Arnold Newman: Evil

Photographers, Photographs

Arnold Newman got it right.

Some three years ago I wrote about Karsh’s wonderful portrait of Churchill, a portrait which is very much a confirmation of the man’s qualities. The unyielding, courageous bulldog. To say that it had an impact on me is an understatement. Our son is named Winston.

But there’s another portrait of a powerful man which needs to be mentioned, though the subject in this case is at the opposite end of the moral scale. It’s by Arnold Newman.

While Newman excelled at powerful pictures of powerful men, never did he surpass the portrayal of evil than when he took the picture of the exemplar of that trait, Alfried Krupp.

Now quite what the Krupp Steel PR machine was thinking of when they had a famous Jew photograph a famous Nazi is hard to understand, but Newman did not let them down. Krupp, for those not up on him, used slave labor to produce the Nazi machines of war in his steel works and, worse, got away with it.


The personification of evil

A magnificent picture which need no words from me.

Tracking warranties

Software

iCal to the fore!

I explained – and quantified – why the arithmetic of extended warranties on consumer gee-gaws made it a slam dunk for the writers of the insurance and a losing proposition for the buyers here. So photographers should know when the warranty expires on their latest camera or lens.

Machines fail when very new or very old/very used. No secret there. Look at light bulbs. Cars. Cameras.

Which brings me to tracking warranties.

As I have recently written, my trust in Apple quality control has been severely shaken over the past year when my new MacBook, Extreme router and wireless keyboard all broke down during the (measly) one year warranty period. In each case I had to scratch around to determine whether the first year of ownership had passed. Apple is a key photographic tool vendor for this user.

Then it struck me. Might as well use Apple’s own tools to track their failures and warranties, so now any time I buy a new toy, the warranty expiration date goes right into iCal with an email reminder to me. And if I do want to check, I simply search iCal for the name of the gadget.

So, Toshiba, I’m not about to forget about the three year warranty on that new hard drive. No way.

To make matters easy, all the receipts go in a three ring binder in chronological order. Easy.

And if I do want to check if something fails, or find the date of the invoice for a warranty claim, I simply search iCal for the name of the gadget – Apple-F in iCal.

So watch out, Apple, Toshiba, Canon, Panasonic, big screen TV maker, et al. You are being watched. Though, in fairness to all but Apple in that list, these manufacturers’ products have been failure free.

There is one far more important reason however, and it is a life saver.

This technique has saved half my net worth on more occasions than I can name. Now that I no longer have a secretary charged with reminding me of these things. To be safe, I put in vital dates twice, with two week and one day reminders. Who said computers don’t save you money?

Lightroom and round trips

Lightroom

To Photoshop, that is.

While the slightly up-tilted camera distortion is not that bad here, a quick round trip (Command-E on a Mac) from Lightroom to Photoshop CS2 and a few seconds with the ImageAlign plug-in sets things dead straight. Command-S in CS2 saves the corrected version as a TIFF file in Lightroom. ImageAlign is not just for de-fishing fisheye snaps!


Cropping of the perspective-corrected result in Lightroom – a superbly implemented tool.

Here’s the before and after – a subtle change but worthwhile:

Here’s the final result. Magical late sunlight. California sky.


Tough neighborhood. 5D, 20mm, 1/750, f/11. ISO 250.

You can see some lens vignetting but I left it uncorrected as it heightens the center of interest. My shadow works – at least for me!

The power of RAW

Lightroom

Two stops under does the trick.

Because very high dynamic range pictures will result in burned out highlights, notwithstanding the fine CMOS sensor in the Canon 5D, I underexposed this one two stops (spot metered on the sky) then brought the detail in the foreground back with the processing controls in Lightroom. Here’s the Before and After – a very well engineered function in Lightroom allowing all sorts of comparisons.


Lone oak. 5D, 20mm. 1/4000, f/8, ISO 250. RAW.

As the controls in Lightroom indicate, I had to add substantial noise reduction and sharpening. As the sun was directly behind the tree, regular exposure would have made the branches unrecoverable – sort of like halation in films of days past. This magnitude of correction could not possibly be done in a Jpg file. The histogram testifies to the complete absence of burned out highlights – there’s no crowding at the right end.


Adjustments made in Lightroom.

I also boosted the Tone Curve substantially in the shadows – this control is perfectly implemented in Lightroom – I used the small pointer tool, which you can see at the top left of the following screen picture,allowed me to see the tone curve in the shadow range by placing the pointer in the foreground of the picture. This helped me determine where to adjust. The dotted line shows the reference starting point.

Here’s the final result after slight straightening of the horizon – the sunlight was quite blinding and it was not easy to see much in the viewfinder!

Once stopped down the rather ‘iffy’ Canon 20mm lens is free from color fringing, so no lens corrections were needed.

Nine West 57th Street

Photographs

About arrogant cops.

It is easy to dislike policemen. They personify the old saying that “A little power is a dangerous thing”.

And while the donut and coffee vendors may rejoice at their number, the reality is that these individuals share the same demographic profile with those they seek to protect us from. Criminals.

My first encounter with an American cop, literally on my first day in New York, was on Sixth Avenue, when I asked one of the city’s finest for directions. Finest at what, they never say. Maybe it’s consumption of vast quantities of donuts, judging by the waistline of the average NYPD man in uniform?

“Move on bud”. That was this guy’s idea of giving directions. This fool probably thought he was in central casting.

And while New York’s greatest crooks go unpunished – they work on Wall Street – it’s hardly any wonder when they are being policed by a squad that has to remove its shoes and socks to count to twenty. Not the NYPD. The SEC.

So this snap brings back pleasant memories of what it’s like to be well distant from Manhattan’s fabled streets.


9 West 57th Street. 1982. Pentax ME Super, 40mm ‘Pancake’, Kodachrome 64

I carried that little Pentax and its even smaller 40mm ‘pancake’ lens – so named because it was almost dead flat on the body when in place – everywhere. It was my street camera, acquired right after I witnessed my first chain snatching in the subway. The woman’s screams still resonate in my ears. The Pentax was my “I-don’t-care-if-they-steal-it” camera while my precious Leica M3 stayed at home for the duration. Needless to add, the Pentax was never stolen. Must have been my insouciant attitude.

Nine West 57th Street has this huge numeral, a twenty foot tall, red ‘9’ on the sidewalk. God alone knows who they had to bribe to allow that, but I suspect the cops’ union was on the list.

In exchange, this arrogant policeman has parked his cruiser right next to the fire hydrant. At least the car is pointing the right way.

Yup, a true New York cop.

You think Chicago cops are more corrupt? Nah! As the great P G Wodehouse once put it “At least when you buy a Chicago cop, he stays bought”.

And California where their cars are cynically emblazoned “To Protect and to Serve”? How about early retirement from speeding tickets and crooked promotions which double the retirement check – at age 50? The French gave us our constitution. Maybe a new Reign of Terror would now be in order?

March 10, 2008 – Fact is stranger than fiction:

That Hammer of Wall Street, the Über cop himself, no less than the Governor of New York, has just ‘fessed up to being involved in a call girl ring. From Eliot Ness to Eliot Mess in one day. Then again, he would have denied all of the above in any case. You shouldn’t. At least the self-righteous schmuck ended his career at a Renaissance Hotel.