More From Clothing Project

This is getting to be fun. I particularly like the first of the three images. Of course, no one would ever buy a photograph of an old pair of my workpants, but it's fun creating the images (or finding them).

Had no idea just how much cat fur coats everything in this house - thank god for clone and heal in Photoshop. I need to be careful with alignment else there are errors in the lines of threads but it hasn't been as hard as I had anticipated, it's just that there's hundreds to do on each image. Wonder how many cat hairs I ingest on the average day?

Clothing As A Project

A long time ago I was lying in bed and noticed that the patterns and shapes made by my hanging pants in the corner and on a stand were interesting. An attempt to photograph them failed but the idea persisted. I decided during Christmas that it was time to resurect the idea and see if I could make it fly.

Here's the first two attempts.

The moire patterns don't in fact show in prints - they are a result of the size reduction for web posting.

Perhaps this is as far as the experiment will go, but I hope not.

Whale Backbone

Here's A Subject To Consider

Fair game since the beginning of photography, churches can make for interesting subjects, old, new, assorted denominations, and it doesn't matter if you are religious - though I dare say a donation would be appreciated and a good investment to support some very lovely buildings.

This cathedral was located in Cheticamp, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia and was all the more beautiful for it being unexpected in a small commercial fishing town. Nothing particularly creative about this shot but it shows the building to advantage and the uncorrected verticals help give it the feeling of soaring, rather than simply falling backwards as so often happens when you don't correct verticals.

New Years Resolutions

Hey, this is my list - go make your own. Still reading? Well, maybe my list isn't all that different from your list, so here goes.

1. Photograph more often. Instead of taking several hours to photograph seriously, I want to do small projects - around the house, in the garden, the neighbourhood, etc.

2. I want to add at least one more class of photographs to my current landscape and industrial images - I'm thinking of still lifes as it meshes nicely with 1. above, requires no travelling, can be done while on call, isn't dependent on daylight, etc. It will be hard to do something not already done before, but I think I'll just photograph things I like to look at and if they happen to have been done before, well too bad.

3. This is the year I HAVE to back up all my raw files. I have already learned that raw processors improve over time as do sharpening techniques and black and white conversions so there are three good reasons to keep the raw file indefinitely! I even purchased the hard drive upon which to place them.

4. I'm going to try to be tidier - but I don't hold out muc hope - currently the desk upon which this computer sits has less than six square inves of space visible - and that includes where I move the mouse round. I tell myself that the payoff for being a slob is that I'm creative - yeah, right, nice try. I really do have to try harder.

5. I'm going to submit my work to at least four different galleries, 4 different publications, and at least four other places that can take work, before the end of the year.

There, that will do for a start. Now work on your photographic best intentions list.

Merry Christmas

The Art Of Cropping-The Before

It takes guts to crop - you have to throw away everything that doesn't make the image stronger. It doesn't matter how interesting the cropped material is - if it doesn't strengthen the image, it has to go. Ideally that process should happen when you shoot rather than later in the darkroom or on the computer.

In the case above, you are looking at the output from PTGui. Since I wanted to choose where to blend the falling water, the output was in layers and no attempt to match brightness was made by the software. Although exposures were the same, the edge falloff and uneven cropping of the two images results in the dark seam (most of the right hand image was included, only half of the left hand image so the middle of the picture is actually the left hand end of the right hand picture and is therefore suffereing fall off.

Anyway, back to the issue of cropping. You will note that the above image includes a lot more than the cropped black and white version of the previous post. What I noticed first was an asymmetry - the right side bottom is very white, the left upper side dark. This bothered me. Next I noted that while the fine patterns of water on the right are nice, the far right isn't as interesting. I decided to crop the far right and much of the bottom out.

While this meant cropping out some lovely icicles on the left lower part of the image - see above for 'if it doesn't strengthen the image...', it had to go.

Elbow Falls Ice

The companion photograph to the one of yesterday, shot from below the fall instead of above. Canon 1Ds2, 24-70 @ 24 mm. and two images stitched with PTGui then cropped.

Elbow Falls

Medium Format

Actually this is an interesting experience. I'm going through my old 6X6 cm. images, shot either with my Zeiss Ikonta or my later Yashicamat 124G (twin lens reflex). Scanning seems to be working quite well - 3200 pixels per inch on my EPson 4870 produces quite nice results and seems to be handling the dynamic range of my negatives fairly well. I had problems with Silverfast - crashing Photoshop on about every second scan, and even the Epson driver sometimes scans results in a blank image and I have to scan again. Tried updating my SIlverfast to the latest version (hoping that would fix the bug) but there was a bug in the visa accepting software so couldn't do that. Tried installing the demo but that didn't work either - they sure don't make it easy.
Anyway, ignoring the occasional blank scan, the epson driver seems to do a reasonable job. Of course I have to spend half an hour removing dust from the resultant scan but that's easy - just tedious and arguably no worse than time spent making backups of digital files. I have been using the 'minimize grain' 'unsharp mask' settings which work nicely. I'd like to try the multiscan feature of the latest silverfast but that will have to wait for another day.

I have a number of images I like from the Yashicamat - the twin lens part was never much of an issue (you can always raise the centre column of your tripod to get exactly the original view). Lack of depth of field in images which are near-far compositions is an issue. There's a lot to be said though for a simple camera with only one focal length lens to choose and making the best of it. Productivity actually goes up and it's amazing how if you only have a normal lens, you can find a lot of compositions which work with it.

I think that were I working strictly in black and white, it might be tempting to go back to 6X6 medium format. I love the square format.

Small Fall

From my medium format days back in the late 70's and early 80's. I was using a Yashica 124G, nice camera, good lens, easy to use, stopped down to f32.
This shot was taken at laurel Lake spillway, w. of London, Kentucky.

Overpass

Wormwood

Last Minute Christmas Ideas To and From Photographers

Here's a few ideas to give as a photographer.

1) Write up a contract to do a family portrait
2) photograph the family pet
3) take a picture of their house
4) make a small (read 8.5X11 or smaller) print and put it in a frame and give that as a gift - giving a print that then needs an expensive print is not only not appreciated, if they don't like the picture - they are in an awkward spot.
5) too late for this Christmas, but how about a book of prints - they don't have to occupy wall space, they get better selection of prints so there are bound to be some they like, and it takes up little space.

Here's some last minute gifts for the photographer.

1) Visible Dust Cleaning system, portable spinning brush, etc.
2) an extra 1 - 4 gig compact flash card make a nice stocking stuffer
3) any of the books on photography by Freeman Patterson
4) reflector
5) lens cleaning brush

Johnston's Canyon Mountainside

From the end of my 4X5 days, Linhof Color Kardan, Red Dot Artar 19 inch (480 mm.) on an apple sauce can wired and glued to a technika board giving me another five inches extension on a very rigid camera. Lots of flare - I had to redesign baffling afterwards and getting this image was not easy.

Ugly Is Beautiful?

Can't really say why I like this image, I just do, well, maybe I can. I like the symetry of the image being divided in half (so much for rule of thirds), I like the symetrical buckets but I particularly like the balance between the curved hose on one side and down and the diagonal pipe on the other side and up, one straight, the other curved. The floor and wall have great texture and the lighting makes for dark edges without having to burn them in. I like the highlighed area of the floor under the open pipe coming out of the wall. That said, sure is ugly though.

Auto Download Photos

I was thinking that it would be nice if our dSLR's could use bluetooth to automatically download images to a portable hard drive in our pocket. If we had two pockets we could download to both drives and have backup in the field without any effort at all. The camera could even give us a message to say that the downloads have been checked and confirmed ok and do we want to erase the onboard memory. This would not require any currently undeveloped technology and seems to me it would be really useful. Anyone listening?

Is Home or Away Better - Where To Photograph

I can only speak to my own experience here but it's my conclusion that I do my best work in areas I have visited before so I suspect the philosophy of 'do France and move on' wouldn't work for me. I'd have to be able to go back. Certainly if you factor the amount of time spent photographing and the number of good images - travel isn't as successful for me as shooting locally. I can produce an image I'm happy with somewhere between every second and every trip photographing for 3 hours each. Travel photography has been less than half as productive. Now my wife is pretty understanding - I can disappear for hours at a time photographing while she strolls on the beach so that isn't the issue. I can get pretty excited about the material I'm photographing so finding stuff isn't the issue. It seems that being excited about the possibilities of subject matter isn't enough. A return visit will pay dividends. There's a lesson there, at least for me.

Selling Prints

Scott Jones sent an email and I thought it worth showing everyone. It was in response to my discussion on print pricing. he refers to Brooks Jenson of Lenswork. With his permisssion here's his description of selling prints. I have to say I'm impresssed with the work he does. He is selling these prints by the way, for $50 for an 8X10 matted to 14X17 - very very reasonable.

Ya know the easiest way is the way Brooks does it. Just sell the bare print in a plastic bag and a backing board and put it in a priority mailer box (free) and charge an extra mailing fee. No fuss; no muss as we Yank say. I thought long and hard about this method, but had two concerns. It just didn't seem very special to sell the loose print and I really like to have my work shown in the traditional way. That is, dry mounted on rag bright white board and then over matted with a window that has a reveal all the way around the print and a weighted space for me to sign my name. Also this protects the surface of the print from scratches and marks that people are quite likely to make on the surface of the prints. I use EPSG paper which I love but it is fragile to scratching.

I handle the work part of this choice by using my local framer who works out of his house. I email him a "map" of how I want him to make my back board and window over mat. He cuts the window on a computerized cad/cam machine so the cut is perfect to the 1/16 inch. He also applies the archival tape hinge to the sandwich. I then drymount my trimmed image into the windowed space, sign and mail. This way I do not have to keep mat board in the house, or spend the time cutting it and making windows, and the cad/cam machine can make a better window than any human can. The cost for all of this is: $17 for a 16x20 sandwich and $15 for a 14x17 sandwich. After I factor in the cost of mounting tissue, paper, ink, crystal clear plastic bag, I clear a profit of approximately $30 which interestingly is more than Brooks gets for his easier method. I also then continue to control presentation. I include a "care and feeding" sheet that tells people how to take care of the print and my suggestion on how to frame it with a specific molding suggestion that any framer can order.

I then charge $10 for shipping fees and materials which I have just realized should be $12 to really cover all the costs of parcel post mail of my 4x corrugated cardboard sandwiches that I mail the matted print in. I haven't tried masonite. I buy the cardboard from our local framer supply store. I have an inch of extra space all the way around and tape it to survive a bomb blast.!

Well at least this is hat I am doing now. If I could just give up the control/presentation factor, then Brooks' method would be an absolute breeze. Hmmmm...

So yes, after reading your comments below again, perhaps that bare print method really makes sense. I am going to have to ask all the people I run into how they feel about bare prints for cheaper cost. Be interesting to see what the non photographer public says.

This is lots of fun talking to a kindred soul. I am enjoying your blog; wish more people would leave comments...

Happy Solstice (yes, it IS getting dark!)

So: thanks Scott for your description. I'm sure Scott is right that people do appreciate the matted prints. My own concern is less the large amount of work that Scott has to do to sell one print than it has to do with the difficulties of shipping larger prints flat through the mail. I have had very well packed prints destroyed by the post office - corners bashed, packages folded in half, despite packing them the same way that Scott describes. I'm open to more suggestions.

Critiquing My Own Efforts

Andy was nice enough to post a complementary comment about the second (the cactus) image posted yesterday as a bit of a self assignment. I thought it might be worth seeing what I could say about my own work.

Before I do that though, Andy commented on it being tack sharp - it is in fact a series of five images blended with Helicon Focus - with the focus shifted gradually from the nearest tip to the middle of the plant (but not the back). It did a superb job. It doesn't always. I tried the same technique with the egg and it resulted in ovelapping and blending errors - I suspect because of the lack of sharp lines upon which to align (I know it was hard enough to manually focus).

Rather than provide a pedantic description of various aspects of the print quality, I'm going to take you through some of the thoughts that I had as I edited the image.

I had great difficulty cropping the image just right - often a warning that compositionally it is weak (otherwise there would likey be an obvious way to crop), I just didn't feel that the shapes of the image quite came together. I was bothered by the lack of balance. The light from outside was coming from the right, the fill was from the left and above. The left side of the picture was much darker than the right and considerable work had to be done to correct this.

I'm still not happy with the blurred areas in the right bottom which isn't complemented by an equivalent blurred area on the left, but at least in editing I matched the brightness to this isn't as obvious a flaw.

Tonally was quite happy with the image and even more so after applying Akvis Enhancer. My first attempt I increased the highlights control but while it separated the highlights (the needles) better it increased contrast too much and I redid the enhancing with the default settings and toned them down to about 50% and was much happier.

I think I have cropped it the best way I could but were you to make a sketch of the major shapes of the image, I don't think you'd see interesting patterns (see prev. blog about this technique for composing).

Does the image excite - hardly, but it's nice. It shows things closer than we normally see, it turns the cactus into a pattern rather than a plant. I'm happy enough showing it to people but I'd not include it in any submissions to galleries, magazines or whatever.