The Online Photographer

Ctein, Apollo 17 Liftoff, Cape Canaveral, 1972

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

By Ctein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe not!

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By Ctein

When Mike asked me if I'd write a regular column for him, I had no idea if I'd be able to sustain it. Three column ideas each month, especially given my penchant for writing long? I've always envied newspaper columnists and cartoonists. While I can aperiodically write great columns and come up with pretty damn funny cartoons, my well would run dry mighty quickly if I had to do it every day.

Yet here we are, at Column 100, and I have a backlog of several dozen ideas that ain't gonna  go away unless Mike decides he wants me at least weekly. I'm amazed. Column 100, almost the third birthday. (By the way, I'm really looking forward to the cake, chocolate being preferred. And the surprise party.)

Old news about tomorrow
Eamon's recent column on "Alternative Futures" made me realize I had more to say on the subject of prognostication, an appropriate choice for the Centennial column. I've already written a couple of columns about this:

"A Brief History of Electronic Photography"

"The Shape of Things That Came"

I've been  one of those industrial consultants who's been paid quite well to predict the future. It's like picking stocks or handicapping ponies: it's easy to make fun of our truly boneheaded mistakes, but the real business is based on percentages. We don't have to be right all, or even half the time; we only have to be right a lot more often than average to make us (or rather, our clients) money.

I've made great predictions (reasonably accurate ones about DSLR designs and time frames 25 years before the products came to market) and truly lousy ones. The lousy ones are more useful; if we don't learn from our own mistakes, someone else will, and then they'll be better at the game.

In the mid-1980s, almost all knowledgeable consultants predicted the demise of rotating-disk hard drives. The dumb ones said that solid state memory would supplant hard drives in 15 years. The smart said 10–12. I was "smart." Yet, here I am 25 years later, surrounded by gently whirring spindles. Who ordered that?!

Solid-state storage prices are about where I'd have expected them to be, circa $1/GB ('80s dollars), in contrast to hundreds of dollars per megabyte back then. That part's right. What's wrong is that we couldn't imagine that disc manufacturers would be able to drive the production costs on a precise and complicated mechanical device down to 3 cents/GB ('80s cents). Storage costs have dropped faster than RAM costs, year after year, and the end is not in sight.

Old news.

The X Market
Here's where it gets interesting. Our prediction could've still been right. There is a certain overhead to manufacturing and selling that it's hard to undercut. That's why you see terabyte hard drives for $80 (2009 dollars) but not 10 GB drives for 80 cents. In 1985, you could reasonably predict that people would want several gigabytes of computer storage today. That would be hundreds of times what they had back then, but it was a plausible extension of existing trends and patterns, and it would make a hard disk business unsustainable, no matter how little a GB of disk space cost.

What we didn't predict was how cheap storage (and other computer-ish) improvements would change the market. That's called the "X Market"—it's all about how the product you're introducing changes the marketplace you're selling into rather than how much of the existing market you'll be able to capture.

We were sure this would be obsolete by now! Blame the X Market.

Had it not been for the X Market, hard drives would be specialty items today. Instead we have the Web, ubiquitous digital cameras (with pixel counts considerably larger than we expected most people would demand), digitized and downloadable music, and home video and motion picture storage. Many consumers feel cramped with 100 GB of storage. Home entertainment systems are available with over 10 TB of storage. A consequence of super-cheap storage, at the same time that it's what makes said storage a viable product.

That's the part of futurism that's hard to predict. It's what keeps life interesting.

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Featured Comment by Carl Blesch: "Here's another way I like to look at storage capacity and illustrate the concept of logarithmic growth in a way mortals can conceive. I was able to put all of my saved workplace computer files from 1986 (the dawn of the PC age at my company) through 1997—just over a decade—on a single 650 MB CD-R. My saved files from 1998 and 1999 fit on another CD-R (thanks, Microsoft fatware—especially for the PowerPoints with lavish illustration and animation). Then it took one CD-R per year until I left that job in 2002. Shortly thereafter, I took up digital photography (scanned film at first) and sound recording. The next year, I scanned an image on 120 film at a 16-bit depth and 4000 dpi, and it took the whole CD-R to accommodate that one TIFF. Similarly, a single CD-R held only one hour's worth of audio I recorded in AIFF. So the contrast: one CD for a decade of my life's work, vs. one for a high quality image or hour of high quality sound. Fascinating!"

By Ctein

Okay, now there's one thing you have to keep in mind. These folks are trying to do something fabulously difficult: write a computer program that can develop a sense of aesthetic judgment. That's so hard that humans can't even do it right or consistently. Read any sample of back columns on TOP and see how often there's unanimity on the aesthetic merit of a particular photograph, let alone any kind of cogent or coherent explanation of why it has merit. We humans don't agree and we're largely inarticulate on the subject. We certainly can't expect much from a machine.

Still, it's hard not to be amused by its efforts, the same way we're amused by inept computer language translation. That's not unrighteous, so long as we stifle the snarkiness. And not take it too seriously.

The program's called ACQUINE, short for "Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine."

Go here and you can enter URLs for (or upload) your photos. How could I resist? I picked a sampling from my website of my favorites (and my audience's, I must emphasize).

For the sake of calibration, there's a reference photo of the Macbeth chart from my website. ACQUINE rated it a 10 on a scale of 100, 50 being "a typical average-quality professional photograph" according to the programmers. Okay, so far so good.

This rates only a 10, but it's not supposed to be art.

Next I handed it my photograph of Castle Eileen Donan, and that garnered an amazing 98.5! "Wow, that computer has excellent taste!" I thought objectively.

It's a 98.5! Do I rock, or what!?

So I fed it a bunch more stuff, and while one picture garnered a mere 34 (obviously a computer error), the average score for the rest was over 80. Insert artist smugness here.

It bothered me to be using URLs for photos directly from my website. As I present them, they're all encumbered with dark gray "frames," grayscales, and title information. That has to be detracting (aesthetically) from the photograph. I figured the smart and sensible thing to do would be to strip off that extraneous matter and present ACQUINE with the photographs in a clean form.

So I did—and my scores plummeted! A few stayed respectable; the Castle photo only declined to 86.5. But two thirds of the photos dropped into the teens and the one below came back with an appalling 6.2.

In other words, ACQUINE thought it was lousy even in comparison to a Macbeth chart!

6.2...6.2??? I am being dissed by silicon.

I guess it's like they say: It's all in the presentation.

For those who like to wallow in data here are the URL's to the photos I tested, along with the scores in their presentation form and the scores after I stripped off the "frames."

Ctein

"Danger, Will Robinson!"

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Featured Comment by Chuck Kimmerle: "That software's hard to please. After my third photo evaluation, it suggested I sell my camera and take up plumbing."

Featured Comment by Adam McAnaney: "For the record, the above picture of The Robot rated a 64.7."

No, really.

You think I'd lie about something like that?

Noise is the bête noire of both the idealist and the fetishistic pixel peeper, but in the real world appropriate levels of noise improve signals.

Ears use noise to improve their sensitivity. There's a signal threshold below which a hair cell in the inner ear won't respond (else we'd be deafened by the din of molecular vibration). Yet, those cells respond to audio signals several dB below that threshold, because random noise in the system mixes with the signal and occasionally kicks it up above the cell's threshold. The response isn't anything like clean, but a static-degraded response is better than none at all.

Most computer printers produce no more than a handful of gray levels. The way they generate the illusion of continuous tone is by injecting arithmetical noise (random numbers) into the process of deciding whether or not to lay down an ink droplet. The probability that any droplet will be laid down depends on the strength of the signal, but it wouldn't be a probabilistic matter at all were it not for the noise.

Digital cameras benefit greatly from a little noise. I can illustrate why in the accompanying figure. The top bar is just an ordinary continuous gradient from black to white: this is our stand-in for a real-world scene. I've expanded the shadow detail, bracketed by the blue lines, to full image width in the second row, for scale. Since the tones are all near-black, you probably can't see any difference on your screen, but I'll fix that.

In the bottom three rows, I've expanded the gray scale only in the illustration, so you can see the gradient in the shadows. In other words, the gradient in the third row is really the same as the second row—you're just kind of viewing it through a contrast-magnifying glass.

Now, what happens when you digitize that shadow range with a hypothetical noise-free camera? You get the fourth row in the illustration. (remember that this is still really covering the same tonal range as the second row.) The continuous grayscale ends up being mapped to a baker's dozen of sharply defined gray levels. Were a photographer trying to enhance the shadow detail in this "scene," they'd have spurious banding and very poor tonal rendition.

Suppose the camera were a little noisy, as it will be in the real world? That's what the bottom row shows: I injected a low level of noise into the original gradient before digitizing it. That is, the fourth and fifth rows have had exactly the same conversions and presentations. The only difference is in the system noise.

I trust I've made my point.

Too much noise is a bad thing...true of most things in the real world. But little bit of noise? That's a very, very good thing!

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Featured Comment by richardplondon: "I think it sheds more light to talk about quantisation than digitisation. Every aspect of what we do digitally with images is subject to this.

"But: we have no completely clean data, analog or digital, anyway—unless we make it so artificially (through active noise reduction). Photons are not nicely behaved—they are little scamps. Only a very tiny degree of jitter is ever deliberately introduced in digital applications (to reduce quantisation artefacts), and I don't think this is being proposed here; not necessary.

"I read this useful article as signifying that we should not officiously clean up digital source data with noise reduction, to the point where we would start to see these other unpleasant artifacts.

"Shot noise, for example, is a true record of the way that some actual light sprinkled onto the sensor. It is authenticity—reality—just as film grains are. Of course we all hope at the same time that read noise and other processing errors are improvable, just as with film grain size/clumping."

By Ctein

Blending modes are one of the more opaque (ahem) aspects of Photoshop. They show up when you're fading adjustments or filters, using layers, using a brush, or performing Image Calculations. Most of the time, blending gets left set to "normal," and you'll never notice it. It's when you decide to use it that the fun (I use that word advisedly) sets in.

Some of the blending modes, like "Lighten" or "Darken" are pretty obvious. Most are less so, but a little bit of playing shows, for example, that blending with "Luminosity" affects only lightness or darkness while "Color" affects only, ummm, color. That's a useful pair. For instance, doing heavy sharpening or edge enhancement can cause chromatic sparklies to appear in color images and exaggerate color noise. Doing the same operations with a Luminosity blend doesn't have those nasty side effects.

I still use Digital ROC for a lot of color correction and restoration work, but it almost always produces far too much contrast for my taste. I apply ROC to a duplicate layer in my photograph. Then I duplicate the ROC'ed layer, and set those two layers to Luminosity and Color blends. I use the fade sliders in each layer to control how much of ROC's changes get applied. Most of the time, I'll leave the Color-blended layer near 100%, but the Luminosity-blended layer will get dialed back to 40–50%. Much better results!

Then there are all those obscure blending modes. I mean, what the hell does "Hard Light" actually do?! I've come up with a visual aid that helps me figure out what's going on. It may or may not work for you.

Start with a 512 by 512 white canvas. Fill it with a gradient that runs from 0 to 255, left to right (Figure 1 upper left), or the full spectrum gradient (Figure 1 upper right) depending on whether you're more interested in black and white or color.

Figure 1

Now create a new layer and fill it with a gradient that runs from 0 to 255 from top to bottom (Figure 1, lower left). If you want to get fancy add a third layer and draw in some black pencil lines at the midpoints (Figure 1 lower right). Some blending modes use middle gray as a neutral/no-effect point, so the crosshairs make it easy to see where that level is.

Figure 2

The result will look like Figure 2, which is not very interesting, because what you're seeing is pure layer 1 at this point. What you have built, though, is a grid that superimposes every possible pair of values in black-and-white (and gives you a representative sampling in color). By messing with the blending, opacity, and fill controls for layer 1, you can explore the effect of different blending modes on different combinations of tones and colors.

Figure 3

Let's take a look at "Color Burn" to see how this works. Figure 3 shows what my black-and-white and color gradients look like when I apply Color Burn blending to Layer 1. How do you make sense of this? Each horizontal row of pixels in the grade is a gradient running from black to white (or through the spectrum). As you move up the grid, you see the effect of blending a particular pixel value into that, starting with 0 (pure black) at the bottom. Now the black-and-white grid starts to make a little more sense. When the blend pixel value is zero (bottom row), every pixel is set to black. When the blend pixel value is 64 (a quarter of the way up the grid), all the underlying pixels that have a value below 192 go to black; all the pixels above 192 (normally light gray to white) get remapped into a tonal range running from full black to white. As you move up the grid and the blend pixel gets lighter, the threshold moves further and further to the left, until at 255, the blend pixel has no effect.

Applying this to a color image (Figure 3 right) produces a strange look, but it's just the same thing going on in RGB channels. When the blend pixel values are very close to black, the color channel values get squeezed to 0 or 255. So, the rainbow values in the gradient get squeezed towards the primaries, where two of the RGB channels are at 0 and one is at 255. As you move up the grid, the compression effect falls off and the colors are less forced to red, green or blue.

Play with this for a while and see if it helps you wrap your head around blending modes. Many of them are a lot, lot weirder and less comprehensible than Color Burn.

Here's a bonus question worth extra points. If you think you understand what's going on in the grids with Color Burn, see if you can figure out what Color Dodge will do to the rainbow gradient before trying it. (I couldn't, but as soon as I looked at the results they made sense to me.)

Ctein

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Towards the end of this article, Aman asked a good question about long-range raw files and why they make flat-looking photos. I felt the answer deserved a whole post.

To begin with, you need to understand that we don't have any way of directly viewing an 11–13 stop exposure range in a photo. A reflection print is good for at best 7–8 stops. A good monitor may add a couple of stops to that, under ideal working conditions. (Ignore manufacturers' claims of 1000:1 brightness ranges; they come from lab measurements that have little to do with reality.)

You can't directly render a long-range photograph any more than you can cram those extra four ounces in the can. So, how do you get all those tones into the photo?

The simplest approach is compression; drop the overall contrast by 30–40%. That's what you get when you do a straight RAW conversion, with highlight recovery, a black level set to 0 and a linear characteristic curve. It's a straightforward mapping of your original photograph, one that's a good beginning.

Unfortunately, it usually looks like crap. That kind of contrast reduction suppresses the tonal differences that give surfaces texture and interesting tonality; objects wind up looking boring and lifeless. Colors become desaturated, because saturation depends on value differences between channels, i.e., contrast.

Illustration #1, above, photographed with my Fuji FinePix S100fs, shows what I mean. The luminance range in this scene fills the entire 11 stop exposure range of the camera, but a monitor (or worse still, a print) can't display that kind of range. This straight rendering from raw doesn't engage the senses.

(I made about 120 photographs in direct sunlight that day, but I had one heck of a time finding ones I could use for this article. Only five photos came close to using up the full exposure range of the camera. None exceeded it. Once more, I say: most of the folks who are complaining about the "limited" exposure range of digital cameras need to better explore how to use their cameras.)

How do you make a photograph like this look better? Find ways to accentuate the tonal differences, especially in the midtones, without throwing away highlights or shadows. The easy way to do that? Apply an S-shaped curve to the photograph, (illustration #2, below, upper left quadrant. Click on the image to see it a little larger). Highlights and shadows aren't clipped; they're merely compressed to allow the more important midtones to be expanded, improving their contrast. Color saturation is improved and the photograph looks clearer and more immediate.

For more emphasis in the highlights and shadows, Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight tool works a lot like split-filter dodging and burning-in the darkroom. It locally adds contrast to the end tones without excessively compressing the midtones (upper right quadrant).

Wide radius unsharp masking globally improves tonality and brings out texture is (see "How To Improve Digital Print Tonality"). It strongly emphasizes local differences in contrast without substantially increasing overall contrast. (Illustration #2, lower left quadrant.)

There are specialized tools that can do amazing things, adding snap and sparkle to a dull long-range photograph without altering the overall contrast one bit. My current favorite is ContrastMaster, a plug-in of daunting complexity that gives me pause. I won't even try to tell you how it works (I'm nowhere near entirely understanding it) nor how to use it, which would take a small book. I simply present one result in  the lower right quadrant of illustration #2. This is only one of dozens of distinctly different interpretations I could have given the original photograph using this plug-in. The two illustrations below show a different ContrastMaster rendering, exaggerated for clarity. Same overall contrast range, same overall brightness, very different local tonality!

Main point is that there are myriad ways to skin this cat. All the examples in illustration #2 look a lot better than the straight rendition in illustration #1 (at least at full size on my calibrated monitor; who knows how they'll look scrunched down on the website. Remember, if the words don't seem to fit the illustrations, believe the words). There is no best or right rendering; that's where the art comes in. And if you don't my local contrast choices, go try some of your own!

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J. B. S. Haldane is quoted as saying, "Science is not a democracy." As with most memorable aphorisms, that's not entirely correct. It's more that the "right to vote" is highly restricted to qualified individuals. Still, there's no question that some sciences are more democratic, in the sense of being open to new citizens, than others. For example, a lay person is going to have a hell of a time acquiring voting rights in quantum mechanics or general relativity.

Astronomy, on the other hand, is the Canada of sciences; it's relatively easy to get into, the residents are sociable, and they are honestly happy to have new people who can contribute to the quality of discourse.

A couple of months back on this site, Christopher Lane wrote a nice article about doing your own astrophotography. There's a lot more you can do, both photographically and scientifically. In about six years you're going to be working with a very cool camera. Here are some specs.

Of course everyone wants to know about pixel count first, so prepare yourself for...

3200 megapixels. And they're nice robust 10 µ pixels.

Color, black and white, false color, infrared? All available: the camera photographs in six different colors across the spectrum from 320 to 1050 nm. Dynamic range? Huge. Low light capability? About 100 million times better than your eyes. 16 bit? Need you really ask?!

It does lack some important "professional" features. There's no "system." In fact, the camera comes in only one configuration with a non-interchangeable lens that isn't even a zoom. Worse, it is a 10,000mm, ƒ/1.2 lens with a 10° field of view, so all you folks who think a medium wide angle is the ideal single lens are just flat out of luck.

The folks who've been complaining about the size of their raw files are not going to be happy. Storage requirements for this camera are going to run 30 TB a day and processing the images coming in will take 100 teraflops.

This is not a hoax column, humor notwithstanding. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is for real and it will be your camera. That's because all the photographs are going to be made publicly available online. You'll get the same access to state-of-the-art astrophotographs as the most famous astronomer.

I can hear some of you naysayers grumbling that it isn't really your camera, because you can't point it wherever you want. Well, you won't have to. The LSST photographs the entire sky every three days. Think of it as the ultimate in motor drives: you just keep firing away and then pick out the photographs you like in Lightroom.

Is this cool, or what? Reflecting telescopes have come a hell of a long way in the 1,000 years since Ibn al-Haytham thought them up.

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By Ctein

A curious datum. I've been cleaning up my office, getting proof sheets organized and filed and my negatives in order. In the process of doing so, I've discovered that I am three days shy of the second anniversary of the last time I exposed any film.

Understand that I still have a fully equipped color darkroom (and will so long as I'm doing dye transfer printing, which still brings in a substantial part of my income), a freezer holding dozens of rolls of film and a couple of thousand sheets of color print paper, plenty of chemistry, two Pentax 67 bodies, and an assortment of lenses. I have not decided that I am not doing film photography any longer.

Digital, not film. Is film dead in the Ctein household? Damfino.

Yet it does not seem to be beyond the realm of possibility. I never made a conscious decision to stop doing black-and-white photography, but over the years the percentage that was black-and-white dropped from 30% to well under 1% by the mid-90s. I may be that I am never going to make a decision about this, but the practice may amount to the same thing.

Organizing my proof sheets is also teaching me that I should be more disciplined in my photography. I've been profligate in my consumption of electrons because they seemed essentially free. Well, they are not. For the way I prefer to work, I still need proof sheets; they serve different needs from on-screen organizers. When I add up the costs of archival storage and backup for my camera files plus the proof sheets I find that each electronic frame I keep is costing me about 8 cents.

That's vastly lower than my comparable cost for medium format film photography (which runs more like $.60), but it adds up when I expose unnecessarily. In addition, there is a curious inversion of costs which increases my time dealing with digital photographs. With film photography, 80% of the cost was in the negative; it cost me little to proof the film, so everything got proofed. Contrariwise, 3/4 of the cost of my electronic photographs is in the proofing. This strongly encourages me to edit the images and eliminate the obvious losers before I proof anything. Unfortunately, that means the proofing process is a lot more time-consuming and is less likely to be done in a timely manner.

Time to start considering my digital exposures a little more carefully and seriously, I think. They do not come for free.

My holiday column talked about the near-term improvements we could expect in digital imaging technology. This time, we're going to go far out. There are technological possibilities that are way beyond anything we've got now. Mind you, this won't be "wantum physics," Greg Benford's lovely name for the made-up science that solved problems on the good Starship Enterprise. There will be no funneling of beams of anti-expositrons through a tachyonic memory to get extra-long exposure ranges. (Note to the physics-impaired: the preceding sentence has no fact-based content whatsoever.) Everything I'll describe is already existing science and engineering; it's just so far away from production-level technology that there's no telling when we'll get it or just what form it will be in.

Combining all three of these sensor qualities would probably be problematic because each is somewhat antagonistic to the other, for reasons of bandwidth, response times, and signal-to-noise ratios. It's hard to see how current electronics would let you make a full-frame pixelless photon-counting full-spectrum sensor. Attosecond electronics might make that possible, but they're far enough off that I don't want to speculate.

A compromise, though, is feasible. Imagine a camera sensor with relatively large physical pixels; 10x10 or even 20x20 µ in size. Each pixel counts photons individually and determines their energy and position (don't worry, we're not anywhere close to the Heisenberg limit). How that information gets used becomes an artistic and photographic choice.

If you're doing really low light black-and-white work, you could decide to throw away the spectral information, and collectively count all the photons detected in the physical pixel. It's the digital equivalent of loading up your camera with high-speed, coarse-grained black-and-white film. At higher light levels, you might choose to start parsing up those electrons by position; the more light, the more you could computationally subdivide the physical pixel into image pixels without excessive noise. Essentially, you "dial out" your coarse-grained high speed film and dial in finer grained, slower, sharper film. Similarly, color and color fidelity become adjustable artistic parameters.

What you'd get would be a kind of "soft" film; image quality characteristics that were previously fixed in physical film and sensors become variables that you control. Fast or slow, black-and-white or color, fine grained or coarse, these are no longer determined by the physical medium but by your artistic choices.

In closing, remember that Ubergeek technology is not inherently in conflict with the traditional craft and art. They can nicely go hand-in-hand. Consider the sheep of things to come...

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By Ctein

Last fall's print offering taught me that I had a lot more fans (note the lower-case "f") than I realized. My friend Peter Hentges suggested I take a look at "1000 True Fans" as a model that might turn this into some sort of long-term benefit to my career, instead of just a one-shot windfall. I decided it was a plausible experiment. What I hope to get out of this is a more stable and secure source of income that will let me devote much more time to creating new art.

Here's what I'm offering:

1) You, the subscriber, agree to give me $9.50 a month for a year, to support my art. This is a donation that supports my work, not the purchase of a particular piece of art.

2) At the end of that year, I'll put up a webpage with a selection of digital prints (at least 6 pieces, maybe a lot more). You can choose any two prints. There are no additional costs, not even shipping. Effectively, two prints cost you less than half what you would normally pay for one ($125+shipping). That's your reward for investing in me.

If you don't care for any of those select works, I'll let you apply what you've donated to any photograph at ctein.com, dollar for dollar. (You'll have banked most of the regular cost of a digital print, for example.) There's no way you can lose.

(Fine print: monthly donations will have to go through PayPal. The $9.50/month is only for U.S. addresses. If you hate PayPal or live elsewhere, see the FAQs below.)

Mike commented that he thought that whether or not I did something like this wouldn't affect me creating new art. Wrong. My art brings in a small fraction of my income, so I can only devote 1–2 days a month to making new art. At even the 100-subscriber level, I'd spend a lot more time making art. That's the minimum number I need to try this; the money isn't worth the effort for fewer. If 100 of my "fans" email me expressing interest in signing up for this by the end of the month, I'll give it a go. Please email me rather than posting your interest as a general comment. I'll send the folks who emailed me a link to a webpage which will spell out all the details and options and where they can sign up for real.

I'm still working out some details. Should I make everything a standard 11x14-inch print size, or should I go as large as 13x19"? How much of what I offer in the selection should be new digital prints as opposed to existing favorites from my portfolio? I'll be guided by the subscribers' preferences on these matters, so email me with your thoughts, please.

FAQs after the break....

Some folks have become interested in the problem of how artists can make money in the Age of Downloads. For example, if someone records a really popular piece of music, how do they make a living if a zillion people will be bit-torrenting it within days of its release?

John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier made an early effort at tackling this problem back in 1999 with "The Street Performer Protocol."

Last year, Kevin Kelly made a stir by extending the brainstorming to the idea of "1000 True Fans."

For a good look at the other side of the coin, read "The Case Against 1000 True Fans" and John Scalzi's extremely intelligent critique.

I'm not going to go into the detailed pros and cons of these ideas. You can pick those up by reading the aforementioned papers. Before posting comments here, please read at least Scalzi's piece and comments to make sure that you're not repeating the well-known and obvious. Many of the arguments have been reiterated ad nauseum.

"1000 True Fans" goes like this:

Fans subscribe to an artist. Instead of buying a particular existing work, they put their faith in the idea that if they liked work the artist has created in the past, they'll probably like the artist's work in the future. They each pay the artist a small monthly sum, who then makes new work available as it's created.

The benefits to the artist are obvious: they get paid up front to create new art, which is where almost all their time and energy and money goes, and they do not have to fret as much about how next month's bills will get paid or whether their creativity will be ripped off.

The benefits to the audience are not so obvious, and that's why these schemes usually fail. You've got to be selling something that customers want and giving them a reason to buy it from you on your terms. It's even tougher when you're selling people future (translation: nonexistent) art.

That's the killer. The notion is that if only X people would pay the modest sum Y dollars a month, the artist could live comfortably. But the reality is that X people simply never pay Y dollars without a very good reason. The artist needs to give them a reason to do so and to keep doing so.

Photographers trying to sell their work have creative constraints not unlike writers and composers. Our production and distribution costs aren't zero, but they are such a small fraction of the selling price that for all practical purposes the model works. The time, energy (and money) required to create a great new print is often considerable, but it takes very little of those to make additional prints, whether you're in the darkroom or on the computer. If I know ahead of time that I need to make 30 or 40 prints of the same photograph, I can turn out that many prints in a day easily. Black and white or color, wet or dry (though not dye transfer!), it doesn't matter.

I have an idea about how I can make this work for me. Not at the 1000 Fan level, but maybe at the 100 Fan level. Next column I'll describe how I'm hoping to sell work on the installment plan.

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ADDENDUM: "Let me address a lot of comments by laying out a simple business analysis for people who might be considering this. On the most fundamental level, regardless of whether or not you can get people to sign up, for this to work it has to satisfy two criteria:

First, it has to make a profit.

Second, it has to make you no less than a living wage (unless you have a bunch of truly free time and you're just doing it for the pin money).

Most folks understand the first, intuitively. A lot slip up on the second.

There are two cases you'd be considering. The optimistic one is where you have enough Fans that you can live off them entirely. The realistic one is where they're paying just a portion of your living expenses, freeing up enough ime and energy for you to create work. The realistic one is a little harder to analyze, so that's what I'll talk about first:

You work the problem backwards. The first thing you need to do is figure out what your living wage is. At a very minimum, that's the amount of money you need to earn each year to cover your bills, obligations, and taxes, divided by the number of hours you want to work each year. It may be more than that: you may want to include allowances for vacations, frivolities, and a retirement fund. Whatever your druthers, be brutally honest with yourself. If you're unrealistic about these estimates because you really want the numbers to come out in your favor, all you're going to do is screw yourself.

Let's say it's $20 an hour.

Now you need to estimate about how many hours it takes you to create a new artwork. That's not just the time at the computer or in the darkroom to get the first print right, it also includes some idea of how much time you spend out photographing to get that one photograph (if that's a significant part of your time budget; if it's not, then never mind). Multiply that by $20, and that's how much you need to be earning, sooner or later, from that artwork. If you don't clear that much, the business will fail.

Let's call that $1,000. So how many subscribers is that per new work?

If your production/distribution costs (time and money) are essentially zero, as they are for digitally-delivered work (music, photographs, e-books, whatever) it's simple. How much are your Fans paying per month for the privilege of getting access to your art? $9, say? That's about $100 a year, net (it's got to take you at least a little time to administer those accounts). So, for each 10 Fans you have signed up, you can afford to create one new work.

You'll need to decide how much new work you need to make each year to keep the Fans happy, and what's the least amount of money coming in that makes you feel like it's worth your time and hassle to set the whole thing up and administer it. Those are entirely personal judgment calls. They're not really about a budget, but they do set a lower threshold on the minimum number of subscribers you'll need to consider it worthwhile to do this.

If your production/distribution costs are not $0, you need to figure out what they are per copy (for some reasonable volume of copies). That's the cost in dollars plus your living wage multiplied by the amount of time it takes you to deliver one work to one Fan. In other words, if it costs you $10 to make a finished print and mail it to a Fan, and it takes half an hour of your time to print it out, package it, and ship it, then your unit cost is $20.

Subtract what it costs to provide the Fan with whatever you're promising them from the amount of money they're paying you annually. In this example, that net-income-per-Fan would be $80. Divide that into $1000 (in our example) and you know how many Fans (about 13) you'll need to support creating and delivering one new work a year.

If you've decided to be an optimist and want the Fans to support you entirely, the math is simpler. Divide your annual Living Income by the net-income-per-Fan. That's the number you need to sign up. Good luck with that!  —Ctein

"Oh joy—another educational experience!"

That's a phrase I learned in college. It should not be said with a cheery demeanor.

My Long March is over. All 730 prints sold in my dye transfer print offer have been printed and all 450 orders shipped. If you haven't gotten your print order within the next 7–10 days, drop me an e-mail.

It was a learning experience:

• You can have too much of a good thing. I always thought that promoters who vowed "no more than X copies will be sold!" were just engaging in marketing hype and that putting a limit on my sales would be an act of hubris. Seems not. I'm never going to get myself in a jam like this again!

• Matrices wear out. For most photographic printing, the point at which you wear out a negative or slide is far, far beyond normal printing limits. Not so with dye transfer. After 100–150 prints, the characteristics of the matrix have changed enough that I can't pull an acceptable print. I went through 2–3 sets of matrices for each photograph in this run. Another argument for limited sales.

• The gods want me to keep making dye transfer prints. It's no secret that I've been a lot more interested in digital printing than dye transfer of late, although dye transfer still pays a lot more of the bills. Making 730 prints was going to use up about two thirds of my remaining paper, but I saw that as an opportunity. I could look forward to the day a year or so from now when I'd have no choice but to move on.

Within a week, I got contacted by two people offering me dye transfer paper that they'd had squirreled away. They'd never even heard about the print offer; it was pure coincidence. End result? Instead of having only one third the amount of paper I did when I started, I actually have more paper now than I did in September!

I know when I'm being handed a cosmic message, and I know not to argue with 500 pound metaphysical gorillas. I'm going to keep doing dye transfer printing for the foreseeable future, artistic druthers notwithstanding.

I'll also be doing another print offering in the fall. Next time, though, it'll be limited to no more than 100 of each photograph and prices will be at least 50% higher, to throttle back demand.

• Kodak made really crappy paper! I didn't realize how bad, though, until I started printing the same photograph hundreds of times. The variation in paper quality could be huge, even within one box of paper. I had to do lots of hand-weeding of defective sheets. Inevitably, some defective sheets slipped through screening; I couldn't avoid making some modestly-flawed prints. I've given some such prints to friends (like Mike) as gifts, but I've still got around eight pairs of prints that are slightly defective. Color and tone are perfect but they have minor surface defects that probably wouldn't be visible if they were mounted, matted, and framed.

Here's the deal. Email me if you want to buy one of these sets for the original sale price of $180. First come, first served, U.S. customers only. If you get the prints and they looked too flawed to you, you can return them. Return postage will be at your expense ($4.95, Priority Mail) and I'm going to deduct my shipping and handling costs ($10) from your refund. I figure that this will be enough to discourage looky-loos. And, to answer three inevitable questions, I will not drop the price further (I'd rather keep them as gifts for friends), I will not break up the sets, and I will not ship these outside the U.S.

• Now I know how to do mail order. My businesses is sufficiently bespoke that I previously did not obsess over the cost and time of shipping photographs. I averaged less than one package a week, and a typical job ran several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Faced with 450 orders, I had to get really good at this. I can now package and ship prints for a fraction of the effort and money. This lets me think about some new approaches to selling my art to my audience, and selling less expensive prints than ever before. Stay tuned; I'll be floating an idea or two for your consideration in the near future.

I'm done. I need a rest. I am going to take a rest. And tomorrow morning, for the first time in almost three months, I will be able to sit back and enjoy a leisurely cup of tea without thinking about how many minutes I can afford to take before I have to go set up the darkroom trays and start printing. Ahh, luxury!

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Thank you for the information. As the dye-transfer matrices are simply hardened gelatin, I had wondered if they would deteriorate over time with repeated impressions; now I know! Personally I have never done any 'production' printing more challenging than a dozen 24x36" inket prints for an institutional order. The quality control issues even for such a small project were not trivial. Just thinking about making 730 perfect individual dye transfer prints makes me shudder, especially after seeing via the Luminous-landscape video how labor-intensive the process is. The two prints I received are flawless, and Ctein is correct: the depth and purity of color displayed by a dye transfer print really has to be seen to be appreciated.

"Bravo, and enjoy a well-deserved rest."

Herewith the State of Ctein Address:

All the pre-holiday orders were shipped out  by the first week of December. In fact, many of the people who volunteered to get their prints after the holidays also got them in December. By the end of the year I had finished two thirds of the prints. At this point I am confident that all the printing will be done by the end of January (barring the usual unforeseen circumstances).

I suspended shipping during the holiday Post Office madness, but have resumed shipping domestic orders. I'll start shipping the foreign orders in a few days. Orders are getting filled in chronological order. I expect the last prints to go out by the end of the first week of February.

I really appreciate all the compliments I've been getting back on my work, but I don't have the time to respond individually. So this is a collective appreciation for all the thank-you's. When I'm finished printing, I'll write up a column about my experiences and what I've learned from doing this.

I think I see a light at the end of this very long tunnel. I really don't think it's an oncoming train....

_______________________

Ctein

By Ctein

Happy New Year! Now the sales really get going; time to break out that un-maxed-out credit card!

If you're shopping for a digital camera, here are some sage words of wisdom:

Procrastination is a virtue in a deflationary market.

In plain words: when products are getting better/cheaper with every passing week, the longer you put off buying something, the better off you are. Never buy a camera before you need to.

On the other hand, don't put off buying a camera when you need to. If you keep waiting for the best possible deal, you will never ever buy anything. The deals will only keep getting better and better. The price/performance ratio isn't going to stabilize any time soon. Not for years, maybe not for decades. Pure performance hasn't plateaued, either. The equipment is going to just keep getting better for a long time.

Just as with computer equipment, there are two broad strategies that buyers follow, depending on their needs and inclinations. The first is to "buy high." In computer terms, buy as much power as you can afford; push your budget to its limit. It may be more power than you need right now, but it means that a couple of generations down the road you'll still have an entirely usable computer.

The second strategy is (big surprise) "buy low"; get a computer towards the low end of the performance range. At least as much as you currently need, of course, even a little more, but minimize your expenditure now and figure you'll be upgrading again in two years.

Understand that there is no objectively correct strategy. As I said, it's about your needs and inclinations.

The same applies to digital cameras. You can buy a premium model today and figure that you're likely to be happy with its quality five, maybe even 10 years from now (which doesn't mean you won't lust after something better, but that's different from need). Alternately, you can buy the minimum camera that satisfies you today, figuring that you'll be getting a much better one in just a few years for the same money.

There is no right answer. My personal style and work habits favor buying high on the computer side and low on the camera side. Our average computer lasts 7–8 years before being relegated to second-tier status, and we live and die by these things. On the other hand, I've bought two digital cameras in as many years; while I think my current one will carry me for more than one year, I certainly don't expect it to carry me for five.

My Fuji FinePix S100fs isn't going to be my preferred digital camera for very many years. I know that. But it's good enough to make me happy until something much better comes along.

I won't try to defend these choices, because they don't need defending. They work for me and that's the last word. Figure out the strategies that work for you. In the long run it will reduce your stress and save you money.

_____________________

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Player: "Hello Ctein, I've always seen you as a bellwether of good sense and practicality when it comes to the tools of the photographic trade. You know what you need and you know what you don't need, and if you don't need it, but it would be nice to have, you don't buy it. As you know, this is very rare. And you have persisted from the film days. Even when all the temptations have blipped on your radar, you just continued to work with your trusty Pentax 6x7. It almost isn't fair that you have street smarts too. :-) Happy New Year to you Sir!"

By Ctein

Once again, a Salubrious Solstice to one and all, and my best wishes to you and hopes that you are enjoying this holiday season, for whatever definition of "holiday" works for you.

Last year, I described the wonders of "X" in a somewhat rarefied way. This year I'm going to be more down-to-Earth in my talk of the unknown. Namely, what sorts of digital camera improvements you may expect to find the [semi-mythical gift-giver of choice] putting in your [personal gift receptacle of choice] in the next double-handful of years.

This is not a wish list. Every one of these goodies is sufficiently mainline and part of the normal manufacturing track that I am certain they will all show up in your digital camera...unless current technology improves so much that it makes some of them unnecessary. That's the unknown part—either you'll get these goodies or you'll get something even better. It's horrible living with uncertainty, isn't it?

Here's the shape of shinies to come:

Back-illuminated thinned sensors: These have twice the collection efficiency of standard sensors, and they've been in common use in scientific instruments for many years. You haven't seen them in commercial cameras because thinning the substrate has been expensive. New manufacturing patents show how to do this on a production basis. It gets you a factor of two improvement in ISO, across-the-board, but it's especially important for small-pixel sensors.

Deep well insulating sensors: A problem with sensor arrays is electron leakage between the pixels. All sensors suffer from this. It reduces low-light sensitivity, decreases sharpness, and degrades color rendition. A new design adds a secondary well layer beneath the pixels that insulates them. Hard to estimate exactly how much this will improve things, but I would guess about half a stop in low light performance, plus better sharpness and color.

Non-Bayer filter arrays: Bayer filters are a good compromise when you have a moderate number of pixels. There are efficient at capturing spatial detail, and computationally simple. They have many disadvantages: poor overall light collection, horrid aliasing problems, and they shortchange blue sensitivity, especially bad for available-light work under normal indoor lights.

Other filter arrays solve all these problems. This is nothing new; Kodak and other companies have been doing this since the early days of high-quality digital cameras. As pixels approach the micron size (and there are very good reasons for them to do so, despite some of the naysaying you've read) quasi—random filter arrangements will improve sensitivity, sharpness, and reduce noise.

Adaptive pixels: Good digital cameras already capture an 11–12 stop luminance range, but there would be some real advantages to capturing a 20-stop range (total exposure freedom, for one thing). Adaptive pixels that alter their response depending on the intensity of light that hits them exist in laboratory sensors; they'll hit the mainstream within a decade, unless conventional designs get so much better that nobody cares.

GRIN optics: "GRadient INdex (of refraction)" lenses have an index of refraction that changes as you move out from the center of the lens. Scanners already use GRIN lens arrays to relay the image from the platen to the sensor. A few commercial camera lenses have already been designed with GRIN elements, but there are problems still to be solved in making large elements cheaply and characterizing them well in production. But, as with aspheric surfaces, which were similarly exotic decades ago, these will gradually penetrate optical designs.

Diffractive optics: Gratings embossed onto the surface of the lens can radically alter things like chromatic and spherical aberration, which are otherwise difficult to correct well. We already have limited diffractive optics. Like GRIN, this is going to improve a lot over the next decade and we're going to get very innovative designs.

Combination optics: What happens if you combine GRIN, diffractive gratings, and lens surfaces of arbitrary curvature? You get single lens elements that perform as well or better as your typical triplet. Imagine what you could do, in terms of lens weight, aperture, and size, if you could cut the number of lens elements by a factor of two or three and make each element thinner and lighter to boot.

This is all off-the-shelf in the next few-to-ten years. I didn't even get into the edgy stuff, like quasi-particle single photon spectral detection, metamaterials, and other exotica, whose future is entirely unknown.

Anyone who tells you that camera image quality is near to topping out simply has no idea of what's waiting in the wings. Salubrious Solstice!

______________________

Ctein

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By Ctein

Picking up from last time...(and like the last column, this one winds up with a question for readers that I don't have an answer to).

Nobody knows everything. Nobody can even understand everything. Even within their limited areas of expertise, no expert knows or understands everything.

No matter how brilliant nor educated my friends are, none of them think they can know or understand it all. I am an expert in dye transfer printing; I know as much about it as anyone else in the world. But some aspects of the process and technology are not within my grasp. I understand when people write about emulsion making, but I don't know the subject well and I couldn't write about it myself without study. When the conversation turns to dye chemistry, I'm pretty much lost. Sure, if I went back and cracked my organic chemistry books and studied for a long time, I might be able to suss it out (more likely not). At my current level of understanding, this material is beyond me.

I have a friend who is without question the most brilliant industrial physicist/electronics genius I know. How good is he? He can tell you precisely how to build a supercomputer starting from a bucket of sand. No exaggeration; he's awesome. And he's commented to me that some of the really new electronics based on quasi-particle physics (don't ask, just don't ask) is stuff he has a lot of trouble wrapping his head around. He might be able to if he had to, but so far he hasn't.

You would think all this could go without saying. Apparently not, else why would some people take umbrage when I suggested that the DxO website is going to be too technical for them? That's a rhetorical question, not the one I'm asking today. I don't really care what the answer to that one is. That's their problem, because if they can't get past that emotion, they're never going to get any smarter or learn anything new. It's not an insult to be told you don't know everything or can understand everything. If you think it is, it'll block you.

Do tell
Now, here's my question for you, one I don't know the answer to and would like to. What are some examples of good, technical introductory literature on optics, photographic science, and metrology? I know there has to be stuff out there. People do learn this stuff! Trouble is I am so far removed from it these days that I don't know what to recommend to people. Rather than just tell people that they won't be able to understand a particularly technical website or paper, I'd love to be able to direct them to resources where they could educate themselves if they wish.

So that's my request for this time. Give me a reading list, please? Print, websites, videos, whatever. Thanks!

_____________________

Ctein

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Mike responds: I'll start. The best basic introduction to camera optics I've ever found is the appendix to Canon's EF Lens Work III called "Optical Terminology and MTF Characteristics." The chapter can be downloaded for free as a .PDF file from this start page. The chapter called "EF Lens Technology" is good too, although much less appropriate as a general introduction.

Also, as I've said before, a very good single-volume introduction to digital photography is The Creative Digital Darkroom by Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan. (I can't say if it's "the best," simply because I'm not personally familiar with every instructional book that exists.)

Featured Comment by Warren Frederick: "Louis Bloomfield is a physics teacher at the University of Virginia and he has written several books about how things really work. His latest is How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the Ordinary. Here is his description of his book. It really is true; his explanations are understandable and detailed:

'This 720-page book contains nearly everything I have ever written about how things work. It is the culmination of a lifetime's worth of tinkering with everyday objects and a fifteen-year mission of trying to teach what I've learned to ordinary people.

'Unlike other "what-makes-it-work" books, How Everything Works goes well beyond structure, engineering, and history; it also examines the real scientific foundations behind the myriad objects and activities it explores.

'As I hope you can already see from this web site, I work hard at expressing serious scientific issues and insights in ways that are accessible to anyone. How Everything Works is the result of thousands of hours of careful writing and it is meant to be read like a novel, not put on the shelf or table as an exhibit. I am not a magician, I am a physicist, and my goal has always been to give away all the secrets. If you, the reader, can't follow or understand what I have written, then I have failed. I hope that you will take a look at How Everything Works and find that I have met my goal.

'There is much hand-wringing in this country (USA) about how far behind we are in science and math. But talk is cheap and action is what counts. Here is my attempt at doing something about scientific literacy in this country and elsewhere. Whether you're 10-years old or over 80, reading this book will teach you an enormous amount of physics and physical science. And most importantly, you'll discover that science is truly part of your everyday world.'

—Lou Bloomfield, Professor of Physics, University of Virginia"

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "I second Mike's recommendations, particularly for Canon's EF Lens Work III. Although Canon needs to update this book for its latest lenses, EF Lens Work III presents a wonderful section on lens design and optical terminology that's quite engaging without being too geeky. (I'm actually giving someone a copy for Christmas...shhh, don't tell her!) I also recommend the Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, Fourth Edition: Digital Imaging, Theory and Applications, History, and Science which features excellent sections on photographic optics, color measurement, photometry, and other technicals. This stuff can be interesting reading on a rainy day but, of course, it's not particularly productive or informative towards one's own photography.

Featured Comment by Oren Grad: "For optics, start with any decent undergraduate text. I have Optics by Hecht and Zajac [OoP] on my shelf. Sidney Ray's Applied Photographic Optics, Third Edition is a rich reference for optical considerations specific to photographic lenses. One caveat is that I'm not sure even the latest edition fully addresses issues specific to imaging on digital sensors, although my older edition does have a limited amount of relevant material in a section on optics for video. A standard text for analog photography more generally is Stroebel et al, Basic Photographic Materials and Processes, Second Edition. Phil Davis's Beyond the Zone System, Fourth Edition is excellent for gaining a practical understanding of sensitometry for traditional analog emulsions."

Mike adds: I have all of Oren's recommendations save the Hecht, and although they're very good, I might question whether any of them quite satisfy Ctein's crucial adjective "introductory"...caveat emptor only on that score.

Featured Comment by Patrick Perez: "What I don't know about optics could fill every book about optics. But from reading over the years, I've gathered that Rudolf Kingslake's Optics in Photography is something of a classic text on the subject. I've never read it myself, being quite illiterate in the area of applied sciences. But as Popeye said, 'I may not be a physgacist, but at least I knows what matters.' "

Mike adds: An anecdote pertinent to Ctein's point about expertise: I contacted Mr. Kinglake at the end of his long life to see if I could entice him to write something for Photo Techniques. Still sharp at age 96 or so, this optical polymath, protegé and son-in-law of the great Prof. Conrady, founder of the Optics Department at the University of Rochester, author of numerous books on optics, and longtime head of Optics at Eastman Kodak, told me he hadn't really kept up as well as he should and that, quote, "I hardly know anything about optics any more."

Also don't miss his A History of the Photographic Lens.

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "I would put in a personal plug for Ctein's brilliant Post Exposure. It's not addressing optics per se. However, I've never seen a more brilliantly succinct explanation of all the issues of visual perception, of contrast control/dynamic range from subject to film to print, and the entire chain of image quality start to finish. I still feel the need to re-read it every year or two just to keep my head straight.

"Some really interesting observations from other posters. I can personally comprehend the reality that it's difficult to be expert at everything; I'm a rural family doctor. I have a very solid grasp of all the relevant primary care stuff, and given the lack of local resources I'm more than competent at most cardiology and obstetrical problems. But I can't be expert at everything. Given time I can puzzle out most clinical issues and therapies, even quite complicated things like chemotherapy regimens or renal/electrolyte problems; but I don't have that time! There just aren't enough hours in the day, even working 80 hours a week.

"And I still have to save a little time for photography."

This morning, Ctein sent us the following update about the dye transfer prints:

I shipped off the last of the domestic Christmas orders for dye transfer prints on Thursday, December 4. Out-of-country Christmas orders were all shipped last week. This is approximately 1/3 of all the orders that came in. If you didn't explicitly agree to have your order delayed until after Christmas, your order has been shipped, unless I made a clerical error. Just in case of that, if you haven't gotten your order by Saturday, December 13th, please e-mail me then to confirm that it was sent.

Please do not e-mail me before  December 13th to inquire if your order was shipped. I can't take the time to respond to such inquiries without delaying other peoples' prints; I'm spending 50 hours a week on this as it is.

From this point on, I'm filling orders in the order that they were received. Many of the people who generously volunteered to have their orders deferred will still get their prints before Christmas (although I fear it's unlikely that many more out-of-country orders will be delivered by then, customs delays being what they are).

Thanks to everyone for their patience; now it's back to the salt mines! —Ctein

____________________

Mike

By Ctein

My column this time carries a request to you, my faithful readers, for enlightenment and edification (translation: I need to learn stuff. You guys know stuff. Gimme gimme gimme.)

But first, this important announcement (translation: blatant commercial plug follows):

Laurie Toby Edison has a special holiday deal on her two books, Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes and Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes.

(Workplace warning: As should be obvious, there are nudes at the links.)

You can order them via the PayPal buttons here for $15, including shipping, instead of the usual $25.

Not really stocking-stuffers (unless you roll them up, which would be a horrible thing to do a book) but they sure are priced that way. At $25, they're more than worth the money. At $15, you should all buy these books!

(Disclaimer—Laurie's my best friend, sometimes photographer partner, and I provided financial support for the first book and the title for the second. Just so you know I'm totally objective in my praise of these books [smile].)

We now return to the program in progress
In a recent conversation with Ben Syverson, it became apparent that I may (and I emphasize the word may) have been steering folks wrong for years. When I read digital camera resolutions given as lines horizontal by lines by lines diagonal, I have understood that to mean total lines of resolution across the entire field of view. Ben has recently noted that on dpreview, they give lines of resolution per unit vertical dimension. In other words, if you have a 2:3 format sensor, it sounds like you would need to multiply the horizontal resolution line number by 1.5 to get the total resolution horizontally across the sensor.

At least, that's how he reads it, and I read it the same way.

Problem is I go back and look at old Pop Photo reviews, before they started giving a single resolution number, and they don't say anything about resolution in lines per unit length. The way the text reads, it sounds like they're talking about lines across the entire field of view.

The numbers aren't compatible. The ratios of horizontal to vertical (or diagonal) resolutions in the Pop reviews aren't particularly different than the ratios in dpreview reviews. I doubt that the sensor or software characteristics have changed that radically. So one of these interpretations has to be wrong. I don't know which one!

If I could find an original Pop Photo article which described their testing procedures, it might illuminate this. I've tracked back to May, 1999 so far, and haven't been able to locate it. (I don't actually know that they wrote such an article, but it would've been their habit to do so.)

Does anyone have informed knowledge on this subject or can point me to references that might clear this up? I would really, really like to know if I've been getting it wrong all these years.

Understand, I'm not looking for "seems to me"'s or "in my humble opinion"'s. I've got plenty of those. I need hard (or at least semi-solid) information.

Thanks for your help!

____________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "Hey! That fellow wielding the cane on Laurie Toby Edison's blog is indeed a familiar man. For fans of science fiction, I recommend his early novel, Babel-17. If you're interested in New York gay culture or what it was like to be part of the scene in the East Village in the 1960s, take a look at his memoir, The Motion of Light in Water. It explains, indirectly, a lot of what is happening in Babel-17. He's also written a few intellectually and politically challenging and sexually transgressive novels called Hogg and The Mad Man. He was also the subject of a documentary film recently called 'The Polymath.' His name is Samuel R. Delany."