Fine Tuning

The image above is one I showed a few days ago. I made a print, put it up in the office and lived with it for a few days. I wasn't happy - oh, it's nice enough, but what I imagined isn't what the print shows. Too much clutter and distraction. I see the image as being about the three light coloured bumpers, looking a bit like the reverse of some Japanese character painted on paper. I tried darkening the rest of the print - didn't like it. I wondered about whether there was some kind of curve that would keep the darkest parts of the print showing some detail but the midtones pushed way way down and leaving the highlights where they were.

Today I tried this and though I didn't record the curve, trust me, it's a bizarre looking one


and this is a reproduction of roughly how it looked. Normally this would produce a very unnatural looking result with incredibly muddy tones, but guess what, it did exactly what I wanted.

I wondered though, whether I should help the print glow just a bit. Normally I'm not a great fan of diffused highlights. This used to be a feature of soft focus lenses, now it's simply a Photoshop trick, and frankly, overdone, but perhaps if it didn't hit you like a sledge hammer, it might be ok, and certainly it fit with my plans for this particular image.

I duplicated the image in another layer, then used gaussian blur of around 20 pixels, changed the blending mode to lighten (so we get the flare, not the spread of dark pixels). I then used the adjustment layer opacity slider to tone down the effect till I thought it reasonable. In fact it may not show enough on screen, though it will help if you take the final image and click on it to have the larger version show in it's own window.




Oh, and there's several dozen minor changes made - I cloned out the numbers pasted on a bumper in the bottom middle of the image, removed a number of scratches and spots that looked more like print defects than part of the image, and in several steps lightened the third light bumper on the right to make it stand out equally to the vertical one and the one on the left.

I'm quite pleased with the print - certainly a lot more than with the original. The glow is subtle - you can't actually see it in the details, it just exists. Exactly what I wanted.

Life Of A Pro

Luminous Landscape a few years ago featured an article written by Doug Brown, largely about his stitching techniques in action photography. As this is still an unusual technique, it remains interesting, but what I liked recently on rereading the article is the description of a working pro photographer and what he goes through to get the shot. From that point of view, it's quite revealing and I thought you might enjoy (re) reading it.

Lens Resolution

As a landscape photographer, it's important to me that lenses be of good quality, right to the corners. As I use a 16 MP camera, any flaws in the lens tend to show, should I some day go to an even better camera (say the 1Ds4) then it will be an even bigger issue.

That said, 95% of the images I take are shot at f11 or f16, perhaps 0.5% at 5.6 or wider.

For me, looking at resolution figures for wide open are pretty pointless. Looking at peak resolution, often at around f 5.6 isn't really all that much help either.

More practical is looking at f8 to f16 since those are the working f stops.

Other types of photography have different requirements. Someone shooting theatre or sports might well need maximum resolution wide open. They may well however not care much about resolution in the corners where I obcess about it.

Some lenses that perform very poorly in the corners do so because of a focus shift (ie. not a flat field) rather than simple outright low resolution - the 17-40 L Canon lens is known for this, focusing closer in the corners than in the middle. Stopping down and adding depth of field may well bring the corners within the area of decent sharpness.

So, as you can see, it's important to 'read' resolution charts and graphs and tests with your own needs in mind.

You'd think that once you stop down pretty far, all lenses tend to be equal. While there is some truth to this, diffraction being what it is; the reality is that complex lenses don't follow simple rules and diffraction does in fact vary from lens to lens and it can be important to check lens performance stopped well down.

That said, you can sure see what happens to resolution when you really stop down - say f 32 on a full frame camera or even f11 on a thumbnail sized sensor on a point and shoot.

Lens flaws like barrel distortion and even chromatic aberration are getting easier to correct, even with Photoshop and Camera Raw so are less of an issue than they were once. Sometiems though the distortions in a wide angle zoom are complex, featuring both barrel distortion in the middle and pin cushion at the outsides (as the lens designer tries to compensate for the barrel distortion) and these complex distortions require outside help from PTLens or DXO etc..

Long and short, consider your needs before comparing two lenses - if lens A is dramatically better than Lens B but only in ways that aren't useful to you, you may be picking the wrong lens, paying too much or carrying too much weight.

Radiant Vista

I have mentioned Radiant Vista in the past but I think it a good enough resource that it's worth mentioning again. I popped over last night and listened to his comments on a submitted image, two young people sitting in what looks like warm late day light, the fellow taking a picture, the young woman staring into the distance (presumably at what he's photographing. My initial impression was 'nice picture' but Craig was able to find a goodly number of things to improve the image, all of which, in hind site; made sense and improved the image. Sometimes we can't improve an image because we simply haven't seen examples of the kinds of improvements that could be made. My next book is going to address that but in the mean time, Radiant Vista is an excellent resource for pointing out how to improve already good images.

Productivity

Just how productive are we meant to be?

I had a three day weekend (we take every second Friday off) and could have gone to th3 mountains, visited the badlands or generally done some really productive shooting. Instead I was feeling stressed and not sleeping well (long story - too much on my plate) and had little ambition to do anything. I'm sure this is a relatively common phenomenon and in fact there are lots of other reasons to be less productive than normal - the muse deserts you, family need your time, work is too busy, etc.

This raises the whole question of how many good photographs we are meant to produce. there are some photographers who are really productive. They tend to work in fashion, figure and colour landscape. After a while all their work tends to look the same and I don't envy their productivity.

I suspect that many serious 'fine art' photograhers would be happy to die (but not for a while) with a portfolio of 3 dozen really strong images. Problem is, unless you plan to die very young, this translates into about one image a year. Many of us would be so discouraged by such a poor output that we'd give up.

It's the decent but not wonderful images that keep us out there week after week, trying for the wonderful and not quite getting there. Like the carrot leading the pony, we need to at least get a sniff of glory every once in a while, even if we hardly ever get to eat the whole thing.

In terms of productivity, all any of us really needs is just enough success to keep us going, to give us some confidence that with a bit of effort, wonderful is at least possible. Just how many good but not wonderful images we need to keep us going clearly will vary from person to person, not to mention how good is good.

Unless we are selling our work on an ongoing assignment driven basis (in which case none of the above applies), productivity really doesn't enter into it. You might be jealous of someone who can come home from a weekend's shooting with 12 good images while you are lucky to do one quarter of that in a month, but really it doesn't matter, so long as you see enough progress, enough success to motivate you to go back out again.

Log

Body Panels

In an industrial part of town, these were stacked next to the road in a large pile and I had fun composing using both shape and colour. It vaguely reminds me of the Union Jack.

My first reaction was that pity I cut off that light coloured panel, top middle, though as it would have spoiled the two corners had I included it and as it doesn't look out of place cropped, it's one of those compromises in which you have to throw away the good to eliminate the bad, and the image has to stand as is.

Just Wandering

WARNING! Rant Ahead

Why is it that photographers and galleries insist on displaying work in tiny on screen images? Is there really such a market for 800 pixel representations of the image that the photographer must fear their theft? Surely it's more likely that all it will do is create advertizing for their work, for free?

I think we hit a new low in the link below. I'd seen the work of this Italian photographer in the latest Black and White. The photographer has no website but there was a gallery for his work, in San Francisco no less - here's their idea of viewing pleasure!

Nile Tuzun Gallery

See, I just gave them some advertizing. Mind you, the images are so small you are lucky if you can even see what it's about.

Slim Pickings

The best I could do yesterday in a walk-about.I did find that using exposure blending worked well, producing undistorted results quite painlessly.

I set up the 40D to shoot three images with +- 2 stops as well as correct. I took the images right from Bridge into Photomatix Pro Standalone for exposure blending, minor adjustments to the blend point and saturation and save the output as 16 bit TIFF.

All that was required then was to edit the images in Photoshop as usual. I think this is the technique to use for sunny day shooting. Will have to try it on landscapes too.

breaking Rules

Over the centuries, artists, writers and composers have broken the current and accepted rules of their art. Most often this engenders howls of outrage, sometimes simple neglect, and occasionally some enthusiastic responses from a limited audience.

In many cases, the lack of response was well deserved and they are never heard from again, some gain momentum and become the leading edge of progress in the art and become famous in their lifetime (Picasso) and other times, their audience isn't ready for them and only years later does their work become appreciated, often after their death - talk about lousy timing).

Most of the really outstanding artists learn to work within the rules before learning to break them and I have written before that I think this is the problem with much of the avant garde work we see published - it's made by people who didn't earn their fame.

That said, what about you and me, about people who have learned to work within the rules, who have mastered the technical and are reasonably competent at the artistic side of image making? Is there a difference between experimentation and outright leading the pack, breaking new ground, actually inventing and creating? Can one lead to the other? Are most of us wasting our time, knowing we aren't Picasso?

I should point out that leading the pack comes with a significant price. Not only may your work not be appreciated for years (if ever or in your lifetime), but you risk downright ridicule, criticism, ostracism and a whole flock of other isms! It's one thing to experiment, while continuing to produce fine images in a style not too far removed from those you have been successful with previously. It's entirely different to completely abandon your previous style, equipment, modes and output for something uncertain, unproven and frankly unwanted. This takes guts, determination, self confidence bordering on megalomania and a large dose of pig headedness.

it's my opinion that experimentation is one thing, a radical alteration of what you do because you feel you need to change is another thing entirely. One might make the case that first you experiment and if it helps you express yourself, then you move to this new technique or style and abandon the old. One sees classic large format landscape photographers who give up on silver prints to go to platinum and when that isn't unique enough, start making albumin and other exotic prints, some of which are frankly bizarre in appearance - cyanotype and so on - they become so wound up with technique that I can't help feeling it has more to do with differentiating themselves from all the other large format photographers than it does with creative expression, but I could be wrong - it just seems that way when you look at their new "improved" images.

With millions of creative photographers across the world (and with the internet, national boundaries mean little these days), the chance to produce really different, new, significant work is pretty minimal. For me, I'd be happy with significant over new and different every day of the week but that's me.

I guess it comes down to whether you have exhausted all you can say with the work you are already doing, whether you need to change to keep yourself stimulated and if you have something to say in a new field or way.

In the mean time, and on the basis of a good grounding in standard practices, why not edxperiment with some of your work. There is a photographer who has taken the images of the Bechers(they of mine heads) and reshot them multiple times in different sizes and aligments - lovely.

Andre Gallant has done some very nice work with multiple exposures while rotating the camera slightly between images. I think that slow exposures of people in action has not been fully explored yet and can produce lovely results - it's hardly new but still has potential.

I haven't seen a lot of really nice lens baby work though some of the Holga work is wonderful - not sure why the difference.

Normal photography has at least one thing sharp in the image, but is that really the only way?

We play with infrared looks but really - do colours need to relate at all to the real world - or could we go hog wild and have purple skies and orange grass? Perhaps in the future "straight" colour photography will be discounted as mere snapshots.

The lead image is from a photograph by Lawrence Christmas of me, one I used for my book flap, and which I had fun playing with in Photoshop - clever? not especially. Original? Definitely not. Fun? Sure was. Would I do it again? absolutely!

I'm not much of a rule breaker. How about you - do you burst out every so often, breaking even your own rules for a good image? How? Did it work? Do you let anyone see the result? Might it lead somewhere? Does it matter?

And In A Diffeerent Vein

Thw weekend was the annual Model Railway Show for the public. Normally I demonstrate scenery making but this year the venue was a soccer facility - a single building holding 4 indoor soccer pitches, on carpet of course. They didn't seem to think that my messing with plaster, paint and water was all that good an idea.

Anyway last night I visited my friend Neil McKay's layout, to photograph it for possible publication. There is no real estate available anywhere in his basement - all full of layout and scenery and buildings. Already a huge steel mill sits on a second level. Neil and Dauna are busy building a model of the Milwaukee Station and where he thinks he's going to put it I have no idea. Unlike most modellers who never seem to get round to finishing their layout, Neil and Dauna have done a great job getting their layout looking very nice.

Staying With An Image

How long should a good image keep your attention?

You go to galleries and some people look at an image for two seconds or less and move on. You feel you should spend more time with an image, but you notice that some images you "get" in the first glance, may even really like them, yet don't offer a whole lot more when you stick around for a few minutes.

Truth is good images vary dramatically in their "staying power". Take for example an image that is all about shapes of colour - there are only three - the background and two shapes one red and the other yellow - and that's basically it - they might be cars or a sign or building, doesn't really matter. It's not difficult to "get" the image very quickly. It may affect you profoundly, yet doesn't require further reading.

An analogy would be a good joke. You read it in two seconds, you may continue to occasionally chuckle as you remember it for a long time after. On the other hand, a novel by a great writer may have you pausing with each sentence to revel in the language, description and feeling. it would appear that the length of the text doesn't relate well to the impact. So it is with photographs. You can have the bold graphic described above or you might have a sophisticated image with not only basic shapes but textures and contrasts and alignments and harmonies which might take you many minutes to appreciate - and in fact may require "rereading" to get the full meaning.

The latter image isn't necessarily better than the first, just different, just as the one liner is different from the novel. Perhaps a better analogy would be a joke and a poem, both with the same number of words, the one having it's impact complete and instant, the other containing subtleties and levels, nuances and depths. The immediate impact of the joke is certainly the more powerful, yet one might keep going back to the poem, re reading it, thinking about the words, their pace and sequence, their meaning and relationships.

Neither the poem or the joke is better, just different. Why shouldn't two photographs be just as different?

Yeh, but what does that mean when I'm out photographing?

Well, quite a lot. If you want the equivalent of the joke, then you need a bold, simple image that grabs you. If on the other hand you want poetry, you'd better be thinking in terms of mutliple levels, more than just pretty or dramatic, you want to offer the big details that grab the viewer but small details that keep them looking. There's the plot, the sub plots, the details and the designs within designs.

Composition and Lectures

We're told that to make a good lecture, you tell the audience what you are going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what it is you told them - ie. introduction, explanation and summary.

In a photograph, think of a bold graphic to start, a more detailed story to be futher explored through the details of the image, but leaving you with that image of the bold graphic as you leave (presumably hopefully enticing you to come back, look at other images by the same photographer, or heavens above, possibly even dropping some money to buy the damn thing.

Think of Pepper # 30 - as you approach the print, or first see it on screen, you see the sensuous curves of this wonderful shape. As you spend more time with the image, first you realize it's only a pepper, then you notice how wonderfully the image glows and how light interacts with the Pepper. Eventually you notice the curving lines of the tin funnel in which he photographed it, but you leave thinking of the sensuous curves.

Composition As Composition

We can learn from music when it comes time to setting out the composition of our images. Think of the symphony. Either it starts out slowly, building tension quite quickly to an exclamation point, or it actually starts with a bang. The composer knows that he has a limited time to get our attention - get too tricky and the audience is lost in the first few bars, make a clear statement, provide a simple melody, capture the interest and often you can develop the theme all you want after.

Symphony compositions seem to tell a story - starting out happily enough, then sadness and depression, followed by struggle and sucess, finally to finish with an even bigger bang than was at the beginning. Mind you, the latter may not be necessary in a photograph since the end is dictated by the viewer wandering off and we hardly need to provide a visual bang to tell them when it's time to cough, clap or get up.

A piece of music that is complex, sophisticated and tricky right from the beginning isn't good at grabbing attention. Pieces like this tend to be appreciated by people who already recognize the genious of the composer and don't need a showy and simple start to lead them in and people who don't need to be able to hum the tune after the show.

Since these people tend to be in the tiny minority, pieces like this tend to be fillers between big bang music to satisfy the masses. So it is with photography, you can get away with the occasional complex subtle less readable photograph if you lead people to it and if you have no great expections of universal approval.

So, an image needs to be easy to understand right from the beginning. It can offer sophistication in it's subtle details and it wouldn't hurt if it told a bit of a story - in the sense of the classic tragedies and comedies going back to ancient Greece.

The Finer Points Of Composition

On the weekend one of the talks I gave was on composition and it was clear that there is interest in learning more so given that composition is a big issue with me, here goes:

I have talked about simplicity in design as being desirable in good images, but it might actually be better to describe it as clarity - the implication being that the important elements of the image stand out somehow so that sense can be made of them, they can be seen in relationship and elements of the image which aren't critical to its design are down played.

If an element is overlapped by 3 other things which don't need to be overlapped, the element in question is not going to be as clear as if it were to stand out against a plain background. On the other hand, if the objects it overlaps are in fact related to it and part of a sequence or series, well that's different, isn't it?

Clarity comes from the relative brightness of the element - in general if it is significantly lighter than surrounding elements it is going to be better noticed - so burning in the surround or lightening the element itself may be important.

If the pattern of elements makes your eyes look left then right, back to the left then up to the top, down to the bottom and finally back to the middle, that isn't clear. If you expect the eyes to follow a pattern, keep it a simple one and make it so there is a flow of the way you want the eye to follow rather than looking like one of those old computer games Pong.

Clarity can come from blurring the background. One of the tricks with Helicon Focus is you can get great depth of field within a complex object yet because you used a wide f stop and didn't keep shooting the sequence into the background, it remains blurred while the object itself has full depth - much more clear than simply stopping down to f22 and hoping for the best.

Clarity is very much about moving around until the main elements of the subject do fall on a simple background. As a rule, unless it is an important relationship, straight lines like power lines and tree trunks and so on should not sprout from the tips or corners of compositional elements (like girl friends heads). Nor do you usually want to divide the element in half with a background line - an unequal fraction is usually better unless you have a specific purpose. Remember that for the purposes of composition, the horizon is an object or element that must be considered. All things being equal, an element will look better if either mostly above or below the horizon and not with the horizon going right through the centre of the element.

Clarity comes from not having too many elements in the image, unless they all relate in the same way (say through shape or tone). It's so very tempting when composing a landscape for example to want to include that lovely curve on the right - that fantastic shape on the left and the terrific cross in the foreground - but all being different, it really doesn't matter how good each is, if they don't strongly tie in, one or more has to go.

Of course what often happens in real life when looking for interesting images, is that when you get tough and eliminate the great stuff that doesn't relate, you are left with a weak image - damned if you do and damned if you don't. All you can do at that point is pack the equipment away, recognize this particular setup as another 'might have been, almost was' and move on.

The more you think about things like this though, the fewer images that get you really excited on the shoot only to look like total crap when you get home - that is so discouraging to ones continued enthusiasm for photography.

Workshop 3

Blue

I would never normally think to include the plastic lid of a garbage can, but this image is about shapes and colour and hey, the colour was right.

Workshop Images 2

This lovely older E type Jaguar was also on our walk. It was challenging to find a position which did not result in chain link fence reflections but at least in this view it isn't especially prominent. Odd that the reflection of the building in the windshield turns out to be an important element of the composition.

Workshop Images

this is the first pair of images from the workshop - on our walkabout on Saturday. It's interesting to compare the colour and black and white images - I like both so choosing one would be difficult.

Workshop

Flew back last night from our San Francisco workshop. 9 participants, great group, some very interesting images made by the participants on our "walk abouts". It was certainly a different kind of photography for me. Uwe strongly encouraged me to leave home my tripod and so I was shooting hand held. I tried out a new camera bag - the Tamrac Velocity 8X. It was compact and easy to use - it was marginal for my 70-200 L IS lens simply because the shape of the back is circular on the bottom and the side pockets aren't quite as wide or deep. I could easily place the lens upside down with the lens hood at the top but that way means sometimes as you bring the lens out it detaches from the lens hood and falls back, hopefully into the camera bag so I prefer putting it in front first. It just fits, especially if you place the camera so the short side of the camera is towards the long lens. Why don't I put the big lens in the middle? Because then I can't put the camera in the bag. The sling system worked great, no diff. sliding the bag round to the front to access items or push it back round again to over the right hip or entirely round to the back which is better. They do make a 9X and if you have a big zoom, I'd recommend that.

I have been very impressed with the sharpness of my new 18-55 IS - this kit lens from Canon is a real departure from previous inexpensive lenses - it's darn good - sure it feels like a toy with it's plastic lens mount and less than brick like build but it works - sharp corner to corner at most apertures and entirely useable wide open.

I have been very impressed with the 40D - it handles very well. I love the my menu which does my formating and mirror lock for me. When hand holding I used ei. 400 to 640 and in one case really opened up the shadows in editing - sure there was noise but it was fine, sharp, looked like tri-x grain (well processed) and sure didn't bother me. Unlike consumer cameras which when pushed to higher ISO's result in a great loss of detail - there was no problem at all from noise suppression - very impressive.

Would I do more hand holding - sure - though I do find that when hand holding, exact framing is more challenging - you look at one corner and get it right, then look at the other corner and oops - I found myself zooming out a little just to make sure I got both corners adequately. Sure makes photography more fun and spontaneous. I might well start doing more walk abouts (but I mmight just take a light tripod too).

I'll post my walk about images when I catch up on my sleep.

Backup

found this message on photo.net in a series of comments about the most reliable drive for backup. It really puts things in perspective.

What is the most reliable TIRE? . I am planning a cross country trip and dont want to carry a spare.

What is the most reliable Parachute? . I am planning on jumping off a plane and dont want to carry a spare.

What is the most reliable camera? . I am planning wedding shoot for a mafia boss thats also a snipper dont want to carry a spare.

What is the most reliable jet engine? . I am planning a jetliner and want to make the design simple

What is the most reliable camera flash? . I am planning a wddding shoot and dont want to carry a spare.

What is the most reliable drill bit? . I am planning to build a house on a remote island and dont want to buy a spare.

What is the most reliable flash card? . I am planning a world trip and dont want to carry a spare.

What is the most reliable battery? . I am planning a world cruise and dont want to carry a spare.

What is the most reliable football? . I am hosting the superbowl and dont want to buy a spare.

What is the most reliable flash cord? . I am planning a wedding shoot and dont want to carry a spare.


ie. no single drive backup system is reliable.

Uwe Steinmuller has written about DROBO a non RAID backup device which looks interesting but in reality a single lightning strike within blocks of your house could destroy your computer, your hard drives and your RAID or DROBO so an off site backup is also necessary and has to be updated on a regular basis - in the end, no system is perfect but the question you have to ask yourself is how much data can I afford to lose, not whether you can afford it. Sooner or later you will lose drives, popssibly entire devices and in rare cases entire systems located in a single building.

I have a good system for backup including unplugged external drives (I risk drive failure but not power surges) and offsite (protecting me against fire). What I don't do is do it often enough. Time to invest in reliable backup - including either a raid system or something like DROBO. I look forward to Uwe's articles on backup as they appear at OutbackPhoto in the next few weeks

Aspens

One of the problems with shooting into trees is depth of field - not enough to keep all the trees you want sharp, yet too much to blur the background. Helcon Focus to the rescue, blending all the images except the last which had the background sharp. I quite like this soft look.

Curses

April in Alberta - supposed to be 22 C (70 F) on Sunday but today we woke to a huge dump of snow, my flight to San Francisco for the workshop first delayed then cancelled outright. I fly out tomorrow night in time for the workshop but my day wandering around San Francisco is shot. This was taken last weekend. There was no snow and above freezing temperatures in Calgary but 35 minutes west...

A better Composition?

I think I like this vertical better.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

My wife and daughter are into horses and we have a 1992 Suburban for pulling a horse trailer. It uses enough gas that we could affor a small car plus gas on what it was costing us to use it as a regular vehicle, so it sits in the back lane, waiting to be used to haul a horse.

Anyway, my wife needed the truck to work and knew the vehicle wouldn't start in the cold weather. A boost and new battery were called for and when the fellow from AMA came by and I popped the hood for him, I noticed the nicely weathered insides and thought it might make a picture.

Normally I'd have everything in focus using focus blending but in fact I quite like this hand held shallower depth of field image with the depths of the motor nicely blurred.

I see my neighbour has an old car in the back garden - I'm going to pop over and check under the hood.

In terms of coming up with ideas for an image or even a series or a project, one never really knows when an idea might pop up or from where. One needs to be always aware of patterns, shapes, tones, light, as well as interesting subject matter. They certainly aren't limited to when you are thinking photography. Few interesting things make good photographs but few photographs of uninteresting things make good images, even if the thing that was interesting is nothing more than a curious shadow.

Hand Holding

No, this isn't a poor man's alternative to sex, though come to think of it I guess it is, but anyway, I'm obviously talking about the non use of a tripod. Now I'm clearly talking through my hat here as I haven't taken a serious shot without my trusty tripod since age 18. Even my recent portrait work I used the tripod, even if I didn't lock down the ball head!

So, what possible insights could I offer. In many ways, I'm simply thinking in keystrokes, making you suffer for my deliberations, but perhaps you, like me, haven't cut loose yet and you might want to think about the same issues.

Tripods serve one basic function (unless you are big into self portraits). They allow slower shutter speeds than you can hand hold. Oh, and they make stitching a lot more accurate especially for near subjects and for wide angles. That's about it.

So, in order to free myself from the tripod, I have to accept blurry images - generally not on), or use a higher shutter speed, or sometimes simplly not try to photograph (eg. after dark) because there isn't enough light.

Now, two reasons to need slow shutter speeds are wanting to use the lowest ISO for highest quality images, and to use a small f stop for maximum depth of field. So I have to wonder what would life and imaging be like if I didn't insist on front to back sharpness? Could I accept some "graininess" of an image by using higher ISO's? Often wide apertures means sharpness in the centre of the image but not at the edges. Could we live with that - do edges even need to be sharp?

What if I combined a wider aperture than I ever use in normal circumstances - just how much would I gain?

What if instead of considering the lack of depth of field a compromise, I actually sought it out, taking advantage of selective focus to reduce distracting backgrounds and to focus attention on the important part of the image? What if instead of accepting moderate depth of field, I deliberately shoot wide open (or at most a stop down for sharapness)?

In the latest issue of Lenswork the excellent images by Larry Blackwood of grain elevators were, shock of shocks, hand held, with a moderately priced digital camera - and they were damn nice. Larry broke other rules too by the looks of it - not correcting perspective, shooting in the middle of the day in bright sunlight and not waiting for dramatic skies. Spend some time looking at the images if you find yourself short on subject matter and ideas.

Anyway, stay with me over the next few months as I take advantage of my new 40D to have some fun with my camera, to liberate myself from f16 and rock solid tripods.

Note that I have updated Larry's web link above since he has redone his website.

San Francisco

I have given myself one day in San Francisco (this coming Thursday) and am definitely soliciting advice on how to best make use of the day photographically. Ideally I'd like to do a quite a bit of shooting, but am also open to visiting photographic galleries. Does anyone have any experience and therefore suggestions?

New Camera

Not wanting to lug my 1Ds2 around San Francisco, I elected to purchase a 40D. I traded off the extra pixels of the new Xsi for the extra waterproofing, speed and handling of the 40D. Sure do love that big LCD.

I had great difficulty deciding on lenses for the camera. In the end I elected to try the new 18-55 IS as it had had good to excellent reports. Everyone recommended the 24-105 but my reading and looking at resolution indicated it was pretty weak at the long end, even on a reduced sensor camera.

I decided to purchase the newish 70-200 L IS lens on the grounds that I can't think of a single situation in which I have taken advantage of shooting at f2.8 - even the very shallow depth of field pipe image was shot at f5. If this lives up to standard, I'll sell the 2.8 to someone who does theatre or sports or music and who can really use that extra stop. This will go some ways towards lightening my camera bag.

Despite ogling the rather cool looking Crumpler bags, I elected to go with the Tamrac Velocity 9 bag. I liked the fact that it is top opening yet isn't likely to spill things, seems to turn round for access easily - time will tell if that's still true when fully loaded. It should easily handle my two new lenses.

The image above is decently sharp, hand held, 18-55, shot at 8 PM with the sun already well down, ei. 400 - despite reports of a noiseless 400, there is definitely "grain" but it certainly isn't objectionable.

My second battery is charging and I think this will work just fine for wandering around San Francisco.

Good Vs. Great

I guess I tend to assume that we all aspire to greatness, if not in ourselves then at least with a few images. In a conversation with a friend last night, he stated that he doesn't aim for greatness, good would be just fine with him. He doesn't aspire to a masterpiece, an image which is interesting or illuminating or fun will be just great.

it makes you wonder just what we should be concentrating on - do you put all your effort into something which is rarely achieved (a truly great photograph, or at least one way better than all your others), knowing that you are working on something that not only is very unlikely to happen with any one photograph, in fact experience tells us that we rarely know at the time of the shutter release which images are going to be our best.

Mind you sometimes we know, I had written to Chuck to comment on his lovely new window and gauze photograph gracing his lead page of his site and he commented in return that he just knew it was going to be really good. Actually what he really said was he was so excited he was practically shaking and had difficulty getting the image recorded he was so excited. That sometimes happens but far more often we don't know ahead of time that an image is going to turn out far better than 99% of our work. You'd think a little bell would go off, in the camera if not in your head - but no.


The linke below will take you to his site, and at least for now to that particular image.


Anyway, my point is whether it's better to be looking for the truly great images or whether we'd actually be better served looking for the merely interesting and letting the laws of chance make some of those exceptional and the rest just what we were looking for.

My own style is to look for the interesting since I very definitely cannot predict the great shots, frequently not even recognizing them in the proofs, sometimes for months.

So, it's ok to aspire to be great, but to be on the lookout for the merely good, interesting, illuminating and or entertaining.

Whether someone who never aspired to greatness in the first place is any less likely to achieve it I don't know - I suspect there is a drive do do better, try harder which may separate those who are happy with good from those who desperately strive for greatness.

The other issue is whether it is very egotistical to even think that you might someday be one of the greats but if you think of how many of us wanted to be Ansel Adams 40 years ago and a teenager, well, most of us would be wearing tar and feathers if it were a big problem. It's one thing to strive for greatness, another to think you have arrived, especially with plenty of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps this is a discussion for another day.

ReEditing

Don't know what it's like for you but when I have to reprint an image, I often want to see if I can do it better. With the tin shed image I restarted from the raw file and am quite pleased with the result.

So much for digital meaning nothing ever changes.

So Just How Important Is Composition Anyway?

Most of you know by now that I have a thing for composition - I feel it is very important to my images. my collection of well composed boring images rival's anyone's.

We have learned that whatever rules of thumb we come up with in photography, someone can find an example of the opposite that works to threaten our rule. None the less, rules simply reflect the way that usually works, that if you were a betting man, you'd not bet against the rule all things being equal.

Edward Weston said that "Composition is the strongest way of seeing", which sums it up very nicely, but doesn't answer our original question of

"just how important is composition anyway?"

Some photographers pay little attention to composition. It seems sufficient to get the subject in the frame and fire. One could argue that a lot of wildlife photographs work that way, probably sports images too and perhaps the majority of portraits, but perhaps environmental portraits more often take advantage of compositional elements.

Even things like collars, rows of buttons, position of arms and even of shadows can be compositional elements. Some of the best sports images are extremely simple in design and make very interesting shapes beyond what they tell of the sport and the event.

Certainly the vast majority of great landscape images are well composed. Still lifes would hardly exist without composition and as for architecture, well composition is synonymous with design in this kind of work.

Could it be that composition is what untalented unskilled or lazy photographers use to make up for lighting, timing, drama and excitement in an image? If we go back to Edward Weston's words, then there has to be something to see which justifies using composition to see it strongest. Thus composition on it's own will not make for good images. Perhaps you have already discovered that no matter how carefully you arrange an image, if it is boring, it becomes a well composed boring image. The image needs more - something worth looking at, because of it's nature.

That nature might be something that pulls at heart strings, whether a puppy or a war, a revealed detail or a subject that works with light to produce magnificent tonalities (think Pepper # 30 or Walt Disney Theatre and Gugenheim Bilbao. It could be it's uniqueness or originality of idea, an expression or simply beauty.

Sometimes all you can do is see something interesting, compose it in the best way possible, and hope that the subject translates well into a still image. You can only do what you can do, but if you do it often enough, with enough interesting subjects, and with a bit of foreknowledge of what photographs well, then sooner or later you are going to produce really good images.

So how does composition help?

Compositional elements may point to the subject, or arrange things in interesting patterns and lines. It downplays the unimportant parts of the image and emphasizes the important. Composition makes sure that the whole image earns it's keep and that there is a sense of rightness to the image, even if that rightness is a jarring interruption or change - as in an image full of straight lines, but one sinuous curve.

Composition helps you make sense of an image. Arrangements of compositional elements have associated emotions - peacefulness, threatening, aggitation, sadness and so on, which can be used to reinforce the message of the subject.

Composition is about harmony and balance, but also about dysharmony and unbalanced. If you think of the Stravinsky portrait with his rather small head in the bottom left corner and the huge open piano occupying the rest of the image - you'd not call that balanced, but it does describe his life in a single black blob. That image did not follow any compositional rules, but it was the strongest way of seeing. If the composition works, who the hell cares if it follows rules?

Composition is of sufficient importance that even war photographers dodging bullets will move around a scene to get the best composition - that's how important it is - worth risking your life for!

CF Card Failures - Photorescue Software

Yesterday I lost all my images of the day from card failure. I had been able to review the images in camera as I worked but after taking the card from the camera and immediately inserting it into the card reader - nothing. On going back to camera, nothing - no images. This was my most recent card purchase, a 4 GB Sandisk III - a bit disappointing. So far it's worked fine today for the previous dust tests so we'll see.

I was able (as always) to rescue the images via PhotoRescue. This commercial software has never let me down, generally rescuing 99% of all the images (in this case all but one of 105 images) - not bad in my book and essential to anyone's work flow. While cards do come with image rescue software, it has never been as effective as Photo Rescue and I highly recommend it. I note that they now have three versions, I have the $29 expert version and so far have not had to use any of it's more sophisticated rescue techniques.

My routine is to let a card fail once and I'll reformat as usual and keep using it, but if it fails again within a month or so - it's history. Don't know if this is efficient use, but it works for me - especially with cards coming down in price as they have.

I'm Pissed Off/Oh, Hang On...

The image above is the result of using $14.95 of sensor swabs (3) on my admittedly very dirty sensor. Damn this is irritating.

OK, so despite some negative reviews of the sensorbrush system - spinning the brush to induce a static charge that will attract the dust, here's the same spot on the sensor after a good brushing.



There are still a dozen or so spots on the sensor, but that compares to probably thousands in the swabbed image. I had truly thought that the grime on the sensor would only respond to swabs but it appears I was wrong - I can comfortably live with a dozen spots, probably only one or two which will even show in the average image.

Points:

I exposed some sky to a manual metering of f32 and the exposure on the mark. I didn't do anything in camera raw and used auto levels in Photoshop to increase contrast dramatically for both images.

Some people find the sensor brush frustrating because it picks up oil from the mirror box and that gets transferred to the mirror. I have to tell you this sensor brush was sitting in a broken plastic box in which the lid was no longer attached, at the bottom of my accessory slot on my camera backpack, for the last six months of fairly regular shooting - I could actually see some black marks on the brush but hoped the marks were too far from the end of the bristles to affect the cleaning process - hardly ideal care - but it worked. Perhaps it's just luck, or more likely bad luck for those who do get oil on the brush. I certainly never use this brush to clean the mirror box or the mirror or even the ground glass below the pentaprism.

Take it for what it's worth. Here's hoping the new self cleaning sensors work as well as advertised (already there are mixed reviews).

Sam, Exposure, High ISO

Having survived the chimney drop, I grabbed Sam for a quick portrait, picking the big door as a background and a modest amount of north light providing the lighting.



Above you see the detail in the image, click on picture to get 100% view.

The lesson appears to be that you can use higher iso's but you need a well exposed image, nicely detailed shadows that won't need further "opening" in Photoshop. Frankly it had never occured to me before to use ei. 800 with my 1Ds2 but I'm very pleased with the result.

Radiator Covers

Apparently these are the covers for locomotive radiators, being repaired and a number of bolts had rusted in place and were having to be drilled, filled, welded and drilled again.

I tried photographing from several angles, using the 90 ts-e as well as the 70-200, the latter with multiple images stitched. I had no sense at the time which composition would work the best and did myself the favour of providing as many options from which to pick as possible. This meant taking an hour to do the work and something like 50 images (remember the blending focus) but was well worth the trouble.

Independent Machinery 15

These images are pushing my limits. The image of Aaron was shot at ei. 800 since the room was extremely dark and with the window behind him the dynamic range was right at the limits of the camera. There was quite a bit of noise and the face not super sharp, but it should make a decent 8X10. He was watching Sam use a cutting torch to free a forty foot high chimney which started 15 feet up - he dropped it perfectly, though some of us were thinking 911 emergency.

The second image was a multi image blend. I really needed the background blurred since it was quite distracting so used f5.6 but even though I used 11 images to do the blend, I should have used 20 or so - with finer increments in focus between images - I managed to miss the tip of the centre metal rest and focussed 1 cm. back - looks like at 5.6 the segments needed to be every centimeter - it might even have needed as many as 30 - we live and we learn.

The Photographer And The Camera

“it’s the photographer, not the camera” has been advice issued by experienced photographers to the wanabe masses for years. I still remember a “Father Knows Best” or some such show episode in which the son wanted to play the trumpet and the “banger” he was using couldn’t play a decent note. Onto the show came somone like Al Hirt, who proceeded to blow them away with his virtuosity on this beat up old instrument.

Photographers who have a lot of experience have been trying to explain to new and some not so new photographers disappointed with their results that a better camera would not have made any of the images the newbie photographer made any better.

Of course, there were always dramatic changes in quality when one moved from 35 mm. film to medium format and from medium format to large format. So it is true today that images made with consumer grade cameras tend to look poorer than those taken with 16 megapixel cameras and those lag somewhat images made with 39 MP digital backs.

They only look poorer though in a few specific ways, to do with tonality, shadows, resolution and so on, while the mre important issues of subject matter, composition, lighting, and so on don’t even come into the issue as all being photographer driven.

Print size largely cancels out the inequalities of imaging - make a nice 5X7 image from 35 mm. slow film, well printed and the result can be wonderfully rich, so too can a consumer level digital camera make nice small prints.

But what is forgotten in all this discussion is that a huge number of struggling photographers are so convinced that it is their cameras that limit their work and who not only spend big dollars to buy cameras they don’t really need, they also waste time experimenting. In the old days it was films and developers. Now it’s raw processors and sharpening tools and Photoshop plug in’s. They change cameras so often they never become proficient with any of them. Frankly “the good worker doesn’t blame his tools” is still worthwhile advice.

The average photographer would be far better to buy an $800 Rebel than a $3000 5D and use the $2200 difference to take workshop, buy books of fine images, subscribe to one or more of the better magazines or do some reading about the artistic and creative side of photography (slim as the pickings are).

But this isn’t the real world - new equipment and big lenses are sexy, they feel good in the hand, they are impressive to look at. There are few of us who have not succumbed to the bigger/better/more philosophy to one degree or another.

To argue that the camera doesn’t matter, when we are talking about a population of photographers who shoot wildlife or football games, do studio work or landscapes is just silly. What might be a better statement is something along the lines of “the photographer still matters more than the equipment”.

After 40 years of photographing I’ve becme fairly competent at recognizing what will improve my photography more. But you know what - I have a big expensive shiny sexy camera. I’m human.

Having Meaning Vs. Being Meaningful

G. Dan offered the following:

G Dan Mitchell has left a new comment on your post "Meaningful Images 3":

"Meaning" is an interesting notion relative to art. With my particular background I tend to think of it in the context of music where one simple way of dividing things up (too simple, perhaps) is to speak of "program" and "absolute" music.

"Program" music overtly "means something" because the composer intends it to be associated with non-musical things - perhaps to represent something specific, to tell a story, or evoke a particular feeling or experience.

On the other hand, "absolute" music is simply what it is. It is no less significant nor does it create a less significant effect on the listener - it just produces the effect purely by means of the sound resources that the composer uses, without specific reference to any particular "meaning."

I don't see why photography should be any different. Great photographs may come with "meaning" attached - either supplied by the photographer or obviously to be inferred through the subject. But great photographs can also simply be great photographs that are not "about" any specific thing at all.

It works for me.

Dan

I like Dan's idea that an image doesn't have to mean anything, it just is - you look at it, marvel at it's beauty, balance, tonality, composition and simply enjoy it's beauty. You leave enriched because looking at beauty is a moving experience, but you aren't changed, other than to think, gee, I liked looking at that beautiful image, just maybe I should look at more wonderful images.

With Pepper # 30, you can get into sexual implications, but really, it's just a pepper. It says nothing about farmers rights or immigrant workers. It has no intrinsic meaning other than to show beauty where one had ignored it previously.

I think Pepper # 30 is meaningful because it is so incredibly rich and sensuous and shows wonderfully what photography is about, but it doesn't have meaning in the sense of representing something.

But, did the peppers start to be meaningful for Edward as he became better at translating their curves and tones and highilghts into beautiful images. I think so, and just because he ate it, doesn't make it any the less meaningful experience for him to have worked on the series.

Meaningful Images 3

A street photographer is wandering around, looking for interesting things to photograph. He has no special agenda other than to be recognized as the next Cartier Bresson, someone with a fabulous eye. He looks left and sees a hot dog vendor - the lighting is perfect and there is a shadow in the background that just adds something to the image - a small child is reaching up to take his just served hot dog. In less than half a second the photographer has seen all these elements come together and takes the picture. Because he's been doing this for a while, focus is spot on, exposure is right, he's learned the trick of good hand holding.

The photographer moves on. Someone is sweeping the sidewalk, large clouds of dust kicked up and the late afternoon sun isolates the sweeper from the background. Suddenly a pretty girl walks by in front of the sweeper and he glances up to admire her. Click.

Our photographer spends a few hours out photographing, coming home with a few dozen images, a couple of them he's really excited about. On looking at the images on computer, one of the two good images is trash - fatal distacting elements or too harsh lighting or split second late. A couple of images that didn't excite the photographer at the time show some real promise. In the end the photographer comes up with four pleasing prints and one fabulous image, not the one he expected.

The above is a not untypical scenario, whether applied to a sports photographer, fashion or landscape. But what about meaning?

You might best describe this kind of image in the above scenario as "slice of life". No great truths have been unveiled but the images (if they are good) beautifully illustrate ordinary human existence. It might be hard to see meaning in any one image especially when examined critically and excessively, but when you put together the work of our street photographer over a year - it tells a story of "our town", beautifully illustrating those little moments in life which define our existence. In this way, they do have meaning and purpose and are worth sharing with others.

The photographer may not have had the intention of "doing a project" but in essence by choosing the images he does, by electing to be a street photographer and select a location and work at it repeatedly until both successful and with a body of work behind him, it really ends up as a project.

The photographer thought of himself as "cruising for snaps" as the late Fred Picker described it, but inadvertently managed to produce a meaningful body of work that many an office worker can relate to.

More On Meaningful

I suggested the other day that meaningful relates to the photographer, not the viewer and went on to suggest that perhaps meaningful might well not become apparent until well into a photographic project, and that photographers who shoot a little of this, a little of that, might never reach the meaningful threshold. There are photographers who do produce some lovely work, simply trying this and that. Kertesz comes to mind as someone who didn't seem to have specific projects yet Chez Mondrian is one of my all time favourite photographs so I guess I'm arguing against myself - mind you kertesz took a lifetime of photographs and is known mostly for a dozen or so images and although I think Chez Mondrian exquisite, I'm not sure that I'd call it a meaningful photograph.

This raises the question as to whether a photograph even has to be meaningful. Perhaps it's like a lot of other common characteristics of good photographs, it helps but is neither essential nor sufficient to make a great photograph - it's just one of many things that could be included to make a great image.

It's quite possible for a photographer to select a subject that he or she thinks will be meaningful to others. This seems to completely contradict what I said in the first article on meaningful. But bear with me.

As a photographer I could choose to photograph one of the "hot" topics - poverty, disease, pain, war, pollution and so on. One could make the argument that this is what Burtynsky did, but when you read about Edward Burtynsky, you find out that he's been photographing the effect of the environment on the landscape since the mid 1980's, long before environment was popular and certainly before he could have reasonably predicted that he'd make big bucks off of selling images of tire piles and rust and what not. To stick with a project for 23 years means that you are involved in it at a fundamental level - it has meaning for you - you are dedicated to it - you are willing to see it through slumps and doubts and failures. Is it any surprise that after this much effort, we can see the meaning in his images.

I think that one could pick a "hot" topic and the quality of the images, the meaninfullness of them is likely to be tied to the comittment made to the project. After all, war photographers clearly choose to go into danger and can produce meaningful work. What I suspect doesn't work very often is to decide at 3 pm to shoot poverty, head down town and onto the wrong side of the tracks, cruise the back alleys, shoot a few bums and come home proclaiming meaningful images.

To me, meaningful goes along with understanding of your subject, a sympathy for it, or at least for the problem it illustrates, it's tied to caring and trying and enduring and repeating and making an effort and sticking to it through thick and thin, then the images can be thought of as meaningful.

Sure I can casually go shoot a bum, but really - what are the odds of showing you anything new or meaningful in such an exercise - it didn't mean anything to me, why should I anticpate you are going to fall over yourself exclaiming it's deep meaning.

Even if you do choose to thoroughly explore one of the more "hot" or "classic" or "politically correct" or "controversial" topics, you can't know who's going to respond or how - you might make predictions about how likely it is that some people will respond to the images, but can't make any prediction about how any one person will perceive them. This is something to be well considered when submitting for publication - in general you are hoping that one person will see something in your images that makes them meaningful for themselves. Given that many people are hitting them up with "meaningful" subjects such as the starving and aids victims and so on, maybe you really don't want to do the obvious and just perhaps your chance of making a difference, of getting published, of creating a powerful body of work will depend on you finding meaning in your project.

Easter

It was actually coincidence, I happened to be on the way to something else and this caught my eye.

Peeling Paint

Peeling paint is a cliche - and one could make a good argument for not even bothering to photograph it. As it happened though, trying to make the best possible composition was more than a little challenging - there being a fair amount of the paint and I consider the exercise well worth trying.

Meaningful Photographs

Scenario:

you think of yourself as a photographer artist or at least a 'Serious' photographer, someone who wants his or her images to mean something. You are looking for your next photographic project. What on earth are you going to pick for a subject so that you can be taken seriously as a photographer.

You decide to look at some current magazines for ideas on what others consider 'Serious' photography. You look at the latest Silvershotz - pictures of lightbulbs, hmmn... You flip over to Phot'art and half the pictures are more or less fashion shots, many of the rest odd quirky images highly dependent on gimicky technique - gee, this is getting a bit discouraging. You look at the latest Lenswork, at least here you see many portfolios showing the traditional values of image craft - well made images beautifully printed - subjects are pretty traditional - cathedrals, nudes, portraits, grain elevators?

In the end you really aren't any further ahead in finding a subject - either it doesn't appeal, looks kitchy or its a great idea but someone just did it and published it so not much scope there - at least for now.

Perhaps if we stop and think about what meaningful actually means, when referring to a meaningful collection of images. Well, I think right off that the whole point is for the images to be meaningful to you the photographer. You have not the right, privilege or ability to pick what is meaningful for me, the viewer. That's up to me to decide. Frankly after looking through the latest images in Phot'Art, my response is 'not too many images are meaningful for me'.

So the images have to mean something to you the photographer, and you don't have to make any consideration at all to whether they are meaningful to me the viewer. Of course doing meaninful work and doing work that is likely to get recognition are two entirely different subjects, though I do think the better editors can see when images mean something to the photographer - there is an intensity, vision, direction, message, or style that says this subject meant something to the photographer and he put his heart and soul into doing his best with it.

I'm guessing that Ann Geddes makes a lot more money with her cute baby pictures than say Michael Kenna, though I'd bet on Michael being remembered far longer.

Anyway, getting back to the subject and the images meaning something to the photographer you can see where the problem lies - the harder you have to think of a subject to photograph, the less likely it is that it's going to have deep personal meaning for the photographer, the more artificial the idea of what to photograph, the greater the chance that in choosing it, you have inadvertantly slipped back into trying to decide what will be meaningful for others.

What if it doesn't work that way? What if the meaning comes after you have been photographing a subject for a while and it starts to fascinate you and you find yourself going back and back for more, trying harder and harder to get the best out of the subject? What if it's the actual process of exploring any subject that makes it meaningful? This might explain why people who flit from subject to subject, never really exploring any one subject, don't tend to make any meaningful images - perhaps the very definition of meaningful precludes little of this little of that type photographers from creating meaningful work, or at the very least makes it a whole lot less likely.

Virtually every photographer I admire put a lot of effort into exploring his or her subject - whether it's Edward Weston's nudes or the quiet landscapes of Paul Caponigro, the native portraits of Phil Borges or the misty elegant and simple landscapes of Michael Kenna, they all spent a lot of time working on their chosen topics. Of course Ansel took grand landscapes - he hiked thousands of miles and was out in the wilderness for weeks at a time - probably putting more wilderness mileage in than 100 average modern tree hugging landscape photographers.

So, perhaps in the end it doesn't really matter what you photograph next - pick something, anything, and see where it leads you. Perhaps you'll get one or two nice images, but just maybe the subject will affect your dreams and drive you crazy and make you burn midnight oil and appreciate people you wouldn't normally give the time of day to. Just maybe the meaning is in the dedication and the dedication is in the meaning and it just happens, or not. If it doesn't happen, then you move onto the next idea.

Perhaps I'll write next about what to do if none of your ideas turns into dedication or meaningful images - does that mean your ideas aren't clever enough, or does it say more about your own attitudes and curiosity and energy?

Dis, Dat, and T'Other

Prognostication

Ah to be a fly on the wall at Nikon or Canon - what are they going to add to the next cameras. Of course their goal is to add as few features as possible compatible with competing with the opposition. With Nikon moving up fast with the D300 and D3, there's going to be more pressure on Canon to add significant features. Personally I'd like to see a tilting 3.5 inch LCD screen - it would make some of my photography dramatically easier. I do have a right angle finder but...

Looking Back

It's been an interesting year - a year ago if someone had said I'd have a successful book behind me I'd check to see what they were smoking. The book is being reprinted as you read this, the first 5000 copies all gone from the distributor and the book is usually in the top 25 photography books at amazon.com.

Thinking Ahead

I'm getting cold feet on another book - not enough images without duplicating - even though the purposes of the books are quite different - afraid that the content isn't different enough from all those photoshop books out there. I'm open to suggestions for a topic that would be both unique and useful.

Feeling Sorry For Myself

I've had the flu for three weeks - completely exhausted, short of breath much of the time - finally improving but even today I slept through lunch before returning to the patients. On Friday started seeing flashing lights - a sign of a vitreous separation (goo from the retina) and wasn't surprised but somewhat horrified to wake saturday with a huge floater drifting in front of my central vision in the left eye - they say it will settle, but it's my photographing eye! Not a happy camper. I make a terrible patient, moan moan, bloody moan!

Photographic Plans

I do feel that Independent Machinery is winding down after 14 trips but I want to shoot a few more of the regular staff but it's time to start thinking of a different project. The rheumatoid arthritis is sufficiently better that landscape is a possibility but I'm not finished with industrial. Was watching a video of Edward Burtynsky photographing some of his industrial shots, using a large ladder to photograph over chain link fences - good idea - he uses the top of the ladder for his tripod head.

Perhaps I need to be thinking about a completely new subject for my photography - hmmn...

San Francisco

Most of the spots are filled for the April 12, 13 workshop but a few are still available. Looking forward to meeting some of you in person.

Latest Lenswork

# 75 just arrived and a lovely issue it is - some of Bruce Barnbaum's classic cathedral images (and a couple I hadn't seen before), interesting images of photographers by Bill Jay and more importantly along with some interesting text, a series of nudes by Rosanne Olsen. Larry Blackwood has a portfolio of grain elevator images which are top notch - strongly designed and beautifully printed.

Brooks tells us that he's no longer going to put Lenswork on magazine racks to avoid the huge waste in which excess magazines are trashed. I can see his point though I'll miss seeing it on the stand, class amongst the masses.

Andy Ilachinski

Sly dog that Andy is, he doesn't exactly tout the fact that on Blurb, the online self publishing company Andy actually has four books. I happened to see brief mention of it on his blog (though I can't see it on his website now). Anyway, interested to see Andy's work in print and curious to see what a self publisher like Blurb could do for black and white images, I ordered Andy's "Landscape Of The Soul" I thought $49.00 a bit steep for a paper back book, but that's inflation for you. By the time I paid for inexpensive postage to Canada, it was another $16 - a bit much for casual ordering but Andy has been supportive of my work and so I went ahead.

Landscapes Of The Soul - Andy Ilachinski

The book arrived, extremely well packaged and protected. The cover has a plastic laminate over it and there was slight peeling along one edge (1 mm.), pretty normal for this kind of book binding. The paper is clean, white and has just a hint of shine. The cover images are quite "selenium" though the images throughout the book are quite neutral. All images are monochrome. Andy has arranged the images all on right hand pages which makes looking at the book in hand very easy and avoids bleed through. The images show clean whites, subtle highlights and good blacks. Shadow detail is fair - about the look I'd get on my 5000 printer with enhanced matte - very reasonable for what it is, a small volume book.

Unlike so many books of the past, the tonalities are very smooth and showing excellent resolution and are free of streaking and unevenness that still shows up in a lot of magazines.

Now for the more important part - the images. The book consists of flowing water, old windows, religious icons, and abstract macro images, all but the religious icon images show to advantage in the printing of this book, the latter with their dark detail would have been better served by duotone printing of the highest order.

I had admired Andy's window images before and there are a few of my favourites here, but I really liked the macro abstract images showing bubbles and folds and lines and were very nicely done. The flowing water images are printed in negative which works very well and you don't even think about it at first. The images are quiet, elegant, and attractive.

Overall a lovely little book of a size perfect for looking through. I'm guessing Andy will sell far fewer than he deserves to but if price point isn't super critical, you'd be doing youself a favour to pick up this book from blurb.

Style

It's common to worry about developing your own style. There are even books you can read to tell you how to do this. Frankly, I think it's a joke. Anything you do deliberately to differentiate your work would be better described as an affectation. Style comes from seeing that way, of doing things in a particular way because you have to to express yourself clearly. It comes from a varied background in photography or the arts. We're tempted to think that composers like Mozart developed their musical style de novo - but it's far from the truth, He had years of musical exposure and training before he started composing and he started composing by picking up where others left off, not by suddenly coming up with a totally new style - Beethoven the same. You'd think the 20th century composers with their non melodic music must have invented it one day, but truth is there were hints in the 19th century. Truth is music was moving that direction anyway. In art, picasso may have developed a totally new style of painting - but the precursors were there and I believe he started out relatively conventionally. Lots of his sketches are very classical in appearance (no eyes between breasts there).

Perhaps someone with a better background on Picasso can comment but I doubt he woke up one morning and said to himself - I need to be different to become famous. If I remember correctly, he was a respected artist already before he painted in the cubist style.

Edward Burtynsky photographs with an 8X10 not because he wants to show he's more manly - he has a point to make and the incredible detail possible with an 8X10 was the only practical tool at the time (nowadays he could in theory stitch with a medium format back, but perhaps in China he still finds the 8X10 more reliable and practical). His huge prints are made to have impact, for you to be able to see the scale, the repitition, the sheer effect on the landscape and the environment. 8X10 glossies just wouldn't do it.


My point? Well, I think you can probably assume you aren't going to develop a style overnight. It almost certainly is going to be a leap in the direction you seem to be going anyway. You can't buy it, read it, pick it up at a garage sale and you can reasonably assume it's going to come with sweat equity and probably not even at a conscious level.

Save yourself the trouble, don't try to rent a style. It'll come, eventually, if you keep trying to express yourself rather than make pictures to sell well or please others.

Lens Extremes

No matter how long a lens you carry (or wide), you will invariably come across a situation in which you could have used a longer (wider) lens. Even assuming you have the money to purchase these lenses, do you really want to carry them?

I suggest that if you have them and are wondering about continuing to carry them, count up the number of keeper shots made with these lenses, that couldn't have been made without them. Good chance it isn't very many. It seems the number of times you wish you had the lens compared to the number of actual keeper images when you do is pretty small.

Since you can't do this experiment if you don't already own the longer (wider) lens, you can at least take heart from my experience that the more extreme the lens, the fewer the situations where not only is it the right lens, but actually results in an important portfolio image. For example, for months I have been carrying my 300 mm. around with me and haven't needed it. When I was out photographing landscapes I would occasionally use it but the keepers were even fewer and frankly if I didn't have it, I could function just fine.

On the other end, I use my 17-40 at 17 mm. mod. often with my Independent Machinery project and would miss it - is there any justification for going even wider to a 14 mm., not a chance. Your mileage might differ.