The Online Photographer

Although I'm often to be found spouting off on this, my own blog, I'm very much still a student myself, still learning. I often learn stuff from the comments. Some of the little epiphanies they lead me to are surprisingly simple and basic—not so much "aha" moments as, one might say, "duh" moments.

I think that in considering the cropped version of John Moore's photo as it appeared in the New York Times (after the issue of cropping was brought up by Richard and the cropped published version was pointed out by robert e—thanks guys), I finally realized just why I have always had an aversion to cropping. It's not that I have some sort of rigid adherence to principles, some remorseless fealty to rules. It's simply that photographs let me see, and, given the choice, I seldom want to see less.

You'd think I would have figured this out, been able to articulate it, thirty years ago. But no.

Once you start cropping, why stop? You've entered context-elimination mode; you're engaging in the activity of denying information to the viewer; why not take it a little further, and then a little further than that? (And by the way, when pictures are cropped in magazines and newspapers, don't think that the effectiveness of the picture is always the primary reason. Most always, fitting to the page and leaving enough room for the text is equally important, or more so. I might also wickedly point out that sometimes picture editors need something to do to feel useful.) In the cropped version of Moore's photo, why leave in the bush in the upper right-hand corner? Let's get that outta there. What does the bright blue mylar balloon contribute? Might as well ex that. For that matter, isn't the lump of flowers underneath the blue balloon "distracting" (to use the debasing argot of the demotic online micro-review) too? Is it too bad you can't get rid of Mary McHugh's water bottle, or the name of the soldier on the next headstone over? Why isn't this:

...the whole picture? (This is certainly a much lesser picture in my view, just to be clear, although the central event and presumably its emotion are still intact.)

I just don't think that way. More context and more information never hurts me, I don't think. Even if the extra information (the stuff in any picture that might have been cropped) is not exactly to the point, even if it's confusing, even if it's "distracting," and even if it detracts from the elegance and artistic rigor of a photograph's formal qualities, the fact remains, I usually still want to see it.

I really think it's that simple.

Cropping out the color
As to whether it would be better in B&W, I think it still works that way, and I don't mind it that way. But it works in color too, and that's the way the photographer took it. As David Vestal says, "So, okay."

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Mike

ADDENDUM: There's a lot of confusion in the comments about what I'm talking about here (for which I take some if not all of the blame). What I'm talking about is trusting the photographer. The photographer is at the scene, and makes the decision of what to show and what not to show. A practiced photographer composes quickly and fluidly, almost instinctively. I'm talking about not second-guessing their judgment. Being at the scene, a good photographer knows where to stand and what to show. That's what I mean when I say I want to see it—I want to see what the photographer wanted to show me.

I would include myself, when I'm the photographer, in that category—my tendency has always been to trust what I saw and how I saw it when I took the picture. If my standpoint and angle-of-view decisions resulted in a weak shot, then I just reject the shot; if it's a strong shot, then I keep everything I saw the way I saw it.

Other people are of course free to make their own determinations about that. I would hope that goes without saying. I can only talk about myself.

My comments above were about cropping. Just to be clear, what we do when we have a camera in our hands at the scene is not "cropping" and should not be confused with cropping. Cropping is something you can only do to a static, 2-dimensional image. It means trimming the edges off or extracting a detail (a segment) from out of the middle of a larger picture. When you're organizing 3-dimensional space into a 2-dimensional image, and live, moving reality within time's flow into a static, "frozen" moment extracted from the flow of time, that's not cropping and shouldn't be called by that name.

In this case we know how the photographer wanted the image, because he blogged about it and presumably would show it in his blog the way he wanted it to be. That's what I want to see. No more, I guess. But certainly no less. —M.J.

Featured Comment by robert e: "If you can forgive me for taking a non-photograph-centric view, sometimes less can tell you more.

"The Times crop emphasizes the central element while suggesting the broader contexts. It is still an arresting image, but for context I am forced to cast outside the picture, where I find find text and other photos, thus apprehending the story the editors wanted to present. It is not necessarily a better picture cropped, but it may be a more effective image to print with other essential explicative material. I think the editors helped themselves by cropping as they did.

"The (presumably) full frame, on the other hand, has a lot more to show and say and a lot more to contemplate. It is a stronger photograph on its own, but so strong that I could get lost in it, perhaps long enough to run out of time to consider the accompanying material, or to lose interest in learning more.

"I think that most news photographers look for the shot that tells the story in an instant. News editors have other tools and a more constrained and nuanced task, or may need to tell a slightly different story.

"On a more mundane level, small details like we're talking about tend to render poorly on newsprint."

The price of David and Peter Turnley's McClellan Street, which I discussed on Monday in the post "Where Do You Live?", has just dropped by $3 to $19.77.

The price of the book in England has also been lowered, to £13.67.

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Mike

In a commercial shoot, the client is in effect an uncredited collaborator. Either you're changing the way you work or see to try to please them, or they (or their representative) are there telling you what to do, or they reject your picks and pick one of your rejects.

(And does [or can] the same hold true for art intended for sale?)

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Mike (hat tip to Seth Glassman)

Featured Comment by Mike Peters: "My best clients are the ones that give me some loose parameters in the range of needing a shot of a person, here's the story, do your thing. I always pre-edit the images and give them the best.

"Some clients were way more specific, having layouts and concepts that needed to be illustrated to make sense in the context of where it was going. Then it's best to understand your place in the process where your job is to make the designers ideas make sense photographically. You do your best, give your input, but you're not the boss in this situation, that's why you get paid so much.

However, when it comes to personal work, it's with the idea that it's only for me and to satisfy my point of view. I don't consider that anyone will ever buy it or want to hang it on their wall. My professional work pays for me to do this and frees me from having to make art that appeals to a mass audience so I can pay the rent. My art is done for an audience of one, me. If others like it, then that's a bonus. If they buy it, it's a bigger bonus, but it has no correlation on what or how I shoot when I shoot for myself.

About ten years ago I was able to draw a very strong line between what I do for others and what I do for myself. My commercial work immediately got better as did my personal work. I will never confuse or try to combine the two again.

By "stress" I mean "to use the lens in such way that its weaknesses are exposed." But first....

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I. How Not to Stress a Lens
Most lenses in history, and especially now, are capable of excellent results—as long as they aren't stressed. Here's how to see the best performance of your lens under optimum conditions:

1. Shoot in strong white light with the camera pointed away from the light source, with no specular reflections or light sources in the picture and no impinging light shining directly on the objective (outermost lens element). Use at least a short lens hood to block light impinging from a radical angle.

2. Use the widest aperture at which aberrations are minimized, which usually involves stopping the lens down several stops from wide open.

3. Use a fine-grained, low-contrast pictorial film, or your digital imaging sensor at its optimum or "base" sensitivity ("ISO"). With many digital cameras, the base ISO is around 200, even if the camera can be set at lower values.

4. Minimize blur caused by subject and camera motion—this might be accomplished with the use of a tripod or other means of mechanically steadying the camera—and  arrange your subject so as to minimize both foreground and background blur.

5. Don't focus too close—lens designs vary, but perhaps stick within a magnitude of 2 or 3 of (50 • ƒ) (where ƒ = the lens focal length). Thus, for a 50mm (2-inch) lens, you would want to place your main subject perhaps 50 to 200 inches (~4–16 ft.) from the camera.

6. Focus carefully. Focus errors are a very common cause of image degradation—much more common than most people realize. (I see focus errors in published work and "great master" photographs regularly.)

7. Don't enlarge the resulting picture in the print or onscreen past a modest limit.

8. (Digital only) to minimize "chromatic aberration" (i.e., purple fringing), don't ask your lens to image complex, fine-lined subjects with high-contrast edges, such as bare tree branches against a white sky, especially near the edge or corners of the frame.

9. (Zoom lens only) use an intermediate setting in the zoom range. Generally, a kit-type zoom will show its strongest performance if you zoom in roughly a third of the way in from its widest setting. (Even though the actual optimum setting will vary from lens to lens, this will usually be close enough.) Doing this will mainly ameliorate geometrical distortion, and falloff (also called "vignetting").

10. Make sure the lens is clean.

With these ten conditions met, you'll probably find that your lens is a very good performer indeed. Even lenses that are very far from state-of-the-art will perform well. This includes many very old lenses and lenses with significant budget compromises, or even the lens permanently attached to an inexpensive consumer camera. Some of the prettiest prints I ever saw were pictures made with a tripod-mounted single-coated Miranda lens from the 1960s. They were just made under conditions pretty close to those described above.

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II. How to Stress a Lens
"Stressing" a camera lens basically involves moving incrementally away from these ideal conditions, such that the lens will be less and less likely to maintain peak performance. Here are a few of the ways this can be done....

READ ON

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Mike

The MiniDigi AF 5.0 is a three-inch high, fully functional digicam replica of the original classic twin reflex camera.

Rolleiflex introduced the original MiniDigi in 2006, but it quickly sold out. The new MiniDigi AF 5.0, which is is available with a red or black casing, has been given some significant performance upgrades, including a 5 MB image file from a 3MP CMOS sensor, autofocus, and a very clear 1.1 inch TFT monitor, located at the top of the camera as it is on the full-sized Rolleiflex TLR.

It's available through specialty retailers. Pricing is expected to be $399 MSRP.

A nostalgic design feature that has modern applications is the square format. The square format means no need to choose between horizontal or vertical position. You simply look downward into the viewfinder at waist level, aim, and shoot.

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Mike

I notice in poking around the web that the Nikon reviewer nonpareil, Thom Hogan, has posted his characteristically excellent review of the Nikon D300. I'm not an industry insider by any means, but by all accounts the D300 is an exceptionally hot-selling camera. The Nikon plant that makes them is apparently working at capacity, and a friend in retail tells us, "These things are flying off the shelves."

If you're interested in the D300, you might also be interested in Thom's article "D3 or D300?"

Those of you who have adopted Lightroom as your primary workflow hub will probably be interested in the press release we recently received from our friend Marc Rochkind:

"LRViewer is a free app for the Mac and Windows that allows you to view Lightroom images and metadata without using Lightroom itself.

"A major LRViewer upgrade, Version 1.1, is now available for download from ImageIngester.com. You can now:

• See ratings (1 - 5 stars) along with the image file name.
• Zoom in to see a 100% view, and then pan with the mouse.
• Export JPEGs with EXIF and XMP info.

"This version also includes LRVmaker so that photographers can customize the appearance and behavior of LRViewer for their clients by:

• Placing a logo on the screen.
• Showing a button that goes to the photographer's web site.
• Opening a catalog automatically when LRViewer starts up.
• Starting with a selected collection or other outline item, and controlling which outline items show.
• Marking images with a watermark.
• Preventing clients from accessing EXIF info and metadata, from viewing images above a certain size, and from exporting JPEGs.

"LRVmaker costs $25; a free demo is fully functional but marks the LRViewer screen with the word DEMO.

"For more information or to download LRViewer and LRVmaker, go to ImageIngester.com."

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Mike

A brief off-topic post—

A new study by the Pew Research Center has determined that as mainstream media coverage of the Iraq war has sunk to below 10% of all news, only barely more than one-quarter of Americans know the approximate number of our countrymen and women who have died in Iraq.

Regardless of your feelings about the war, regardless of your politics, it seems obscene to forget these people. None of them wanted to die, and none of them went there for that purpose. Yet, in the event, they have sacrificed everything—their futures, their future progeny, the opportunity to be there for their families and children—they have lost the whole world, forever. They died because their country asked them to serve, and their service was to all of us—pro-war, anti-war, and even those simply not paying attention.

They matter. As of March 10th, their number was 3,974. So now you know again, in case you'd lost track.

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Mike

At long last, T.O.P.'s long-awaited (well, long-promised, anyway) review of the Zeiss Ikon. Have a look.

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Mike

By Steve Rosenblum

Speaking of Peter Turnley and where I live: Peter Turnley now is where I live this month. He is the Artist in Residence from March 14th, 2008 through April 18th, 2008 at the University of Michigan Residential College here in Ann Arbor. We are both alums, and he graduated a year or so after I did. As part of his residency he is going to give three lectures, each at noon at the Residential College in East Quad:

March 11: The Year 1989 In Images
March 18: Refugees—The World's Homeless
March 25: Photography as Visual Storytelling

Many of the photos from McClellan Street portfolio are on exhibit there this month. So, anyone within driving distance of Ann Arbor, come on over!

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Steve

It occurred to me that this might be a useful question at this point, if you've been following along with the discussion for the past several days. There's an old expression that I think goes, "That hits me where I live." As I understand it, the expression refers to something the appeals to you directly and viscerally, that you admire most of all, that you find most nourishing to your enthusiasm. Something you might also say "I'm a sucker for." (Pardon my clumsy blundering about, but I think it bears defining.)

As a music listener, for instance, what "hits me where I live" at the moment is Bluenote-label jazz from the 1950s. Can't get enough. (When I was in grade school it was the Beatles, in college it was Neil Young, and for a while in my 30s it was Trevor Pinnock and other Baroque music on period instruments.) Note that these are not value judgments for anybody else. Maybe, for somebody else, where they live might be big-hair rock from the '80s, or Barry Manilow, or the Three Tenors. I have an older friend who loves big band. My son's uncle when I knew him was crazy about the Beastie Boys. For my friend KK I suspect it is the Velvet Underground. But don't most listeners have some artist or other that is right at the core of their love for music, the one that speaks to their heart most easily, the last band they'd want to give up?

Where you live—it's something you just love out of proportion, the thing you'd take to the desert island, the thing you return to again and again, the thing that grounds you. The thing you have a weakness for.

So—photographically, where do you live?

Always dangerous speaking for others, so this is just provisional, but I'll go out on a limb and say that for Ctein, "where he lives" photographically speaking is 6x7 color negative film and 16x20 dye transfer prints (which you can arrange to see if you're in the San Francisco area, by the way). Better hear that from him, though.

For me, the style of photography I simply love best—where I live—is documentary style 35mm B&W. For a superb example, take a look at the Turnley twins' McClellan Street in the new issue of the Digital Journalist. Ambitious to become photojournalists, the brothers just went out and shot their own neighborhood, practicing their craft, warming up. McClellan Street happened to be where they lived. What resulted was a set of simple, honest, straightforward pictures that reek of life. They couldn't be more beautiful.

This is one of those projects that just make me want to hang it up, because I know I'll never do better. For me, stuff like this is as good as photography gets. There's a book, too. I'll have to get it, that's all there is to that. Might as well drop the bucks right now and not worry about it.

Peter Turnley on McClellan Street, Fort Wayne, mid-'70s

...and gettin' nailed.

Check out the portfolio. (There are always good portfolios at the Digital Journalist.) I notice, too, that the Digital Journalist is continuing the site redesign that they started last month. "From now on, we will be presenting HD videos prominently in our features," the new newsletter says. If you don't have the DJ bookmarked, you should. My friend Pierce writes a column there. This month's is about Leica.

And speaking of videos—this isn't really off-topic—go to YouTube.com and search "Jeff Mermelstein Media Matters." Look for parts 1a, 1b, and 2. The videographers just couldn't resist the Ken Burns disease, zooming in on and panning around within still images, which I (you guessed this, right?) can't stand. But, Mermelstein: I like the guy. He seems almost a little Asperger-ish, he's so focused. I admire that.

This is "Random Excellence" for this week, by the way. Although it's not really very random (the Turnleys and Mermelstein are at the top of the game).

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Mike  (Hat tip to Kent Phelan and Tom Kaszuba)

Featured Comment by Chris: "Where do I live? While I've ventured into several neighborhoods of photography, the one that keeps calling me back is railroad photography. I'm not talking about the roster-shot cult, either.

"The late Gary J. Benson wrote a book called The Art of Railroad Photography and it truly was a life-changing book for me. Previously, I had been content to stand at grade crossings and shoot the 'wedge' that is the mainstay of many rail photographers (and accounts for about 90% of Lucius Beebe's shots from what I can tell). The wedge is appropriately named. Basically it's a shot with a 50mm (in 35mm terms) taken at a 3/4 angle that causes the train to look like a wedge. It can feature other elements, but is generally a shot of the train (especially the locomotives).

"After reading Mr. Benson's book, several new worlds opened to me, but the greatest was the concept of the 'Trainscape.' Roster shot wedges are okay but they don't tell much of a story. Learning to feature trains in the environments in which they work is a great way to liven up a railroad shot.

"This past weekend I was out railfanning on the Limon Sub. of the Union Pacific which runs east of Denver. The line was originally part of the Kansas Pacific. While it lacks the scenic majesty of the Moffat Sub. which tunnels through the Rockies, the old KP has a charm all its own. The plains are beautiful in a rugged sort of way. It was truly a challenge to feature the trains in this environment in a meaningful way.

"In addition to the concept of the trainscape, Mr. Benson also taught me that railroading extends beyond the world of locomotives. Most railfans are content to happily shoot their grade crossing wedgies of the locomotive. Getting a good shot means getting a rare locomotive more than anything else. Beyond locomotion, though, is a rich, fascinating industry of equipment, environments and people! One of my biggest goals lately has been to add the human element to my railroad shots.

"All this had added up to an addiction. I truly can't wait to get out and shoot more train shots. My 'physical neighborhood' allows me to follow this pursuit of my 'photographic neighborhood' wonderfully. Colorado offers many great railroad opportunities.

"In addition to mainline action throughout the state, we also have several tourist operations. With operations like the Durango and Silverton; the Cumbres and Toltec; the Georgetown Loop; the Leadville, Colorado and Southern; the Colorado Railroad Museum; and the San Luis and Rio Grande (all but one of which operate photogenic steam locomotives) the railroad photographer has some amazing photographic possibilities. Add in mainline steam events by the Union Pacific's mammoth locomotives and it's about as perfect a place as railroad photographer could ever live.

"Of course, my neighborhood comes complete with neighbors, as well. When I'm not out taking railroad photos, I truly enjoy immersing myself in the work of others in my neighborhood. Perhaps my favorite way to spend a quiet evening is paging through the books by Don Ball, Jr. (I have all of them). In addition to his own great photographs, Mr. Ball also included the work of some truly great railroad photographers like Jim Boyd, T.J. Donahue, O. Winston Link, etc. Beyond those greats, I've also really come to enjoy the work of other greats like Richard Steinheimer, Mike Danneman, Brian Solomon, etc.

"It's been a fascinating journey, and as enjoyable an addiction as one could 'suffer' from. I'm glad you posted this piece, Mike. I can't wait to read some of the other responses. There have to be some other fantastic 'neighborhoods' out there!"

Mike replies: You're lucky to have a subject you're that passionate about. I worked for a model railroading magazine briefly and helped judge their annual railroad photography contest one year (I still have Gary Benson's book, too)—it's a challenge all right, not as easy as it looks.

Speaking of the human element, south of town we have a long approach where the tracks don't block traffic anywhere (it passes under the main girdling road, Rt. 59). I'd noticed that long trains sometimes pause there, just short of the first signal. I never knew why they stopped—I assumed it was to adjust their timing to get back on schedule or something. One day I happened to see an approaching train slowing as it neared the crossing, so I swung the car into a nearby lot and hopped out with my camera, thinking to get a shot as it passed. I waited for the train, but it slowed to a stop well short of the crossing.

Then I noticed one of the two engineers hop out of the cab and start walking briskly away from the train. I was curious, so I just hung out and watched. Well, he disappeared into the nearby strip mall for a while. The train waited. A little while later he came striding back—carrying a couple of bags from McDonald's! He swung himself back up into the cab, and they fired 'em up again and off they went.

So that was it! Somewhere I have a shot of an idling locomotive straight on, headlamp blazing, with that guy climbing back into the cab with his and his buddy's lunch.

Featured Comment by All Day Breakfast: "I'm a sucker for photographing quirky looking trees in an urban environment, tall mundane buildings which rise above non-descript urban settings like monoliths, You Are Here signs and the spaces between dwellings. This has been going on for about a year. I photograph other things too of course but I get really excited when I 'see a good one' of one of the above. (FWIW you can see more examples here.)"

Christopher Burkett, Green and Gold Floating Leaves, Arizona (reproduced with permission)

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "I've always loved the perfectly rendered intimate color landscape, ever since stumbling across Robert Glenn Ketchum's book The Hudson River and the Highlands twenty years ago. I signed it out from the library so frequently I was on a first-name basis with the staff. (I finally bought my own copy). Christopher Burkett's work has the same flavor, depicting a single tree as a little corner of heaven. I presume this type of image captivates me because it matches the human scale of things here in the East, in contrast to the monumental Western 'big sky' landscape. Over the last couple of years my own work has evolved to stitched panoramics printed large, so that standing in front of the print distills my sense of what it looks and feels like to stand in a hushed forest quietly enough to hear the small critters going about their business. I can't get enough of 'em.

"Music? that would be the Jayhawks, with a side-order of GooGoo Dolls. The Jayhawks for their witty lyrics and harmonies, and because my kids hate 'em; all I have to do is put on a CD, and they flee the room. Ah, solitude. The GooGoos because I grew up in Buffalo, and know exactly what 'Broadway' is about. I've been in those bars."

Ernest Theisen, Steps to the Cross, bromoil transfer print

Featured Comment by Ernest Theisen: "I live with pictorialists from way back in time to today and with Zeiss Ikon folders and with Kallitype chemicals and with lithographic ink, and with folks like these."

A scrub woman in 1892, from Rediscovering Jacob Riis.

By Sam Roberts, The New York Times

Every generation needs to rediscover Jacob Riis for itself. Born with a preacher’s passion, building on decades of prodigious research by scholars and fellow reformers and empowered by the emerging potency of photography, Riis transformed himself from a penniless Danish immigrant into the conscience of New York and a confidant of Theodore Roosevelt’s.

In companion essays in Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York (The New Press, $35), Bonnie Yochelson, a former curator at the Museum of the City of New York, and Daniel Czitrom, a history professor at Mount Holyoke College, assess Riis’s immediate and enduring impact without overlooking his weaknesses and prejudices.

“How the Other Half Lives,” the title of the work with which Riis remains most closely associated, was an understatement. The poor he chronicled probably accounted for more like three-quarters of New York’s population. An earlier version of the title was more to the point: "How the Other Half Lives and Dies"….

READ ON at nytimes.com

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Mike

In looking over the comments to my admittedly ungenerous essay that I linked yesterday, and to some of the comments in response to "Funny That Way," I can see that there are a few points begging to be made.

To begin with, my essay "Why I Hate Infrared" confuses the duties of the artist and the critic. Critics really have no business decreeing which modes of art and methods of working are valid and which not; the task of the critic is to be open to what individual artists are trying to do, and to try to judge whether they have succeeded. For a critic to be doctrinaire about means and methods, and to dismiss whole classes of endeavor merely based on matters of media, is for the critic to admit his own terminal shortcomings as a critic! That is, any critic who would say "all infrared photography is bad" is in effect saying "I'm close-minded and no good at my job." Art that works is art that convinces. And just as it's up to the artist to convince us, it's up to the critic to remain open-minded to the possibility of being convinced. It's quite possible for a good critic to say "I've never seen any infrared photography that I've found convincing," but that's very different from saying "Infrared photography that could convince me can't exist"—the latter is simply the admission of a blanket prejudice, a species of blindness—blindness being, of course, a distinctly undesirable quality in an art critic.

Student of criticism: I hate abstract expressionism.
Teacher of criticism: Fine, but which abstract expressionists are good?

The corollary of this is that artists aren't critics, and artists must have these blanket prejudices. The reason is that for an artist to have passion, she must believe in the importance and the validity of her chosen approach. This requires allegiance, and a dismissive or hostile attitude towards incompatible approaches becomes collateral damage.

Walker Evans, Parquet Central II (Sleeping man), 1933

Ralph Steiner visited Walker Evans in the hospital at the end of Evans's life and showed him a portfolio of landscape photography. Evans flipped through it quickly and dismissively said, "nature bores me."

That's the artist talking. "All nature photography is boring" would be a ludicrous critical position. But Evans believed in socially meaningful photography of people and what their surroundings revealed about their condition. For him to give "equal time" to pictures of rocks and trees (or color abstracts, or surrealism, or any other mode of working similarly distant from his own) would be tantamount to him discrediting the centrality of his own concerns in his own work. Show me an artist who doesn't loathe or dismiss whole categories of artistic endeavor and I'll show you an artist who isn't committed to his own art.

This may be why we have so few good photography critics, A. D. Coleman and Max Kozloff notwithstanding: because almost all photography critics are also photographers. Being both, they can usefully serve us as guides to what they love (I think of Robert Adams here), to what inspires and feeds their own work, but in the end they haven't got the objectivity that would allow them to remain open to the possibilities of ways of working, seeing, and thinking far from their own.

Personally I'm always struggling with this duality. I have a strong natural bent as a critic, in that I fancy I can sense when an artist has something valid to say and I like the task of puzzling out what that is. But I also have strong beliefs as an artist, emphatically-felt doctrines about what this medium is good for and what conforms to its nature, what's got richness and what's bankrupt. They're different kinds of good taste. The critic and the artist in me often conflict.

Edgy actions
As to gimmickry, whether it's infrared film or overcooked vegetables: I respectfully suggest that smart photographers ought to watch out. The online world is becoming a sort of massive, monstrous camera club, an "academy" bound down by strictures and rules and mass taste. Conformity to this world is the antithesis of creativity, and it suppresses individuality. Because of the greatly accelerated degree of discourse and the de facto emphasis on competition (for attention, for audience, for approving comments), we're moving towards a point where not only will we have sorted all pictures into genera and categories of cliché, but we'll have a standard method for Photoshopping each generic category! I felt a sort of horror watching a video the other day in which the instructor recommended an extreme style of image manipulation that he repeatedly referred to as "edgy." First of all, I suspect that any time someone calls something edgy, it automatically isn't; but what really struck me is that as the end of this process of turning a half-decent photograph into some sort of post-pictorialist Frankenstein creation, he recommended making all the steps into an automated action, which could then be applied to other pictures literally with a mouse click. Is this the future of style? It leaves me wide-eyed, gulping.

Do you remember the Garry Winogrand quote from that great video we linked a while back? "We know too much about how pictures look and should look. And how do you get around making those pictures again and again?" The 'net effect is that now people strive to make cookie-cutter pictures ("again and again") that embody "how pictures look and should look." Most pictures aren't pictures, they're imitations of pictures. Collectively we're rushing toward what we should be rushing away from. Individually, of course, there's nothing wrong with any of this—as I've said, any individual can do anything he or she pleases, as long as there are no casualties. But as an active and expectant member of the audience of photography as a whole, it makes me wonder, and, I have to say, worry.

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Mike

Running a website is a fascinating business. I can tell, for instance, that something (probably the post "Funny That Way") got some traction out on the broader Internet—not only because our traffic for the past two days has been about 40% higher than normal, but because of a sudden increased incidence of what I call "drive-by comments." (The allusion being, of course, to wild potshots taken out the windows of speeding cars by perpetrators who think they won't be held accountable.) "Drive-by comments" are flippant, dismissive, or insulting. They're usually snide. They're usually very brief, and typically offer nothing substantive—they do no more than register an attitude, a stance, a pose. A raised middle finger, perhaps.

I don't post 'em.

The reason they stick out is that they're in such marked contrast to the thoughtfulness and friendliness, the cordiality, the collegiality, of 99% of the comments we get on ordinary days from readers who've been with us a while. "Drive-bys" are probably a normal style of Internet discourse, but elsewhere.

Of course, The Online Photographer always welcomes new visitors. But, as I try to mention from time to time, this isn't a forum. Comments are moderated. The everyday, all-purpose rule is "no ad hominem." We're adults here (or act that way)—a community of equals, no one better than anyone else despite our varying levels of activity and expertise, and we try to observe civilized conventions of decency and politeness. We like it that way. Why? Because it makes it a nicer place to visit.

So to those whose habitual mode of discourse is just to take a potshot without thinking: no need to bother. We already know you have an opinion, because, er, everybody's got one. Better yet, hang around for a while, read along, and wait to make a comment until you have something to add to the conversation.

Sincerely,

T.O.P.'s Chief Bottle-Washer and Head Factotum.

Added to the archives: "Why I Hate Infrared; Or, The Search for 'Specialness,'" an early essay on the subject of aesthetic tricks 'n' gimmicks in photography. I believe this has never been published before—I really can't say for certain because I don't remember.

___________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Christopher Jones: "You have published this before! It's in Lenses and the Light-Tight Box, Bearpaw 2005."

Mike replies: Thanks Christopher. I should have figured it was out there someplace.

Featured Comment by David Mayer: "I grew up not particularly fond of most vegetables, at least as they were presented to me by my English mother. She tended to cook the bejeezus out of every vegetable, so greens took on a dark muddy color, any crispness was completely boiled out of them, and apparently too went their flavor. When I was old enough to start eating at nice restaurants, I discovered how more gently cooking, steaming, blanching etc. could result in wonderful tasting foods that not coincidentally looked appetizing with more natural color (although steaming actually tends to make the color more saturated). Does this mean I don't like cooked vegetables? No, I just don't like overdone vegetables.

"Many photographers do to their photographs what my mother did to her vegetables: they overdo it. And when they do, I most heartily sympathize with the spirit of your post, Mike. However, if such special effects are applied sparingly or at least in moderation, they can add to the flavor (aesthetic appeal) of a photograph.  Perhaps not to everybody's taste, but then we are talking about art.

"I have to admit to owning a Lensbaby 3G, and it's fun to play with. But it takes practice to get it right (technically, not aesthetically) and the number of times I've found a use for it I can count on one hand. 

"By the way, my mother is actually a good cook except for her tendency to nuke her veggies. Her microwave has one setting: eleven. Like my mother and her microwave, many Photoshop hobbyists (dare I call them photographers?) haven't discovered the opacity slider.

"I love the ranting, Mike, you do it with such eloquence."

By Richard Howe

I've recently made a whole bunch of uncontrolled and statistically invalid experiments (but fun and, to me, anyway, informative) to try to get a handle on these issues of fidelity, "true to lifeness," for myself. The following condenses and simplifies what I actually did by quite a bit, and is more methodical in the telling than I actually was in the doing, but since what I want to share is mostly the results, it's enough (I hope) just to recount the outlines of the process. After all, it's not a lab report, and when I was making the experiments it never occurred to me that I might be communicating the results to anyone but a few photographer friends.

I photographed the stuff on my work table just to the left of my monitor, with the camera about where my head is when I'm looking at the screen, at a focal length that more or less matched my eyes' field of view, in interior (indirect) daylight (but with a good gray card and calibrated white and black), and varied both depth of field and, especially, the overall focus (do my 16.7 mp really matter? Are eight enough? etc.).

I then brought these up in Photoshop, and looked at the images life size as seen on the 30" monitor in front of me, and then, just turning my head and eyes a little bit, looked at the reality they were supposed to represent. (By the way, I covered one eye for this, so as to exclude the contribution of stereo vision to the sense of reality. And then, of course, I tried to adjust the images in Photoshop to make them, or at least one of them, match the reality as close as possible.

I then made two 13x19" prints (Epson 2200 on Epson Enhanced Matte paper and on the new Exhibition Fiber paper) of the "best" one, i.e., most realistic (to me), and propped them up vertically (but only one at a time) to the right of the monitor.

Now  I could look a little to my left and see "reality," look straight ahead and see the monitor version, and look a little to my right and see the print.

Here's what I found out:

It's impossible (at least for me) to exactly match the image, either on the monitor or as a print, to the reality. No surprise there.

It is possible to get close enough to make the effort interesting. This actually was a surprise.

Resolution/sharpness mattered, of course, but a 1 pixel radius Gaussian blur didn't make enough difference to matter (remember, these were pretty hi-res images to begin with).

A very modest artificial selective focus achieved using a circular layer mask and a slight blurring of one of the layers, so that the center was perceptibly sharper than the periphery, helped, as long as the images were more or less life size. At smaller sizes, this didn't matter at all.

Color mattered more than anything else (if everything else was okay to begin with, of course). But here it got more interesting.

Matching the luminosities mattered a lot. This meant, among other things, substantially reducing the brightness of my monitor (and recalibrating accordingly) as well as getting more light onto the print (this introduced some white balance problems, but not enough to matter that much, or so it seemed).

Saturation was really complicated, and the most difficult of all, really: it was difficult (actually impossible) to match the subjective impression of the highly saturated colors of the reality without overcooking the less saturated colors—is there a "saturation dynamic range" akin to the luminosity dynamic range?

White balance mattered a lot, possibly more than anything else, and how closely the white balances of the images matched reality had a large effect on how well the whole range of saturations could be matched. Matching hues, especially in the highly saturated range and in the near true gray range contributed more than matching hues in between. Incidentally, adjusting the color balance so that the gray card was truly neutral (0, 0 in Lab color space) by no means produced the most realistic looking results.

I couldn't tell any difference between the two papers. This was the biggest surprise, especially since I'm something of a nut about papers.

Although I work in a thoroughly color calibrated environment, what worked for the screen and what worked for the prints were so different that they couldn't be exchanged. A print from the version that looked best (most realistic) on the monitor looked horribly bland as a print, and the print version looked horribly overcooked on the screen. The prints required "turning up the volume" substantially on everything, especially saturation, sharpening, and "local contrast"; the screen versions (even with the monitor dimmed way down) had to be much more subdued.

What surprised me most of all was that I really liked what I judged to be the most realistic images, on screen or as prints. I'd always assumed that I had to at least slightly (if carefully) overcook an image to compensate for the disparity vis-a-vis reality.

The lessons learned (mine, anyway):

1. My expectations and ideas about what "looks realistic" have more of an effect on how I judge the fidelity of a photograph than anything else, including its "true" fidelity or lack of it;

2. Getting a reasonably high fidelity result means balancing many trade-offs among all the available parameters, and can only be achieved if the reality is right there in front of me for immediate comparison (or maybe I just have a lousy visual memory, though there is some evidence that I'm okay on that score).

3. If the intent is to convey one's response to what one has seen, rather than to make the truest possible image of it, then we're in the realm of art, or one of its realms, anyway, and all bets are off.

_____________________

Richard

A rare early photograph of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan has been discovered in Boston. A staff member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society found the 1888 photograph in a large photography collection recently donated to the Society by Thaxter Spencer. It is believed to be the earliest photograph of Keller and Sullivan together and is the only one known showing Keller with one of her dolls, which were important in her early education.

A worldwide celebrity and noted intellectual often named as one of the most admired women of the 20th century, Helen Keller was one of the great American radical socialists, an early feminist and eloquent champion of many progressive causes such as universal suffrage, birth control, and pacifism. She helped found the American Civil Liberties Union and was a longtime supporter of the American Foundation for the Blind. She was given the Presidential  Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson and is pictured on the Alabama State quarter (a coin, for those not familiar with American money).

She is best remembered today for the story of how she overcame profound deafness and blindness with the help of her teacher Sullivan. The story has been dramatized many times, perhaps most notably in the 1959 play and subsequent 1962 film "The Miracle Worker" starring Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft.

_______________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Damon: "Really a beautiful photo. And thanks for the write up. It's most intriguing and makes me want to read a good biography of Helen Keller. I'm afraid my knowledge of her stops at what they taught us in grade 5 or so. Any suggestions?"

Mike replies: I haven't read it, but her autobiography is well regarded.

Oren got me to thinking the other day. I wonder if you could construct a matrix of all the technical properties of a photograph alongside a general estimation of how much each of those properties matter to people. Because if you could, I think you'd have to record that people are much given to grand arguments about ever more detail from their cameras (lenses, sensors) but would also register as being seriously lacking in concern about accurate color.

If online galleries in general are any indication, then we must live in a neon, day-glo world. I've just visited some galleries chock-full of colors that I'm reasonably certain never existed in nature. Golf courses where the grass looks like tempera poster-paint, a fishing boat so turquoise it would have to have been translucent and lit up from inside in real life to look like it did in the picture, sunsets that "improve" on what the Good Lord intended. It makes me wonder how many people ever bother to really look at the world—with their eyes, I mean—and then make some sort of honest attempt to make their pictures match what they see.

Let a lens or a sensor offer even slightly less than state-of-the-art resolution and detail, and people are all over that like the avenging angels. But then those same people, apparently without a thought, will jack the color ten yards north of realism and shrug—wondering if maybe they shouldn't jack it a little more.

What the world really looks like

The digital photography version

So why do people care so much about technical "accuracy" in some areas and not at all in others? Isn't the look of the world itself a useful reference? Why is inaccuracy in color rendering simply a given, while a little blurring of fine detail resolution or a touch of noise in the shadows are so adamantly not tolerated?

People are funny.

______________________

Mike

P.S. Sorry, but Velvia never looked like this.

With Sigma's fixed-lens, large-sensor compact just now reaching the market, Olympus has countered with a plausible alternative in a serious DSLR compact. The new 10MP E-420 with live view and the new-style high-resolution LCD screen updates the E-410—and this time comes with a matching lens, the system's first "prime" or single-focal-length compact lens. Of the E-420 sensor, Pop Photo says, "Olympus says color reproduction should be on a par with the pro-level E-3, which hit stellar color accuracy numbers in the Pop Photo Lab (February 2008)."

The new Zuiko Digital 25mm ƒ/2.8 (50mm-e), part of the lowest-grade or "standard" lens lineup (Olympus divides its lens line into "Super High Grade," "High Grade," and "Standard"), has five elements in four groups, including one aspheric element. It is less than an inch thick and weighs a mere 95g. Curiously, it has never appeared on the Olympus Digital Lens Roadmap. It will be available in April with an as-yet-unannounced street price (probably less than $300).

Longtime Olympus photographers will note the similarity to the old E-Zuiko 25mm ƒ/2.8 for the Maitani-designed Pen-F half-frame camera.

___________________

Mike