take Pictures (good luck with that), How to Find Inner Peace, How to Beat the Stock Market (same as finding Inner Peace in my book and just as hard) and, funniest of all, How to Find Yourself.

Judging from the prevailing content at City Lights Books on Columbus Avenue, at the foot of Little Italy in San Francisco, most of their patrons are lost, because psychology, philosophy, new age stuff and so on quite dominate the store. There are lots of patrons trying to find themselves here. While I would argue that little of worth in the field of philosophy postdates the writings of the Frenchman René Descartes (the dour stoic who gave us “I think therefore I am”, Descartes was that rarest of Frenchmen, a man without passion) and the Scot David Hume (the empiricist who pronounced “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”, Hume was that rarest of Scots, a man of passion) this in no way takes away from the need for a great bookshop like City Lights.

City Lights. G1, kit lens @ 24mm, 1/640, f/4.8.

I removed the ugly overhead wires using a combination of the Content Aware Fill and Clone Stamp tools in PS CS5.

The focus here is resolutely on the left or, as the current euphemism has it, ‘progressive’. That in no way takes anything away from a fine bookshop.

So no visit to the jewel of the west coast is complete without a call at City Lights. So famous is the store that it even has its own Wikipedia entry and, around the corner, there’s a street named after one of the founders. Shades of literary France.

City Lights Books is an amazingly fun place to visit. Not only are the chances high that you will find some fascinating gem to read but just observing the patrons is pleasure enough in itself.