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Ctein

Thursday, 10 June 2010

The Importance (or Not) of the Print(ing)

By Ctein

A couple of comments on my last two columns provide the starting point for this column. John Camp commented that he expects that "printer setup and color management will be much more standardized" within a few years and software will allow one to print well with little experience. Cameron makes a closely related comment on my last column, where he describes the business of going from camera file to a printer-ready file as "photo post-processing" rather than printing.

Both of these comments view printing as the merely physical act of driving a file from bits on a hard drive to ink on paper. But, as Cameron intuits at the end of his comment, "Or am I somehow missing the point of what it is that a master printer does?"

Well, yes, he is. What Cameron calls postprocessing is properly part of the whole custom printing process. There've been several occasions when the client has provided me with a "finished" file to print and I've looked at it and really wished they had sent me the RAW file instead and let me do the conversion and adjustments, because honestly they didn't do a very good job. Please understand that I'm not talking about reinterpreting their vision. I'm saying that anything they could do I could do better. My output file would have had less highlight and shadow clipping (when that's aesthetically appropriate), better sharpness, less grain/noise, and more clarity than theirs. For a start.

Blog141figure1 Before

Blog141figure2 After

A photograph by Roger Pellegrini before and after custom printing. A lot of what I did isn't going to be very visible in this small, low quality reproduction, but there are eight substantial and important-to-the-final-print alterations. Only three of them were requested by Roger, and only one of them is blatantly obvious. As for the other five, Roger just told me to print as best as I could.

There's a lot I can do with a photograph even if what I'm receiving is the "finished" file. In fact, it's extremely rare for me to print someone's file exactly as they send it to me. Even if they think they're done with it, I can convince them they're not. They may have done 75% of the work  needed to make a really great print, but there's another 25% that I know how to do and they don't.

People like to talk about the RAW conversion process as being a lot like developing film, but there are some very important differences. For one thing, film developing is a pretty straightforward and non-aesthetic operation. Unless you're heavily into Zone System antics. Even if you are into such games, film development is about giving you the starting point for a really good print, not about getting you a negative that yields the perfect and ideal print with no further attention. That's what custom printing is about.

RAW conversion lets you make a whole bunch of artistic and aesthetic decisions that film development never does. If you're not superb at that, your final print will suffer for it. If it really helps you to think of RAW conversion as being like development, then you'll be better served thinking of a RAW converter as though it were 10 film developers rolled into one, with all possible combinations of development times, agitations, and temperatures being available. Looked at in that fashion, I can tell you that most people doing RAW conversions are "misdeveloping their film" to a greater or lesser extent.

Another important change is that unlike true film developing, RAW conversion can be done over and over again. The camera file is "fixed;" the conversion isn't. It may be subject to reconsideration and reevaluation as one's aesthetic demands become clearer. That more properly places it in the artistic domain of "printing" than "developing."

Some people think that all they need to get a great print is a well-done RAW conversion. That's true only a small percentage of the time. For example, easily 3/4ths of the photographs I see, film or digital, would benefit from some dodging and/or burning in before they're printed. How many folks do that when they're RAW-converting? Yeah, damned few.

As for John's push-button printing, I think we are already there for 90+ percent of the serious printers (I mean people, in this case). Just pull the printer (now I mean the machine) out of the box, follow the roadmap to set it up, use the canned profiles that your operating system will automatically invoke, and you'll get very good-looking prints. The hassles are the exceptions rather than the rule. I don't think we have to wait for the future for printing to become easy. At least, not so long as it's not extreme, high-end, custom printing.

On the other hand...

I'm genuinely not sure how much printing will be done in the future. Some folks, two weeks back, expressed the interesting notion that it didn't matter if one did one's own printing or not, so long as the photographer did get good prints. I think that's only true if prints truly matter. Many will argue that, especially today, viewing a photograph on a screen simply cannot do it justice, so people are aesthetically shortchanging themselves. I can't support that. After all, traditional slide photographers rarely felt that way, and their best work speaks for itself. Yes, this is relevant.

Some of you old-time slide photographers are going to hate to hear this, but most of your viewing environments were crap. The average slide presentation, even in camera clubs and other "serious" settings, suffered from objectively poor brightness range, sharpness, and shadow detail, as well as distortion and artifacts of many sorts. If you threw quite a bit of money at the problem and were very careful in designing your viewing environment, you'd get something that was, by objective measure, about as good as carefully-made-but-not-exceptional print. You had to burn lots of C-notes to achieve superior viewing. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that was true, so help me Kodak.

Meanwhile, the Loyal Opposition is thinking, "Hey, Ctein acknowledged that on-screen viewing can't stand up to a well-made print; hasn't he just refuted his point?" No, to the contrary. Note my repeated use of the word "objective." Subjectively, those projected slides look great! Why? That's very complicated to explain; oversimplified, if you present the brain with a visual experience while isolating it from the surrounding world, your perception expands or contracts to match the experience. The slide, even if shoddily projected, becomes a universe unto itself, not answerable to external objective measurement.

Screen images in any technology benefit from this perceptual illusion. TV, by which I mean the 525-interlaced line, analog-broadcast-bandwidth limited stuff, should look lousy by all objective measure. Instead it looks great all out of proportion to the specs. Ditto with small, limited-gamut JPEGs viewed on mediocre monitors. They look a lot better than they really are. If you throw the kind of money at digital display that you'd throw at a decent slide projection setup, you get a great viewing experience, no matter that some of the technical specs may be mediocre compared to a print.

Personal experience trumps specs every time, and all that really matters in photography is the viewing experience you have when you see a photograph, not one little bit the measurements you can make on a lab bench. We make photographs for people, not photometers.

(Hmm, I like that. You may quote me. Attribution always appreciated.)

Some people gravitate to sheets of paper (I'm one), some to screens. A few are equally happy with either. If what the photographer truly loves and desires (not the same thing) is the image on the screen, whether projected, pixelated, or both, then a print is irrelevant. It can express nothing that matters to them about the worth of their photograph. It's the wrong medium sending the wrong message, just as much as a 50KB JPEG doesn't convey nor inform the viewer very much about one of my dye transfer prints.

There are going to be exceptions. Even a studio-quality 30" display will not do justice to a 4x5 chrome (or digital equivalent). But, neither did traditional slide projection. I'd be surprised to learn that there were ever more than ten people in the entire United States at any given time who had projection setups that could do full justice to 4x5 photographs. What matters is not the specs, what matters is how good it looks and how strongly it can speak to you. Don't underestimate the strength of the projected photograph. A strong print draws your attention away from the rest of the room. A strong screen image owns that room.

That's it for my much-extended musings on printing. Next time, we get back to tech-speak, and a très-cool trick I came up with for using my Olympus Pen at ISO 6400 and liking it!

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Thursday, 10 June 2010 at 01:25 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (61)

Thursday, 03 June 2010

Custom Printing and Artistic Ownership

By Ctein

Well, my column on digital printing two weeks back, which seemed like a straightforward technical column, has developed into a complex and erudite conversion that is anything but straightforward or shallow. Way to go, commenters!

And, once again, a comment from Geoff Wittig provides me with a theme. If Geoff keeps this up, I'm never going to have to come up with an original topic again.

So, taking a deep breath and diving into the deep end of the pool...

Last week, Geoff relayed a remark by David Plowden—"David Plowden has described a conversation with a custom printer who boasted that he could make a better print from Plowden's negatives than Plowden could. 'No doubt you're right; but it would no longer be my photograph.'"

This is a remarkably nontrivial thought. Unlike Benson's remark to the effect that "...photographers who hand their images to someone else for printing are abdicating part of their artistic responsibility," which provoked in me a (completely justified) "this isn't even wrong" reaction, Plowden's observation is simultaneously and in various ways and circumstances right, wrong, sideways and off-axis in the complex plane. It's most assuredly not amenable to simple analysis. (Of course, I was not there for the conversation and I don't know just what that printer said to Plowden.)

In an "average" sense, I'd disagree with the notion. When I do custom printing for people, no matter their level of printing skills, I'm going to be making suggestions about ways I think the print could be improved. Sometimes they're trivial—a slightly different crop, a modest dodge or a burn. They're tweaks on what the photographer's providing me as a starting or reference point. Usually the photographer agrees with me; on occasion they don't. It's their call; it's their vision I'm trying to fulfill (I'll get back to that).

I think it would be wrong to say that the resulting photograph is in any way less theirs because I happened to come up with a good idea they didn't think of. People make suggestions to me all the time about my own photographs. On occasion I accept them. I don't think of the result as being less my own photo; after all, I'm learning new stuff all the time! That is part of being an artist.

(And, to keep the discourse as clear as I can, I've already established that I consider it entirely irrelevant who controls the instrumentality of printing. You personally feel differently? Fine. That was last week's column; you can go argue your side in the comments there. If you already have, please don't reiterate the same point here. We're moving on, not going in circles.)

I truly don't believe the minor fact that I may suggest to the photographer a better way to print in any way affects their artistic ownership. But, that's only a small part of a larger landscape. Back to that "fulfilling the vision" thing, which gets into just what "collaboration" can mean.

I collaborate with photographers on printing their work. I don't know any custom printer who works any other way (although I have no trouble imagining they might exist). The reason we succeed in this business, if we do, is that we know lots more about how to make a good print than our typical client. We're not a mechanical device they simply issue instructions to. We try to find out what they want of their photograph and then we propose ways they can get that, often ones they never thought of. It's a collaborative process, no question of that.

But the resulting work is not inherently nor usually a collaboration, although it could be. The photographer had some idea in mind when they made the photograph. It didn't include the input of the printer. We came into the picture (ahem) much later, at a stage where the photographer is trying to physically implement that vision. But that creative vision doesn't originate with the printer. Again, usually—the interesting exceptions are part of the reason why Plowden's situation is anything but trivial.

Blog140figure1

Examples make this point clearer. My best friend Laurie Toby Edison and I have created joint works such as the one above. Our Collaborations derive from a complex process of interactions, but even at the points in the process where we're not actively engaged with each other, we're both aware that collaborative work is happening. There's a mutual vision from before the first frame is exposed.

I also print for Laurie. Laurie's a masterful printer, so almost all the time I am supposed to exactly duplicate a print she's already made, like the one below. Which, it turns out, I can't do, and I'll get back to that later because I have a hunch it's germane. Whatever; I get very, very, very close. On occasion, though, she's been really pressed for time and she's just handed me the negative and the proof sheet, and we have a conversation about what the print should do. Then I print the negative 'blind,' and almost always I get something she likes. It's still her photograph, 'cause it's still her vision. I simply realize it for her via remote control, as it were.

Blog140figure2

Photo © 2010 by Laurie Toby Edison

That's not the normal photographer/printer relationship; Laurie and I have had 30 years to get in each others' heads. But it's not telepathic and I'm not always right. As with any photographer, I'll usually make suggestions, and Laurie will usually vet them, but sometimes, not often, we simply aren't close to being in agreement. Laurie's given me prints to match that I quite disagree with. I tell her so in no uncertain terms; what else are friends for?

The conversation typically runs something like this:

C: This ceiling doesn't work. We need to paint it beige.

L: Nope, I painted it taupe, and I wanted it taupe.

C: But taupe simply doesn't work. It catches the sun wrong and it clashes with the drapes. It really needs to be beige.

L: No, if it were your ceiling it would need to be beige. It's my ceiling.

That's the trump card. So I paint it taupe, just knowing in my heart of hearts that I'm right and Laurie's wrong. But it's her photograph and it doesn't matter that she's utterly wrong (and she is, you know) and I know better (and I do, you know). She owns the work.

I'm still right, though (he grumps with entirely characteristic maturity).

But, I think there was one time—out of hundreds of photographs—when she did agree beige would be better, and the resulting print was very different from what she originally envisioned. It was still her photograph, though; I'd never have made it. Merely giving her a great idea for making it even closer her vision didn't make it mine.

Okay, now what about that remark I made about not being able to make prints that look exactly like Laurie's? It's been my general experience when printing for other master printers. Almost every time, I can't do it. I strongly expect it would be true in the other direction, if I needed to have someone else print my work. I can't explain it. I can say it's not a matter of one or the other of us being better printers. It also doesn't seem to matter whether it's digital or wet printing.

My best not-a-real-answer guess (insert a whole lot of arm-waving here) is that there are two things going on. One is that master printers are working at such a refined level that our work's affected in significant ways by variables that aren't even in the recognized sets of parameters we try to control when printing. The other is that we can see subtleties that most people would never notice, so we find significance in print differences that most folks would justifiably consider ignorable.

If (and this is a really large if) this situation applies to most master printers, then Plowden's and even Benson's remarks become more understandable. Within their frames of experience and reference, they would be undeniably true, although they still wouldn't be universals. The concerns and sensitivities of master printers are not those of 99% of the folks doing printing. We may be entirely justified in those sensitivities, but there's still something of a princess and the pea thing going on.

One last wrinkle I'd like to toss out. I suspect I would be okay with other folks printing my work. I've noticed that while I am extremely particular and fussy about having a print come out exactly right, what constitutes "exactly right" for me can change considerably with time. I can hit the bull's-eye every time, but the target moves around. I have to force myself to be a little less fussy than my inclinations run. I've been known to fine-tune a print, in wet darkroom terms, to within a 20th of a paper grade, a quarter CC color balance and/or 1% exposure. Should I go back and reprint that photograph the next day, what I'll decide looks exactly right will not agree with the previous day to such incredibly tight specifications. If I look at it a month or year later, my idea of the best print may be considerably different. There may even be two or three different versions that I consider best prints, "local maxima" in the print space, if you will.

You can see why, given that, I think someone else of comparable skill to mine could make prints that would satisfy me. But, I have no idea if my experience is common or not. It would be interesting to hear from other "extreme printers" in the readership on this subject.

In any case, I've taken the topic about as far as I want to in this particular direction. But I'm not done with it; next week I'll ruminate on yet a different angle on this complex business of printing and what it means to us.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Thursday mornings.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Thursday, 03 June 2010 at 09:25 AM in Ctein, Photographic aesthetics, Printers and Printing | | Comments (46)

Thursday, 27 May 2010

Do 'Real' Photographers Print?

By Ctein

I don't hold a lot of agreement with assertions about what photographers are obligated to do, as I've written in columns like "Channeling David Vestal" and "The Photo-Fetishist League." I think one of the more destructive mindsets in the arts accompanies a pronouncement to the effect that you are not a Proper Artist (or Practitioner, if you eschew the term "artist") unless you do such-and-such. We've all been fed them. Real Serious Photographers don't work in color. Or if they do, they only work in slide film. Or if they do that as well, they only work in large format. Or, absent that, at least they work in film, because we all know that it's not real and personal photography when you drag that durn, soulless computer stuff into it. Or, if they are so far gone and lost from The True Path (TTP [tm]) that they're committing digital photography, at least they work solely in RAW and never JPEG. Yup, we gotta maintain standards.

The reason why this is all nonsense is very simple: Every approach you take to photography will have its strengths and weaknesses, both artistically and technically. What's bad is when there's a mismatch between what you want to do and the advantages and disadvantages of how you're going about it. I rail against absolutism because it encourages that sort of mismatch by demanding TTP.

These pronouncements have been appearing my entire life. I don't expect them to stop. It's a game of whack a mole; when it pops up, you whack it. Sometimes the moles pop up where you don't expect them. I was stunned to read in a comment to my last column that, "...photographers who hand their images to someone else for printing are abdicating part of their artistic responsibility." Oh man, I can't let something that wrong pass*.

(Yes, there are certain arenas where prints don't matter one bit. That's obviously not the scope nor intent of the claim. Even absolutism has to be judged with a grain of relativism, so no fair shooting at the fish in the barrel.)

Failing the absolutism test is sufficient reason to damn it, as I've already argued in 2.5 columns. But worse, I think it's specifically bad advice. Printing takes a lot of time, money, and energy. No photographer is given an unlimited supply of any of those. Resources you devote to printing are ones you cannot devote to making more photographs, making more timely photographs (which may matter), learning and practicing how to make better photographs (which definitely matters), even traveling to more interesting locales to make photographs (travel being another one of those things that consumes time, money, and energy).

That's not to say that you shouldn't know what a good print looks like. That's very different from having to do it yourself, or ever having done it yourself. In fact, DIY can sometimes interfere with knowing what a good print looks like. Anyone in the biz has seen vast numbers of poorly printed portfolios, "wet" and "dry," where the photographer clearly had no idea that their printing sucked.

We can likely agree that understanding what a good print looks like is important. It's the main reason Mike started the low-cost print program at Photo Techniques magazine. We both think that's really important; it's hard for photographers to know what to aspire to without reference.

But, once you know that, is there an unavoidable need to be doing your own printing? No. Custom printers have existed since Day One and it's their business to understand what the photographer needs and to elicit the information from the photographer that will get them the print they need...even if the photographer doesn't know how to articulate that. It's part of the job. It's not even an especially rare skill; there used to be a zillion decent custom labs out there.

Many justly-famous photographers haven't done the majority of their own printing. In some subgenres like portraiture that is even the norm; the majority of great portrait photographers did not do their own printing; some never even learned to print. Among four photojournalists I have a fondness for, Pearce, Kennerly, Jarecke and Turnley, we have substantial talents with quite varying amounts of personal printing in their careers. Even in landscape photography, that bastion of fine printing, it's a mixed bunch. Eliot Porter was famous for doing dye transfers of his landscapes. Galen Rowell wasn't exactly well-known for his darkroom time.

Personal choice
Obviously I  made the "print your own" choice, even taking it to possibly unreasonable extremes. But it's never been clear that it was the only right choice for me. Some arguments to the contrary: I am a vastly better printer than I am photographer. Is that imbalance really good for one's art?  I don't think it is for mine.

It may not have even been the smartest career move. Frank McLaughlin, the patron saint of dye transfer, once asked me in all seriousness if I was really better off having  immersed myself in doing dye transfer printing. A good case could be made that I've spent as much money in the darkroom as it would've cost me to buy others' dye transfer printing services, and I would not have been out many thousands of hours of my time.  And I'm not sure I could even claim a net profit on printing my own work until the dye transfer print sales here on TOP. That's 30 years to financial break-even, again not counting the number of hours spent.

Understand that I am not expressing one bit of regret. I like my life. But I cannot logically defend it as the best choice, either artistically or professionally, for me. As for declaring what must work for others, oh, that is to laugh.

Ctein

*An afterthought to insure that we don't veer into the ad hominem...I didn't write this to defend my printing business; I did it because I have a deep knowledge of the subject. 99.9% of you could decide that having anyone else print your work would be abhorrent and it wouldn't affect me one bit nor in any way jeopardize my income; you're not my clientele.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning on TOP.

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Ouch! Smacked down by Ctein!

"I probably deserve it for implying such an absolutist position. But I'd like to clarify a bit; I was paraphrasing a comment made by Richard Benson in an interview in Lenswork. [Issue 84 with audio on 84 Extended —Ed.] Benson is the author of The Printed Picture, former head of Yale's art department and an expert printer. (Okay, the academic credentials may be considered a negative here, but still.) Regarding the print as a physical artifact, as the final work of art resulting from the photographic process, I think the assertion still has merit. Delegating the actual process of crafting a print from your photograph does indeed relinquish some of your control over the image, and introduces at least a modicum of someone else's interpretation into the final print. David Plowden has described a conversation with a custom printer who boasted that he could make a better print from Plowden's negatives than Plowden could. 'No doubt you're right; but it would no longer be my photograph.' That's obviously a bit of hyperbole, but Plowden is emphasizing the importance of controlling every aspect of the photograph's interpretation. Certainly there have been countless fruitful collaborations between photographers and printers; not for one moment to I mean to denigrate the remarkable skills of fine printers like Ctein. Robert Glenn Ketchum's work for example is known largely through the spectacular Ilfochrome prints made by Michael Wilder. Obviously working closely with a skilled printer who follows your instructions (or who can educate you regarding where the image 'wants to go') can yield a superb result.

"There are also obviously large areas of photographic expression where finicky darkroom (wet or digital) interpretation and a physical print are irrelevant. The vast majority of snapshots and family photographs come to mind. Plenty of photojournalism finds its home as 2x3" halftone reproduction on newsprint, where careful attention to print quality seems beside the point. Then again, it's hard to imagine W. Eugene Smith's work having precisely the same feel or impact without his obsessive stylized darkroom interpretation.

"As always, YMMV. Like the old Ben & Jerry's bumper sticker says, 'If it's not fun, why do it?' For me, printing is easily half the fun. But if anyone finds it torturous and gets great results from Mpix or Costco, well, have fun!"

Ctein replies: Oh, absolutely not meant as a smack-down of you. (I'm sure you know that, but I want to make sure everyone else does, too.)

I think there are some interesting ideas worth exploring in more depth in the Plowden anecdote; there's a deep and fascinating question along the lines of "What does 'artistic ownership' mean and what compromises or enhances it?" It might even be the seed for a whole new column. But, I'm too blitzed after 13 hours of traveling to think deeply right now.

Featured Comment by Greg Smith: "Best thing you've posted I've seen. Good job. I do my own printing, because I haven't tried a pro shop yet. Economically, its cheaper for me to self-print. My work sells, so there is some validation for my efforts and I take a measure of satisfaction in being able to tell those curious that I do the entire process from camera to frame myself. Someday, when the funds present themselves I will try a custom house, see what's what. Talk of absolutism brings to mind a bumper sticker: 'Death to extremists!' Best wishes."

Posted on Thursday, 27 May 2010 at 07:28 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (77)

Thursday, 20 May 2010

Returning to Hell: Color Management and Snow Leopard

By Ctein

About 11 weeks ago I wrote about the insanity-inducing problems I was having getting proper prints under MacOS X 10.6.2: "The Printer/Photoshop/Snow Leopard Hell." The OS update to 10.6.3 didn't change anything nor have I heard that the soon-to-be-released 10.6.4 will. It's still hell out there.

I learned how to live in hell. At this point I have all my printers working properly, with good profiles that behave correctly under Snow Leopard, and I've convinced myself that the prints I'm getting are nearly identical to what my MacBook Pro running OS 10.4.11 produced. It took several steps:

1) Making sure I had the absolutely most current drivers for all my printers.

2) Culling my existing profiles. ColorSync Utility identified which of my ICC profiles were v4.x, and those were banished, as Snow Leopard still will not play nicely with them. That wiped out most of my custom profiles. Happily, Bill Atkinson's profiles for my Epson 9800 were ICC v.2.x. That allowed me to compare prints made with Photoshop CS4 from both my laptop, under MacOS X 10.4.11, and our iMac running 10.6.3. They were very close to indistinguishable. Really, I expected bigger differences from changes in the print engine between the OS versions.

3) Generating new profiles for my Epson R2400 and R800. This is where things started to get "amusing." I set ColorMunki to produce version 2 printer profiles. The prints came out way too dark; my profile was clearly no good. I had something set wrong in the twisty little maze of printer controls that all looked the same. Huzzah, the X-Rite website had several helpful pages:

"Prints not matching either display or compared to canned profiles"

"Prints look too dark using printer driver with Leopard or Snow Leopard"

I needed to give control of color matching to "Epson Color Controls" rather than "ColorSync." I should have caught this; the first test chart just looked wrong. My profiling test chart should have had dark and saturated color patches (figure 1). When the software is massaging the data behind your back, you'll get a result that looks more like figure 2. Many patches are lighter and pastel. You need to find printer driver settings that get you a print that looks more like figure 1...usually. I'll get back to that.

Blog138figure1
Figure 1. A properly made profiling test chart is going to look something like this. Note that most of the color patches, especially the ones corresponding to primaries, are dark, saturated, and rich. It's the kind of output your printer will produce when it's just dumping ink on the paper, with no adjustments to get the most accurate color.

Blog138figure2
Figure 2. If a printer profile is sticking its nose into your profiling process, you get a print that looks more like this. Most of the colors have gotten lighter and many are pastel. If you see something like this you need to backtrack and figure out how to turn off color management, because a target like this is not going to produce a good profile...usually.

Well, once I got the driver settings right, everything went swimmingly. ColorMunki gave me a great looking profile. I don't think it's quite as good as the V.4 profile I generated under 10.4.11; the transitions between primaries are little harsher in my new V.2 profile (figure 3). But it is so very close that I doubt it will make a perceivable difference in any of my prints.

Blog138figure3 Figure 3. On the left is a print made using my ICC version 4 custom profile printed under MacOS X 10.4.11. On the right, the same test image printed using an ICC version 2 custom profile under Snow Leopard v 10.6.3. They are very close to identical, although I think the latter isn't quite as smooth in color gradations.

So much for the R2400 printer; on to the R800. Here's where things got weird. The very latest Epson driver software didn't present me with the same interface as the driver I had running under 10.4.11. When I tried the X-Rite recommendations, I didn't get a clean, un-massaged test chart; it looked a lot like figure 2. No combination of settings did any better. After wasting far too much paper, I decided what the hell, let's see what happens if I just go with this and generate a profile. I mean, if there's really, truly no way to turn off the driver's color massaging, it's a constant that the profile should be able to take into account, right?

A naïvely hopeful assumption, but in this case it worked! I wound up with a profile that looked just about as good as the ones I'd been running under 10.4.11. Equally significantly, the test prints I made with both the R2400 and R800 looked remarkably similar, which is no small achievement given the very large differences in the ink sets of the two printers.

I still don't understand why I couldn't entirely turn off color management, but the pragmatist in me doesn't really care. It worked.

So I'm good. Well, until Apple decides to finally fix the ICC bug and I decide I need to redo my profiles...or Epson updates their drivers and printer interfaces...or I get a new printer. But at least now I feel that whatever happens I'll be able to cope with it.

So, taking a deep breath and setting aside a good chunk of spare time, I just finished upgrading my MacBook Pro from MacOS X 10.4.11 to 10.6.3. An entirely straightforward 45 minute process, that ended up taking me 14 hours. Sigh, it's still business as usual when upgrading core software, and that business is most assuredly a sadistic one.

Ctein's regular column appears weekly on Thursday mornings.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Thursday, 20 May 2010 at 08:39 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing, Software | | Comments (37)

Thursday, 13 May 2010

More On Print(er) Sharpness

By Ctein

In my column on January 5th, "How Sharp Is Your Printer? How Sharp Are Your Eyes?", I described a relatively easy and robust way to test how sharp your printer was and how sharp you needed your prints to be. I recommend that readers reread that column and the comments before reading the rest of this one.

One of the questions I got from a couple of readers was whether or not printing at a printer's "magic" resolutions (360 / 720 ppi for Epson printers) would make a difference in the results I got. While I suspected it wouldn't, suspicion is not the same as experimental data. So, this week it was back to generating resolution test pages and pixel peeping.

I generated four more pages to accompany the ones I made for the last article. That provided me with comparison pages at 300, 360, 450, 600, 720, 900, and 1200 ppi. I printed everything out on my Epson R800 printer on Ultra Premium Luster paper at the highest quality settings. Time to start squinting. In the set of four running from 300 through 600 ppi, the results were unequivocal and monotonic; even with the naked eye I could see that each jump in file resolution resulted in a sharper print. Comparing the 360 ppi print to the 300 and 450 ppi prints, I could see single-pixel-scale artifacts in the latter two that didn't appear in the 360 ppi print.

Blog137figure1
These two illustrations, above and below, show highly magnified sections of the test prints produced as described in the article. From left to right, they're from the 300 ppi, 360 ppi, and 450 ppi files. Observe that there's nothing "magic" about 360 ppi; it's in between the other two in sharpness. the 600, 720 and 900 ppi files show similar results.

Blog137figure2

As I mentioned last time, I have pathological test targets that can demonstrate that difference. As I also mentioned, it's not relevant to printing real-world images. The 450 ppi print definitely looked sharper than 360 ppi, which looked sharper than 300 ppi, and the improvement in sharpness with each jump in resolution seemed just about right. In the real world, gross resolution trumps single pixel artifacts any day.

(Sidenote: There's no point in looking at intermediate resolutions to these—you'd be unable to see any differences in sharpness with such small resolution changes.)

As for the test prints between 600 and 1200 ppi, the same monotonic relationship held, but now you're down to the pixel-peeping area. prints get minutely sharper with increasing resolution, but I'll never be able to notice it in real life. I'm not convinced there is any improvement, even microscopic, going from 900 to 1200 ppi.

On a purely practical level, it's clear to me that there are folks out there who've missed the (real) forest for the (ideal) trees. They argue that everything should be printed at a magic resolution, ignoring the reality that your photographs don't magically come at those magic numbers. Resampling a photograph that's going to print out it 300 ppi at the size you want up to 360 dpi is not going to make it look visibly better. Resampling a 450 ppi photograph down to 360 ppi will cost you sharpness and fine detail.

Now, all my test photographs were printed out natively through Photoshop. Start bringing third-party RIPs into the picture, and all bets are off; the difference in appearance between a "straight" print and a RIPped print has a lot more to do with the rendering engine than the ppi it is rendered at. If the RIP wants to render at some magic resolution, more power to it. Just understand that the improved quality you see is much more a consequence of how was the data is being massaged for the printer than the resolution it's being output at.

By the way, no, I am not going to compare the various third-party RIPs versus Photoshop. Doesn't interest me. Photoshop works well enough for me. Just so you know. Your mileage may differ.

I think that's it for this subject (barring more intriguing questions that I haven't thought of, of course).

Next week, I hope to be able to revisit the Snow Leopard color management issue and the week (or two) after, an interesting take on the question, "How big can I print this?"

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Thursday, 13 May 2010 at 09:00 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (31)

Thursday, 06 May 2010

Animal Language

Once again, by popular demand, we're Off Topic and On Parrots*. 

As I've explained in previous columns, Elmo, my African Gray parrot, has a substantial listening comprehension of English and an extremely large repertoire of utterances, but he shows no evidence of understanding when he "speaks" English. Maybe he could be trained to, a la Dr. Pepperberg and Alex, but we haven't made any attempt to do so yet. The words he speaks are just sounds that fall into (broad) contextual categories but don't have specific meaning. Still, he makes me wonder how deep the biological roots of language go, considering that birds and mammals diverged some 300 million years ago.

Item 1: Elmo likes to play "peekaboo." I hold up a book or newspaper in front of my face and say, "Where's Elmo?" He responds by saying "Peekaboo," and I drop the newspaper and say, "I see you!"

Elmo has several different ways of saying "peekaboo." The basic way is in the little singsong voice that you would use with a small child. He will also say it with a flat inflection, in a drawn-out lower tone, "peeeeekaaaboooo." He can also whistle it, in a way that no human could without the aid of electronic filtering: Several octaves higher, it's the same 'tune' as the singsong version of the word, except it's whistled and superimposed on that are the phonemes (p)eeeee(k) aaaa (b)oooo—the consonants are almost inaudible, more like glottal stops.

There are several variants of these three major forms. Why is this interesting? Because Elmo considers them all equivalent replacements in the game, and they all sound clearly like "peekaboo" to us humans. He and we are processing inflection versus content in the same way, even when the content is wildly distorted.

Item 2: Elmo's picked up a number of words and phrases from us, mostly related to eating. Among them: "fresh water," "corn chip," "tortilla chip," "Would you like fresh water, Elmo?" and "Here's fresh water, Elmo."

Elmo likes to riff on things that he's learned to say. He will babble, manipulating those sounds and phrases. Sometimes it's just repetition; he'll repeat the word "chip" (one of his favorites) with different tones and inflections. Much more interestingly, he does recombination. He'll say "Would you like (a) chip?" "Would you like a tortilla chip?" "Here's a corn chip," and so on. On occasion he'll say "Would you like (a) Elmo?"

Blog136figure1
Elmo doesn't know what he's saying, but he knows how to say it.

Why do I find this interesting? Because it's grammatical, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense. He always strings verb clauses and object clauses together in the right order. He never assembles them in a nonsensical way. We never hear "Here's Elmo, corn chip" or "Corn chip would you like?" or "Would chip you like?" Although we have solid evidence that Elmo does not use words in a specific way, he does seem to use a rudimentary grammar.

Possibly I'm just easily amused (possibly?!) but I'm intrigued by Elmo's ability to construct new inflections and pronunciations for words and still have them sound like words, and his ability to combine and recombine individual utterances without losing grammatical construction. I can't help but think that has something to say about the deep biological underpinnings of human language.

Ctein

*While I have many areas in which I can claim expertise, linguistics isn't one of them. So, for all I know, what I've written in this column is utterly obvious to anyone who has any substantial knowledge of that field...or it could be entirely wrong. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances. (Seeing as you're reading this for free, I suppose you're getting full value.)

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Jeff Warden: "When I was a kid we had a yellow-fronted amazon named Corky. He was already thirty when we got him as a gift from his previous owner, a judge with sophisticated taste and a love of opera music. I could stop right there, couldn't I?

"Corky could ad lib very emotional falsetto opera sounds at will, for long periods, and at great volume, just like he heard on the radio all his life. He could say things that would make you think he knew what he was saying, like 'goodbye' at the appropriate time, 'Hi Corky,' etc., and when everyone was quiet at the dinner table he could be relied on to ask 'What's your troubles, Bubbles?'

"He loved to whistle, 'Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits,' and especially liked it if we would fill in the 'two bits' for him. He'd give you the the 'Shave-and-a-haircut...'" and wait. And if there was no reply he would do it again, and again. He had nothing else to do. If he was having no luck at all, he would start to vary his approach; an octave higher, then lower, faster, very slowly now, maybe with a little pathetic quiver to the whistle—damn, that was funny.

"Eventually we'd relent, and give him his two bits. Then from the kitchen there would be a wall of joyous operatic sound that can't be described; let's just say the bird was as happy as birds can get, and all for the cost of two bits."

Posted on Thursday, 06 May 2010 at 07:03 AM in Ctein, Off-topic posts | | Comments (46)

Thursday, 29 April 2010

They're Selling Us Crap Paper

By Ctein

I've just finished printing up a bunch of "art quality" 11 x 14 prints for my Contributors, and I'm so frustrated I feel like tearing my hair out. (Yes, I have plenty to spare. What's your point?) The amount of time and money I waste because of shoddy inkjet paper manufacturing practices is appalling.

This is not about aesthetic qualities like tone and color rendition or D-max. I'm talking about genuine manufacturing defects: fibers embedded in the emulsion (figure 1), bubbles and pinholes, inclusions that penetrate the surface (figure 2), and highly visible scuff and scratch marks straight from the factory.

Blog135figure1Figure 1. This kind of manufacturing defect is very easy to find (ruler markings in mm). Unfortunately, it's the least common. The flaw would stand out in a light or dark area, because there is damage to the surface relief, as you can see in the grazing-light photograph on the right.

Blog135figure2
Figure 2. This is by far the most common kind of manufacturing defect. It is almost invisible (it's between the arrowhead and the ruler) but if printed upon will produce an obvious flaw. It takes a lot of time going over blank paper to catch these defects and I'm only partly successful.

This isn't a big problem with "RC" papers. It's when you move into the world of fiber papers that you start to endure a world of pain. I've yet to try a fiber-based paper where I don't get a couple of bad sheets per box. The standards of some of the paper manufacturers are astoundingly low. The Harman FB Al glossy paper, which I love for its appearance, is atrocious; I typically reject a quarter of the sheets in a box of 11 x 17" sheets. The larger the size of the paper, the more rejects. For 17 x 25 sheets, far fewer than half are good.

Traditional light-sensitive photographic paper manufacturers dealt with exactly the same issues. It takes more attention to quality control and cleanliness, and more critical standards for your raw materials to make a good fiber-based paper than an RC paper. Coating the base with plastic eliminates a multitude of manufacturing problems. Wonder of wonders, they figured out how to do that; it is not, in fact, rocket science. We expected high quality paper, and we were entitled to do so. It's no fun going to the trouble of making a darkroom print, getting the finished print on the viewing table, and discovering some gross physical flaw that makes it unusable. When we did, we screamed bloody murder, and most of the time paper manufacturers responded appropriately.

It's not about "getting what you pay for" (or any other supplier-centric apology). Fiber inkjet papers are not cheap; in constant dollars, they are frequently more expensive than silver gelatin B&W darkroom papers were. We're paying premium prices; we're getting substandard goods.

Although I wouldn't be any happier if the stuff were dirt cheap. Lousy paper costs me, even if the paper were free. If I make a print on a defective piece of paper, I've wasted a couple of dollars of ink as well as the time it took the computer and printer to create the work. The printing costs and time are avoidable...if I successfully weed out the defective sheets before I print. That time and trouble is considerable. A minority of paper defects are so horrendous that they'll just jump out at you at a casual glance (figure 1). Most of them, though, are small white-on-white defects that are nearly invisible in an unprinted sheet of paper (figure 2) although, once you lay a bunch of dark ink on them, they will catch the light and they will stand out like blemishes on an adolescent's forehead. I have to check unprinted sheets closely at just the right angle, under the right mix of diffuse and specular light, to catch those flaws.

Some photographs are fairly forgiving of paper flaws; they are light enough and busy enough that I can get away with using slightly defective sheets. A photo like the Weathered Sulfur Vents (figure 3) will survive slightly-less-than-perfect sheets; I know the viewer is never going to see a very slight flaw. Unfortunately, that's not many of my photographs. A photograph like Floodlit Colombia (figure 4) is utter hell. Even after weeding out 30% of the sheets, there's still a 25%–30% chance that I've missed some defect that will be glaringly obvious after I've printed out the photograph.

Blog135figure3Figure 3. A photograph like this can tolerate one or two very small surface defects, because it's mostly light in color and very busy.

Blog135figure4Figure 4. A photograph like this needs a pristine surface to be printed on, because any emulsion defects catch the light and are glaringly obvious.

There is no excuse for this. Simply none. The paper manufacturers are getting away with using incompetent manufacturing techniques and expertise and selling us garbage. And, unfortunately, the vast majority of nouveau digital printers have not a clue that the paper manufacturers can do much, much better if their feet were held to the fire, and they do not understand that they should expect better.

Unlike so many of the technical problems I face in fine printing, shoddy paper is one I have no fix for. Damn and double-damn.

Ctein

All photographs copyright 2010 by Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Miserere: "Your struggle felt familiar, and I just realised why: This problem is reminiscent of when my sister used to play the clarinet. For those that don't know, you need to place a wooden reed on the mouthpiece which, when vibrated as you blow, produces the instrument's sound. All woodwind instruments have them as far as I know (and saxophones too).

"Well, they sell these reeds in packs, and they're not cheap. My sister would buy packs of ten, open them, then spend an hour testing the reeds individually. I don't remember exact numbers, but it went something like this: 3–4 reeds would be unusable and get thrown out, 5–6 would be fine to practice with, 1 would be superlative and she would mark it and save it for performances and exams. If you bought the more expensive reeds, you simply increased your odds of getting more usable ones, but we did the math and it was more cost-effective to buy the cheap packs and throw 3–4 away than buy the more expensive ones and throw 2–3 away. I remember saying to her once 'but surely there must be some brand that sells boxes with 10 good reeds, or maybe a box of 3 guaranteed excellent reeds!' She insisted there wasn't."

Mike adds: And try buying vinyl records. Ironically I have 50-year-old records that have numerous flaws and defects that I find perfectly satisfying to listen to, but it's really annoying to spend $50 on a current two-disk, 45 RPM deluxe superdisk and find it comes out of the shrinkwrap with multiple flaws baked in. Vinyl is only about 10% of my listening, and I just do it for fun—I don't really need to mess with it at all—but it's still amazing how elusive good QC can be. I recently bought three copies of Dexter Gordon's "One Flight Up" on Cisco and just had to give up. 

In general, Ctein's point is just further evidence of one of my pet theories: that digital inkjet printing is actually the opposite of "all you have to do is push a button." Q&D lowbrow digital printing is easy as pie, but really top-level digital printing might actually be harder than darkroom printing of a similar level, unless you do a lot of it and do all the work to keep everything tuned and humming.

Featured Comment by John Custodio: "That's why I never print on roll paper. I examine each sheet before I print on it, which I can't do if it's in a roll. I've had lots of problems with Museo Silver Rag with specks and junk in the coating, also similar problems with Hahnemuehle Photo Rag Baryta. Recent batches of these two papers are fine, however. Seems like they've solved the problems, at least for now.

"In my opinion, the weakest step and what causes me the most lost time in the entire digital process (shooting, Photoshop, printing) is printing. And the weakest link in the printing process (color management, ink, paper) is the paper!"

Featured Comment by Michael W: "Funny story about fibers in photographic paper. Back when I was going to college in the late '80s my father worked for a paper mill, and they had a summer work program for college students if their parents worked at the mill. The last summer I was there I was assigned to one of the slow but high-quality machines. We had a run of dense bleached coated stock that was as I was told for a large American photo company. The QC on this run was much much higher, so  much so that the QC department set up a station at the end of the line. One day at the start of the shift I was asked by one of the lowest hands on that machine to help him drop some powdered additives for the coating into a hot mixing vat about halfway down the line. I was helping him pour the powder out of 50 lbs. brown bags. One of them got a away, and a piece of the bag about 8 x 12 inches wound up in the vat. Talk about some upset people. the mill manager came down, the QC guys came down, everyone came down and waited. Finally about ten minutes later, small brown fibers started showing up in the 12x12 samples pulled off by QC...well, the run as it came off the rollers went right back into the process at the start of the line to be rebleached and remilled...long story short, when I came back the next day, 24 hours later, QC was still rejecting the run. It wound up taking nearly four shifts to get all of the brown fibers from that 8x12 piece of bag out of the system. Needless to say I was not asked to help with pouring again...."

Featured Comment by Matthew C.: "I'm ready for the end of paper myself....

"I have 100+ fine art nature prints from some of the top landscape photographers sitting at home piled in a closet. And they are beautiful, and I love them and bring them out every month or two just to savor the beautiful images. But I'd enjoy them even more if I could just bring them up on a 20x30 luminescent 300 DPI screen hanging on the wall, maybe switching between them every 20–30 minutes or so.

"Thirty seconds after picking up an iPad, I knew the paperless future has finally arrived. We'll see the end of routine printing in the next 10 years. It's a technology whose time has passed. Honestly I get more visceral joy from looking at and handling 4x5 trannies than prints...."

Brwhite-defect
Featured Comment by George Kraniotis: "I feel the pain...every day...this image is an insect trapped underneath the coating of a sheet of Hahmemuhle Bright White. I kept it in order to send it to my supplier. And what about scuffing after printing? Big issue as well. Some papers scuff just by looking at them. Pretty sure the manufacturers can do something about this as well."

Featured Comment by ed nazarko: "I sell a lot of very large panoramas—12x144 inches, 18x180 inches—and my biggest cost and time waste comes from flaws in the paper. I usually print on smooth fine art, which hides flaws very well, better than fiber or semi-gloss papers, and I'd guess that I have to print an image at least twice to get one yielded. If I'm lucky, the flaw shows up early in the print and I can kill the job and only lose that little bit of paper. (Yes, I sit there monitoring...a hateful process, but the savings in paper costs are huge.) There have been a few papers where I couldn't get a single clean print done (I don't print them smaller than 12x144). I tried fiber or semi-gloss coated papers last year, and the yield was so bad I'm sticking with smooth fine art. I love the extra color and punch of the fiber papers, but couldn't get my head around how many failed prints I'd have to accept."

Posted on Thursday, 29 April 2010 at 03:05 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | | Comments (57)

Thursday, 22 April 2010

How Not to Get Your Product Reviewed

By Ctein

Every so often Mike and I like to talk about the "supply side" of the photography writers' business. This one's about the strangest reviewer experience I've ever had, without a doubt. So sit right back and you'll hear a tale...

Back in the early "noughts" I wrote an article for Photo Techniques magazine on working cross-platform. Back then, Virtual PC was the state-of-the-art emulator. I was long overdue to revisit the topic, so we scheduled a new article, wherein I would compare various and sundry virtualization engines (VMware Fusion, Parallels, VirtualBox and the like) running photographically useful applications. I acquired several virgin copies of Windows Vista Ultimate and talked to the public relations people for VMware at Mac Expo last year. They gave me a copy of Fusion on the spot.

Fusion installed with no trouble on my MacBook Pro, and Windows Vista went into that with nary a complaint. I had a nice clean install on a system with plenty of hardware resources, and the performance gauges looked nominal. That's when things started going sour.

I know emulation's pitfalls, and don't have unduly high performance expectations. But my installation was unusable. It was so slow and balky that I couldn't even drag a window without getting stuttering and ghosting, with long pauses between responses to my input that made apps entirely unworkable. Obviously something was badly wrong. I knew people out there who are using this combination for productive work. No way they could have been seeing the non-performance I was.

I decided to try another approach and migrate my less demanding, everyday Windows 2000 PC system over to Fusion. I installed the migration tool on my PC, launched it, and one minute later got the blue screen of death. I tried reconfiguring it every which way. Either it didn't run at all, or it went to BSOD.

Okay, I'm a reviewer; I'm good at breaking things. I posted some messages in the users' forums to see if they could be of any help; they weren't. So I logged onto the VMware website to register my software to get the complimentary tech support. Reviewers typically get tech support at a higher level than ordinary consumers, but I always like to try going through end-user channels to see what that's like. But the website wouldn't accept my software's serial number!

Finally I figured out how to contact customer support without a "valid" serial number, which was much trickier than it should be. That's when it went from sour to completely surreal.

Customer support informed me that my serial number won't register because it was a "giveaway" product and they don't provide complimentary support on giveaway products. I carefully and politely explained that I'm a reviewer. As I wrote to VMware support in my final e-mail, "Honestly, do you really want reviewers writing things like, 'I tried Feature X. It didn't work for me,' without them ever getting a hold of a support person to find out if there is a fix for their problem or if there's something they don't understand? I kind of doubt that."

It was like talking to a brick wall. All they'd tell me is that I'm not entitled to any technical support. I understand companies who don't want to provide me with a product because I'm not a major reviewer. Never before have I encountered a company that was enthusiastic about me reviewing their product but wasn't the least bit interested in making sure I was using it properly. Usually they're all over you for not talking to them about a problem before publishing (which is a whole 'nother ethical issue Mike and I have discussed at some length).

I wrote the PR agency describing this bizarre situation and asked if they could do anything about it. Still no support.

A month or so later, I was at a party with a bunch of my hacker friends, and I mentioned this bizarre incident within earshot of a friend who's a senior engineer at VMware. He took it upon himself to kick an internal e-mail upstairs on the matter. Still nothing from VMware.

Meanwhile, Photo Technique magazine was undergoing major revisions, de-emphasizing product reviews and so making this particular project low priority. I decided to give it one more go, though, this year at Mac Expo. At the VMware booth I found that there's been substantial turnover in their support and public relations teams. The people I talked to were appropriately appalled at hearing what happened. They promised to get me a copy of the latest version of the software, with a support license, as soon as the dust settled after the show.

That was more than two months ago. I've heard nothing. If I really cared, I'd follow up; I understand stuff can fall through the cracks at a trade show. But, this is my fourth unsuccessful attempt to penetrate VMware's iron curtain.

In the meantime, Mactech came out with a detailed performance comparison between VMware and Parallels (here and here) that clearly demonstrated that, for my own personal needs, as opposed to my needs as a reviewer, Parallels was going to suit me much better. I went out and bought a copy. So far it's given me no grief, although I'm still figuring out how to optimize performance.

Understand that I hold no grudge against VMware; some of my friends work there! I know many people who are happy with their products. Heck, I might even have been one of them...if they'd given me a chance to find out. But they made my job as a responsible reviewer impossible. And in doing so, did themselves out of some (very likely) favorable press.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column is published every Thursday morning.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Thursday, 22 April 2010 at 11:04 AM in Ctein, Software | | Comments (11)

Thursday, 15 April 2010

Of Verbs and Trademarks

By Ctein

So, I've been wondering. How do companies go about effectively protecting their trademarks in the age of the Internet? This came up a couple of weeks ago when I was having dinner with an IP attorney friend. We wondered about what steps companies have to take to protect themselves these days.

Some background, for folks who aren't familiar with trademarks: Unlike patents or copyrights, there's nothing inherently creative in a trademark. It's merely something that uniquely identifies your business. It can be an ordinary word, a real name, something made up. All that matters is that it identifies you and not your direct competitors.

Ronald_mcdonald_jumping1 You can claim trademark protection only within your sphere of business. There's nothing to prevent me from starting McDonald's Photographic Studio, because that's not an area of business in which McDonald's the hamburger chain operates. Similarly, Apple Computers (now just Apple, Inc.) and Apple Corps Ltd., the holding company founded by the Beatles, manage to coexist. That relationship has proven a dicey one, because the boundaries between computers and entertainment continue to morph. About every dozen years, they have to renegotiate who owns what turf.

Trademarks can be images or "looks." If I open a hamburger stand named CteinBurger, done up in a red and yellow color scheme with a yellow arch in front of it, I will hear from The Clown's attorneys. That's called "trade dress" and McDonald's has it protected.

How do you protect a trademark? Simple; you register it! First come, first served; prior use and art don't particularly enter into it.

Seems straightforward, right? Well, there's a big catch. If your trademark becomes (or already is) a generic term instead of being a unique identifier for your enterprise, you lose your protection. Contrary to what a reader commented several weeks ago, this is not happening to Xerox, FedEx, or Band-Aid. They are solid trademarks and are in little danger of being lost. Those words have not become common synonyms for "copy," "ship," and "adhesive bandage," and are not likely to.

Trademark holders have to be diligent and actively stamp out misuse of their marks. Xerox's attorneys regularly sent out letters to magazines reminding them that Xerox was a trademarked term and the article that referred to "Xeroxing a document" should have said "copying a document." Xerox fought hard to preserve its trademark. Nowadays, there's little risk, because there are so many copier brands on the market that few people automatically think Xerox when they think "photocopy."

Verbing the noun is okay so long as it refers to what's been trademarked. There's no risk when people talk about "googling" or "photoshopping," so long as they mean that they are using Google or Photoshop. Should people start generally saying "I googled Ctein on Bing" or "I photoshopped that picture in iPhoto," Google and Adobe will have a problem on their hands.

So far as I know, trademark law doesn't care about good intentions. It's not enough that companies make the effort to get people to use their trademark terms correctly. They have to succeed in preventing genericization! Here's where my wondering starts. It seems to me that this is an increasingly difficult thing to accomplish. In the era of print publications, there were relatively few sources of potential misuse to track. That's no longer true. There are a gazillion different little online publications, most of them written by people who wouldn't know a trademark if it hit them over the head. The fourth estate is a lot harder to police these days.

What are companies doing about this? How are they policing the vox populi when those numbers are expanding exponentially? I'm sure we have some trademark experts and representatives from various companies reading this; I'd love to hear their comments on how they handle these issues and what their policies are.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by nick: "No discussion over trademark protection on the internet is complete without referencing Hormel and SPAM."

Posted on Thursday, 15 April 2010 at 07:31 AM in Ctein, Legal and social issues | | Comments (44)

Thursday, 08 April 2010

Statistics, Damned Statistics, and the 'Visio Populi'

By Ctein

I don't get much of an opportunity to find out which of my photos are most popular among my audience. The reason is that almost all my sales are high-end prints, so I rarely sell many of each. The "best sellers" sell a handful of copies; most sell just a few. It's not a good sample set, statistically.

I have sold scores, even hundreds of prints in the four special print sales I've run over the years through Photo Technique magazine and The Online Photographer. The selection set is so constrained, though, that it still doesn't tell me anything interesting.

Recently I got to have some fun with numbers. I put up a web page with 14 photographs for my Contributors to choose their prints from.

Almost none of the Contributors had seen any of these photographs in the flesh and nobody had seen all of them, so people really were picking based on the online images. The selections include a few photographs that Contributers suggested, but there were only a very few suggestions, so it doesn't much skew the results.

Forty-five of my Contributors selected their prints, which was a large enough sample to run some numbers with. The results entertained me. I am perhaps too easily entertained, but I hope you'll also get some entertainment value out of seeing how close your tastes are to my collective audience's. I don't know what you'll find. Even more interesting, I suppose, would be if any of you who aren't especially enamored of my work wind up ranking the photographs much as my audience does. That's a particular and most rare talent beneficial to curators, gallery owners and editors—being able to anticipate the taste of the visio populi, even when it isn't to your personal taste.

Including a dye transfer ("Sealing Wax Palm") throws off the results a bit, as I gave Contributors the choice of picking either the dye transfer or two digital prints; a bit of apples vs. oranges muddles the results. Fourteen dye transfer prints were chosen in lieu of two digital prints. Amazingly, that is about the percentage I would've guessed. A fluke.

The rest selected 100 digital prints; here they are listed in order of popularity:

Columbia at Dusk—15
Floodlit Colombia—13
Alcoa Building—12
Apollo-Soyuz in Floods—9
Reflections in Montreal Centre—8
Grasses in Liquid Sky—8
Weathered Sulfur Vents—8
Trojan Nuclear Plant—7
Buena Vista Park—7
Moon Bow and Blue Moon—5
Jazz Dinner—4
Christmas Oranges—3
Blue Forest—1

The two black-and-white photographs did better than I expected, seeing that's not what I'm known for. (The fact that I think they're really great photographs is, of course, irrelevant.)

Not counting the dye transfer, more than half the selections were for older photographs. I'm considering "Weathered Sulfur Vents" a "new" photograph, because it's part of the last decade, and all the other old stuff is really old. If one restricts "new" to the past year or so, barely more than a third of the selections were for new photos. I didn't particularly expect that, but seeing as the "new" work is having to compete with that culled from nearly 40 years of photography, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Were it to play out differently, it would suggest that my past taste wasn't anywhere close to as good as I thought it was, or that I had become incredibly better in just a few recent years. Anything's possible; not everything is likely. On the other hand, I'm disappointed the bottom three didn't do better. I really like them! I know, something has to be last, but still..

Make of it all what you will. As I said, for amusement value only. I hope you're appropriately amused.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning.

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Featured Comment by - et -: "Just to throw a little more confusion into the discussion, I'll reply to the question by Marcus, in the comments, about the 'scientific bent' of contributors. I am an aerospace engineer who worked on the Apollo Program for the first eight years of my professional career. My print choices were 'Jazz Dinner' and 'Buena Vista Park.' However—if 'Apollo 17 at Dawn' had been one of the choices, that print would have been my preferred choice by far. Strictly a personal matter due to memories and my association of the image with a special part of my life—not directly due to either my scientific bent or the artistic value of the print. (Although I do love that image from an artistic viewpoint also.) How do we account for factors like that in looking at the statistics? I suggest that we get many, many more people to contribute to Ctein, so the sample size will become much larger and the results more statistically valid. :-)"

Posted on Thursday, 08 April 2010 at 02:28 AM in Collecting, Ctein | | Comments (15)

Thursday, 01 April 2010

Oddities of Image Stabilization

By Ctein

Two weeks ago I bought a Panasonic 45–200mm lens for my Olympus Pen EP-1. Along with my Panasonic 20mm and the Olympus 14–45mm zoom, that gives me a pretty complete kit (save for wide-angle and macro work). I have found the image stabilization in the Olympus worked very well with my other lenses; I've had utterly spectacular results when I've used shorter focal lengths handheld in the 1/8–1/15 second range. The first illustration here was photographed with the Panasonic 20 mm lens at ƒ/1.7 and 1/7th of a second, and the companion frames are similarly sharp.

Blog130figure1 Image stabilization works wonders...(go here for a larger, higher-quality JPEG)...

Consequently, I was hoping that I'd be able to handhold the new zoom down to some fairly low shutter speeds, especially with the choice of on-lens and in-body image stabilization. That would go some ways to compensate for its modest aperture (otherwise, it's a very nice lens). Well, that's not what I found. At low shutter speeds there was some benefit to image stabilization, but the higher the shutter speed went the less this was true.

At shutter speeds above 1/250 of a second, I am half-convinced that image stabilization produced less sharp results than no stabilization at all. At 1/125 of a second and above, image stabilization is not obviously better than no stabilization. It is most definitely not foolproof; I would say only half of the frames were pixel-level sharp, even at 1/250 of a second.

At 1/60 of a second and lower, image stabilization is clearly advantageous, although not by as much as one would think. It looks like the lower the shutter speed, the better image stabilization does relative to ordinary handholding; the problem is that with a 200mm lens, low shutter speeds are going to be problematical (that's an understatement).

Blog130figure2

...Except when it doesn't! 100% sections from some test photos. All photos made at ƒ/6.3, 1/250th sec., 200mm focal length. Photos 1–3 used Olympus in-body stabilization, 4–6 Panasonic in-lens stabilization, 7–9 both stabilization systems and 10–12 no stabilization. No series of three photos is entirely sharp.

Note: The poor showing by in-camera stabilization in this series was not replicated in other test series. Sometimes, in fact, it was better than in-lens stabilization. All test series, though, showed that having both systems on produced no additional problems, but that having no stabilization at all worked as well as or better at high shutter speeds than any combination of stabilizing systems.

Several hundred test photographs indicated that there was no clear-cut advantage to one stabilization system over the other. Interestingly, having both systems on didn't perform any worse (didn't perform any better, either). The manual says not to do that. Sometimes manuals are wrong. No doubt you are all shocked to hear that. What I have to conclude is that image stabilization is of modest benefit with this lens used at its longest focal length, but it's not really a game-changer. That's somewhat disappointing. Most notably, getting consistently tack-sharp photographs at 200mm is going to require me to use exposure times even shorter than 1/250 of a second, unless I can improve my handholding skills. The methods and stances I've used in the past worked extremely well, but they may not be optimal for this camera and lens combination.

I've never had a chance to do this kind of careful comparison before, and I'm a little surprised at these results. But, after discussing this with other folks it seems like my results aren't abnormal. I posted a query about this on the mu-4/3 forum and quickly got some very helpful and informative comments, as well as valuable links to relevant tests other people had done. For those of you with Micro 4/3 systems, I really have to recommend that user group. Most of the time, when I post a question about a technical problem on a user forum, all I hear is the faint susurration of chirping crickets. Not with that bunch!

Anyway, if there's a reader out there who's got some real expertise on the technical innards of these systems, I'd love to hear your comments. My hypothesis: the frequency response of these systems is limited, so when the exposure gets into the few millisecond range the system can't compensate for the dominant motion frequencies. With long exposures, those high frequency movements are less dominant and they tend to average out into a symmetric slight blur. With short exposures, there isn't enough time for random motion to average out; you get a smear. The problem's exaggerated by long focal length lenses, where a little bit of camera movement translates into a lot of image movement.

That's a wild-ass guess. I'd love to hear more educated opinions.

A cautionary note: if you want to chime in with your opinions about what's going on, it would be good to read the thread on the mu-4/3 forum first and follow the links there. Your thoughts may very well have been anticipated.

Whatever, it's looking like image stabilization is not a "set it and forget it" kind of thing. Dang.

Ctein's weekly column on TOP is published every Thursday morning.


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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Thom Hogan: "All stabilization systems have a 'sampling and correction frequency.' On the Nikon VR systems, for instance, that frequency is a bit above 1/500, which is why I've long recommended that you turn VR off at 1/500 and above.

"As you get shutter speeds closer to the sampling frequency, you start to run into what I call 'stutter' problems. Basically, the system is still correcting for a -XY movement when a +XY movement is now needed, but the sampling/movement frequency isn't fast enough to compensate in time for the shutter speed (or only partially compensates).

"What the frequency is on the Micro 4/3 bodies is I don't know, but it seems lower than on the Canon/Nikon in-lens systems.

"Makers promote stabilization as a marketing checklist item. Users interpret that as meaning 'always use it.' Just the opposite. Stabilization should never be on unless you know you need it and know it will be effective."

Posted on Thursday, 01 April 2010 at 09:25 AM in Ctein, Photo-tech | | Comments (37)

Thursday, 25 March 2010

Artists Ain't Saints: Jim Marshall, 1936-2010

By Ctein

I'm feeling mildly discombobulated. I just found out an hour ago that Jim Marshall died in his sleep last night (Tuesday night) in his hotel room in New York City; he was there for another show opening and to give some lectures. There are no details at this time. I imagine his body simply...stopped. He was 74, and honestly it was amazing he made it this far.

There's a photo of Jim himself here.

Jim didn't treat that body well. Understand that I hate the term "substance abuse." Our strait-laced, puritanical society considers any use of mind altering substances outside of the legally-accepted norm to be "abuse." Sorry to burst that bubble...wait, no, I'm not sorry at all...but society is filled with highly productive people who spend substantial amounts of each day in, um, altered states. They use, they don't abuse.

Well, that wasn't Jim. Jim abused. He abused in spades. His clean and sober periods were short intermissions in a lifelong tightrope act. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll epitomized most of Jim's adult life (okay, I'm guessing about the sex part, but, you know, given the temper and the times, it's kind of hard to imagine it any other way.)

Blog131figure1

Copyright by Jim Marshall, all rights reserved

I started printing for Jim in April of 2001. Six dye transfer prints of this photograph of Miles Davis. Up to that point I had run my business on a cash-up-front basis. Made billing and bookkeeping a hell of a lot simpler. I told Jim that's how I worked and he said, "Sure, no problem!" By the third invoice, he was having me run an account for him. It just kind of happened. Jim was one of those forces of nature; he liked to do things his way, and the whole world warped itself to make it possible.

Practically the first thing Jim told me was to make a print for myself of anything I printed for him and he'd sign it. For all I know, my collection of Jim Marshall prints is worth more than everything he paid me over the last decade. He could alternate between being ridiculously tightfisted and incredibly generous. Mess with his intellectual property rights and he would go for your throat, literally and legally. Lots of people tried to rip him off, sometimes people who should know better like major magazines and television networks, sometimes just people who thought they could get away with putting a photograph of his on a T-shirt. Jim made a lot of money off of the many people who tried to rip him off. But ask Jim for something, almost anything, and if he didn't think you were out to rip him off, he'd say yes.

Blog131figure2

Copyright by Jim Marshall, all rights reserved

I digitally printed this photograph for Jim late last year. I thought it was one of the best photos of his I'd ever printed; it was like rich velvety chocolate. When I brought my copy to him to be signed, I told him how good I thought that photo was and that I was going to give it to my best friend as a birthday gift, because she was a huge Miles fan. Jim said, "That's cool. Print up another one for yourself and I'll sign that too."

Unless you follow the music business or have been a fan of Jim's, you really have no idea how many famous photographs he made. Check out the collections on his website, and be sure to click through the little square thumbnails; they're crops for identification purposes, not the whole photograph. People going to that site to buy work know what they're looking for, and the thumbnails work as commerce, not as a good displays of art.

But there's a whole body of Jim's work that's hardly known, civil rights photography that he did in the South before he became famous for music photographs. It's serious, profound, fascinating work. He should be famous for it. Of course he won't be. He'll be remembered for his iconic music photographs, unless some curator "rediscovers" him 50 years from now.

Not endearing
Then there's the other Jim. It drove me crazy that he'd casually throw out epithets like "nigger," especially because I knew that if there were ever a white man who didn't have a racist bone in his body (and I'm not convinced there is) it was probably Jim. It's that Jim didn't care; when he felt like being offensive, he was oblivious to who he offended and how. He just vented. Some people would say he spoke his mind. Some, from a distance, might even think that was an endearing trait. I was there. It so very much wasn't.

And if he was on a tear, you didn't want to be in his way. There's a story that in his younger days he and Hunter Thompson got in a pissing match and Hunter Thompson backed down. I entirely believe. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of Jim, and we all did a lot of tiptoeing and a certain amount of fancy footwork to make sure we didn't get there.

It didn't always work. Two years after I started printing for Jim, he took great offense at something I did. I insisted upon giving him an estimate for a rather large job before I started on it. It set him off; he was hugely offended that I didn't trust him to pay me no matter what the job cost. Go figure. Have I mentioned that Jim was not entirely rational?

He was so upset he wouldn't even talk to me about it. Ever. I didn't hear from him again for four years.

I got off lucky. A colleague of mine who was doing custom film processing for Jim some years ago had a gun pulled on him! Kind of soured that relationship.

Finally, Amelia, his walks-on-water assistant, convinced him in 2007 that he really needed to be dealing with me if he wanted to get any more dye transfer prints made. But he still couldn't stand the idea of talking to me. Everything had to go through her as an intermediary. That nonsense went on for about eight months. I knew it was ridiculous; Amelia knew it was ridiculous. Jim was being...well...Jim. But by this point I'd figured out some of Jim's buttons. I made a nice digital print of one of my photographs he really liked (the Apollo 17 liftoff), signed it to him personally, giftwrapped it, and gave it to Amelia to give to him as a Christmas gift.

Mid-morning, December 26, the phone rings: "Hey, Ctein, buddy, it's Jim. I really love that photograph. Thanks so much, man! I need some stuff printed, when can you have them for me?"

And life was back to normal with Jim Marshall, if I am allowed to use the words "Jim Marshall" and "normal" in the same sentence. I managed to avoid ticking him off after that, although there were a few perilous missteps along the way. It worked out okay; if he pushed too hard, I pushed back...very, very carefully. And rarely without consulting with Amelia, in case I was about to misstep. Sometimes I felt like dealing with Jim was not like walking on eggs—it was like walking on hedgehogs. Barefoot. At least he never threatened my life.

The last time I printed for Jim, it was three dye transfers of Jimi Hendrix in his blue shirt and a digital print of Janis on her psychedelic Porsche, a previously unprinted and unpublished photograph. Not the same one that's in his books. This one has the trademark Janis grin. I like it better.

Blog131figure3

Copyright by Jim Marshall, all rights reserved

And that's all he wrote. Possibly the most generous and irritating man I've ever worked with. I'd be surprised if I ever meet anyone more generous. I sure as hell hope I never meet anyone more irritating. Alkie, druggie, abusive, and open-hearted. An exhausting combination.

F*ck that sh*t
Some of you reading this may be mildly offended by the tone of what I've written. Or even majorly offended. Too bad. This is the kind of attitude that Jim respected and liked. I'm really sorry he's gone, and he'd be happy to know that I'm really sorry he's gone. Jim always wanted badly to be liked. And I really did like that royal pain in the ass. But if I got all pious and holy and handwringing on him now, his ghost would rise up to haunt me, rattling chains and saying, as Jim frequently did, "F*ck that sh*t, man!"

I can't wait to see the photos the man is gonna send back from hell. They are going to be dynamite!

Jim Marshall, dead at 74. I could say R.I.P., but honestly I think that would be altogether last on his wish list.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears every Thursday morning.

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Featured Comment by Paul: "Of course my favourite Jim Marshall images are those of Jimi Hendrix. I suppose there will be one big party this weekend up in the sky. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and loads more all posing for Jim Marshall. There will be one very lonely M4 missing his owner down here."

Marshallleica
One of Jim Marshall's M4 Leicas

Featured Comment by David Seelig: "I knew Jim for 25 years or so nice obit Ctein and very accurate as to how Jim was, I will miss him."

Featured Comment by Nick Despotopoulos: "As the guy whose company built & ran Jim's website for the past year plus, a collector of his work and a close friend since 1988 I can say that Ctein has it the way it was man...no sh*t! Also let me say that working with Ctein on Jim's stuff for the past few years has been a pleasure—he's a true professional. Now where's that bottle of Wisers Whisky...Nick Despotopoulos, Groovy Collectibles LLC for groovycollectibles.com."

Featured Comment by Jeff Kausch: "Jim was an Advertising Photographers of America San Francisco Executive Board Member, a close friend of many APA members, and a central character in the Bay Area Photo Community for decades, so we have created a special section on the APA SF blog to help honor him. Photographer Jock McDonald and agent Norman Maslov are just two of Jim’s friends who have already contributed. If you have any stories or photos of Jim or relevant links to share, please email them to us. Thanks."

Featured Comment by Fern: "Thank You...you have so beautifully captured the essence of this man. Through the lovely Amelia I had the honor of meeting Jim. While perusing his photos one afternoon when he graciously offered to donate any photo I wanted for my special breast cancer fundraiser, and before I could even think about leaving after being mesmerized for hours by his incredible work, I had to celebrate some occasion with Jim, who would simply not allow me to decline several shots of fine whiskey. I also had to work really hard at graciously declining his requests to come away with him for the weekend! Rock on Jim!"

Posted on Thursday, 25 March 2010 at 12:25 AM in Ctein, Obituaries, Photographers, historical | | Comments (69)

Thursday, 18 March 2010

Supporting 1000 True Fans

By Ctein

Before launching into this week's column, follow-ups on old business. We bought a "new" car (a used Chevy HHR still under bumper-to-bumper warranty, for those who care), I sold the VW bus to the state as part of their smog-hog buy-back program, and I sold all my film camera gear (thank you, Columbus Camera Group and eBay).

Care to guess which got me more money, the car or the gear?

We now return to the regularly scheduled broadcast, the latest column in the series on my "1000 True Fan" experiment. I'm using "support" in two senses: what Contributors get from the program and what I have to do to maintain it. When I proposed this, Ken Tanaka correctly pointed out that administrative overhead was not ignorable. Fortunately, it's worked out pretty much as I expected.

Make no mistake, I didn't get anywhere close to 1000 True Fans (didn't expect to), I got 94. But those Contributors provided me with approximately $15,500 gross revenues, $12,500 net. That's about one third of what I need to live on, not a life-altering level of support but certainly a life-enhancing one that provides me with considerably more time to work on my art—the point of this.

Blog129figure1 This is a screenshot of my spreadsheet, with dummy entries to preserve my Contributors' privacy. This links to a mail merge template in Microsoft Word. (Click on the image to see it larger.)

My paperwork overhead ends up being under one day a month. To track Contributors, I created a simple spreadsheet. I copy each new Contributor's information into the spreadsheet and annotate it appropriately. The first eight columns are mailing information that I use with a Microsoft Word mail-merge template I created to generate adhesive mailing labels. "Subs" are abbreviations I used to record the tiers of support, monthly or annual payments, and U.S. or foreign Contributors. "Fee" is how much they're paying. "StartDate" lets me track when subscriptions are up. The next two columns get summed, so I always know what my monthly and one-time-annual revenues total. "Status" is scratch notes I use to I track whether I've mailed stuff I'm supposed to, e-mailed notifications, followed up on missed payments, etc.

What do the Contributors get in return? Periodic e-mails tell them how things are going with links to a private webpage where they can see recently finished pieces. Ideally I should be mailing them every month, but I haven't gotten my act entirely together. The emails don't take a lot of time, just few hours a month to prepare a couple of new JPEGs, write a newsletter, and have Mail bulk-email it.

Last Christmas I sent the Contributors a set of holiday notecards that I hand printed and signed as a surprise gift. Something like that lets people know that you appreciate what they're doing for you. People don't give you money if they don't think you're grateful. Like the newsletters, it's a way of making a connection, but it's a lot more tangible and has more impact. That was relatively time-consuming and expensive. Preparing and mailing 100 packets of five note cards and envelopes took me a good week and a half. So, I'm now up to around two days a month for support.

You can also do your Contributers favors. Last winter I offered them about a dozen extra dye transfer prints from the first TOP print sale at an extraordinarily low price, and super-cheap copies of my photo restoration book before the new edition came out. They also got advance notice of this year's print sale.

I promised people at least a half dozen photographs to choose from for their fulfillment gifts, but I ended up offering 13; here's my final selection. The first photo on this page is a dye transfer print that I overprinted for the TOP print sale, although all I had promised them were digital prints. Another unexpected perk.

The big outlay of time and money is coming up: notifying the first Contributors their subscriptions are fulfilled and they can pick their gift prints, and preparing and shipping those prints. It will wind up being about a dozen days work.

All told, probably three days a month go into supporting people who provide one third of my living expenses. If I tripled the number of subscribers, I could survive on this (barely) putting just a third of my time into "business." That's not bad! Beyond 300 Contributors, I'm not sure about my current workflow; I doubt it works for 500. If by some miracle I ever got to 1000 True Fans, it would definitely break; simple arithmetic shows support would become a full-time job. When would I do the art?!

On the other hand, at $133K/yr. net I could afford to contract out a lot of the administration. Heck, it's more money than Paula and I combined have made in our very best year; she could quit her job and become my manager. This is what's called a "champagne problem;" I should be so "unlucky" as to have it.

Now comes the Really Big Question: can I keep my True Fans? This is supposed to be an ongoing source of income for creative types, not a one-shot. The model breaks badly for my kind of business around that (I'll explain next time I write about this), so I'm nervous. In a couple of months, I'll be able to tell you how my efforts to keep Contributors has worked out.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning. —MJ

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Posted on Thursday, 18 March 2010 at 09:15 AM in Ctein | | Comments (17)

Thursday, 11 March 2010

What Tests Don't Tell You

By Ctein

A few weeks back, a reader wrote to Mike comparing the sharpness of prints made with his 6-MP and 12-MP digital cameras. He put in some effort to compare apples and apples. Both cameras had the same format, and he used the same high quality prime lens on both cameras at the same ISO and aperture. He worked on a tripod, photographing the same target at the same distance under the same conditions, and he printed out the photos using the same workflow in several different sizes. He saw little difference in sharpness between the two cameras. Apparently, up to fairly large print sizes, it didn't matter whether he used a 6- or a 12-megapixel camera.

The reader had made an error. He'd stopped down the lens all the way to ƒ/11. That meant his likely blur circle was larger than the pixel size on either camera. I guesstimated that the most resolution difference between the two cameras he could hope to see was 10–15%, so small as to be nearly undetectable in real photographs.

A good equipment test is really a well-designed scientific experiment that measures the variables on which you want to collect high-quality data. Few people have the knowledge or skills to design such experiments. There's a reason people go to expensive schools for many years to learn how to do this. The majority of tests that I read about online are done incorrectly. When they produce unexpected results, as they did in the case of this reader, the first thing to investigate is the testing procedure.

I've written many columns and comments about print sharpness and what people can and can't see. There have been many comments from readers who couldn't verify my assertions, making comparison prints on their inkjet printers. The readers neglected to determine whether their printers were even capable of reproducing such fine detail before making the comparison prints; they weren't. Like Mike's correspondent, their experiments were too crude to measure what they were looking for.

That's why I was so happy with this column back in January: "How Sharp Is Your Printer; How Much Can You See?" It's not easy to come up with a robust test that a non-expert user could run that tells them something useful and meaningful about what kind of fine detail they're getting and seeing.

There's another way tests go wrong. Mike has described to me how tests of total harmonic distortion failed to tell us how audio equipment would sound, because it really matters to the human ear which harmonics get distorted. Once you know that, you can design an appropriate test, but the most competently-executed THD test won't tell you what you want to know.

I just ran into this with my Olympus Pen E-P1 (which I am very a very happy with, don't get me wrong.) Published tests report a pleasantly low level of noise with this camera. DxOMark is still my favorite for quantitative information, and they have comparison data for my old Fuji S100fs and the Olympus. My field tests pretty much agree—with a glaring exception. No one's noise tests distinguish between visually-random noise and noise that appears as a regular pattern. By the time electronic noise gets massaged into a photograph random electronic variations can turn into a very non-random artifacts.

I photographed a moonbow on New Year's Eve, handheld with the EP-1 (God, but I love an ƒ/1.7 lens and image stabilization!) The top image was taken at ISO 800, the lower one at ISO 1600. In these comparison illustrations I've cranked the chroma all the way up to "11" to make the noise readily visible; it's nowhere as obvious in the original photographs.

-

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ISO 800

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ISO 1600 (click on either image to see it larger)

The increase in truly random noise between ISO 800 and 1600 wouldn't make the higher-speed photograph unusable, especially if I ran it through good noise reduction software. The color banding that you can see in the ISO 1600 shot does. That's a manifestation of noise that isn't reported in the published tests, and it's a real killer. At ISO 800, the nonrandom noise isn't a showstopper. At ISO 1600, it is unacceptably distracting to the viewer in the correctly-printed photograph, and it's not something I can filter with software.

Now, keep in mind that this is the kind of subject which is most likely to bring out such noise—broad uniform areas of low saturation in the dark part of the tonal scale. A more variegated scene would disguise this noise. What it means, though, is that I can't really count on this camera for quality results above ISO 800. That's about a half a stop faster than quality results out of the Fuji S100. The thing is, based on the simple noise data, I should get nearly two stops more usable speed out of the Olympus. Clearly, not gonna happen. That's a disappointment, and it's a failure of the testing protocols. The data being reported is technically, but not visually, accurate.

Tests. They don't always tell you what you need to know.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

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Posted on Thursday, 11 March 2010 at 08:15 AM in Ctein | | Comments (58)

Thursday, 04 March 2010

The Printer / Photoshop / Snow Leopard Hell

By Ctein

Everyone knows what happens to technological pioneers. Unfortunately, sometimes even prudence and caution won't save you.

The last generation of operating systems seemed designed to exterminate the pioneers. People pointed fingers and laughed at how many problems Windows Vista caused its adopters, until Mac OS 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard) came along, and demonstrated that a major code rollout, no matter which team you played for, was going to cause no end of grief. (Yes, yes, all you UNIX users can feel smug about how you roll your own bug fixes out of string and sealing wax and twigs. Goody for you. Now go away.)

My MacBook Pro came shortly before Leopard was released, and when I heard about all the compatibility issues, I just decided to hell with it and wait for the "bug fix" release. Kind of the way a lot of PC users avoided Windows Vista and stuck with XP. We stayed with Win 2K. Ironically, we're now running Windows Vista on our iMac, and you know it's great. I don't see what everyone was complaining about—all it needed was a full set of patches, a totally pristine environment to run in, and a state-of-the-art 2010 computer with performance equivalent to a dozen supercomputers. Runs smooth as glass!

Ahem.

But back to the Mac side. Snow Leopard came along, the operating system that would fix Leopard. Well, kiddies, guess what? They broke printing. Really, really badly. It's weird that this hasn't received more widespread publicity outside of the geek lists, because if you're someone who cares at all about color management and having your prints look right, you're pretty much screwed. In particular, if you're someone who happens to use Snow Leopard, Photoshop CS4, and a high-quality Epson printer, right now you are in hell. That hardly describes anyone except...oh...maybe most of the serious graphics professionals out there.

Can you tell I haven't been a happy camper? That's right, I knew you could.

The problem isn't limited to that combination of components, but it's certainly the most notorious one. What makes the matter especially pernicious is that there are several things that are screwy, so that fixing one problem doesn't get you out of Hell, it just moves you into a different level.

Problems and workarounds
Here's my understanding of what's going wrong. Now, I need to preface this by saying that I am not a color management guru. Normally if I write an article about something technical, you can take it to the bank. In this case, you should deposit the check but not spend any of it until it's cleared (stretching a metaphor well beyond the breaking point). I'm 90% certain of what I'm talking about, but that's about it.

In any case, I'm indebted to a friend and reader at whom I was whining last weekend in serious frustration over these problems. Turns out his job is closely tied to this whole mess (I had no idea, I was just emotionally imposing), and so he could describe to me in simple terms what was going wrong. That let me get part of the way out of hell.

First, Snow Leopard has a bug in it that screws up rendering if you're using a version 4 ICC profile (this bug appeared in  MacOS 10.6.2; it didn't exist in 10.6.1). That's going to be any profile that's been generated recently. Color Utility will tell you information about your profiles. You might have some that go back to version 2. If you don't, you are hosed until the 10.6.3 release (we hope).

Doesn't matter what software you use, what printer you use, and what hoops you jump through: If you attempt to color manager output using a v.4 ICC profile, it is not going to work. The print is going to come out horribly wrong.

Some people figured that if they can generate new profiles from within the operating system, they can use those to undo the distortions the operating system is inducing (understand that such profiles would fail when the operating system gets fixed, but as a stopgap it's not an entirely bad idea). Now you run into the second problem, and this falls mostly on the heads of some printer manufacturers. If you're using a profiling system that expects you to print out targets using Photoshop, printing out targets that haven't been color managed has become somewhere between very difficult and impossible. (For those who haven't done this kind of thing, creating a profile requires printing out a test target that shows the printer's uncorrected output, so the software can figure out what it needs to correct). The reason for that is that printing with profiles entirely off under Mac Photoshop requires breaking some rules, and that's what the third-party software authors did. The rules changed with Snow Leopard—those who didn't pay attention (read: many of the printer driver authors) have left us with obsolete code running our printers.

As I said, there are some workarounds, sometimes. In fact, I do all my profiling using ColorMunki, which doesn't even go through Photoshop and can generate test targets just fine. But...

...The resulting profiles won't work! Why? Because, guess what, they are the latest v4 ICC profiles! Back to square one.

There's another gotcha, which may or may not be a bug, that needs mentioning. Your printer has a default profile assigned to it; ColorSync Utility can tell you what. If it's sRGB or no profile at all, you're going to have problems. Understand that this has nothing to do with whether you let Photoshop manage colors or let the printer manage colors; it's a system setting.

But that's just me
In my case, this story has a semi-happy ending. I checked all the profiles on my new iMac and, joy of joys, the profiles that Bill Atkinson provided me for my Epson 9800 printer are old enough that they are v2.x. I installed the latest Epson printer drivers, printed out my killer test targets under CS4, and they are 99.99% perfect. There's a truly minuscule difference between printing under Mac OS 10.4 and Mac OS 10.6, but it's pixel-peeping, it really is. My test targets ferret out things like that, and the differences are ones that will never be troublesome in a real print.

So, happy happy, joy joy, I at least have one professional printer that's running on my new iMac. After only four months!

I have no idea when I'll get the R2400 and R800 working properly. At least I can still run those off of my MacBook Pro, which, you may be sure, has not yet had its OS upgraded.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column is posted every Thursday morning.


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Featured Comment by Robert Roaldi: "I have no useful info to add to this, just a comment. I am just so sick and tired of the fact that the industries that make computers, screens, printers, cameras, scanners, and everything else, cannot get this colour matching thing easy and correct. If geeky experts want to live on the gamut fringe and worry about all sorts of exotic colour reproduction issues, well go ahead, the world needs people like you. But like 99% of the world, why can't I just buy some paper, and have some button to push on my printer that gets it 95% right. No museums want my prints yet, so why should I have to learn all this arcane detail just to put something on my wall, and that only after wasting untold dollars on ink and paper. They sell papers in boxes of 25 but all the trial and error sends the first 20 to the recycling bin.

"The instant you move away from sRGB, it's a minefield. But even restricting your entire workflow to sRGB, there is still no guarantee that your printer will spit out something acceptable on the paper you buy, never mind matching what the calibrated screen showed. Then every month, there are new papers and printers on the market.

"It's fun taking pictures but everything else about the hobby sucks. Frequent software and hardware upgrades, colour matching incompatibilities everywhere. Some applications use corrected colours, other don't. It's a crock. I wrote software for 25 years before being put out to pasture by the industry and in the old days they fired people who made products this lousy. Why do we put up with it?

"There's a lot written how people don't print anymore; they only show pictures on screens. That might be because most prints are ugly and dull. Maybe we need a printshop in every neighbourhood staffed by professionals who we can pay to do our printing for us. But hey no, let's all waste hours, paper and ink trying to do it ourselves using equipment built to standards that no one on earth observes.

"If our banks and car companies worked this badly, we'd put them all out of business, wouldn't we?

"Sorry, rant over. I'll calm down now."

Posted on Thursday, 04 March 2010 at 08:08 AM in Ctein | | Comments (69)

Thursday, 25 February 2010

What Can't Digital Do for Me?

By Ctein

In the comments to my last column, Jason asked what kind of situations I thought I might run into where digital wouldn't be able to do the job. Understand that I don't actually expect to run into any such situations; but I can never say never. My training in physics makes it very hard for me to claim anything with absolute certainty. Ask me if the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning, and I'll feel compelled to answer, "very likely."

There are certainly situations where digital makes things difficult, possibly to the point of impracticality. Of course almost any photographic problem can be solved by throwing sufficient amounts of time, energy, and money at it, but I'm trying to be practical here. I ain't solving a digital photography problem by buying a Phase One back, any more than I'd solve a film problem by hauling around an 8x10 view camera. So, if you want to nitpick my examples, please be realistic in your nitpicking.

Medium format color negative was exquisite at rendering fine detail and texture, and I could record exposure ranges far in excess of 10 stops with excellent linearity. I'm also fond of night photography.

Digital cameras are great for doing long exposures, because they have no reciprocity failure. But they're lousy for doing long exposures, because they build up noise. You can eliminate much of the noise if you're willing to let the camera do automatic long-exposure noise reduction, which doubles exposure times. Sometimes that's impractical. If I were the kind of photographer who liked to photograph multi-hour star trails (happily, I'm not) digital would present some real difficulties, while film takes it in stride.

My photograph of the Transamerica Pyramid required more than a 30-minute exposure, because I had to stop way down to get enough depth of field (a view camera would have made life a lot easier). Absent very expensive gear, a 30-minute digital photograph would not come out anywhere as well. Fortunately, it wouldn't be necessary. Without reciprocity failure, the exposure time would drop down to about three minutes. I could likely make this photograph at ISO 400 digitally, with the exposure time under a minute. Running automatic noise reduction will then work fairly well and won't add excessive amounts of time to the endeavor.

Some situations are tougher. Digital cameras can capture very long exposure ranges, but they tend to lose good separation in the darkest detail, and heaven help you if you clip the highlights. That makes a photograph like this one of the floodlit space shuttle Columbia extremely tricky. Almost all the important detail in the scene is in the extreme highlights or shadows, and this subject uses up absolutely 100% of the range of the color negative film. If faced with such digitally, I would probably bracket like mad and merge the photographs together.

Understand this is not an easy photograph to make under any circumstances; while I could (barely) record the scene on a single frame of film, it took me weeks in the darkroom to convert that into a good print. Silver or silicon, this would end up being a lot of work.

The most difficult case is my Jewels of Kilauea book project. This subject matter is a worst-case scenario. The shiny lava gets really, really black; the iridescent highlights are really really bright. Like the shuttle photograph, what's aesthetically important about this subject matter is in the extremes; mid-tones are often irrelevant. Complicating the issue further is that this is subject matter for which texture is extremely important, and fine texture is something that digital has a lot of trouble dealing with. (There are technical reasons for that; I may devote a whole 'nother column to it, some time.)

Making satisfactory digital photographs of this subject is tough enough. Making ones that would blend in with the film photographs I've already made is not an impossible job, but it is dauntingly difficult. This one project has likely been a major factor in keeping me from coming to a decision to go 100% digital.

What changed my mind? First, I admitted that after a half dozen years of stasis, the odds of this ever becoming a book were quite small. Next was realizing that the portfolio already has well over 100 utterly dynamite photographs. That's more than enough for any exhibits or shows. If making any new digital photographs fit well with the film ones turns out to be too tough a job, I can simply decide that those photographs will never be exhibited together. Finally, in the unlikely event the book was revived, it's 90% photographed; I only need 10–20 additional photographs. What winds up on the printed page is sufficiently denatured from the originals that I'd have no problem making the book look like a seamless whole.

No photographic medium can be all things to everybody. Looking for perfection in the arts is worse than a fool's errand. I've decided that the ways in which digital is not perfect will present as little obstacle to my art as the ways in which film is not perfect. I lived with film's warts for 40 years; digital's won't faze me.

Ctein

Ctein's column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

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Posted on Thursday, 25 February 2010 at 02:32 AM in Ctein | | Comments (52)

Thursday, 18 February 2010

Ctein: 'I Quit'

By Ctein

Don't panic (or rejoice, if that's your pleasure). It's not what you think.

A little less than a year ago I wrote "Transition State," the last installment in my chronicling of my steady migration from film to digital photography. I noted then that it had been nearly two years since I had made a film photograph, but I wasn't ready to decide I wouldn't make any more. As a friend concisely and eloquently put it, "You've stopped, but you haven't quit."

Last Wednesday a bit finally flipped in my subconscious. I went from indeterminacy to decision: I am done with film photography. In other words...I quit.

Why did the brainbit flip just now? I suspect something that entered into this was me thinking about what I'm going to be doing with my art and my work over the next year or so (between my Contributors and the recent print sale, I should be able to devote an awful lot of time to art). None of that thinking involved picking up a film camera. The decisive process isn't happening on the level of conscious thought, so this may be merely the highest brain function rationalizing what the rest of the brain has decided.

Blog125figure1
Here it is, Ctein's very last frame of film, file number 040807-C#12 (indicating it was exposed on April 8, 2007). Technical information for those who care—camera: Fujica GA645; film: Kodak Portra 800-2. Th'th'th'th'at's all, folks!

I've told a few people here that I'm close to, and, to my surprise, they've been startled by my decision. They've known that I've been doing nothing with film and that this rough beast has been slouching towards Bethlehem for years. I'm not sure why it should come as any surprise that it finally arrived.

There've been three questions I've been asked repeatedly:

Q: What if you change your mind?

A: Not very likely. There's a reason it took me three years to come to this decision. It's not one I forced; it's one that's arisen spontaneously. I know what I feel. More importantly, I have learned over the years how to pay proper attention to what I feel and what I really want. I want to move on, and so I am going to.

Q: What if you see a wonderful photograph that you need film for?

A: On the very rare occasions if/when that happens, it'll be the same as when I saw a wonderful potential photograph that I needed an 8x10 view or panoramic film camera for. Neither of which I've ever owned. Shrug, move on, and find a wonderful photograph that I could make. I've never lost sleep over the few percent that got away. I'm not about to start now. Honestly, I'm not even sure it's ever going to happen.

Q: Does this mean you're giving up your darkroom?

A: Well, if you're talking about conventional printing, I already have. I don't do Ektacolor printing any longer, and I have no interest in ever doing so again. I very rarely do black-and-white silver gelatin printing, for clients. The reason I keep the darkroom up and running is because dye transfer is still a substantial part of my business. I can print dye transfers from film or digital originals. Anyways, I've got three times as many unprinted portfolio-quality negatives in my files as I have dye transfer materials to print them on.

The decision is mostly of psychological significance; I haven't made any film photographs in now-approaching-three years. I'll clear a little room out of my deep freeze when I get rid of a couple of hundred rolls of film. I'll get some very modest amount of money for my 35mm and medium format equipment. A buyer from Columbus Camera Group is supposed to be in town the early part of March and I'll find out what they're willing to offer me. Coincidence, by the way; I found out about that the day after the bit flipped. Maybe the gods are telling me something.

If I sold the stuff on eBay I'd possibly get more moolah, but I sincerely doubt it's worth my energy and time to dispose of the gear. If I think CCG offer's way too low I'll take my chances on eBay. Now that I've made my decision, though, I would rather just be done with it. I'll probably hang onto my Pentax 67 lenses, on the off chance that Pentax finally comes out with a medium format digital body that I care about. (I'm not going to give them too much longer; I will only wait so long for vaporware to condense.)

So what's my next step?

I don't have a bloody clue. Isn't that fun!

Ctein

Ctein's column appears on The Online Photographer every Thursday morning.

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Posted on Thursday, 18 February 2010 at 08:14 AM in Ctein, Film and Darkroom | | Comments (85)

Thursday, 11 February 2010

Why Is It (Not) Art?

By Ctein

(Editor's note: For several years now, Ctein [the name is pronounced "kuh-TINE" and yes, it's legally his entire name] has been writing three posts a month for TOP. Starting this morning, his contributions will be weekly and will be published every Thursday morning.)

Greetings, Citizens. Today I am going to ask some of you to put on your thinking caps and deal with some difficult questions. I'm going to be asking you why you hold certain opinions. "Why" is always a very hard question, but "what" isn't an interesting one.

Understand that this will count for 0% of your grade. You don't have to participate. But, should you choose to do so, you will be graded...by a jury of your peers. Tough audience. Fervency of belief won't sway them; insightfulness will.

So here's the question I'm putting to you: Some of you considered Michael Paul Smith's work to be less than art—not good art versus bad art, just not art. I'd like to know why.

Mere wordplay will not be deemed an acceptable answer (although elegance will be admired). Saying that it's "craft" and not "art" begs the question. That's just two buzzwords concatenated, devoid of useful information. Tell me why you think it's craft instead of art, and you have something meaningful to say to all of us.

I told you it would be a difficult question. It's easy to say that you like or dislike something. It's easy to categorize something based on your own internal value system. It's hard to understand how that value system works, let alone articulate it. But doing the hard stuff is when we all learn things.

If this weren't bad enough, I'm going to throw some questions at you of both a serious and semi-rhetorical nature; consider them carefully before responding. They are intended to confound:

• Is it just Michael's work that you don't consider art, or is all studio photography not art in your mind? Again, the important question here is not "what?" but "why?" If you think all studio photography is not art, you have to tell us why. If you think some is and some isn't, you have to figure out what distinguishes them from each other. (To keep from muddying the conversation too much, let's not include photographs of humans or animals. Photographing animate creatures, whether in their natural habitats or an artificial setting, is very different from photographing a non-responsive or immobile object.)

• Can still life photographs be art; if so, then why some and not others? If categorically not, then why is it that Van Gogh's Sunflowers can be considered art but a photograph of a vase of sunflowers can't be?

• If studio photography isn't art, why should outdoor natural photography be considered art? How would me photographing a real building in the outside world hit a different artistic level from me constructing a faux building in a studio and photographing it?

• If you don't think any photography can be art, then...no, let's put down the can opener and step slowly away from the worms. We've opened enough cans for today.

Tackle these questions as you see fit, or feel free to duck the whole issue. Just remember that if you decide to play, few people will be interested in what opinions you hold; what they will value is knowing why you hold them.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by norrin: "I think the answer is about 80 years old. 'La trahison des images'—The Treachery of Images."

Featured Comment by anonymous: "Oh, boy!  Here's where Zen training really pays off: the answer, of course, is mu!"

[Ed. Note: Definition of mu.]

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "Of course studio still life photography and by extension any photography can be art, or at least examples of studio still life photography are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, and The Met. Questioning that is like asking whether paint can be art or giant pieces of marble or goats wearing tires or young woman covered in cake frosting can be art. Almost anything with 'this is not art' written on it will qualify as art albeit with much eye rolling and 'you should have been here 30 years ago.'

"About Michael's work? It certainly could be, it depends on intent and context. Flicker is a pretty crummy context for art unless the intent is clear.

"I'm pretty sure that a vase of sunflowers has been exhibited as art somewhere, on the other hand I once grew 80 acres of sunflowers but that was for snackfood and it was called farming. I did later take a photograph of that field on fire after it was harvested, made a mural sized print of it accompanied with text about the death of my father, and showed it in a gallery.

"It's all about framing. (Yes a pun.)

"Next week Mike Johnston asks 'what is Jazz?', which reminds me of the NYC Noise Fest where there were all these people complaining 'This isn't noise, this is music!', and no I'm not making that up."

[Ed. Note: And if the following is not the last word, I don't know what is:]

Featured Comment by David Comdico: "As a categorical placeholder, the term Art has become so loose as to be indeterminate. We have learned the vocabularies of Duchamp, Warhol, Koons so today literally anything can be, and is, considered art. Dada, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Postmodernism—each was railed against (as photography was in its early history) as antithetical to art. The problem these critics faced is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove a negative—and at the very least epistemologically dicey. So I propose here instead not to argue categorically but qualitatively.

"To begin, there are many ways to think about art, to be sure. Here is a quick but incomplete list:

"The institutionalization of art hardly has the power it once did but its authority still holds sway. The institutional theory holds that if something is in a museum it is then, de facto, art. For example, it has been argued that Duchamp's urinal became art as soon as it was displayed as such in a gallery. Silly as this sounds, there is a grain of truth here as the issue is context: the context informers a viewer how to regard the object, or in this case, how not to utilize it.

"Second, there is the political approach that claims art has emancipatory aims and is uniquely positioned to free us from our cultural blinders. Here the artist is, as Sartre suggests, committed. Empathy plays a large role and thus by extending our selves we see how others are effected by forces under our control. Here, Art is the medium which has the unique properties to accurately transmit this uniquely encoded message, and effect change by changing people.

"Third, there is art as experience or phenomenological event. Thinkers such as John Dewey and Merleau-Ponty explored this vein, which I think creatives have a lot of experience with and can relate to, especially the street photographer. One's imagination is held in creative tension by the flow of experience so that the senses are fully engaged and the doors of perception are unlocked. This, however, is not merely subjective response, as the artwork must objectively capture a certain gestalt. Dewey speaks of an infant's cry out of hunger as being in-expressive since the newborn has not yet learned to connect the cry and the resulting satiation. Therefore, artists simply cannot rely on an outburst, they must express their thoughts and feelings through the form of their medium of choice.

"Fourth, as we become more experienced our taste expands. We have prior experience and standards, both personal and cultural which we bring with us. Culturally, we call this body of work the canon, and today this concept extends down to even the most minute level where tastemakers will categorize exemplary musical bands, say, even within micro-genres of popular music. So taste has become common sense but its roots are fairly recent, in the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury who shifted the source of order from reason to taste and feeling.

"And of course, lastly, we cannot leave out the metaphysical and philosophical approaches to art. Philosophically, today most so-called post-modern art has a metonymic relationship to the objective world so the work itself cannot be located in the material of the work itself. This a tricky move, and it invalidates much of what was said above concerning experience; it is also often concomitant with a political angle of some sort (yes, the categories are hardly discreet). The metaphysical is probably the most familiar to us as it's perhaps the default position: art is that which is beautiful. We can trace this idea back to Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists and it is so intertwined with our language as to be almost invisible as a theory.

"So, regarding Michael Paul Smith's work in particular, the question, to me, is not 'is it art' but is it successful art. For starters,  we can assume a certain level of curatorship so it is art on that account at least—we view it with certain expectations—that the photographer took these photos for some purpose other than to document his work as a model builder.

"Politically, the photos seem to suggest that the idyllic image of mid-20th century America is an illusion, or perhaps a lost vision. That is, we take the image to be an old photo of a bygone error until we discover, or are informed, that it is a fake of recent vintage. From this we postulate two possible political motivations: one, that Smith has nostalgia for a simpler, purer America that was once a model for the world but is now only a model within the world, or, alternatively, that he is politically critical of this popular image of an idealized America and suggests that the history we have of this past is just as fake as the model which represents it. It is also possible that the intent of the photo is for the viewer to oscillate between these two extremes.

"The experience of this art occurs a bit outside of the work itself so is, in my mind, post-modernly metonymic. One is not drawn to the photo's form or innovation thereof. The most remarkable thing about the work is what it is not: real. So the experience of viewing this photo is rather bland, but this should not immediately disqualify it's possible status as a successful work of art.

"As a work of beauty, one can appreciate the craftsmanship of the model maker-which I believe in this case is Smith himself. The detail is convincing and it fools the eye, even after the trick has been revealed. Photographically, the black and white is convincing enough to be from the era the model represents, but the telltale sign of modern techniques are more visible here. In short, the photo does not seem to have aged.

"Philosophically is where the work, I believe, succeeds or fails. As a post-modern work, the locus of interest is equally in the work as it is in the network of associations the work invites. So we have a series of contrasts and conflations: real/fake, old/new, photo/world, construction/reconstruction. There is certainly much that is worthwhile to think about. The final challenge is how an individual work of art fits into the oeuvre of a particular artist and into a genre of work amongst other artists. Two artists that come to mind who explore similar territory are Thomas Demand and George Rousse, against whom favorable comparisons would be no easy feat.

"So, finally, my take away is that, if intended conceptually, the work is interesting and well executed but not strong enough to contend with similar work in this vein, nor is it uniquely revealing to be considered as a breakthrough on its own (i.e. I am invoking taste here). However, this is tentative and subject to revision if the photographer's other work gives me a fresh insight. On the other hand, if the photo is intended as a non-conceptual illusion or recreation then it is only half-successful and its nostalgia is then somewhat troubling.

"Now, it could be that most of this is a serious misreading of Smith's photograph. Such misreadings are not unusual in photography—see Eugene Atget and E. J. Bellocq or any number or vernacular photographers. In my reading, for example, the partially convincing black and white is a conscious choice intended to influence interpretation—that is, the ragged sleeve is on display to undermine the staged reality. So the work is meant to fool the eye and then give in to it—any more convincing and you would need additional information to uncover the true meaning, and any less—say unabashed digital color—would not have succeeded as illusion initially. But perhaps the reasons are more mundane: maybe the photographer only chose the format he did because he wanted to hide some imperfection that color would have revealed—or perhaps he considered the illusion complete."

Posted on Thursday, 11 February 2010 at 09:06 AM in Ctein | | Comments (124)

Wednesday, 03 February 2010

The Final Hour

I have to tease my friend Ctein that he can be a bit Spockish at times. I asked him what the chances are that he's going to take the dye transfer print offer page down at exactly 8 a.m. Central Time tomorrow—that would be exactly two weeks from the moment it went up—and he calculated the odds mathematically: 1 in 800.

But he will take it down as soon as he wakes up. Meaning, this is the 11th hour, figuratively if not literally. If you're still thinking about it and haven't jumped yet, better wake up!

Mike

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Posted on Wednesday, 03 February 2010 at 05:13 PM in Ctein, Print Offers | | Comments (4)

Monday, 01 February 2010

Three Days Left!

Sealingwax Don't forget that our current Dye Transfer Print Sale is still going on, but only for three more days, till Thursday morning.

After the next three days, it's quite possible that no one will ever again have a chance to buy a dye transfer print for a price this low...I mean anyone, ever, in the history of photography! That sounds exactly like hyperbolic sales talk, but it happens to be literally true. I could deconstruct and defend that statement in detail.

Ctein has already shipped about a third of the current orders. Most of the orders were made the first day of the sale, so even if you ordered the first day you can't assume your order has been shipped. But he will send you an email confirmation when your order does go out, so there's no need to email him to inquire—you'll be kept apprised. He's well on track to ship all orders within 30 days of the date of the order. (We've got him working hard.)

Please go to the order page to place your order. I'll post one last little reminder on Wednesday, but it would be best not to wait till then.

Mike

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Posted on Monday, 01 February 2010 at 08:39 AM in Ctein, Print Offers | | Comments (11)

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