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July 2009

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

A Little Lesson in Aerial Photography

Richardsonaerial

Our friend Jim Richardson, in his blog, has a nice account of taking this picture, and of planning aerial photographs in general. Jim's blog takes pictures mostly from his work for National Geographic and tries to give a down to earth, nuts-and-bolts look at how they were made.

"The latest," he writes, "is about an aerial photograph of wheat harvest for our 'Great Plains' story, in which I go into considerable detail about the rigors of aerial photography from a small plane. It also emphasizes the importance of capturing moments (even from the air) by studiously predicting when they are going to happen. It's not a romantic view of photography, just what you have to do to make it happen."

Mike
(Thanks to Jim)

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Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "When I was in high school I would take aerial photos of crops on my family's farm. We would take the doors off of a Citabria and I'd take pictures out the door. Between the placement of the doors and the struts and me in the backseat and 120mph of wind buffeting me, the pictures sucked for any other purpose than seeing how the center of the sunflower field was doing. In retrospect I think it was all just an excuse to go flying with the doors off the plane. I hadn't thought of that in years, and now I can distinctly remember the smell of avgas and the farm."

Featured Comment by Hikari: "I had once the chance of taking photos from the window of a small plane and got sick after 30 min. smelling the gasoline and looking through the viewfinder. From that day I really appreciate the work of these kind of photographers."

Featured Comment by Tim F: "Tip from someone who has done this all of once: do not ask the pilot to fly as low as he can if you only have one pass. I was looking up at telephone poles."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Any discussion of aerial photographers would be incomplete without giving full credit and fawning admiration for my own aerial hero, Georg Gerster. Long before Yann Arthus-Bertrand took the world by storm Gerster was showing us what art aerial photography could be. He has built up an enormous body of work of simply stunning images.

"Once, years ago, I had the honor of working with him, when we were doing the 'Day in the Life of America' and I was one of the assigning editors. Georg Gerster was assigned to me and I remember sitting there asking him what he wanted to do. Simply and professional he said, 'I want to do what you need done.'

"Quite a guy, and not a bad photographer."

Posted on Tuesday, 14 July 2009 at 02:04 AM in Shooting techniques | | Comments (15)

Monday, 13 July 2009

The World's Shortest Camera Review: The Sigma DP2

It pains me to write this. It really does. In so many ways, Sigma has made a valiant effort to create the kind of camera I first called for four years ago, and that I think is still needed in the marketplace: the DP2 is a true compact, with a fixed lens of highly utilitarian focal length and acceptable lens speed, yet with a DSLR-sized sensor. Compliments of a generous reader (thanks again, T.J.!), I had a chance to shoot with a DP2 for a few days last week.

My reaction could be confined to the two sentences in the second-to-last paragraph of this post, except that would be the world's shortest camera review.

The good news is that Sigma did two of the most important things very well: the lens in this camera is superb, and the sensor's image quality is beguiling. Despite one or two minor IQ oddities that I consider basically inconsequential, the overall look of the image files is distinctive and remarkably pleasing. These two important parameters are good enough that for some people, the results that are possible could be worth putting up with the camera. In some ways, DP2 images look better than what I get from my DSLRs.

The bad news is that the camera is slow. I mean like 2002 all over again.

The only way to get good shutter responsiveness in AF mode is to pre-focus, but as soon as the action around you fires up to more than leisurely-stroll-level, pre-focusing seems to take forever. It takes so long that you can't even pre-focus directly on moderately fast moving subjects, because the subject moves before the camera can lock on to it! As for throughput...well, when a camera uses an hourglass symbol to indicate progress writing a single picture to the card and you find yourself not infrequently watching that hourglass symbol as you wait to take the next shot....

The DP2 is a camera that would virtually force you to work out a method that it's capable of and that's acceptable to you in order for you to use it, virtually to the point that it would dictate the kind of subject matter you could use it for. At least comfortably. If you shoot almost exclusively static subjects at middle distances or greater, it could work. Sean Reid describes using it with a clip-on optical viewfinder for medium-distance subjects outdoors, guesstimating focus distance with the handy manual-focusing wheel. (In my past experience, this works reasonably well at middle apertures for subjects farther away from us than we are tall, roughly—with practice. For closer subjects, like maybe four or five feet on in, you often need more exact focus, so you'd either need to be really good at the aforementioned guesstimation or switch to AF.) You'll also be better off shooting JPEG, so the camera has a chance to keep up with you. Shooting raw with the DP2 is like walking holding hands with a three-year-old: it's just gonna slow you down.

For me, the camera's egregious lack of responsiveness makes it a non-starter. Workarounds are all well and good, but I would just prefer to have a camera that works better.

I wanted to like the Sigma DP2. I really did. But it's like a tripod with two legs: what's missing overwhelms what's done well. I have to call a personal verdict of "not recommended."

Mike
(Thanks to Ted Johnson)

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UPDATE: I just found out the camera I used last week did not have the latest firmware, which is said to improve AF speed. So add a grain of salt—or another one, if you disagree with what I said—to my comments about that.  —Mike

Featured Comment by Colin Work: "The problem with workarounds with the DP2 (and many other cameras) is that they were not designed to support this.

"Old film cameras were designed for manual focus and a pleasure to use in this way as well as being quick.

"When technology works well, great, but when it doesn't, trying to work around it is generally worse than not having the technology at all—try retuning a modern TV when you've lost the remote!

"For me, the best cameras (old and new) are those which reduce the need to take the camera into consideration when shooting. An old manual film camera achieves an almost perfect level of 'transparency'—it works pretty much exactly as fast as you can think and react.

"Very few DSLRs in my experience can match this...my 1D3 comes close, but even then I occasionally have to make a focus point change when it 'mis-locks.'

"From what I read, the DP2 has nothing like the level of transparency I would want. Yes, IQ is very important—but of no value whatsoever if the critical moment is missed.

"I think we will wait a long time for the perfect DMD—not because it can't be made, but because the manufacturers will not risk bringing a stripped down, feature-limited camera to market. We may get a usable DMD, but only by using a sub-section of an otherwise highly spec'd (and priced) camera."

Posted on Monday, 13 July 2009 at 10:09 AM in Camera Reviews | | Comments (67)

Saturday, 11 July 2009

John Loengard, 'As I See It'

Perhaps this will indicate just how circuitous my thought process can be sometimes. Writing the previous article summary about the twice-lost Cartier-Bresson prints sent me off looking for an illustration for it. Most of my illustration ideas come from my head, and I thought of John Loengard's excellent portrait of Henri Cartier-Bresson in old age, so I went off looking for that. I couldn't find one I could use (the only one I found has a disfiguring watermark on it), but, in the process of searching, I discovered that John's fine book As I See It is still in print. (Here's the U.K. link.)

Considering how fast many photography books seem to go out of print these days, I'm always surprised to find that good ones published in years past are still available. This was published way back in 2005. Four years is a middlin'-long lifespan for a book these days.

As a photographer, John Loengard was like a golfer who never went to Q-School* or played a mini-tour—he became a LIFE magazine photographer when he was still in college. Later, he was the picture editor for the monthly incarnation of LIFE, from 1978 to 1987.

Many of his books are more about LIFE magazine and other photographers than they are about him, like the excellent and entertaining collection of early-'90s interviews with former LIFE photographers, What They Saw. His "must-have" book in my opinion is Pictures Under Discussion, which pairs photographs with short essays in the manner of Szarkowski's Looking at Photographs (speaking of which, you do have that one by now, don't you? If you don't, chop chop). But both those books of Loengard's are out of print. As I See It is a retrospective monograph of his own photographs. Although John Loengard's contributions to photography have been multifaceted and not limited to his own work, his pictures are underrated. They're very fine, as well as being interesting and entertaining to look at because of their subjects (he's especially good with portraits of other photographers, for instance. Which I guess is where I started here).

Asiseeit

Mike


*There are only a handful of golfers who have never had to run the gauntlet of Q-School to qualify for the tour. Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, a few champions from other countries, and a scant few others. Even Tom Watson went through Q-School—once.

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Featured Comment by Mike Peters: "When Pictures Under Discussion first came out, I pored over it for months, reading and re-reading. The book was quite illuminating for a young photographer.

"One day, I decided that I should show my work to John Loengard himself, secretly hoping he would see the work of a budding genius, or maybe just provide me with a nugget of advice or inspiration.

"So, I called the offices of LIFE and asked for his extension. Astonishingly, he answered the phone and gave me an appointment. I was on cloud nine, knowing that this would be my break. So, I prepared my portfolio, making the best prints of my best work.

"On the appointed day, I made my way to LIFE from my home in N.J. And there I was, in same hallways where the giants of 20th century photojournalism once and still roamed. We sat down and he pored over my work, inspecting, tossing aside, looking again. Finally the moment came where he had something to say, I sat forward, my heart leaping out of my chest.

"He leaned back and told me that my pictures were boring. He may have said other things after that, but my mind was stuck on boring. Dejectedly, I left, crushed, totally flattened, ready to quit photography.

"And now 25 years later, I realized that I was boring, even to myself, and my photos reflected who I was. When I was in my 20s I should have been living life to the fullest, doing interesting and crazy things, taking chances. Instead, I lived a life full of fear and negativity. Well, duh, that's what was in my photos.

"Thank you John Loengard for being honest with me, and giving me that nugget of truth.

"My copy of Pictures Under Discussion continues to give insight to all who experience it. I pass that book around to all of my friends who become interested in photography, and each person wants to read and re-read it just as I did. It has become well worn, but it's capacity to inspire is undiminished by time or technology."

Posted on Saturday, 11 July 2009 at 01:04 PM in Books | | Comments (12)

French Government has Oeuf on Face

The French government has egg on its face over an archive of rare and extremely valuable Henri Cartier-Bresson prints that it lost not once, but twice—some of which are now resurfacing on the private art market.

According to an article in The Independent, it seems Cartier-Bresson gave 551 vintage prints to the French government, most of which came from a 1955 exhibition at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Some were made by the photographer himself—unusual because, for most of his career, he had other people make his prints for him. (He was, or claimed he was, allergic to darkroom chemicals*.)

The archive was later discovered to be severely damaged by water leaks in the basement of the museum facility where they were being stored. Reluctantly, after inspecting the damage in 1991, Cartier-Bresson agreed that the prints should be destroyed.

Ten years later, Cartier-Bresson recognized a print from the archive being offered for private sale. He made a formal complaint, and the sale was stopped.

Since the photographer's death in 2004, more of the supposedly "destroyed" prints have been showing up on the art market. Where did they come from? Nobody seems to know. The Cartier-Bresson foundation has formally demanded that the French government admit that it did not destroy the prints; the French government says the prints now turning up must have come from some other souce. (I'll trust Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson's widow, who recognizes the prints as having come from the archive.)

There's plenty of motive for skullduggery: a single one of these prints can be worth more than a quarter of a million dollars.

Pass les oeufs, please. Plenty of shamefulness to go around.

Read the article here.

Mike


*I sympathize—I'm allergic to washing dishes.

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Featured Comment by Andre Moreau: "For those who read French, here's the original article from the Le Monde newspaper."

Posted on Saturday, 11 July 2009 at 11:53 AM in Exhibits | | Comments (13)

Thursday, 09 July 2009

Raving at Dpreview

The scribes at dpreview.com oft make proud reference to the length of the site's reviews..."our 32-page review," etc. But I have to confess my slothfulness...for me, their reviews are 2-page reviews, all of 'em, because all I ever read is the "Introduction" and the "Conclusion." Hey, I'm an executive, towering like a colossus astride the TOP empire, and I'm busy. With the blog, not so much. But I've got the garden to water, the dog to take to the park, and housework to ignore.

And naps, don't forget how much time naps can suck out of each day. It's brutal.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that I'm not attuned to all the subtleties of dpreview's reviews. But is it just me, or did Richard Butler and Lars Rehm just give a rave review to the Olympus E-620? "The Four Thirds range has tended to lag a fraction behind the best contemporary APS-C sensor-size DSLRs," they write, on, er, the Conclusion page. "This isn't the case with the E-620...it's up there with the best of them." "...you'll be impressed by the level of control you get for so little money." "Its ability to deliver great images, straight out of the camera[,] hits the spot precisely." "...competes more convincingly with its peers than any Four Thirds camera we've yet seen."

 Olye620-4

That sounds like a rave to me. I could be wrong.
Mike

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Posted on Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 09:29 PM in Cameras, new | | Comments (68)

Met Warns Officers Off Photographers

By John Oates, The Register (U.K.)

The Metropolitan Police has issued guidance to its officers to remind them that using a camera in public is not in itself a terrorist offence.

There has been increasing concern in recent months that police have been over-using terrorism laws and public order legislation to harass professional and amateur photographers. The issue was raised in Parliament and the Home Office agreed to look at the rules.

The guidance reminds officers that the public do not need a licence to take photographs in the street and the police have no power to stop people taking pictures of anything they like....

READ ON at theregister.co.uk

Mike
(Thanks to John Hogg)

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Posted on Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 12:57 PM in Legal and social issues | | Comments (12)

It Really Was Love

Couple1969Burk Uzzle, Couple, 1969

(Photo courtesy Lawrence Miller Gallery)

WoodstockThis summer will mark the 40th anniversary of the famous music festival near Woodstock, New York that took on the name of the town. One of the more famous pictures of the event was taken by Burk Uzzle, a former contract photographer for LIFE magazine and now a past president of Magnum. One reason it became so famous was that it was the cover of the first (of two) Woodstock albums. (Strange as this may sound, I don't recall ever seeing the album cover before, although I think I must have at some point. At the time, I was 12, listening to things like Donovan's "Mellow Yellow" and Motown on the radio, and my father's Al Hirt records—I played second trumpet in the school band.)

The couple in the photo are Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, both 20 then, local kids. They had known each other only three months at the time, but they married two years later—and are still together today. (So it was love.) They're both 60 now, and have been profiled so often that they sometimes get recognized out in public. There's a nice article about them in the New York Daily News that shows a picture of what they look like today.

They still live in the area, too, all these years later.

Mike
(Thanks to Stan Banos)

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Posted on Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 02:53 AM in Visual Culture | | Comments (19)

Wednesday, 08 July 2009

'How Much Harder Would It Be to Do What I Like?'

Alain

A video interview with landscape photographer Alain Briot on SmibsTV (Episode 24). In an interesting bit from the early going in the interview, Alain talks about how hard he was working making at living at something that didn't make him very happy, at which point, he says, he asked himself the question in the post title. The rest, as they say, is history. It's certainly an interesting way to look at life.

Alain's new book is due out later this month and is available for pre-order now.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Dustin: "Great interview. It was motivating to hear a photographer actually talking about being able to make a living doing what you love. It seems that most of the time we all hear about the negatives a whole lot more than the positives."

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "That's a very nice talk with Alain. I encourage young people, in particular, to watch this interview as it's full of encouragement for reality-checking and rational self-assessment. I also encourage practicing 'fine art' photographers to watch, this as Alain's attitudes regarding the balance between his art and his business is a very healthy and productive one that many others might benefit from studying and adopting. Yes, he admits encounters with luck. But when you look at the whole story you realize that he made the opportunities for lucky encounters.

"I do not follow landscape photography very closely, per se, but I consider Alain to be one of America's preeminent practitioners today. I admire his work as the wonderful art that it is...nobody does it better. But I also admire his determination and fortitude to succeed and his willingness to share time and perspectives with others."

Posted on Wednesday, 08 July 2009 at 07:18 PM in Photographers, current | | Comments (10)

Flipping Real Estate

I've got no beef against America's Best Newspaper, The New York Times (which I sometimes also call "the world's best photography magazine" because its photography content is so much better than what you find in most photo mags)—but, according to Editor & Publisher, it appears that they're the latest victim of getting burned by an unscrupulous photographer.

It's curious—one of the traditional roles of the print media was to act as a gadfly to business and government and keep 'em honest, look into their claims and behavior and so forth and check to see if they were all on the up-and-up. So, now, has it fallen to blogosphere to play the very same role vis-a-vis the traditional media itself? Or am I reading way too much into this?

(I'm not being grandiose, because I don't do much original reporting here on this blog. Original opinion is the best I can claim. I mean the Blogosphere, capital B, meaning, other people who know more than I.)

At any rate, it seems the paper commissioned the distinguished Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins to travel the U.S. photographing abandoned construction projects for an article in the Magazine. Pretty obvious what they expected, since a sentence near the start of the article began, "Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation, traveled...." A commenter at metafilter named unixrat (who turns out to be Adam Gurno of Rosemount, Minnesota—there's an audio interview with him on Minnesota Public Radio News) got suspicious, and compared one of the pictures with a straight left-to-right flip, proving the photo was a mirror composite with a few details changed to disguise the fact. Curiously, a lot of the discussion at metafilter addressed people who "just couldn't see" how the flip proved the image was fake. I'm betting our readers won't have that problem.

In any event, the Times agreed. The slideshow has since been replaced by a terse note that says, "The pictures in this feature were removed after questions were raised about whether they had been digitally altered."

It can happen to the best.

Mike
(Thanks to els and Andy Adams)

UPDATE: There is now a fuller explanation on the Times site, at the link called "since been replaced" above:

Times_notice

Note the phrase "...most of the images...."

(Thanks to our reader JR for pointing this out to me. —Ed.)

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[Advertisement] Is this the best 4/3 camera made?


Featured Comment by John A. Stovall: "It pales when compared to this."

Featured Comment by Stan B.: I'll be the first to admit I'm not very good at spotting such things—but this was not some flash news item. These days, photographic images need to be meticulously vetted. And if the regular photo editor ain't up to task, perhaps a new position needs to be created and/or utilized—an Image Authenticity Editor, if you will.

"And if Mr. Martins is, in fact, guilty—what is the mindset of someone making a career of the very thing he so publicly goes out of his way to divorce himself from?"

Mike replies: I emailed Edgar asking if he'd like to tell his side of the story. I'll let you know if I hear back.

UPDATE 9 July: I received the same reply from Edgar that the Times published on its Lens blog. He says he's traveling and will have a statement when he gets back and can review the discussion. (I think I might extend that trip if I were him....)

Posted on Wednesday, 08 July 2009 at 04:10 PM in Legal and social issues | | Comments (34)

Tuesday, 07 July 2009

Random Excellence: Vlad Artazov Nails It

Artakov

Hard on the heels of the 78 Rules link below, another whimsical and funny set of pictures, this time from Czech photographer Vlad Artazov, who gets creative with a very common subject. Warning: some of the pictures show a seamy side, and some show intimacy and more, although somehow I doubt you'll be offended. (I especially liked the pregnancy picture and the porn theater!)

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Kee)

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Posted on Tuesday, 07 July 2009 at 09:17 PM in Random Excellence | | Comments (23)

Monday, 06 July 2009

Photographing a Supernova

Ctein-1Ctein, Apollo 17 Liftoff, Cape Canaveral, 1972


Ctein-2
Ctein, Total Eclipse Coronal Streamers, Cabo Pulmo Mexico, 1991


By Ctein

Part of photography is in the hypothetical. Some of it's intellectual exercise; some of it is "luck favoring the prepared." I wouldn't have been able to make either of these photographs if I hadn't spent a lot of time in advance figuring out just what was going to be required to make them.

Recently, a friend asked me about the prospects for photographing Betelgeuse when it goes supernova. Not as far-fetched as it might seem. Betelgeuse is a very late stage red giant (it's the brightest star in Orion, the left shoulder), with large-scale instabilities. It's in the last moments of life.

A red giant lives a million times longer than a human being, so the fact that Betelgeuse has anywhere from "seconds" to "days" to live doesn't have quite the immediacy it does when we're talking about a human being. Still, there's a finite chance the wavefront is already on its way and will arrive in our lifetimes.

I started thinking. How long would it be extremely bright and visible? Answer is, for months, although the peak brightness should only last for a day or so. Still, even days are enough time, unless you're unlucky enough to be clouded out. Or Betelgeuse is lost in the sun's glare. Not much we can do about that.

So, how bright? Here's where it gets interesting. Predictions for this kind of supernova are uncertain. A somewhat arbitrary number thrown around is peak luminance equal to 100 billion suns. There can be variations by an order of magnitude. Supernova 1987a is another reference point, although it was on the dim side.

Betelgeuse is far away, so it wouldn't look very bright to us, would it? Well, it's not all that far away. Merely 600 light years. Our sun is 500 light seconds. So, dividing 500 seconds into 600 years and squaring, it's just about a factor of one quadrillion. Which would make supernova Betelgeuse only 1/10,000th as bright as the sun. Whew, no chance of excessive sunburn! (You'll get zapped by possibly 1000 neutrinos, no big deal. Happily, the main radiation jets will be pointed away from the earth. But no predictions on what happens when the charged particles arrive; I'd have to do more research.)

But, that's bright! The full moon is 1/300,000th as bright as the sun. So this arbitrary calculation says supernova Betelgeuse would be 30 times as bright as the full moon. Huge uncertainties in that number, but it seems safe to say it's somewhere between one and several hundred times as bright as a full moon.

What makes this a photographic challenge is all that light is concentrated into a very small point. For the human eye, it's an area about 1000th that of the moon. So the "surface luminance" of supernova Betelgeuse could be anywhere from a few percent to as bright as the sun. Shining on the landscape that is 10–15 stops darker than a normal sunlit one.

Photographing scenes under a full moon isn't much different than photographing them under the full sun, not counting a 16 or 17 stop difference. Similar size source, similar color characteristics, etc. Here the light source is much more concentrated and bluer, shadows will be sharper and harder, there will be much, much more bright light scattering near to the source, relative to the scene. It will be a real challenge for HDR.

Honestly, I'm not sure HDR could tackle it. A point source that bright in a scene produces a substantial amount of scattered light in any optical system. When you're dealing with luminous ranges that push 20+ stops, it becomes very problematical what any range of exposures captures in the shadows. More food for thought. I hope this doesn't happen tomorrow; I need to work on the problem.

Of course, if it happens in the daytime, it's much easier to photograph. It'll just be a brilliantly bright spark of light in the sky. Boring.

Things might start to get interesting 5–10 years after the explosion. There might be some photographable light echoes and maybe a nice dense nebula, both getting into the size range of the full moon. But I'm not sure about that; need to do more detailed luminosity calculations. Might just be of astronomical interest.

Or maybe not!

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Posted on Monday, 06 July 2009 at 06:09 PM in Ctein | | Comments (43)

Sunday, 05 July 2009

'Try To Avoid From Too Purple Images'

Okay, we can all go home now. Latvian photographer Ivars Gravlejs has covered them all. All the rules. There are 78 of them. But wait! How can I remember 78 rules? I can't remember 78 of anything. I can't remember 78 former classmates' names, or 78 of the meals that I've eaten, or 78 of the women I've slept with*. How can I remember 78 Photography Rules for Complete Idiots?

(One slight problem though...the "wrong" photograph in #47 is a great shot.)

Mike
(Thanks to Rachel)

*Don't disturb me. I live in a dreamworld of my own imagining, and I'm happy in here.

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Posted on Sunday, 05 July 2009 at 01:17 PM in Photographic aesthetics | | Comments (68)

Saturday, 04 July 2009

OT: Music Question

I just caught part of a fascinating documentary on PBS with Dr. Oliver Sacks, the popularizer and philosopher of neuroscience who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and who was portrayed by Robin Williams in the superb movie "Awakenings." In an FMRI scanner, Sacks's amygdala (a.k.a. the lizard brain, the most primitive part of your brain, the center of smell-memory and raw emotion) lit up while he was being played Bach, but not when he listened to an outwardly similar piece by Beethoven. I've long suspected we have a "personal chemistry" connection to certain kinds of music, even certain composers or songwriters. My brother has an almost mystical connection to John Coltrane's music, for example, but Coltrane has consistently left me cold over the years—I have "aColtrania," I guess. That's a neologism from amusia, defined as the inability to perceive music as music. Well, it's not that bad—I can hear and "get" Coltrane. He just doesn't grab me, is all I mean.

So I have a question. Let's say you were off to the proverbial desert island—or not a desert island, but a very beautiful and pleasant island where you're going to spend the rest of your days, but where there would be no music except what you brought with you. You can bring all the music you want, but only in one specific musical genre—classical-period classical, Jamaican reggae, 1950s doo wop, Renaissance plainsong, heavy metal, like that—for you, if you're a music lover, what would that genre be? What's the one style and kind of music that's truly your favorite, that you could least do without, that lights up the emotion center of your brain like a Christmas tree?

Mike

Featured Comment by juze: "Well, how about if we take a different approach. In mathematics, there is the so-called Erdős number. Anyone who ever co-authored a paper with Erdős has an Erdős number of 1. Anyone who co-authored a paper with someone whose Erdős number is 1 has an Erdős number of 2. Etc.

"Basically, I'd take anyone with a Tom Waits number of 3 or less."

Posted on Saturday, 04 July 2009 at 09:03 PM in Off-topic posts | | Comments (142)

Friday, 03 July 2009

Mix 'n' Match Madness

And it begins: the E-P1 with a Voigtländer Nokton, and with the old 40mm ƒ/1.4 lens from the original Pen and with any Four-Thirds lens you choose....

Mike
(Thanks to Gen Kanai, Oren Grad, and Adam McAnaney)

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Posted on Friday, 03 July 2009 at 01:53 PM in Cameras, new | | Comments (21)

Blogging on Auto

I should just point out that the post "Fake Photojournalism Wins" from two days ago was the purest example yet on this site of automatic blogging. Michael Walker appended the link to a comment he made. I checked it (as I check all the links in the comments) and thought it was interesting, so I posted it. You then took over.

I thought the discussion that ensued was really good, and I thoroughly enjoyed it—there were some really thoughtful, subtle, intelligent comments on many aspects of the case, and from both sides (approving and disapproving).

And I didn't have to do anything. Except flip the switch.

I'm just sayin'.

Mike

Posted on Friday, 03 July 2009 at 12:58 PM in Blog Notes | | Comments (6)

Depth of Field Hell: The Coda

...My coda, anyway. The original post was published on June 21st. A couple of final points:

1. My philosophy has always been that people should have fun with photography any way they want to as long as it's legal and doesn't hurt others. So if anyone wants to make a lifetime study of the science of DoF, I have zero objection.

2. I shouldn't have said, about depth of field (DoF), that "Most of what's out there is 99.75% complete chrome-plated bulldung." That's only the cumulative effect of error-ridden forum-style exchanges between non-experts. Henceforth, I'm going to recommend Paul Van Walree's excellent and well-written page to anyone who asks about the subject.

3. ...Comma, however, I need to reaffirm my commitment never to talk about the subject. What can I say? I backslid.*

4. The flickr slide show that Johnny R created and linked to in the comments was pretty cool (even though the bokeh of that first picture gives me full-blown heebie-jeebies). His comment was antagonistic, which wasn't really necessary, but it did make me feel strange—first time in 12 years I've been criticized for being anti-bokeh....

5. I feel rather sheepish for being very thick about one thing. I had my "duh moment" about this at long last thanks to some of our commenters. The fact is, I'd been reading persistent and (theretofore) inexplicable rants, claims, and misinformation about shallow DoF for something like a year without understanding the reason behind it: it's because people are trying to rationalize their purchase of a full-frame DSLR! Or trying to assert the superiority of the full-frame DSLR they've already bought. Duh! I'm normally pretty good at detecting the psychological underpinnings for any given observed upsurge in hooey, but I wasn't on top of that one. I should have been on to it a lot sooner.

Which leads me to...

Flowers2-small 6. The smaller size of APS-C and 4/3 sensors is really much more of an advantage than a disadvantage, in my opinion, because it allows us to use shorter lenses for the same angle of view and get more DoF at wider apertures. All else being equal**, I prefer an APS-C or 4/3 sensor to a 35mm or "full frame" one where DoF is concerned.

Which leads me to....

7. We should remind ourselves from time to time that the visual (aesthetic) conventions of photography we're all so used to are essentially an accident of the medium's technical properties. When a fixed-lens camera takes a picture of a  flower in the foreground, we expect the background to be out of the DoF and blurry, but there's nothing artistically intentional in that preference—it's only because we've become used to the way in which cameras typically render scenes visually that we think it's appropriate and desirable. We might exploit the innate photographic properties to explore the visual implications of those properties, but that's a case of us adapting to our tools.

What I'm saying is that if the physics of lenses happened to dictate that far focus distances had little DoF and close ones had large DoF, then that's what we'd be used to, and expect, and demand. But there wouldn't be anything innately superior about it aesthetically.

Right now, thanks to Photoshop et al., we are less dependent on the inherent properties of camera vision than ever before (for better or worse). And it's quite possible that we shall soon be entering an era when the visual properties of imaging systems will be enormously more varied and flexible than they are now. When that happens, the properties of "camera vision" will be even less fixed, and in that case peoples' expectations and preferences will evolve further. When that happens, artistic intention will play a greater role than it does now. For the time being, however, DoF is less a parameter that we have to "control" than it is a property we can't do all that much about, and which we must simply accept.

And finally...

8. Don't obsess about it. That's my recommendation, anyway. Pay attention, study your pictures, and you'll get a feel for DoF eventually. At that point, as well as in the meantime, it is what it is. A picture either works or it doesn't.

Mike

*Past tense of backslide, meaning to relapse into temptation, bad habits, or practices previously foresworn.

**The problem, as I've written elsewhere, is that all else is not equal. The APS-C and 4/3 viewfinders are not as good, and the cameramakers have not seen fit to provide us with more than a hodgepodge of lenses designed for the reduced-size formats, complicating lens choice considerably. But the reason I like full-frame cameras is for their viewfinders and because they restore traditional focal-length lenses to their traditional angles of view, and (secondarily) because of their somewhat improved high-ISO characteristics—not for any reason having to do with DoF.

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Posted on Friday, 03 July 2009 at 12:34 PM in Photo-tech | | Comments (49)

Thursday, 02 July 2009

Sweet Prime for Canon DSLRs

WenigerBy Sabrina Weniger

In the just-released current (July, 2009) issue of Zeiss Camera Lens News there's a short article by Sabrina Weniger about working with the new Zeiss ZE Planar T* 50mm ƒ/1.4 for Canon EF mount.

Planarforef

The Zeiss Planar 50mm ƒ/1.4 ZE is probably only "better" than its Canon equivalent at ƒ/1.4 and perhaps ƒ/2—but it "draws" differently (as Sean Reid might say), and its beautiful build and handling make it a very satisfying long-normal lens on full-frame DSLRs as well as a superb portrait-type optic for any of the better Canon APS-C cameras. (And thus, as I probably don't need to point out, a sweet lens to have both now and later if you're planning a future move from a reduced-sensor Canon to a full-frame one). There's a good review (of the Nikon equivalent, which I assume is optically identical) here.

Mike

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Posted on Thursday, 02 July 2009 at 02:47 PM in Lenses | | Comments (38)

Wednesday, 01 July 2009

Fake Photojournalism Wins

Fake-2 Guillaume Chauvin, "Je suis en conflit avec ma famille depuis que j’ai seize ans. Même si je n’ai ni bourse ni aide parentale, j’ai toujours su me débrouiller seul." Armin, 23 ans, Master de sociologie.*

By Chase Jarvis

Two French students were awarded the annual Grand Prix du Photoreportage Etudiant last week to honor a photographic story that presented images documenting the precarious lives of students today and the things they must do in order to survive and succeed.

The only catch is that the entire story was a fake....

READ ON at blog.chasejarvis.com

Mike
(Thanks to Michael Walker)

*"I've been in conflict with my family since I was sixteen. Even though I don't have any money or help from my parents, I've always known how to take care of myself." Armin, 23 years old, Master of Sociology.

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Posted on Wednesday, 01 July 2009 at 01:00 PM in Visual Culture | | Comments (46)

AIPP Australian Professional Photography Awards

Aus-1

Backstage...this year's Canon AIPP Australian Professional Photography Awards attracted 655 entrants from all over Australia, submitting a total of 2,367 images. Behind the scenes the prints wait in their cases to be judged.

Aus-2

Print handler Phillipa Adams rotates the next print to be judged. Each image was reviewed and marked by a panel of experts over three days of judging. (Photos: Charlie Brewer)

A sampling of the winners' work can be seen online.

Mike

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Posted on Wednesday, 01 July 2009 at 10:51 AM in Visual Culture | | Comments (28)

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