Keld rediscovered

Photographers

The Great Dane is back.

I first learned of the sparse, severe work of Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen from early issues of Leica Fotografie magazine from the 1950s. His focus on carefully composed details of ships, ropes, man made items for the most part, was appealing for its clarity of vision and very sparing use of color. It has aged a lot better than Danish furniture.

While ‘lifestyle’ magazines leave me cold for the most part – why would you pay for marketing after all? – there’s one that is head and shoulders above the others. Indeed, as the only way to get it is to be the registered owner of one of their products, its hardly marketing at all. After all, you have already paid up. And the best thing about their products is that no one will know what you have. If you like gauche Rolexes, look elsewhere. That magazine is put out by the makers of one of the very few mechanical items more lovely to behold than an early M Leica. It is called Patek Philippe and I urge you to get a Patek if for no other reason than to enjoy the publication:

Most noteworthy in its editorial policy is the frequent focus on art and photography. The currrent issue (Volume 11, Number 7) has, in its large pages, superb portolios of the work of Don McCullin (of Viet Nam war photography fame) and Keld Helmer-Petersen. An equally fascinating article looks at modern makers of sundials. Add substantive pieces on French sculptor Camille Claudel and Francois Junot, a Swiss maker of mechanical objects (see the cover, above), and you have content not likely to be found in the pages of some nouveau riche-targeted hack job put out by ‘luxury’ car makers extolling the virtues of their plastic upholstery and the latest in internal decorating.

While Keld-Helmer Petersen made his living as a commercial photographer, it’s his 1948 book ‘122 Colour Photographs’, which I am lucky to have in the library at home, that made him famous. When everyone was working in monochrome, he turned to color because, in his words “You have to think of colour as form….”. It helps that the interview is conducted by a famous photographer, the Englishman Martin Parr, so it is neither banal nor trite.

It looks as if his ‘rediscovery’ may encourage Petersen to publish again and I urge you to place the book on your short list.

And just in case you fall for Patek’s tag line “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after if for the next generation”, let me disabuse you of that belief. The reality is that it’s like owning a rangefinder Leica, meaning a cleaning and overhaul every five years at horrendous cost. These are intensely mechanical devices, after all. The next generation had better hope I don’t go belly up if it wants mine (the Patek, not the Leicas; I’m selling the latter). Leicas get obsoleted. Pateks do not.

The best $140 you will ever spend

Photography

Lacie’s 250gB Porsche hard drive.

It’s fifty years since IBM shipped the first computer hard disk drive. Its platters were some 24″ in diameter and it weighed one ton, requiring delivery by fork lift. There were 24 disks in the pack and you can see them here:

It stored 4.4 megabytes. Suffice it to say that only fat bankers could afford them for an annual lease payment of $35,000, or $400,000 in today’s money.

When asked why they didn’t increase the capacity for another three years, IBM responded that Marketing had concluded that there was no way they could sell something larger, as no one would ever need it….

Today that drive woud not store one photograph taken on a Canon 5D digital camera. My iPod stores almost fourteen thousand times as much data.

You can buy Lacie’s 250gB desktop hard drive for $140 from Lacie. Products from other reputable manufacturer’s abound – I mention Lacie because it works for me, comes in fast Firewire for use with Macs and is almost bearable to look at. You don’t need a fork lift to install it. And you will sleep well at night knowing everything is backed up. If Apple’s contention that only 4% of users back-up daily is correct, chances are you are one of those who does not. And with all photographs being digital nowadays (even film users have to scan their originals for printing or back-up) those originals are simply too precious to lose.

And don’t wait for Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard, with its built in back-up functions, to ship next spring. Buy good back-up software like SuperDuper! now. Want to bet that you will not crash over the next two quarters? There are other products but Lacie’s Silverkeeper (now ‘1-Click’) has never worked for me and my copy of Dantz’s Retrospect not only failed all the time (and Dantz could not/would not help), the software was written by someone with a grasp of English comparable to that enjoyed by the Hispanic laborers who pick the grapes every year in my vineyard.

Storage is cheap. Good pictures are not.

Digital tampering

Photography

Science in the service of truth.

I wrote recently of the need to Be sceptical in the face of a dishonest press corps with questionable ethics, illustrating the piece with the crudely altered pictures taken by a schmuck with a political agenda working for Reuters.

Well, someone has decided to apply science to the process of uncovering digital fakes, and more can be found in this excellent web site. That someone is a member of the Dartmouth faculty (though I recognize that’s no guarantee of integrity) named Hany Farid and he is to be commended for his work. It’s instructive to realize that the many illustrations on his site of tampered ‘news’ pictures are from across the political spectrum and academia. No party or ideology, it seems, is above blame ot guilt. Anyway, Dr. Farid sounds like the real thing – check out his research papers to get an idea of how he goes about the discovery process. Here’s someone applying a forensic approach to photographic crime, which seems entirely appropriate.

Some digital camera makers are now beginning to offer ‘original digital signatures’ as part of the information stored with digital images. Sounds like these should become required equipment for the staffs of major magazines.

True, cheating is as old as the world – Farid’s examples amusingly include Lincoln’s head on another politician’s body (as if Lincoln needed any help!) – but it’s nice to read that someone is trying to institutionalize the process of discovery using mathematical techniques. Nor does he restrict his work to still pictures, for he addresses video fakes (no, not newscasters, but that’s pretty close – that’s a subset that should see elimination of humans, replaced with inexpensive cyborgs, with no loss to viewers and considerable financial savings to the networks) in one of his papers.

Enhanced QTVR interactive features

QTVR

CubicConnector does the trick.

That rather intimidating title is nothing more than the addition of ‘click here’ functionality to a QTVR movie/panorama.

This is best illustrated by the enhanced version of the 360 degree panorama of my home theater which has graced these pages before.

Once the QuickTime image loads – click below – cursor over any of the pictures on the walls and the cursor will change to a finger pointing to a globe. Click and you will be take to a high quality image of the picture. Click the ‘back’ button on your browser to return to the panorama.

Click here

This is done using CubicConnector which allows ‘hotspots’ to be defined in a panorama. Each hotspot can then be connected to an image – not good as the file size swells and the image is distorted – or to the URL of an image on your web site. I used the latter approach as it maintains the relatively small size of the QTVR movie and gives you complete control over the size and quality of the image displayed in response to the mouse click. The CubicConnector software is so well designed that the process is intuitive and the whole thing – including learning time – took me one hour to do, which involved creation of fifteen hotspots, one for each hanging picture.

Click on the arrow at the lower left of the QuickTime screen and you can toggle hotspots on or off so that you can see where they are:

You can still zoom in or out in the QuickTime panorama using the Shift and Control keys on your keyboard. The panorama was made using HDR techniques; the photographs on the walls are all straight prints as I had no idea what HDR was when I took them!

In addition to a hotspot for every picture on the walls, try clicking on the snuggle ball to the lower right of the projection screen. The owner was away when this was taken. And, yes, the box he is sitting on contained none other than the Canon 5D used to take the pictures for the panorama, but not one of those on the walls.

Joseph Sudek

Book reviews, Photographers

A master of lyrical monochrome.

There is so much to like in the Aperture book ‘Josef Sudek – Poet of Prague’ that it’s hard to know where to begin. Sudek (1896-1976) spent nearly his whole life in Czechoslovakia. From 1940, inspired by contact prints from large negatives he devoted himself to this way of working, using a cumbersome large format camera and tripod.

None of this was made easier by the fact that he had lost his right arm as an army soldier in WWI, yet no allowances need be made in looking at his wonderful pictures. What a life. Surviving the first war only to see his country dismembered by the greedy Germans, Poles and Hungarians while cowardly French and English politicians stood by and watched. Surviving twice more, this time WWII and the Cold War, and finally enjoying the fame that was deservedly his late in life.

The reproductions are superb, none finer than those of his series of St. Vitus Cathedral taken in the late 1920s. The narrative is outstanding, written by people who both knew and worked with him.

My favorite quote of his, on page 44, goes as follows:

“It would have bored me extremely to have restricted myself to one specific direction for my whole life, for example, landscape photography. A photographer should never impose such restrictions upon himself.”

The book can be bought for 50% of its original hardcover price, which was $40, from Powell’s Books and should be in every photographer’s library.