Category Archives: Photographers

Cataloging movies and books

Movies, Software

An important source of inspiration.

I believe it’s important for any photographer to manage his sources of inspiration, be they books, magazines or movies. As is clear from yesterday’s journal entry, movies are an important source of ideas for my photographs so it’s important that all those DVDs are properly cataloged for easy retrieval.

In my case each DVD is labelled on the spine with a sequential number and that number is recorded as the location in the database. Movies are filed in numerical order – to arrange by title is futile in a growing library, as you will be constantly rearranging things.

For the past few years I have been using Delicious Library to do the database work but have become increasingly disappointed with its poor export capabilities and general slowness. When the new iPhone software was announced the other day it was immediately obvious that DL’s creators had dropped the ball and failed to deliver a capable iPhone export. Add the fact that you cannot network your DL data unless all networked computers use OS Leopard and I was ready for a change. Networking is important in my setup as the database is maintained on the office MacBook and then shared with the old iMac in the bar, where movies are looked up. The old iMac, no speed demon with a 1 gHz G4 CPU, is perfect for this sort of thing.

Along comes DVDpedia which not only offers a host of export formats, it also permits dynamic syncing with your iPhone once you download the related application to your phone. And, best of all, it’s very fast, far easier to use than DL (it’s as fast as OS X’s Finder) and has an import function to bring in all your Delicious Library movies. The import works well. You really do not want to have to reenter everything manually if you have as many movies as I do – some 500 and counting.


‘Location’ refers to the movie’s number for easy retrieval


Apple’s superb Coverflow view is a built-in option if you use OS Leopard

You can see my library online in one of the many export formats by clicking the Link at the bottom of the page. Download is very fast.

A related product from the same vendor – Bookpedia – does the same thing for your book collection. In aggregate, the cost of these two applications is less than DL which integrates the movie and book cataloging functions. Click on my book Link below and you will see a Bookpedia version of the photography books in my library.

Here is my Bookpedia library Syncd to the iPhone:


Touch any thumbnail for a full screen view of the cover

Learning monochrome

Movies, Photography

Everything I ever needed was in the movies.

I ceased taking monochrome pictures in 1977, though every now and then you still can catch me hitting the monochrome button in Lightroom.

But that’s not monochrome photography.

While the simplicity of seeing imposed by a monochrome palette makes anyone a better color photographer, I no longer take pictures thinking in black and white. My black may be red, my white blue, but I simply do not take black and white pictures.

Color is more challenging and, done right, more satisfying. Black and white, in a way, is cheating. Take out enough variables and anyone can do it. Not that all modern color is good. Anyone can paint a late Rothko or Motherwell. Fine work, true, but the genius of seeing and the skill to convert the vision to canvas are hardly abundantly on display here.

But when it was all I did, I loved black and white. No serious work in color was being shown by anyone in 1960 and that changed little through 1977. The pioneers, as ever, were the great fashion magazines, but the establishment critics saw to it that their art was disregarded. Shame. You could miss an awful lot of Parkinson, Clarke or Penn that way.

While my love of black and white was doubtless furthered by all those great books in the Kensington Public Library on Hornton Street, what really flipped the switch for me happened a good deal earlier when I first saw Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ (1949) on our home TV which, of course, was black and white, like the movie. I was already familiar with those expressionist masterpieces ‘Metropolis’ and ‘M’ by Fritz Lang, but this was on a far more approachable plane. It did not need much imagination to grasp Graham Greene’s plot or to be awed by the acting of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. But what really gripped you was Robert Krasker’s photography, and rather than go on about it, I’m attaching nine favorite images from the movie. Krasker’s use of tilted perspective to convey an unwordly, wide angle look, is tremendous.

It’s not really clear on the small screen, but the next image shows the dying Harry Lime (Welles) poking his fingers up though the sewer grating as he tries to escape the good guys:

The camera cuts to his face. Sheer genius.

See what I mean? Krasker got the Oscar that year. There was no competition.

On a trip to Vienna in June, 2024, my son WInston searched out the original location and his photograph even replicates Krasker’s crazy tilt. Mercifully the ugly gratings have gone, but little else has changed 75 years later:

Tools

Book reviews

Another fine lesson in macro.

A few years back I developed tendonitis, meaning that if I stress my wrists too much everything from elbow to wrist hurts like hell. One likely cause is that many years of woodworking as a hobby did a number on my tendons and, as I understand it, these are not things that readily mend.

In the event, it was probably a timely warning. I still had all ten fingers attached where they should be and, let’s face it, I wasn’t giving Chippendale any competition, so the woodworking tools were sold and the proceeds applied to converting the workshop to a home theater. Suffice it to say that all those newly white walls made for a fine photography exhibition space in addition to a great place to watch movies, play pool, throw the occasional dart and …. well, you get the idea. American leisure at home.

From those woodworking days, I recall that easily the best magazine addressing amateur woodworking is ‘Fine Woodworking’ published by Taunton Press, a specialty publisher with a very high end focus on content, presentation and photography. One of their editors, a superb woodworker, published this labor of love a few years ago:


Click the picture for Amazom. I do not get paid if you do that.

Not only are the tools depicted beautiful art works, the photography is stunning. Great care has been taken with settings, backgrounds and lighting and the whole thing is a masterpiece of table-top photography. Best as I can tell, Nagyszalanczy is both writer and photographer.

Flies

Book reviews

An unlikely source of inspiration.

You know your home library is a good one when you come across books you never knew you had.

Which is exactly what happened to me the other day when in search of inspiration and education about good macro photography. I have no earthly idea how I came to own this book, but I am most certainly glad to have discovered it.

While the subject may be unusual the photography contained in the pages of this book is some of the best macro work I have seen.

Atlantic salmon flies are tied as much for their looks and display as they are for real fishing. This book covers the gamut from fly tyers interested solely in emulating pre-WWI techniques (!) to those interested in the very latest designs using synthetic materials. The interviews with these artisans are almost as good as the photography.

As the book was published in 1991, before large frame digital existed, all the work here is on film and, while it’s hard to make out from the picture of photographer John Clayton on the jacket cover, was probably done on large format. The lighting, posing and choices of backgrounds all speak to a work of love and exceptional effort.

No longer on Amazon, look for this book in the remaindered catalogs. The excellent Alibris has it. Highly recommended for the beauty of the subjects and the photographic execution.

Patrick Demarchelier

Photographers

And the diva.

Take a look at the engrossing movie The Devil Wears Prada and you will hear the Meryl Streep character (an amalgam, one imagines, of the two great Vogue editors of recent times, Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland) ask on several occasions “Can we get Patrick?”.

I cannot remember a time when Patrick Demarchelier – yes, that Patrick – was not famous. With just cause. Click here and you will see what I’m writing about. Pair this superstar photographer with a true, like-they-used-to-make-them, superstar actress whose looks match her acting skill, and you have Hurrell’s Hollywood recreated. Angelina Jolie is a Star in the old sense of the word. Sure, there are the bizarre tattoos (self expression, if you ask me) and all those adoptions (how many starving kids have you saved recently?), but, heck, that’s just modern times. There’s no denying the woman’s acting skills, her commitments to charity ($8mm donated in 2006 alone), and for lady readers, the hunk that passes for her soul mate. Did I mention that she’s gorgeous?

Thanks, Mr. Demarchelier, for making life that much happier for this fan.