Public schooling

Photographs

Urban art at its worst.

Walk south along that chicest of San Francisco’s streets, Fillmore, and turn west on McAllister and you are suddenly in an area which feels like a concentration camp. Lined with housing estates for the poor, each comes with a healthy ration of locked gates, barbed wire and surveillance cameras.

Then, just when you though things could get no worse as you approach City Hall, something like this confronts you:


Lefty. G1, 35mm, f/5/5, 1/400, ISO 100

An appropriate tribute to one of the greatest government crimes of our times. Public schooling. This mural suggests that this chap finally cracked and set about himself with a heavy object, doing the students justice. Can’t say I blame him. Just imagine turning up to school only to be confronted with this daily ….

The Panasonic G1 and GH1 sensors

Micro Four-Thirds

Sensor design is still in its early days.

A friend of the blog, has forwarded a fascinating technical piece which addresses changes in digital sensor design and suggests the oligopoly held by Canon and Nikon, who account for 78% of the DSLR market, is likely to weaken.

Most significantly, the article provides evidence that the Panasonic sensor in the GH1 (the G1 with video added) is anything but the same as the one in the G1. I would hate to have to compete with a behemoth like Panasonic which can roll out the first workable Electronic View Finder in the G1 only to completely redesign its sensor for the GH1 released shortly thereafter.

I quote: “Upon receiving the DMC-GH1, we fully expected to see a fabrication process similar to the DMC-G1, but partnered with a new design to add HD video functionality. While still early in our analysis, we have been pleasantly surprised to see Panasonic switch fabs and radically re-design their fabrication process and pixel architecture. ”

By the way, the GH1’s sensor is oversize compared to the one in the G1 so that when the user changes aspect ratios (16:9, 3:2 or 4:3) the total pixels used stay much the same.

The article also addresses innovations by Samsung in the sensors used in the fine Samsung/Pentax DSLR cameras and suggests that Canon is sitting on its laurels for now. In fairness, I have to add that’s no bad thing given how wonderful the FF sensor in my 5D is, but I have never known complacency to be a winning strategy.

Click the chart for more.

For those who thought sensor designs had peaked this piece will reinforce the fact that we are still in the early stages of innovation which, coupled with the new breed of Electronic View Finders, will make the next decade a Golden Era for new and increasingly responsive camera designs. In fact I expect that a decade hence, the pentaprism and flapping mirror will have disappeared from all but the most basic cameras (and the Leica DSLR, of course), confined to Rube Goldberg’s (Heath Robinson’s for UK readers) garbage bin where they belong.


On the BART. The G1’s antiquated sensor will do fine for now!
G1, 31mm, f/5.4, 1/80, ISO 800

Spirit of the Sixties

Photographs

Some people never grow up.

I suspect this is the sort of thing you can only see on the West Coast, where you can still occasionally find hippies driving around in VW Microbuses.


G1, 30mm, f/5.3, 1/1600, ISO100

Someone really should tell these folks the Sixties ended a while back, valid as their sentiment may be.

Spotted, where else?, in San Francisco.

How not to succeed

Photography

Forget the degree.

I have always thought of a degree in photography as being about as worthwhile a concept as a doctorate in professional wrestling. Either can teach you technique but neither has significant bearing on your chances of success.

A friend’s commitment to the school of hard knocks when it comes to making your way in photography got me thinking. Are not most of our great commercial and fashion photographers graduates of the same school, having started as grips and photographers’ assistants?

Look at the curriculum for any photography education culminating in a degree and chances are that :

  • It will be taught by an old guy no one has heard of with many credentials after his name. He’s teaching because he failed to make money in his field of purported expertise.
  • It will pride itself on requiring the student “….to devote substantial time to traditional darkroom work”. Using film. But of course. The mystery of the antique.

The first point is obvious. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

The second is the primary reason why you should run, not walk, from such a course of study, and is a requirement imposed by the dated and unsuccessful on their modern charges. It’s not too far to go to say that this is a crime, because it will significantly hurt the student’s chances of success.



Current curricula extracts.

The high fallutin’ reasons put forward for this ‘darkroom experience’ idiocy is that the student will learn to understand the photographic process from first principles. Or some such rot.

Given that the only thing you can hope to learn in a classroom is technique, then the rational approach in the modern, fast paced and hyper competitive world is one which focuses on the best and fastest tools out there. No student messing about with chemicals and safety lights can hope to learn a fraction of that which the one with a decent DSLR and a computer running Lightroom or Photoshop will. While the first is still worrying about putting up the blinds and locking the door, the second has looked at fifty images in twelve variations each and learned mightily from the iterative process. At the end of just one day’s work Student Number One has maybe produced one image which he is still waiting on to dry. Number Two has some six hundred to choose from. Which is going to learn more?


Xanadu. Four variations – forty seconds.
5D, 24mm, f/6.7, 1/125, ISO400, processed in Lightroom

So go to class and learn technique but if that involves ‘traditional darkroom work’ or ‘traditional media’ run like hell. And if you believe that traditional darkroom work will make you a better photographer then I can only ask why you didn’t try a horse and buggy before learning to drive?

As for learning to see, no classroom will ever teach you that.