Category Archives: Photography

One year later

Photography

After twelve months of these columns, what have been the highlights and disappointments?

I have been having a whale of a time writing these columns for twelve months now and have been true to the name of this journal, Photographs, Photographers and Photography.

Content has been fairly equally balanced between discussion of great (and not so great) photographers, photographs and photography, whether addressing philosophy or technique. Ever cognisant that equipment is but a means to an end, I have frequently illustrated these columns with pictures, mine and those of fellow photographers whose work I admire.

To simplify retrieval of older columns, I have added a reverse chronlogy captioned ‘Archives by Day’ on the right hand side of the screen.

The Columns:

On the columns themselves, there was never any lack of ideas for content but a few stand out as having been an absolute blast to write. So much so they pretty much wrote themselves.

Here are my ten personal favorites.

Film is Dead. July 6, 2005. This has not only proved to be one of the most popular pieces, the fact that it caused much controversy when written, being deleted by the twit who passes for a moderator at Photo.net where it was first published, only goes to confirm how true it was. It’s hard to believe that it was written just some eleven months ago, during which time film camera production has virtually ceased in the US and even mighty Canon will throw in the towel soon.

About Cartier-Bresson. June 15, 2005. A tribute written from the heart to the greatest photographer of his time.

Degas – Photographer. July 1, 2005. A man with great vision from the early days of photography – and the last days of painting.

Quality time with Ansel. July 8th, 2005. Recounting my visit to the pretentious Weston Gallery in Pebble Beach. I still smile about the experience today.

Pandora’s Box. February 2, 2006. Because anticipation is so much more fun than getting there and this day marked my final move away from a photographic life pretty much dominated by Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar and their magical products. Something better had finally come along.

Eliot Porter – The Color of Wildness. February 8, 2006. A favorite photographer. A favorite book.

A Break in the Storm. March 4, 2006. Told as it happened. A wonderful moment with gorgeous lighting.

Walker Evans. March 17, 2006. Another personal favorite with a crystal clear vision.

The most fun I ever had taking pictures May 18, 2006. A sort of fond au revoir to the Leica and the great times we enjoyed together.

In search of Edward Hopper. June 14, 2006. An American painter who greatly influenced how I see.

The Equipment:

A simple story. Starting with a veritable cornucopia of film equipment in 35mm and medium formats, all was sold to make way for but two digital cameras. Canon’s superb EOS 5D replaced all the medium format bulk and Panasonic’s jewel-like Lumix LX1 saw the Leicas off with aplomb. And lots of nice eBay shoppers saw to it that my net investment in the new gear was absolutely zero. Well, to tell the truth, I still have some money left over….

Apple really did ‘Think Different’ when they created Aperture, the photo processing application for regular people without advanced computer degrees. Drop the pictures in, press a few keys and prints or web pages emerge. Cataloging and retrieval are similarly simple. The best software product for photographers ever, not least because you can only use it on an Apple, the best hardware for photographers.

When it comes to Really Large Prints, Hewlett Packard paved the way with its fine DesignJet, at half the price of the competing Epson. It’s great to see HP is back with a good CEO rather than a film star wannabe.

Underlying all the problem-free creation of printed and electronic images is the sold underpinning of Apple’s Macintosh computer technology. It bears repeating that no self-respecting photographer who values his time should be suffering with Microsoft Windows. The name alone – ‘Operating System’ – is a joke. What is your time worth?

If Aperture was the most enabling software of the year, then ImageAlign must be the most ingenious. With this bit of magic you can take the rather silly looking results from Canon’s full frame fisheye and have the equivalent of a 12mm hyper-wide angle lens at one third of the cost of Canon’s exotic 14mm rectilinear offering. Without ImageAlign pictures taken with the fisheye are even more tedious to behold than those of your kids. At least the grandparents like the latter.

The Business:

I have trashed Kodak mercilessly on more than one occasion over the past year. Part of my ire is that of a jilted lover – I used little else but Kodak’s world class materials for nigh on forty years. It is always painful to see a loved one leave, and sometimes pain turns to anger and remorse. Especially when the loved one does lots of stupid things. You lash out. Guilty as charged.

At the same time it became clear that world domination in photographic equipment was far from restricted to Canon and Nikon. Competition improves the breed and the sheer number of new hardware makers is encouraging to see. We need some full frame digital sensor competition for Canon (the 5D is ridiculously overpriced for lack of any competition), but I cannot believe Nikon or Sony or Panasonic or Casio or Samsung won’t get there in the next twelve months. All photographers will win as prices drop and performance rises. Be assured that Canon’s next 35mm full frame sensor, whatever its pixel count, will be the final toll of the bell for medium format equipment.

The most inspiring event:

Like so many earlier photographers making the switch, I found conversion to digital liberating and artistically inspiring. Photography truly is fun again, with the percentage of time spent processing falling to an all time low, and more time available for the searching out of subjects.

The best vendor:

B&H in New York. No contest. Not only are you assured that an order placed on Monday will arrive at your California doorstep on Friday, when they say ‘In Stock’ they mean it.

The worst vendors:

A tie.

Light Impressions, which I think of as Dark Depressions. If you want to mount some prints before Christmas, better get your order for mats and mounting board in now.

A book vendor calling itself Photoeye is tied for last place with the boys at DD. Slick web site, with innumerable emails about their latest book offerings. Specials on this and that. The only snag is that I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the book you order is out of stock and likely to remain so for weeks or months. I know. And don’t, whatever you do, get on their email list, as clicking ‘Remove Me’ has no discernible effect. What finally worked for me was an email laced with questions concerning the owners’ parentage. Stick with Amazon.

Here’s to the next twelve months.

Into the sun

Photographs, Photography

That approach seems to account for a high percentage of my pictures.

It’s second nature, I suppose, but somewhere up to half of my outdoor pictures seem to be taken into the sun. I just love the effects that renders. Modern near flare free lenses make things much easier than in days past of course, and even that Canon fisheye, where it’s pretty easy to end up with the sun in the frame, produces but one small flare spot, easily removed in Photoshop. Overall image contrast seems unaffected. Lenses have never been better, and in the case of many of the Canon range, more affordable.

Case in point, I just sold my Leica 90mm Apo Summicron Asph lens for more than you would pay for any but the most exotic lens from Canon. Is the Leica lens that much better? Well, you cannot tell from prints…. Whatever that great Leica lens gains in optical quality is scarificed on the altar of dated technology known as film. The full frame sensor in the 5D just holds up much better once reproduced size gets seriously large as long as you err on the side of underexposure to avoid blowing out the highlights.

Father and Child. Canon EOS 5D, 24-105mm at 70mm, ISO 200, TLR monochrome action in PS.

Web sites for photographs

Photographs, Photography, Software

Keeping it simple is the best solution

In a spare moment the other day I was meandering through a selection of web sites using the remarkable Firefox browser plug-in Stumble Upon. Two things struck me. First, just how much work has been put into many of the photography web sites out there and the growing prevalence of Macromedia Flash animation effects.

Indeed, it sometimes seems that the author’s prowess in writing animation code takes pride of place over the photographic content. As site after site made me wait while all the animation code loaded – and that’s with a fast connection – I found myself simply clicking though Flash sites in serach of something simpler. The reality is that if you are forced to wait while all this digital noise ensues, your likely interest in looking at pictures fades away. And just imagine having to sit through this every time you go there. Hardly condusive to repeat visits.

Now I’m not saying that my web site avoids Flash simply because I don’t like it. In fact, I wouldn’t know how to write Flash code if you paid me. Heck, I just learned how to make clickable page references open in a new browser window! Rather, I have focused the design of my web site on simple, clean lines, with consistent presentation of all pages. I adopt a white ‘Apple look’ thanks to using the Better HTML plug-in for iPhoto ’05 or ’06 to generate the web pages (I use the DP Polaframe template) and have a very simple menu system to access these.

A while back I learned how to have all the choices in my web site menu reside in one file which is referenced by each page of thumbnails, so if changes are made, I need only make the change once in a central menu for it to appear everywhere.

I also try to constrain each pictorial to no more than three pages of thumbnails, eight to a page. In this way any photo can be accessed with just a couple of clicks. Further, the DP Polaframe template has a neat feature so that when you click anywhere on a full sized picture, you are automatically taken to the next picture.

When I first started my web site some five years ago, it suffered from ‘menu creep’. Selections were constantly being added and maintenance was not fun. I knew it was time to make a change when that most dreaded of choices – ‘Latest Work’ – made an appearance. You see this often on web sites. I never click on it. After all, as I don’t know the chronology of the ‘earlier’ work, what possible relevance could ‘latest’ have to my interest or enlightennment? No, ‘Latest Work’ had to go.

Then I agonised over the picture used on the home page. It has variously been clickable, static, many pictures or just one. I have settled for one static picture which I change every month or so, as the whim takes me. And clicking on it does nothing.

Picture size is another dilemma. First, large images have to be in files no more than 200kB in size to load quickly. Attention spans are short in the modern world, and rightly so. Secondly, make them much over 800 pixels wide or 600 pixels tall, and you will cause someone with a laptop viewing agony – the picture should not have to be scrolled to be completely visible. Obvious, but I got this one wrong a lot in the early days.

Finally, I decided to scrap all reference to equipment or technical information regarding the pictures. I may write lots about that sort of thing here, but it’s simply irrelevant when showing your work. If you want that sort of thing, there a link to this blog in the web site menu.

So that’s how, through trial and error, my web site came to look the way it does. I hope you like the pictures, but even if you do not, I trust you will enjoy clicking around.

Main stairway, Hearst Castle. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm Fisheye, Image Align, PS CS2, TLR Orange filter

Canon 15mm Fisheye lens – Part II

Lenses, Software

Not only wider than the 14mm, it more than holds its own

I dropped by Hearst Castle again today to put the Canon Fisheye lens through its paces. The ultra wide angle of view, equivalent to a 12mm full frame lens using ImageAlign – see Part I – is ideal for interiors of the magnificent rooms, aided by the noise free sensor in the EOS 5D which allows ISO to be cranked up to 800 with impugnity. Something that is required as the Castle prohibits the use of flash and tripods.

I took Tour 3 this time, which visits the bedrooms used by Hearst and his many guests – the likes of Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn and David Niven. On the way we stopped by the large outdoor pool only to find, to my amazement, that it had been drained! Actually no bad thing as you could see the beautiful Carrara marble floor in broad sunlight. Evidently the pool had sprung a leak and workers were busy patching it up for the Hearst family’s annual summer visit, something they negotiated with the State of California when they donated the property years ago.

Well, it was a moment’s work to take a snap from the exact same vantage point I had used a few weeks ago when a fellow photographer had allowed me to try his very costly 14mm Canon ‘L’ ultra-wide lens. In the pictures below, you can see just how much wider the fisheye is after correcting for barrel distortion with the ImageAlign plug-in in Photoshop.

Canon EOS 5D, 14mm Canon ‘L’

Canon EOS 5D, 15mm Canon fisheye, Image Align

Chromatic aberration had been minimized in both images using the lens correction filter in Photoshop CS2.

While I was processing these, I thought it might be instructive to compare actual pixel-sized extracts of each image. Granted, the lighting conditions varied slightly, but here are screen shots of the white marble statue at center left – the print size would be over 40″ wide:

Canon EOS 5D, 14mm Canon ‘L’, actual pixels

Canon EOS 5D, 15mm Canon fisheye, Image Align, actual pixels

Fairly compelling evidence that the Fisheye + ImageAlign more than holds its own. The smaller size of the statue in the second picture is accounted for by the wider field of view of the fisheye lens.

How do the lenses compare directly into the sun? Both are simply outstanding. The original of the 14mm image had one internal reflection at the top, which I removed in processing. In the following fisheye image, the sun is in the frame of the original, disappearing after use of ImageAlign. You can see one internal reflection artifact above and to the right of the statue’s head.

The god Mars. Carrara marble. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm Canon fisheye, Image Align.

Indoors? No problem. Both lenses are bright at f/2.8, making composition easy.

Hearst Castle. The indoor pool. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm Canon fisheye, Image Align. ISO 1600

Hearst grew up in a time when the incandescent light bulb was just coming to market and never got over his wonder at the magic of electricity. This fascination translated into a near total absence of lampshades in the Castle’s guest rooms. That is as Hearst wanted it. Opportunity enough to try the fisheye’s handling of light sources in the frame at full aperture.

Guest room at Hearst Castle. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm Canon fisheye, Image Align. f/2.8. ISO 800

The bare bulbs are rendered with a gentle glow – not perfect, but more than acceptable in the circumstances – this room is very dark as are most, by design. There is no air conditioning in Hearst Castle.

For Part III of this review, click here.