All posts by Thomas Pindelski

About Thomas Pindelski

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Blurring the lines

Photographs

Where does graphic arts start?

The hardliner in me loves Alcatraz. It’s what a prison should be, compounding a remote location which dares the prisoner to escape on pain of death by hypothermia, with the ultimate cruelty – a view of one of the world’s great cities whose sounds you can hear when the wind blows right. Thus heightening the meaning of incarceration, freedom just out of reach, is true punishment.

But the liberal in me sees those same factors as nothing more or less than cruel and unusual punishment, for no matter how heinous the crime, civilization can do better than that. Visit Alcatraz, look around you and listen to the excellent tour tape and you will know what I mean.

So the other day finding myself on the Marina at the north western end of San Francisco, I naturally couldn’t resist a snap of this forbidding, long unused, fortress by the bay. The icy, biting wind may make northerners laugh with scorn but it reminded me why you wouldn’t want to try to swim from the island to the shore.

As it was a blustery day and the haze and water mist were conspiring against visibility, I didn’t expect much and not much was what I got.

Alcatraz lost in the mist. G1, 45-200 @ 91mm, ISO 320.

But later, sitting at the monitor and thawing out, I thought I would try to make something of it. It took a while, masking this and enhancing that, but the whole process reminded me that nothing is real any more. And, candidly, I have no qualms making something half decent out of an image that would ordinarily head straight for the trash. The final version, antique coloring and all, works for me. The lines between photograph and illustration are now so blurred that nothing is real any longer.

Alcatraz prison in all its threatening splendor.

Cull ratios

Photography

Digital doesn’t translate into lower retention rates.

I’m mostly a street snapper so when I return to my computer and insert the memory card from the camera, I have learned not to be too quick to hit the Delete button.

Coming off the high of another street session, it’s easy to let poor judgement rule so I have found it’s best to wait a day or two befrore culling pictures.

Now culling, for the most part is, I believe, a good thing. Storage is no longer a valid reason to cull losers as disk space is impossibly inexpensive, but the time spent on not having to keyword all those images and the greater ease in cataloging and retrieval make keeping only the winners the rational thing to do. A great image which cannot be found for all the noise created by hundreds of losers has less chance of ever seeing the light of day, after all.

So I tend to cull aggressively and that practice got me thinking about what I call the Cull Ratio – the ratio of deletions to exposures.

In the days of film there really was little need to cull anything. For a start you kept your film strips as taken and tended to scan the best pictures to disc in any case, keeping the original film as a back-up. Further, volumes tended to be far lower in film days. Bytes are almost free, film and processing anything but.

The other day I happened to notice that I had just taken my 5,000th snap using the Panasonic G1 and that statistic got me thinking about how many of those I have kept, never having taken so many pictures in so short a time with any camera before. I had bought the Panny in early-July, 2009 so clearly I have been merrily banging away since then to hit 5k in a mere 6 months. In turn I wondered what my retention rate has been for earlier days and other gear.

Determining the Cull Ratio for my film days is easy. I simply add up the number of images I have scanned to disc and compare that to the number of rolls of processed film in storage.

For the digital era it’s even easier. As I have my digital cameras set to perpetually record exposures using incremental numbering, I only have to take a look at the number of the last frame taken to get the denominator, and take a quick peek in Lightroom – where all my images, film scans and digital – make their home. That gives me the numerator to determine Cull Ratio which is computed as (1-(Retentions/Exposures))*100%.

So here are my Cull Ratios:

Film – 8/1971-6/2007: 89%
Canon 5D – 2/2006 – 1/2010: 78%
Panasonic G1 – 7/2009-1/2010 : 80%

I confess to some surprise at the Cull Ratio results. Off the top of my head I would have guessed that my Cull Ratio would be far higher with digital than with film when, in fact, the exact opposite is true. I am retaining on average 21% of my digital images whereas with film the retention rate was closer to 11%. That’s almost twice as high a retention rate.

In the film days I know I was far more studied in my approach to pressing the button. Partly because I had little money for the back-end costs and partly because I never liked processing and the attendant unproductive time investment.

In digital days you might argue that I have become less selective, keeping almost twice as many images, but I do not think that is the case. Yes, cost is no longer a consideration but it is not a significant variable either for, were film to be the only choice today, cost would no longer trouble me, and I would simply delegate the processing to save time.

No, I really think that digital has made me a better photographer, based on my Cull Ratio, for the three reasons:

  • Heretofore hopeless images – poorly exposed or lit – can often be saved with digital manipulation, made especially easy by Lightroom.
  • I am more inclined to experiment and take snaps which would never have had a chance of coming out in film days yet which now I take with impugnity, frequently finding I have managed to ‘get away with it’.
  • I think that my eye is better today than 30 years ago.

I’m not advocating any particular cull practice based on the above. Having thought I would write ‘you can never cull enough’ when first ruminating about Cull Ratios, objective data must rule supposition. So I have had to eat my words. And speaking of eating, here’s a recent digital image which would never have made the cut in film days – poorly exposed, poorly composed and awfully lit, it was saved by digital processing.

American grotesque. On upper Fillmore Street in San Francisco. G1, kit lens.

Panasonic G1 software updates

Micro Four-Thirds

An interesting quirk.

As I mentioned in my first article on the Panasonic 45-200mm lens for the G1/GH1/GF1, the first thing I did was to update the software for that lens and the 14-45mm kit lens and, in the process, also separately updated the software for the G1 body when I saw that was also out of date.

I thought no more of those updates until, out of curiosity, I looked in Lightroom to see how many snaps I had retained (post cull) with the 45-200 since getting it. Well, it turns out that, based on the dates of pictures, Lightroom was pretty clueless about which lens had been used on the G1 until those updates were made! Now the lens used is correctly recorded when the picture is taken but until then it’s all ‘Unknown Lens’ – 99% of which will have been with the kit lens in my case. So either the lens or the camera software updates – I don’t know which – did the trick and now I have the comfort of knowing which lens was used.

G1 lens metadata from Lightroom.

Quite what use that information is in practice I’m not quite sure, but at least it is there. So if that sort of thing matters to you, it pays to make the software updates in a timely manner.

As of now I’m only aware of one reason not to make the G1 body software updates. Versions after 1.2 (I’m not dead sure which version but I seem to recall it was 1.3) will not work with non-Panasonic branded aftermarket batteries**. Given that the saving on grey market batteries is trivial, I hardly regard this as an issue but, then again, both my batteries are Panny branded so it’s easy for me to say that.

** If you are bound and determined to save $30 and prepared to accept the risk that the ‘fix’ may be broken with later software updates, you can buy an aftermarket battery for $22 here.

The year of the tablet

Computing

Everyone is getting on the bandwagon.

Notice anything here, from my news reader?

Yup, it’s the year of the tablet computer. Quite why all these manufacturers are rushing to market when they have no delivery system for content – books, games and movies – I don’t know, but the one that does, Apple, will announce its version on January 27 and I suspect it will be worth waiting for. Sales are rumored to start in April, 2010. A direct, wireless link to iTunes is a given.

I’m hoping for not just a playback device but also a half-decent computer which will allow processing of pictures in Lightroom or the like. Here’s hoping.

Artist’s rendering.

Disclosure: Long AAPL call options at the time of writing.