Category Archives: Photographers

Grace

Book reviews

An honest memoir.


Click the image for the Amazon US site.
I get no payment if you do that.

In the sciences and technology, success is highly correlated with raw brainpower and a good education. There are thousands of STEM graduates, unknown to the public at large, cleaning up economically, as they should be. That seems largely fair to me. Effort and intellectual acumen are rewarded.

But cross the divide to the world of sales and marketing, where there is no obvious educational correlation with success, and you are in the land of the flim-flam man (and woman). Examples of occupations where reward is unrelated to education, but highly correlated with an ability to lie (‘spin’) and cheat your customer include real estate, stock brokerage, popular broadcasting and car sales. I have yet to understand why an individual’s ability to enter a home into a database to show a prospect the bathroom merits a 6% commission.

And it’s that world which Grace Coddington has been a large part of for 50 years. Coddington is a fine example of the exception that proves the rule in the world of fashion, peopled as it is with mediocre talents and lax scruples which mostly sees the ill educated opportunist succeed to the detriment of true talent.

Long the Creative Director at US Vogue magazine, Coddington is a heart warming reminder that even in this most back-biting of industries – the purveying of clothing and scent – talent does occasionally rise to the top.

In an honest exposition of her life, and without any sense of self-aggrandisement, Coddington relates her life from a start as a beautiful model with a pre-Raphaelite face, to the top of her industry. Her many failed marriages – she definitely needs to avoid the altar – are related with no trace of self-pity as this young woman from a remote Welsh village makes her way from what we now call a ‘supermodel’ to the creative management of the industry’s bible. Along the way she works with the creme de la creme of the world’s greatest photographers many of whom, as I have written time and again here, work in the world of fashion. And what distinguishes photographers from the bunch of talent-deprived hangers-on in this industry is that if you are a quack you will not remain employed for very long.

They are all here, from the early masters like Penn, Beaton and Parkinson, to today’s best, the likes of Testino, Leibovitz and Elgort, via original geniuses like Bailey, Donovan and Bourdin.

There’s no ‘kiss and tell’ here, just a straightforward exposition of Coddington’s experiences with more photographers than most could ever name.

If nothing else, there’s a skilled explanation of why any ambitious person needs to come to the United States, enshrined in an insightful comparison of European and American work ethics. It’s a strong confirmation of the wisdom of my decision to leave England some 35 years ago, making America my home.

Highly recommended, not least for her charming sketches which copiously illustrate this wonderful memoir. When I finished I found I could even forgive her a life long love of cats, those most odious and self-serving of creatures, much as are the mediocrities Coddington has had to suffer during a long and successful career.

North by Northwest

Movies, Photography

The best thriller ever.

In mentioning some essential Blu-Ray DVDs the other day, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest was naturally in the list.

The reasons are simple. From Saul Bass’s opening titles superimposed on the UN building with a reflected First Avenue gradually coming into view to the oh! so suggestive closing shot of the train entering the tunnel, this is the perfect thriller. Bernard Herrmann’s score of yearning beauty complements two equally beautiful leads, Cary Grant and an extraordinarily beautiful Eva Marie Saint.

But it’s Hitchcock’s love for the vastness and variety of America, perfectly realized in Robert Burks’s cinematography, which is the real reason to see this outstanding movie. Some examples:


A perfectly poised Eva Marie-Saint in the railway sleeper.


Cary Grant runs from the United Nations building.


Grant at Prairie Stop 41 in the middle of nowhere.


“Are you Mr. Kaplan?”
“Cain’t say I am ‘cos I ain’t.”


One of the most famous images in the cinema.
Grant is chased by the crop dusting plane.


At Chicago’s Union Station the cops try to
find a disguised Grant in a sea of Redcaps.

The extended train scene in the first third of the movie is the finest ever made. It takes place on the Twentieth Century Limited which ran between New York and Chicago back when train travel was glamorous. At that time this meant magnificent Art Deco design by Henry Dreyfuss; watch and you will agree that travel was never finer.


An image worthy of a latter day Edvard Munch.
Grant now doubting Saint’s motives is torn between
caressing and throttling her.


Saint shoots Grant. Owing to the many takes,
the little boy at the right got tired of the
noise and wisely stuck his fingers in his ears.


Grant climbs Mount Rushmore to avoid the bad guys.

The Blu-Ray version improves markedly on both video and sound compared with the regular DVD; maybe not as much as Lawrence of Arabia does, but enough to make it worth the very modest outlay.

Essential Blu-Ray movies

Movies, Photography

A small collection.

Having successfully added a Blu-Ray reader/burner to the HackMini I went about buying a few Blu-Ray movies, all of which I already own in standard definition DVDs. These are distinguished by exceptional cinematography, often more reminiscent of still images and come highly recommended in these new transfers based on user reviews at Amazon.com. I regard most of these as essential viewing for any photographer. These are the ones I bought:

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece remains one of the very few science fiction movies I will watch. It’s a genre I mostly detest as it’s all to easy to conjure up fantastical plots which bear no relation to reality by some asinine construct like time travel or teleportation. Poor excuses for proper writing. But Kubrick’s movie is different, not just for its startling foresights and extraordinary imagery but also for its pervasive sense of mystery. You place your own interpretation on what you see and have no need to explain it to anyone. And there is, of course, the most breathtaking cut ever in world cinema, being the moment the monkey hurls the weapon in the air to the space station in orbit. Exceptional video and sound. (Full disclosure: For the past 5 years my screensaver has been the Hal 9000 lip reading).

  • Funny Face: Stanley Donen’s 1957 confection has Fred Astaire acting Richard Avedon and Audrey Hepburn as the ingenue fashion model. The Gershwin score completes this exercise in champagne perfection and you have not lived until the multiple fashion ‘shoot’ scenes have overpowered you, set in the most beautiful city on earth, Paris. If you are a photographer and do not have this movie …. well, sorry, you had better stick to reading gear reviews.

  • Lawrence of Arabia: Like Kubrick, David Lean made very few movies and no bad ones. This was his best. A beautiful Peter O’Toole in his acting debut and the second greatest cut in cinematic history after Kubrick’s in 2001, the moment when T E Lawrence extinguishes the match. Maurice Jarre’s unforgettable score completes this exercise in perfection.

  • North by Northwest: Take the all time leading man, Cary Grant, match him up with Eve Marie Saint and an evil James Mason (surely the most beautiful, sonorous voice ever, back when beautiful English still set the standard for enunciation and could still be heard on the BBC) and set them on a cross-country chase across America from the bar in New York’s Plaza Hotel to Mount Rushmore, throw in a fabulous, memorable score by Bernard Herrmann, and you have the best thriller made. The Blu-Ray transfer is exceptional.

  • Once Upon A Time In America: Sergio Leone not only made the greatest Western (it takes an Italian!), see below, he also made this exceptional gangster movie about the Jewish Mob during prohibition. The early New York scenes at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge tell of a longing for a simpler world which never ages. James Woods, with his typical intensity, and a fine Robert DeNiro make the movie riveting, but it’s the youthful actors in the flashbacks, especially a divine Jennifer Connelly, who make the movie. Despite its vast length, almost four hours, the set design and art direction are to die for, and the movie is over before you know it. Sticking with the best of the best, Leone had Ennio Morricone write the haunting pan pipe music and Tonnino Delli Colli did the masterful cinematography.

  • Once Upon A Time In The West: Forget third rate players like John Wayne or limited range ones like Clint Eastwood. OUATITW is a unique melding of acting (Bronson, Fonda, Robards, Cardinale), directing (Leone), cinematography (Delli Colli) and music (Morricone). The regular DVD is already very fine but the Blu-Ray adds nicely to the visuals and greatly to the sound. Listen to the steam train ‘breathing’ in that magical opening sequence. The Blu-Ray comes with not one but two versions of the movie, the 165 minute theatrical release and the 166 minute remastered one. Watch the latter.

  • The Third Man: The finest monochrome photography, still or ciné, is to be found here. No self-respecting photographer should be without this movie and the Blu-Ray transfer is beyond words wonderful. Karras’s zither has never sounded better.

  • To Catch A Thief: Another confection with two of the most beautiful people who have ever trodden this Earth – Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. This is the last of three movies Kelly made with Hitchcock (after ‘Dial M for Murder’ and ‘Rear Window’) before her new job as Monaco royalty and she has never been more beautiful. The setting and cinematography on the French Riviera are to die for. Once my son graduates Harvard and I have made a fortune, I’m retiring there ….

* * * * *

These all ran me $10-12 except for Funny Face which was an exhorbitant $35, remastered in Sweden for some reason. It’s OK, it’s in English.

It’s not like classics like those above come around every day. The most recent was made 20 years ago, which tells you something about the CGI-digital garbage and poor writing with which we are presented by modern movie makers. There’s lots of film grain to be seen in the above movies, and thank goodness for that.

With disk storage so inexepensive, I rip my Blu-Ray movies to disk and give the originals to the local library. Nothing beats (cataloged) random access.

The Hackintosh and Blu-Ray

Hackintosh, Movies

Another step forward.

It’s no great secret that Apple has never included a Blu-Ray reader/burner in its computers. Maybe they are right. With the increasing availability of HD streaming video they have concluded that BR makes no sense. Maybe their greedy profit margins on their mostly mediocre hardware couldn’t survive the markup? Who knows?

A related problem is the dishonesty of the movie studios. Ever interested in hosing the consumer down for something claimed to be newer and better, a lot of classic movies have been cynically copied to BR discs with no effort made to go back to the original film stock, no enhancing of signal-to-noise ratios, no scanning of the original images and no great sound. That’s a lot of no. So you often get a poor transfer whose major distinguishing feature from the SD DVD is the price.

My choice for my inaugural Blu-Ray movie is Lawrence of Arabia. Robert Harris is recognized as one of the most adept restorers of old movies, and every frame of the original 65mm film has been scanned, retouched, color corrected and so on. A true labor of love. So I started with a Blu-Ray disc created from his restoration.


El Orance at the Red Sea, Aqaba.

But first the technical details.

The HackMini, my TV Hackster, uses a modest Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 motherboard and an equally modest EVGA GT430 graphics card, the last sporting VGA, HDI and DVI outputs. It runs OS X Lion 10.7.4 because there’s no earthly reason to upgrade. I have long used it with VGA connected to the TV set with a separate 3.5mm coaxial cable for sound. It has worked really well. An expert Hackintosh friend (thank you, PB!) had alerted me that getting the HDMI port (it conveys digital video and audio) working is quite a challenge. For those into Hack matters, the DSDT.aml file has to be edited extensively and depending on your hardware, additional drivers (‘kexts’) may have to be installed. It all looked a bit forbidding, and my ace hacker and Hackintosh guru FU Steve was out of town, so I got down to the hardware part first.


The inexpensive nVidia GT430 – this is the VGA/HDMI/DVI version in the HackMini.

The cheapest Blu-Ray reader/burner I could find was an LG for all of $44 – prices seem to fluctuate daily:

As you can see, the size is the same as that of its predecessor, and replacing the original Sony drive was a matter of a few minutes, helped by the ample space in the HackMini’s enclosure. MacMini owners need not apply ….

Next I connected the drive to the TV using an HDMI cable and rebooted. Naïvely thinking that I could use the latest version of the VLC video payer with Blu-Ray enhancements added, I fired up the app and got an error message. The Lawrence of Arabia BR DVD is encrypted and will not play through VLC.

So I hunted around a bit and came up with BluRayDVDPlayer and had a perfect picture first time but …. no sound over HDMI. You can try this app free, the $40 price registration removing the obtrusive watermark. Sure enough, looking in OS X’s System Preferences->Sound disclosed no HDMI output. I checked out the hacking instruction at Tonymacx86 and was less than enthralled, so I reconnected the drive to the TV using a VGA cable and separate sound cable. Ha! BluRayDVDPlayer takes the digital sound feed and makes it available to the analog VGA feed. Wonderful. Video and audio was now working. So the all in cost was $44 for the hardware and $40 for the application. But nothing is every clean in Hackintosh land. For once, those unfortunates who do not get it, AKA Windows users, can click right through.

But try and buy the Mac app from the BluRayDVDPlayer site and nothing happens when you click the ‘Buy Now’ icon.


Click the image.

However, right click or ‘control-click’ on ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Open in a new tab’ and you are up and running. A code is immediately emailed to you, easily input, and the watermark is gone. The interface is exquisite, the tuning Preferences engineered by users – lean and mean, fast, unobtrusive – and the app appears to be regularly updated for the latest nefarious copy protection schemes of the fools in Hollywood who earnestly believe that buyers will make 35GB copies for distribution to their friends. Right.

Update September 24, 2013:

Since updating my TV media PC to a Mac Pro using the same excellent nVidia GT430 card, I have had great success using the HDMI connection from the Mac Pro to the TV using this HDMI hack referenced here with BluRayDVDPlayer. A fine product. The only anomaly was that on occasion a Blu-Ray movie ripped using MakeMKV would not reproduce sound, somwething that could be remedied by going to Audio->Audio Device->HDMI (Encoded Output) and switching to Audio->Audio Device->HDMI. I dropped the developers a line asking how to make the latter the default audio setting, as it works with all movies (and also respects the scroll wheel on my BT mouse for volume control) and immediately received the following response:

This works perfectly. Try getting this sort of service from the big boys in Cupertino or Redmond ….

Update ends.

So what about the experience?

Lawrence of Arabia in Blu-Ray is truly starting at the top. A photographer’s dream. As I wrote in the introduction of this piece, it is overwhelming, one of the greatest movies made, its great length but a flash as you sit, enthralled. I once saw it at the Carnegie Theater on 7th Avenue in NYC in 1985 on a large screen and really that is the way it should be seen. But a decent sized home TV and this splendidly remastered Blu-Ray DVD come pretty close. I’ll leave you with two images, a mere 1000 pixels wide – no prizes for guessing which is which.



Subjectively? Blue-Ray leaves HD streaming content in the dust. Regular DVDs? Not a chance. Netflix will happily rent you Blu-Ray DVDs for a monthly premium of $4. Their catalog now numbers some 3,300. Just make sure the ones you rent have really been remastered (Amazon reviews are good for this) not some slimy hack copy of a low quality DVD file.


The home screen on the HackMini.

Indy developers rock!

Movies, Software

Thank you, DVDpedia.

I have been using DVDpedia for over half a decade to catalog my burgeoning movie collection. Because all my movies are stored on hard drives, the discs discarded, DVDpedia also has a priceless feature which not only looks up a new movie in Amazon, returning all the details of actors, director, dates, cover art, etc. it also allows links to the file on the harddrive to be made with ease. Thereafter, any movie is one click away, with all the search and sift benefits denied those who store discs on bookshelves. Try finding all the discs starring James Stewart under Alfred Hitchock’s direction, or finding all the Suspense genre movies on your bookshelf in 5 seconds. Indeed, the number of DVDs chez Pindelski is exactly one, a remsastered Blu Ray version of Lawrence of Arabia which I am using to get a new Blu Ray reader installed in the HackMini to work over HDMI. More of that later.

DVDpedia permits the user to set up ‘Smart Collections’ and I have done this for favorite Actors, Directors and Genres. Now my voice controlled TV (“Winston, pull up all the Hitchcoks, please”) system is complete.

Anyway, when I upgraded the TV from a 720p 42″ to a 1080p 55″ the other day, it immediately became obvious that the grid view font was now so small as to be unreadable:

So I dropped Conor at Bruji, the author of the app, a line with a screenshot.

Two days later he sent me a re-coded and recompiled version which, with the addition of a couple of simple Terminal commands which he provided, delivered this:

Now all is readable again at my preferred 10 feet viewing distance. I even saw the typo in the left bar at last!

This is the sort of thing which makes it so great to have independent developers around. Truly bespoke customer service. Thank you Conor.

You can buy DVDpedia for a very modest sum by clicking the image below and I recommend the app without reservation. Variants for Books (which is what you see when you click on Books on Photography at the base of this page), CDs and Games are also available, and the iPad/iPhone version is wonderful when you want to quickly check whether you have a movie or not, as it syncs your Mac with the mobile device.


Click the picture to go to the Bruji site.

Movies are a huge source of inspiration to any photographer and you simply cannot have enough. Online services tend to see movies come and go so it makes a lot of sense to keep local copies for home viewing for those occasions when they are not available elsewhere. Mine reside on two Mediasonic hard drive enclosures, holding four 3TB drives each.

I understand from Conor at Bruji that he hopes to add the extra large font option in future releases of his application.

Update May 10, 2013: The Extra Large font feature has been added and you can download the enhanced application here. You don’t even have to do any additional code input with this version.