The Online Photographer

By Ctein

We don't see things the way our cameras do. The qualities of human vision can be summarized by saying that we're lousy at absolutes, pretty good at relatives, and brilliant at differences.

Consider tonality. Although human vision has an extremely long "dynamic range," on the order of 10,000,000,000:1, we don't see a lot of tonal steps. That's something we can measure. Set up two equally-illuminated squares next to each other. Start turning up (or down) the brightness of one of those squares and make note of the point at which you can see the demarcation line between them. That's the smallest tonal difference you can see at that brightness level.

You can continue stepping your way up (or down) the brightness scale until you hit pitch-blackness or blinding nova-white. Count up all the steps, and that's the  total number of distinct tones that you can see. For the average human eye, it's about 650. In the middle of that brightness scale we can distinguish tonal differences of a mere 1%, but towards the extremes it can require a half-stop difference in brightness for us to be able to see it. This has some interesting consequences.

First, this explains why we have trouble seeing shadow detail in prints under dim lighting but see it so clearly in the sunlight; the lower the luminance, the poorer our tonal discrimination. Conversely, in sunlight, it's hard to see the subtle tonal differences in the highlights.

Second, there is an optimum illuminance for viewing a print that will maximize the number of distinct tonal steps we can see in it. For a typical high quality photographic or inkjet print with a brightness range around 200:1 that's around 200–300 foot candles, and the maximum number of tonal steps we can see in that print is 250–300.

Third, this is why 8-bit printer output looks as good as it does. It's close to our visual capabilities. It's not really there, because the 256 gray levels in the print don't match up with the visual discrimination steps. 16-bit output would produce visibly better tonality. It would not be dramatically better.

Under many circumstances, we see far fewer tonal steps than that. As I said, we're good at differences; the human nervous system is excellent at performing differential analysis. We can pick up on that sharp boundary between two regions of slightly different brightness. Blur out the boundary and our abilities drop dramatically. Anyone who was ever tried to uniformly illuminate a backdrop by eye knows what I'm talking about. I'm certain there is nobody here who can do that to even 1/4 stop—a 20%  variation. Most folks can't do it to even half a stop.

Many will see this as a uniform light gray field, but on a calibrated gamma 2.2 monitor there's about a half stop difference in brightness from the center to the edge.

Here the same brightness variation is in four well-defined steps. Now it's pretty easy to see that the brightness isn't uniform. Our vision is good at evaluating brightness differences but not absolutes.

How we see fine detail is another matter; in that regards, we're better than most people realize. That's a topic for another day.

____________________

Ctein

Ctein's site

By Ctein

In various comments I've mentioned the problems inherent to mechanical rangefinder cameras. The complex connection between what you see in the rangefinder window and what you get on film is prone to errors. Most rangefinders aren't very precise. The few that are precise (like the Leicas) are rarely if ever accurate over the full range of focusing distances.

Even autofocus mechanisms have their flaws. My Fujica GA645 has two separate autofocus mechanisms, for near and far distances. The far distance focus is dead-on, but the camera consistently back-focuses by about 6 inches on near subjects. Fuji's repair center in New Jersey swears it checks out perfectly on their test jig. Now, when I photograph a near subject, I lean forward while focusing, press the shutter halfway to lock the focus, and lean back before pressing it all the way. Funky, but it works.

My friend Laurie Edison has been using one of the hard-bodied Fuji 645 rangefinders for many years. Those cameras are robust and reliable. A few years back, though, she started getting increasing numbers of out-of-focus photographs. It took us a while to be sure that there was an accuracy problem and that it wasn't just Laurie being sloppy. Eventually we became convinced there was a consistent back-focus problem. It appeared the camera was out of adjustment.

We tested this in a simple but effective manner. We sat down next to each other and I picked a brightly lit subject on the far side of the room that had very clear and contrasty edges. I focused and made careful note of the exact distance. Then I threw the lens out of focus, handed the camera to Laurie, and had her focus on the same point.

It took her quite a while to bring the superimposed rangefinder images into alignment. She kept hunting for the right setting. When she was finally satisfied that she had focused accurately, she handed the camera back to me. Her best focus distance was considerably (and repeatably) behind mine. She was having a lot of trouble aligning the superimposed images and that she was consistently back-focusing. There was nothing wrong with the camera.

Then I remembered something. Laurie had astigmatism, but she was not in the habit of using her glasses with the camera because she could see the rangefinder images sufficiently well without them, although it was a little blurry. Astigmatism doesn't just smear ones vision, it causes doubling of out-of-focus images. That's what was was messing up her focusing—the ghost images were creating a spurious and illusionary alignment in the rangefinder window.

New glasses with a better prescription for her astigmatism and a diopter lens for the eyepiece to let her see the image sharply with her glasses on solved the problem. She could once again focus fast, assuredly, and accurately.

So, the next time you think you may need to send your rangefinder in for costly repairs, first check to make sure you're not astigmatic.

______________________

Ctein

By Ctein

(When we last left our hero, he had a mere 45 GB of photographs to sort through. How did he cope?! We now return to the story in progress...)

There were a whole bunch of obvious duplicates I could weed out. Tee's work habit was to stock iPhoto libraries with all the original camera files in subfolders named "Originals." Those that interested her got copied into the parent folder of "Originals." I used Bridge light table windows (screenshot below) to compare the contents of each dated folder with its Originals sub-folder. Why Bridge? Because it happened to come with my copy of Photoshop. Really, any image viewing program that lets you display large numbers of photographs on one screen with associated metadata, lets you sort them by different criteria, and lets you select ones to move or delete ought to work just as well.

This is where it occasionally got tricky. Most of the time files of the same name in those two windows would be the same photograph, but they'd have slightly different file sizes. Tee's workflow involved re-saving the photographs rather than merely duplicating them. Doing some careful, direct pixel-by-pixel comparisons in Photoshop, I found only the most trivial differences, so I kept the larger version. Occasionally I would find files of the same name where the "copy" was markedly larger. This was a guarantee that Tee had made some sort of alteration. I always preserved both versions of those photos.

This sounds a lot worse than it really was. It was entirely visual work; I'd queue up some jazz, put on some headphones, and zone out to the music while I mowed down duplicates. After a week or so, I'd made my way through all the library folders, and Tee's hard drive had shrunk by another 8–9 GB. Now came the hard work.

Half of the photos resided various project and works-in-progress folders; they usually duplicated or were derived from the iPhoto files. Fortunately Tee often carried the camera's image number through the naming process. I could use Mac OS's Spotlight utility to search on a string like "0194" and scan the list to match photographs across folders. Some projects derived from a couple of specific days' photographs. Once I'd paired up two folders this way, I'd usually find they had a whole bunch of photographs in common. (I also wrote down these folder connections for future scholars.) Others derived from years of photographs and I had to do wild-card searches on frame numbers for most of the individual photographs to find their sources.

Derived photographs could be very subtly different. Tee reworked images in stages, and I needed to preserve all the intermediates. I wrote a time-saving Action in Photoshop to compare photographs. It pasted one photograph as a Difference layer over a second photograph and added a curves adjustment layer that increased the contrast four-fold (below). If there were any differences, they jumped right out.

Once, there were two photographs that had different version letters, but I honestly couldn't see any difference between them. The Action showed that Tee had removed four birthmarks from the subject—not exactly obvious!

I'm pretty well convinced I didn't miss more than 1% of the duplicates and didn't mistakenly delete even a handful of unique images. Now the hard drive was a svelte 30 GB. After I wrote "readme" RTF's for the files in the new archive, explaining to future scholars what I had done and how I organize all the files, I wrote two copies of the archives back onto the hard drive that had been provided. Then I burnt four sets of DVD's on Kodak Preservation DVD blanks. Nothing is certain, but these are as good as you can get. One set stayed with me, one with the executor of the state, a backup copy went to my friend Laurie Edison's home, and the "official" copy to the University.

A few files got munched when I burnt my DVD's, probably 1 in 10,000. Bless Photoshop's Contact Sheet II function for catching them for me. I created an Errata folder, containing fresh copies of the munched photos for inclusion in a catalog CD. I also copied my "readme's" and my folder cross-reference notes to that CD. The bulk of the CD was a set of about high-resolution JPEG files—the full set of of contact sheets generated from the DVD's of Tee's work. 12 images across, 12 images down, and about 130 sheets in all, as illustrated last time. The sum total of an artist's digital life. In two handfuls of gold disks. A strange thing to contemplate.

And equally strange—viewing all those photographs in chronological sequence, over and over, was a little like viewing a stop-motion encapsulation of someone's life. By no means the sum total of those years of living. Still, an important subset of them, sitting on my hard drive, presenting itself on my screen as I scrolled through page after page of images, finally arriving at the very last folder, shown above. Dated 7/27/06, it contained mostly photos of Tee. More self portraits? I have no idea. Either way, they're the last photos in her files.

Tee's life ended exactly one month later.

____________________

Ctein

A third of a century of artistic endeavor makes an impressive stack: "I should mention this isn't everything. There's about two more feet worth of boxes behind the chair. Plus 20 shelf-feet of small photo boxes and proof sheet binders as well. To coin a phrase, 'I just reorganized my office and boy, are my arms tired.' " (Ctein in California with some of his photographic work.)

A Reverse-Engineered History Of The Camera Business

By Ctein

Eamon's wonderful inside look at the camera industry inspired me to add my own musings to his historical perspective. What I have to say complements it. My connections to the business have been very different from his, so we are fondling different parts of a very large and complicated elephant. Let's wind back the clock about 40 years and run forward.

For the 1960s and most of the '70s  there was a vast gulf between professional cameras and amateur  cameras. The margins on the professional cameras were considerably better and they conferred prestige  on the amateur lines (what Eamon nicely termed the "mindscape"). Their volume was insignificant, though, compared to the amateur market; the price differentials were huge.

In the mid-'70s, Canon got the notion that they could mass-produce a high-quality SLR. Meanwhile, Minolta in a desperate bid to save their failing business  decided to invest in truly innovative manufacturing technology. The cost of quality SLRs  started plummeting, and Olympus, Pentax, and Nikon followed Canon and Minolta's prescient lead.

In the 1980s, inexpensive, seriously good SLRs became the norm. A substantial fraction of the huge amateur market bought a "real" camera. Boom times for the camera makers! But, as will always happen, the market and the technology matured. That's a really bad thing for sales. When everybody owns a decent, well-made camera and you can't hand them radical improvements every year, your sales projections are  gloomy.

Happily for the camera makers there was a new shiny trinket to seduce the consumers—the point-and-shoot camera. Innovative technology and clever design drove sales. In turn, the P&S's drove the technology. Modern compact high-performance optics, electronics, and sensors and control mechanisms  owe much of their existence to oft-maligned P&S's. As a class, they were the most sophisticated cameras ever produced.

But that market was also maturing by the end of the last century. What was waiting in the wings to keep the industry rolling? Guess!

The slow roll-up to digital
Electronic/digital photography didn't surprise anybody who understood the technology. It had been developing slowly, steadily, and predictably from at least the early 1970s (I would bet the late 1960s, although I don't have facts to support that). Modern digital camera designs date from  no later than 1971, non-chemical printing technology as well. (Side note: I'm talking about commercial/industrial technology here. If you're talking military/espionage, they were and are 20 years ahead of the curve. But that technology almost never trickles down to consumer products.)

The first digital camera prototypes (much cruder than the farsighted paper designs) appeared mid-'70s. By the early '80s, Kodak was hinting that photofinishing was going hybrid and by the mid-'80s, primitive consumer electronic photography products started appearing. Indeed, around 1994 a Fuji rep even asked me if I thought she should be giving up her film camera. I told her, correctly, that digital was indeed the wave of the future but that the wave was made of molasses and it was still January.

It took about three decades for digital photography to slouch all the way to Bethlehem. Then it got a big kick in the pants from an entirely predictable event that few planned for. The dot-bomb. Everybody remember The New Economy? Sorry—meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And we will get fooled again, because it's in our nature to want to believe that the streets are paved with gold and money will grow on trees.

The dot-bomb was more of a disaster for the consumer/electronics industry than outsiders know. We're still in recovery mode: the economic metrics don't reflect how badly those businesses were hurt. The  scale of the collapse  was so huge that (contrary to some popular  assumption) terrorist attacks  produced only barely a visible blip in the curves.

Paradoxically, that was just the break digital photography  needed; it was not quite ready for prime-time,  price/performance-wise. Still, it was close and manufacturers were now in desperate straits. They could not wait for the normal transition to the next wave of shiny  consumer-lust-inducing baubles. Like Minolta,  decades earlier, they needed to gamble and force the market or they were going to die of starvation for sure.

That's when (and why) camera prices started plummeting and the performance/price ratio started  rising even faster than it did for home computers. Manufacturers drove down prices aggressively, almost suicidally. They rolled out new models long before the old ones had paid off their investment. This was consumer pump-priming on a desperate scale, and it worked to our benefit. That long,  ponderous 30-year swell suddenly hit the uncharted reef of May, 2000 and slowly but irresistibly broke into a perfect  wave. With a speed that couldn't have been  sensibly predicted pre-dot-bomb, it drowned film photography (and several companies) and it floated whole rafts of new products and services.

We're still riding the wave today and it's a wild trip. I'm kind of wondering, though. What's in the cards when this market matures? It will, you know, and then the industry will have to move on to the Next Great Thing. I wonder what that will be?

______________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "It's fun to make predictions. But it's more fun to see past predictions. Rochester Institute of Technology has preserved a page of predictions made by several renowned photographers of the day and published in a 1944 issue of Popular Photography. With this being at the end of WWII there is a recurring 'post-war' perspective. Have fun!"

Mike adds: I'm impressed by Eliot Elisofon! Film never miniaturized as much as he predicted, and, in color negative film, dye clouds merely replaced the light-sensitive silver halide layers. But he correctly predicted the explosion of photographic education in the 1970s, and perhaps we can grant that his "built-in lens turret" is the zoom lens, in effect if not in execution. Pretty impressive predictions.

By Ctein

It's spring, and this man's fancy turns to…mortality.

My very first column for The Online Photographer was about the death of Tee Corinne. Tee's estate commissioned me to organize her computer files. My task was to eliminate the chaos and duplication and make it accessible to future scholars at the University of Oregon. I had Tee's external hard drive, floppies, Zip disks, CDs, and DVDs. All told, there were about 70 GB of data in about 75,000 files: Tee's writings, correspondence and photographs.

Tee had used a variety of word processing programs, some quite ancient. Early stuff was named in the traditional "8.3" DOS fashion we had to work with in those dim, dark days. For example, a file might be named "INVISIBL.LNS," shorthand for " Invisible Lines." As you might expect, modern operating systems get flummoxed by this.

I reconfigured all the names and appended the file creation dates. MacLink Plus converted them en-masse from their original formats into DOC files, a format so widely used I can be sure programs capable of reading it will be available into the indefinite future.  INVISIBL.LNS became INVISIBL_LNS_05161994.DOC. Done!

The photos took 95% of the work. First I had to get all the files into my computer. CD and DVD reading and writing isn't foolproof. A single read of Tee's original disks didn't copy all the photos successfully. Adobe Bridge usually signaled when a  photo was broken by either refusing to display a thumbnail or displaying a low-quality thumbnail with a black border. Sadly, it wasn't foolproof.

To get 100% reliable results, I pointed Photoshop's Contact Sheet II function at the hard drive and told it, "Make me contact sheets of everything!" Every time it encountered a file that wasn't 100% kosher, it halted and let me know. Then I'd go back to Tee's original disks. In all but two cases (out of over 15,000 unique photographs), I could come up with a good version of the file. It took a long time for the system to crunch that many photos, but it didn't require constant attention.

What does it take to sum up an artist's life? More than one screen shot, for sure, but this is a record of the last half-decade of Tee's life. Each barely-visible dot, 144 to a sheet, is a unique photograph.

The contents of Tee's disks and hard drive overlapped but weren't identical. In addition, there were numerous duplicates where Tee copied a photograph to a particular project folder to work on. Finished work was sometimes duplicated in several places for different projects. Sometimes the file names were kept the same, sometimes not. In at least two cases, there were files that had identical names and identical file lengths in different folders that were entirely different photographs.

My only option was to look each and every photo...several times. Multiply that by around 25,000.

One single contact sheet from the 130 pictured above.

The first step I took was to identify the unique contents of the hard drive and the disks and merge them into new folder. I opened up two full-screen light table windows in Adobe Bridge, showing corresponding folders from the hard drive and the disks, and started comparing the thumbnails. Boy, I have never been so happy to have dual monitors with lotsa pixels!

It went faster than you might think. The contents of the two data sets were similar, and I could scan a whole screen quite quickly. Anything that was a dupe (same look, same name, same file size) got deleted from the disk folder. Once I'd finished purging the folder I copied the remaining disk files over to the corresponding folder for the hard drive. I preserved the unique disk contents as well, so future scholars could see which photos Tee had offloaded from her hard drive. Who knows; it might be of interest?

Now I was down to a mere 45 GB of data! It was time to weed out the superfluous, as I'll talk about next time.

____________________

Ctein

Photoshop Bicubic vs. Genuine Fractals vs. BlowUp

By Ctein

On to film scans. They're a different kettle of fish from digital photos. It's not just that the image structure is very different. It's that you usually have access to many more pixels than your typical digital camera produces. Scanning at a higher resolution beats upsampling every time. But that's not always possible, and sometimes you'll hit the wall anyway, especially on a large print from a cropped frame.

I tested two scans: a low-resolution (1200 ppi) oil-immersion scan of a 6x7 format Provia 100 II slide (above) and a high-resolution (3200 ppi) oil-immersion scan of a 645 format Portra 400 negative (below).

At 10X, even the low-resolution scan is going to result in a 7 by 9 foot print at 300 ppi, and you'd never need to print at 300 ppi for prints that big! Unless cropped severely, that's not the kind of photograph that anyone's going to be pixel-peeping at.

I taped comparison prints to a wall, stepped back 30 feet and started walking towards the pictures until I could see some difference between them. They looked identical at 15 ft. (and I have considerably better than average visual acuity). At 10 ft. the Genuine Fractals print definitely looked sharper. BlowUp beat out Bicubic, but just by a hair. The differences were not miraculous; it was just that Genuine Fractals was incrementally better. 6 ft. was about as close as I'd want to get to these extreme enlargements; closer, they all looked like varying degrees of mush.

Genuine Fractals also looked best at 4X and 1.67X. At 1.67X, Bicubic Sharper looked better than BlowUp (and better than Bicubic). This is the only case I found where the flavor of Bicubic I used made a difference in the relative rankings.

The 3200 ppi scan would print out at almost 18 in. by 24 in. at 300 ppi. You'd never upsample a file like this by 10X unless you were doing wall-sized display images or there was really serious cropping going on. Still, for the sake of consistency in testing, I checked it out at the three usual enlargements.

At 10X, Genuine Fractals won again, and again the critical viewing distance was about 10 ft.. This is obviously more a function of the printed pixel size than the original scan pixels. Printed out at a more plausible 100–200 ppi (for large display-sized prints), I'd expect the critical distance to move back to 15–30 ft. This time BlowUp came in a clear second, not too far behind Genuine Fractals. Bicubic was definitely in third place.

That ranking carried through for 4X, but BlowUp got relatively better-looking. At 1.67X, it was a real tossup between Genuine Fractals and BlowUp; the former was a bit crisper but the latter had slightly better tonality and less grain. Both of them beat out Bicubic.

And the winner is...
My conclusions from all the tests? Genuine Fractals is aggressive about finding and sharpening edges, but like a freight train rolling just a little too fast it's likely to jump the tracks in spectacular and catastrophic fashion. It was a consistent winner at 1.67X, reliable enough that I'd trust it to do the best job. For bigger enlargements, no way. In my judgment it's more often wrong than it's right. BlowUp produces a much more "photographic" look; while it doesn't sharpen as well as Genuine Fractals, it was a lot less likely to 'uglify' the photograph. Based on a very limited test sample, it seems like Genuine Fractals is more comfortable dealing with film images and a lot less so handling the artifacts that come with digital photographs. Alien Skin BlowUp is more egalitarian.

But, don't write off Bicubic! A lot of the time it produced the best results of all, most especially when the photographs contained fine and subtle texture and detail.

This leaves open the matter of alternate approaches. Qimage? Incremental upsampling? Split upsampling à la Martin's suggestion? All good questions. If there's a Part IV, I'll look at these matters, but I make no promises. I've got two weeks to make up my mind, and, please, no begging. I know you readers would like me to do it, but this testing is time-consuming so only one vote counts here—mine.

If not that, my next post will start a series of articles on a much more somber subject—sorting and cataloging a dead artist's work.

____________________

Ctein

Photoshop Bicubic vs. Genuine Fractals vs. BlowUp

By Ctein

My previous post made clear that none of these three upsampling methods is consistently superior to the others. Perhaps we can learn more of their behavior from other test cases.

But first...Lubor asked if incremental upsizing with Genuine Fractals produced better results. The illustrations above shows what happens when I upsized to 10X in five steps instead of one. The result emphasized Genuine Fractals' flaws as well as its benefits. Edges were even cleaner and sharper with incremental upsizing, but fine detail and highlights became even more polygonal and less natural-looking.

On to new cases. This detail shows a portion of another ISO 100, low-noise photograph from my Finepix S6000fd. It differs from the photo I tested last time in that it lacks the sudden and extreme contrast changes of that Christmas tree photograph. At both 1.67X and 4X, Genuine Fractals came in first, Bicubic Sharper came in second and BlowUp placed third. The differences, though were not profound. At 10X, Bicubic won out, not because of problems with artifacts from the two plug-ins, but because they both suppressed the fine detail in the stand for trees, mistaking it for noise. Their images were less sharp than Bicubic's.

Okay, let's take a closer look at this noise vs. detail business. Above is a full frame photograph from my camera. The lighting conditions were extremely poor, so I had to use ISO 1600. Even in this reduced-size image you can see how noisy the original is. (By the way, most of the noise can be successfully suppressed with Neat Image, but that's not the point of this test).

The three 1.67X enlargements are nearly indistinguishable. Genuine Fractals looked marginally worse; it mistook some of the noise extremes for real detail and enhanced them, so its rendition has slightly worse grain than the other two.

At 4X there's nothing to distinguish the three versions. Edges are no sharper with the plug-ins; noise looks similar in all the enlargements. Take it up to 10X? Oh, the horror, the horror! As you can see in the closeups, the two plug-ins, having confused noise for image, have dutifully enhanced it in an entirely unattractive way.

OK, there's a clear lesson here—if you're intentionally retaining noise for aesthetic reasons, don't trust your enlargements to "clever" algorithms. Stick with simple Bicubic. If you're not, be sure to do your noise reduction before enlarging.

Next time it'll be film scans and some synthetic test images that show some of the interesting peculiarities of all three approaches.

____________________

Ctein

Photoshop Bicubic vs. Genuine Fractals vs. BlowUp

By Ctein

Now that I have a giant printer (Epson 9800) I've been getting interested in what it takes to get really good, really large prints. Obviously huge scans (or original camera files) are best, but sometimes one has to upsize an existing file.

For years I'd been hearing about how superior Genuine Fractals was. When Alien Skin came out with BlowUp, my curiosity got piqued. Two competing and expensive (over $200) plug-ins? I was sure they would blow Photoshop Bicubic interpolation away. But which one was the truly superior program? The fine folks at Alien Skin and OnOne Software provided me with evaluation copies to satisfy my itch.

Well, I got surprised. Nothing is all-around superior. Bicubic, BlowUp, and Genuine Fractals produce very different looking results, but each produced superior enlargements in different cases. If I were keeping score, I would say BlowUp was the best more often and Genuine Fractals best less often that either BlowUp or Bicubic. It depended upon the particular file I was upsizing and how much I was upsizing it.

(Click on images for larger size)

This was hardly what I expected, and it killed my notion that this would be a quick report. Many hours, 20+ gigabytes of images, and a hundred square feet of prints later, I'm writing this as a three-parter for Mike. Normally my columns are spaced 10 days apart, but we're running these on three-four day intervals so you'll have the whole story in one week instead of three.

I upsized an assortment of different files by 1.67X, 4X, and 10X. I did find one consistent difference between the three approaches. Bicubic is by far the fastest and least memory-intensive choice. It ran 5–10 times faster than BlowUp. Genuine Fractals was by far the slowest. It ran 2–12 times slower than BlowUp and 20–60 times slower than Bicubic. It also consumed prodigious amounts of memory. It's a good thing my Macbook Pro has 4 GB of RAM!

But that's an incidental. What really counts is quality. I tried to be fair in how I looked at the results. All files were printed at 300 ppi on my Epson 9800 on glossy paper. I didn't pixel-peep (well, not too much), but I did scrutinize the prints fairly carefully. While larger prints are often viewed from some distance, if your prints aren't being given a critical examination there's really no need to consider either of these pricey plug-ins.  Stick with fast and free Bicubic.

I began with a fairly low-noise test photograph made with my Fuji Finepix S6000fd, and upsized it 10X. The illustrations in this column show a very, very small section of that enlargement at 25% scale. Subjectively, this proves a pretty good match for what you would see looking at the prints. Still, I must remind readers that the point of illustrations is to illustrate my points, not to prove them. If you don't agree with my description, based on what you're seeing on-screen, trust the description.

The two plug-ins did a great job on the strong continuous edges of the ornaments and the pine needles. But they lost subtle fine detail, like that in the textured golden bands and cap of the seahorse ornament. The result looked plastic, like a digital photo that has had too much noise reduction applied: edges are hard but texture's missing.

I should mention that both plug-ins have controls for fine-tuning their outputs. The changes weren't enough to alter my rankings, but I did adjust the settings to produce the most pleasing results each plug-in was capable of.

Genuine Fractals fared the worst, because it took the small bright highlights and turned them into distractingly hard-edged polygons. The golden string looked downright weird. Overall, the print looked sharper, but also looked just plain wrong. The image no longer looked like a photograph; it looked like it was created with a paintbrush.

While BlowUp produced less distracting artifacts, there was still no question in my mind—Bicubic was by far the best choice if I wanted a print that still looked like a photograph.

But you know that's not the whole story, or this would be a one-part review.

When I made 4X enlargements of the same file and compared prints, it wasn't so clear-cut. Genuine Fractals still produced an unpleasantly artificial rendering, so it stayed in third place. But now it was a tossup between BlowUp and Bicubic. The suppression of fine detail and the artifacts in the highlights were less bothersome, and edges were definitely clearer in BlowUp's version. I would pick BlowUp over Bicubic by a nose.

Down to 1.67X, and I got a new surprise. There were subtle but clearly-visible differences between the three renderings; equally clearly the superior one was Genuine Fractals', no question about it! The loss of fine detail and the highlight artifacts were invisible at this scale. The edges were uniformly cleaner and sharper, and the image was just a bit less noisy with smoother tonality. BlowUp came in second and Bicubic came in third.

Curiouser and curiouser. Would other test files produce the same rankings? Well, what do you think? Tune in next time for further adventures.

____________________

Ctein

By Ctein

S'truth! My habits and practices came from cutting my photographic teeth on Polaroid film. For the first several years of my "serious" photographic life, Polaroid was all I used (save for a few rolls of 35mm film developed in a summer photography class). I even used it for the first two years I was a photographer on my college newspaper.

Eugene McCarthy running (almost literally!) for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968.

There's a good chance, in fact, that I wouldn't even be a photographer today were it not for Polaroid. Until I got a Polaroid camera, my photographs were extremely ordinary. I've gone back and checked. I was usually the one wielding the family camera, but any other family member could have done exactly as good (namely, bad) a job as I. That all changed early in my teens. My grandpa gave me his Polaroid Highlander 80A rollfilm camera, with Wink-light flash and a modest number of filters.

Having the instant feedback made all the difference in the world (that's why I've always been enthusiastic about digital cameras for beginners). I could immediately see what was wrong with a photo I'd made. Being of an inquisitive and scientific mind I promptly started experimenting. The second illustration here shows a very early photo I made while experimenting with filters to improve skies.

A very early experiment with my new Highlander. Penciled notes on the back say "3000/orange filter/EV 15." Polaroid experimentation not only made me a good photographer, it made me a good record keeper.

In a few years I acquired a full-size Polaroid Model 150 rollfilm camera. Not only did I want those luxuriously large (3 in. by 4 in.) photographs, but Polaroid made a wondrous assortment of films that were not available in Highlander size. I started photographing color, which was now technically as easy as B&W. ASA 3000 B&W film became my mainstay for low light fun and home photomicrography. The 10,000 speed oscilloscope film let me experiment with night and high-contrast photography. Polaroid's infrared film was great.

I'm not sure how I got the money to buy that camera. Polaroid was expensive, and I could only afford to make a handful of photographs each week, even devoting most of my allowance to buying film. I learned how not to waste photographs. I got really good at that, to the point where I expected every photograph to be a keeper. I learned how to take a pass on lesser compositions, to make the one photograph I really wanted to make and walk away. I learned how to meter well with an averaging meter. Polaroid film was no more forgiving than slide film, and your exposures had to be pretty much on the mark. I became skilled at looking at a scene and instantly intuiting how much it deviated from the 12% effective reflectance that the meter expected to see. For my high school graduation, I got a Polaroid Colorpack 250 with all the accessories. Until just a few years ago when I got access to a digital camera, I still used that for some of the product shots for reviews in Photo Techniques magazine. I bought a first-model SX-70 camera and made many, many hundreds of photographs with it into the early 1980s, when the poor stability of the prints soured me on it.

That's what Polaroid did for me. It taught me to develop my eye and discrimination and never make a photograph unless I knew it was the right photograph to make. It taught me to meter accurately; today I still use an averaging meter for all my film work. And it let me start developing my interest in color four or five years earlier than I would have otherwise, without being hampered by inconvenient and lengthy processes.

I'm not going to mourn the loss of Polaroid film; it's no longer important to me in any way. But I do owe it considerable gratitude.

____________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by David: "I'm mourning the Pola loss. It sucks that so many photographers can carry that 'let's move on' attitude so easily for the film processes that proved the medium. To each his own.

"Type 55 is a special thing, nothing like it. I use the medium format stuff to proof lighting. There really is, for me, no better way to do it.

"...Maybe I'll start using digital to check my lights...nowhere near as cool because then I'll have nothing to drop into my box of old Polaroids. That box is like a treasure...I go in there looking for ideas and reminders of ideas all the time. Like Ctein...notes all over those things, lighting diagrams, schemes and ratios. Nice to not have to sit at a computer to do this...stare at a screen for yet another series of tasks.

"I can't think of another invention (computer) that has been so liberating and so insulating/alienating at the same time. Biggest paradox ever."

By Ctein

My last column, on the possible merits and drawbacks of the MacBook Air, raised an interesting question in my mind. How much storage space do folks really need for photographs on their trips? I mean actual demands for storage, as opposed to hypothetical exercises based on multiplying file sizes by some imagined number of photographs one might take.

Here's what I found looking at  four recent trips whose photos are stored on my hard drive. (By way of background, I'm using a Fuji FinePix S6000. This is a 6-megapixel camera that generates 13 MB RAW files that yield 35 MB 16-bit PSD files.) A photography-oriented vacation on the Oregon coast lasted about nine days. The folder for that trip weighs in at a little under 8 GB. There are some days where I generated 2+ gigabytes worth of photographs, but there were many more days where I produced less than a gigabyte.

Sea Lion Cave, on the Oregon Coast, is an amazing place. Prepare to make lots of photographs... and be deafened. Those beasties never shut up!

Was this trip atypical? Looking at three other fall trips, it seems not. A five-day trip to Alaska produced 4.5 GB of files (including one huge synthesized panorama running some 750 MB). Three days in upstate New York got me a little over 3 GB of files. Six days split between New York and Minneapolis came in at just about 3 GB.

Days when I made a lot of photographs produced larger folders, but not by as much as I would've thought. On such days, most of my free time in the evening was spent sorting and winnowing the images I'd made. On days when I made only a few photographs, I had more time to work on them in Photoshop, so there were fewer files but more larger ones from those days.

It looks like I typically need 1 GB of storage for each day of a trip. If I want to err on the very safe side, I'd double that to 2 GB per day. If I went out and bought a nice high-end DSLR with twice the number of pixels, 4 GB per day would give me ample safety margin.

I'd like to hear what kind of numbers readers come up with for themselves. Let me emphasize that what I'm looking for here is actual, historical experience, not theorizing. Look at your last several trips, photography-dedicated or otherwise, and let us know what you find out.

____________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by John Camp: "I was embedded with a helicopter company in Iraq in January and shot 5.3 gigs of Nikon D3 raw (12.1 megs each) in nine days. I am primarily a writer and the photographer who was with me shot about 4X as much.

"I took 32 gigs of CF cards with me and kept the images on the cards, as well as backed up in my laptop. Flash memory is now so cheap that I plan to buy a few hundred dollars more of 4-gig cards, and use the cards themselves as my primary storage and backup, like rolls of film. With the D3 I can shoot simultaneously to both cards, and use the camera to confirm that they're there.

"I'm reluctant to use cards bigger than 4 gigs because too much is at risk if something goes wrong. This may be a fantasy, but I worry about things like a possible electronic or static  fault in the camera that damages both cards simultaneously. I never actually filled a card—the 5.3 gigs I used was spread of three 4-gig cards."

By Ctein

The new MacBook Air is not a substitute for a MacBook Pro. Steve says as much, and if he didn't the pricing would tell you so. They both cost about the same. The Pro is undeniably the more powerful and expandable system, so should photographers even care about the Air?

Maybe, just maybe.

Surprisingly, the MacBook Air is not a lot smaller than a 15 in. MacBook Pro. The Pro is only an inch longer. The Air is only 25% thinner, coming in at three-quarters of an inch instead of one.  It's startling how much difference that makes; if I had hazarded a guess before I measured it, I would've said the Air was only half as thick. The big difference is in the weight: the Air weighs only a bit more than half as much, coming in at three pounds.

Apple discarded a lot to slim the machine by that much. No optical drive, no Firewire or Ethernet ports, and no expandability. The I/O limitations could be a problem. You can get USB to Ethernet and Firewire adapters (although the latter are rare and costly). You get 2 GB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, a built-in battery, and you better like it. You can plug in an external monitor, which is cool. You can also plug in an external optical drive, which isn't really. I've owned compact laptops which had external peripherals. It's a pain hauling them around. It's a lot more convenient having everything built into a larger machine.

On the plus side, the machine is incredibly wireless-savvy.  It can communicate wirelessly with another Mac or PC and use that machine's optical drive. The LED screen is bright enough to be readable in direct sunlight (although I'd rather not). The keyboard feels great.

So why might you care?

For start, when you're traveling, the RAM and hard drive are entirely sufficient. 2 GB RAM is enough to work on pretty large images in Photoshop efficiently; few of us own such high-end digital cameras that we'll be taxing the system resources. After installing the OS and all your primary applications, you're still going to have a good 50 GB of hard disk space free for images.

Two reasons why a photographer might go for this, both of which have photographic analogies:

• The camera that makes the best photographs is the one you have with you. The  fancy camera that you left at home because it was too big or inconvenient to use doesn't make very good photographs at all.

• No professional photographer would ever think of going on assignment without a backup camera body. No smart amateur going on expensive trip would, either. Camera failures are rare, but they can ruin your assignment/vacation photography.

How important is having a computer with you when you go off to to make digital photographs? Think about the possibility the MacBook Air is like that second camera body or the camera you take with you because it's small and light enough to not be a bother.

I'm not running to buy one. But you might have good reason to be.

___________________________

Ctein

Photos courtesy of Apple, Inc.

Featured Comment by Herman Krieger: "And there is the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) with a built in camera."

Featured Comment by John Camp: "I just spent a couple of weeks dragging a 15" MacBook Pro around Iraq, and I definitely need a lighter laptop. With a D3, three lenses, the usual accessory bits, a sat phone and a couple of books, I could barely pick up the pack. One way Apple has reduced weight in a fake way is to move the power supply off-board. I don't see any change on this one, so I'm assuming (incorrectly?) that you'll still have that fat white power supply to haul along with you. There's another half-pound or so that they don't count.... What I really need is simply a small 12-inch MacBook Pro. I could finesse the optical drive, but need battery access.

"I'd make some changes—like more USB ports, and dedicated CF and SD ports would be great. Shrink the power supply.

"I think the problem is that Jobs thought he learned a great lesson with the iPod and the iPhone, which is that flash counts more than function. It does, to an extent, in certain products, but function becomes more important when there's more cash on the line. They produced a flashy computer with the Air, but it's short of function. What they really needed to do was sit down with engineers and figure out the best possible travel computer—what do real working travelers need, when they're Mac users? They didn't do that; they went for cool-on-the-beach. My personal feeling is that possession of a Mac, alone, won't pick up that many chicks. Of course, I could be wrong...."

By Ctein

This is my 50th (golden anniversary) T.O.P. post, so let's discuss the source of  gold:

Public Relations!

PR is the way that companies get the press to notice them. All PR gets you noticed. But some PR won't get you noticed in the way you want!

PR doesn't have to be expensive. The photographs here show a bit of PR from a certain film manufacturer (guess who) a dozen years back. A working four-function calculator built into a film canister: the original "digital film!" The film's a membrane keypad; you squeeze the symbols to enter them.  It works faster than you'd think. Those things cost about as much to the company as a single mailed press release did, and the press loved them.

Mine finally died, so I took apart for your benefit and to see what I could do. The dead battery was easy. The partially disconnected ribbon connector to the LCD display, unfortunately, is probably beyond my skills to repair. I'm going to show it to a genius friend of mine just in case he may be able to fix it. I'm really enamored of it.

Then there's bad PR. Consider the late, unlamented Fred Picker, whose products got a lot fewer reviews than they would have if he hadn't been such a royal pain to deal with. If you have two meritworthy products and one space for only one review you go with someone who is pleasant not who is an aggravation.

I'm signed up as press for MacWorld Expo, which means I get emailed tons and tons of press releases. Ninety percent of them have nothing to do with me; that's true for most of us press. Companies no longer have a financial interest in winnowing the mailing list, what with e-mail. It's a cost of doing business we accept, although we may look more favorably upon companies that do pay some modest attention to who they're contacting.

Last Tuesday I received a press release for a music product I'd not ever be reviewing. I sent my usual form reply that says "unsubscribe" in the subject line and says "Please unsubscribe, thanks!" in the body. This cuts way down on the amount of junk mail I get over the course of the year.

Wednesday I received a different press release from the same company and the same PR person for the same product. I repeated my request to unsubscribe. The same thing happened Thursday. And again on Friday! At this point the PR person had sent me four press releases for the same product. This is very bad manners! I have better things to do than clear my mailbox of multiple announcements for the same item. It doesn't get you more noticed in any way you would like to be. I sent off an intemperate e-mail:

"You have set me four emails for the same goddam product. You have ignored three unsubscribe requests. I have reported you to my ISP as a spammer. Go to hell."

That finally got the attention of the PR person, who apologized but claimed that she had never seen any of the three "unsubscribe" emails (yeah, sure) and obviously had no clue that sending out four press releases for the same item was extremely inconsiderate.

I'm not mentioning the name of the company nor the product, because I have no intention of giving them any free publicity. They got noticed, all right.

________________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by Erlik: "'Companies no longer have a financial interest in winnowing the mailing list, what with e-mail. It's a cost of doing business we accept, although we may look more favorably upon companies that do pay some modest attention to who they're contacting.'"

"Hah!

"What we'd look more favourably upon are the companies that don't send the same PR to ten people in the same magazine. And then go telephoning each of the ten people after half an hour asking whether they received the PR and when it will be printed.

"Or the companies that don't send multi-megabyte ad images with their press releases unasked.

"Or that the same companies then don't waffle for two weeks getting images from some event to you while your deadline screams towards you like a cruising missile.

"Or the companies that do not send elaborate pictorial flyer-invites in attachments when two lines of text would suffice.

"Or the companies that do not put the same two lines of text in a DOC attachemnt while in the mail they explain that we can read what they want us to read in the attachment.

"Or the companies that do not put ten lines of stupid disclaimers under one line of text.

"Or the companies that don't put the whole of their mailing list in the CC field instead of creating a mailing list or at least putting everybody in BCC.

"Or the companies that don't organize their press conferences in the middle of a work day at the end of the month when every magazine is in the throes of finishing the next issue. An hour's drive away, at that.

"Or the companies that do not organize whole-day events at the same time of the month and then insist you have to come. Or the companies that do not organize press conferences in the centre of the town at midday, when you can't find parking space for love or money.

"Endless are the follies of PR people...."

By Ctein

Those of you with long memories may recall my two columns from a year back about the $10 keychain camera (here and here). It was a helluva lot of fun to use, but the nonstandard storage format was readable only on a limited number of computers, and the fact that photos were stored in RAM meant that I lost a high percentage of them due to dying batteries. And, let's face it, the picture quality was even less than marginal.

Six months back, Mike ran an item about the CatCam. When read the photographer's description of what he had done, I realized this was a keychain camera with a memory card slot! Of course, I had to buy one. Even at the lofty price of $25, it was more than worth it. I am now the proud owner of a VistaQuest VQ1005. I decided to go all the way and splurge for a maximum-sized memory card: a $10 512 MB SD card. I am nothing if not a big spender.

Above: The VistaQuest VQ1005 takes SD memory cards. The sliding cover protects the lens and the shutter release. Below: Ready for action, with the memory card inserted, the lens uncovered, and the nearly-useless viewfinder extended.

The size is similar to my previous keychain camera: The VQ1005's a few millimeters fatter, but it's slightly smaller in length and height. It answers many of my previous complaints. It uses standard digital camera storage format, so it looks just like a USB hard drive on your computer under any operating system that recognizes USB. No weird drivers needed. Insert an SD card into the slot and photos are automatically written to the card. When your batteries finally die (and they will die, believe me; just like the other camera, this one constantly keeps the RAM powered up) you don't lose any photos!

At standard resolution (which produces the best image quality on this camera) about 2000 photographs will fit on the memory card! As a result, the issue of whether to reformat or delete frames hasn't come up; I'm just leaving every photo on the card (and, of course, downloading them to my computer). I expect the camera to break before I fill the card.

Camera resolution is a whopping 1.3 megapixels. In other words, we're up to about cell phone quality. In my opinion, the pictures benefit from considerable massaging in Photoshop, especially the Shadow/Highlight tool (but just about every snapshot benefits from that fabulous tool).

The "near" focus setting works best for photographing one or two people. This is the photograph as it came directly from the camera.

The quality is considerably better after some Photoshop work. Judicious application of the Shadow/ Highlight tool, some sharpening with Focus Magic, and some noise reduction makes a big difference!

The camera does not have the low-light capability of the other keychain camera; it'll work okay under bright indoor light, but that's its limit. On the other hand, it doesn't totally lose it in direct sunlight.

In fitting with this camera's fine quality standards, it actually has a lens with two focus positions—one setting for closeups of people and one for landscapes, according to the icons on the camera. The near focus setting seems to be about 3 ft. and the far focus setting at about 10 ft. But the "plane of focus" is anything but flat, as my last illustration clearly shows, so who knows?

Where's the point of best focus at the "for" focus setting? Beats me! Seems to depend on where you look in the photograph. Field flatness; what's that?

Same photo, post-Photoshop. Great art, fer shure!

I didn't find any stores that carry this camera on their shelves, but it's available online from several sources. Take my word for it: this is a must-have for any serious connoisseur of fine photography.

_________________________

Ctein

ADDENDUM: Here's an Amazon link for the camera. I got mine from CompUSA, but they're defunct, and I'm one of those anti-Walmart types, so Amazon's your best bet.  —Ctein

Photons, photons, photons!  (© 2007 by Ctein)

By Ctein

Ever since I was a toddler I've celebrated Xmas. Not being a Christian, I couldn't have cared less about the "Christ" business. But the whole holiday thing? Just my cup of tea! And "X" plays an important part in that.

X is the symbol for the unknown and the mysterious. It's the unpredictable and the novel in our lives. It's what makes the world so much more interesting, that element that transcends the known.

But what makes it especially great is that it's about the answerable. Implicit in X's invocation is that there is an answer that will be revealed.

Xmas morning was all about X. You never knew what was wrapped in those seductive boxes under the tree—but you knew you'd be finding out. Art's like that. You capture that photo in your camera and you can't really know what you've got until you develop the film or pull the image up on the computer. Anticipating and imagining how wonderful it's going to be is a big part of what's so much fun about art—you know you'll get there, but you don't really know where you'll wind up. That's the miraculous power of X.

X makes physics work. It would be just as hard to have modern physics without X as modern math without zero. X is a source of wonderment. So's physics. Take a jaunt with me; this'll be about you...eventually.

We live in a universe governed by gravitational force, the strong force, and the electroweak (EW) force. Forces are the noodges of creation. They make things happen. No forces, and it'd just be an undifferentiated, amorphous sea of indifferent quarks waiting for the end of time. Terrible fodder for photographs. Not to mention no way to make them!

Forces are strange beasts. They're not just noodges, they're particles as well. You can talk about a gravitational field or graviton particles and you're talking about the same thing (here there be devilish details). That'll matter to us, but gravity itself doesn't matter much for photographers, 'cept as it holds our tripods in place.

The EW force is odd even for a force. It has dual identities. One is the weak force, an atomic-scale force that controls the decay of certain subatomic particles. You may think it 's irrelevant to photographers, and you'd be wrong.

The other is the electromagnetic (EM) force. It's lingua franca for the whole universe. Anything that has charge engages the EM force. Y'see, particles with like charges repel each other; unlike charges attract. But what means these words "repel" and "attract"? AHA! Force! The particles push and pull on each other. They can't help it; the EM force obligates them to jostle each other about. And that makes weird, relevant-to-shutterbug things happen. (Finally!)

A charge has an electric field. It's what does the pushing and pulling (that field's "really"—for a loose use of the word "real"—a cloud of charged particles popping in and out of existence in the vacuum). A jiggling charge creates something else, called a magnetic field. A magnetic field, in turn, moves charges and so can change an electric field. It's the yin to electric's yang.

Miraculously, a blessed cycle arises. An oscillating electric field creates an oscillating magnetic field. In turn, an oscillating magnetic field creates an oscillating electric field. Each bootstraps the other, and those interlinked fields go racing off at the speed of light. Photons, my boy, the future's in photons! These are the particles of the EM force.

Photons carry energy. Charged particles that generate them send some of their energy elsewhere. Charged particles that absorb them acquire that energy. Most of the energy that moves through space travels via the EM force, packaged up in handy, bite-sized photons created by jiggling charges. What makes charges jiggle? Mostly, it's heat. And where does most heat come from?

Surprise—it's the weak force, the other facet of EW. The weak force lets neutrons convert into electrons and protons and vice-versa. That's of more than passing interest, because without those conversions, hydrogen fusion doesn't work. And the sun goes out. All the suns go out. There are still photons about, but they're a much scarcer resource.

It'd be really hard to make photographs from the thin EM soup that would be left. Heck, it'd be really hard to make photographers (maybe life, but not as we know it, Jim). We'd not be having this conversation were it not for the electroweak force's dual identity, and the peculiar yin-yang nature of electricity and magnetism.

Our art is predicated on some obscure and unlikely physics. Ain't that a wonder?! There's something to celebrate. So, enjoy your solstice and have a happy holiday for whatever that means for you. And remember—everyone gets to find happiness their own way.

___________________

Ctein

By Ctein

I like botanical gardens—they're a great place to photograph plants, as opposed to "landscapes." Kind of like doing environmental portraiture with flora instead of fauna.

One of the nicer ones I've stumbled upon is the Bellevue Botanical Garden, near Seattle. It's public, free, and definitely worth your time to visit, if you're within an hour or two's drive. I give it a serious B+. That's a very high rating. "A" level world-class gardens are few and far between.

From Thanksgiving to the end of December it becomes something else: "The Garden d'Lights." From the description, I thought they merely decorated the garden heavily with lights. That would have been enough to get me there. I'm a sucker for Christmas lights. (And for insight into why they fascinate me, see here.)

But this goes way beyond mere decoration—the volunteers (it's all done by volunteers) create a garden from lights. It's amazing to behold, and well deserving of my hour or so in the car. It's free, tripods are welcome, and it's utterly photographer-friendly. It's the first time I've ever felt that people were being way too polite trying to stay out of my line of sight.

Christmas displays like this are a great place to pull out some of those digital tricks. Displays are often too big (or too detailed) to be well-covered in a single photograph. Even on film, size matters (all the work in my monograph was medium format, 'cause 35mm just didn't cut it). Digital's the same. I often made multiple exposures of pieces of a scene, to be photomerged later in Photoshop, because CS3 makes doing this kind of thing easy (top picture).

It's also the ideal situation to use HDR. Unless you've got a really high-end digital camera, these subjects will sorely tax the exposure range you can capture. Well, nothing's moving and you've got a tripod; bracket like mad and combine the results in the computer to get something more like what you saw (below). I made three, sometimes four exposures of every scene I photographed.

You could go really nuts and do HDR panoramas, but I decided making 12–20 exposures for a single photo was excessive even for me.

Finally, here's a tip for calming the camera shakes. If you've got a semi-stable support for your camera but no cable release you risk of jiggling the camera a bit when you press the shutter release. Using the self-timer works, but there's a faster way. Set your camera for auto focus and don't pre-focus before making your exposure. As soon as you press the shutter button, let it go. Your camera will spend a few tenths of a second hunting for the focus before it makes the exposure, which is plenty of time for the finger-induced jiggles to die out. It's the one time when you should jab at the shutter release.

______________________

Ctein

By Ctein

----------"We cannot be so insecure as to avoid clichés at every pass."

- ---------------------------------------—M. Johnston, 6/2/95

-

I do not know if our 'steemed editor is really as vehemently anti-cliché as he recently asserted, but such was not always the case. He gave me this wise advice a dozen years ago when he caught me apologetically referring to a photo in my portfolio as being something of a clichéd subject.

I've taken his words seriously since. And, in a nice coincidence with recent discussions, my eye was attracted just last weekend to such subject matter. So, I noodled around with it and produced the following photos. I like them all; a few of them I'm very happy with. I won't tell you which ones; I leave them for you to contemplate sans comment.

(And, by the way, it seems I've answered my question in the affirmative as to whether I could switch on the fly between B&W and color when using a digital camera.)

__________________________

Ctein

By Ctein

Terry Pratchett made this distinction between erotic and kinky: "It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken."

(All right, all you nasty little boys and girls, I'm going to sit here patiently till you stop thinking those dirty thoughts. Nasty, nasty, nasty!)

Then there are those I deem fetishists—they're the ones who think all of the rest of us should be enamored of their chicken.

Photography has always had its fetishists, who not only embrace one small aspect of photographic quality and pursue it to the exclusion of all others, but are fervent in their belief that we should all follow in their feverish footsteps. Don't get me wrong; I'm just fine with erotic or kinky. But I love my own chicken, thank you very much, and I don't need you repeatedly knocking on my door waving pamphlets and inquiring if I've embraced the Love of the Great Pullet and insinuating I will burn in Hell (or at least remain wholly unsatisfied) if I don't.

Photography has always had fetishists. The good old analog days gave us Orthodox Zonies. I've got nothing against the Zone System, but these folks evaluate every photograph by how completely it utilizes the range from Zone I to Zone IX and spend more time calibrating film/developer/paper combination than making interesting photographs. The Weston Gallery always has some examples of their labors on its walls. Think of perfectly-tuned pianos playing Three Blind Mice and you'll get the idea.  O.Z.'s think every medium is a nail for their hammer. They've even promoted Zone System for color negatives, and it would take a whole 'nother column to explain the ways that's wrong.

Then there are Full Framers, Filmcan Alchemists, and Manual Modeans, among others. Always it's a monomoniacal focus on one aspect of photography that's run amok in their brains.

The digital age has brought forth whole new flavors of fetishes. The DOF Diffraction Limiters. (Heaven forbid a lens should ever be stopped down below its optimum aperture...as if we didn't do that all the time with film.) The Big Sensorists. (Ohmigawd, you just can't make a decent photo with a small sensor, you just can't. As Scotty would have said, ya kenna break the laws o' physics.) The Mad Aberrationites. (Coma, chromatic aberrations, blue fringes, oh god, my eyes, how they burn, aeeeeeeiii.) The Full Histogrammerians. (Waiver in your vigilance and a gap will appear in your histogram, and demons will fly though it, and we will all be doomed. Note to apocalyptics: learn the difference between data and information.)

Why this flowering plague? DD-B suggests that in the analog days, your typical obsessive could only analyze a few aspects of a photograph. You had to have some serious experimental chops to collect much real data, and the folks with said skills tended to understand the import (or lack thereof) in what they were measuring.

Digital data and computer software let folks analyze photos six ways to Sunday without any sophisticated knowledge of what it is they're looking at. They can easily determine that Photo A has a higher Flummox Coefficient than Photo B, and there you have food for a fetish to feast upon should the hapless soul be so inclined. Photo-fetishists haven't gotten more fetishistic, they just have so many new and easier kinks they can develop fetishes about.

Do as you've always done. Argue with them politely until you're bored (I can promise you they'll never get to that point). Then slam the door in their faces and go back to making the kind of photos that you want to make. Take care of your chicken and the feathers will take care of themselves.

I made this with a 35mm point-and-shoot. Full auto mode. On-camera flash. Lens stopped down way beyond its sharpest point. By-the-book processing. Cropped the neg. I like it enough that it's part of my permanent portfolio. Go ahead; sue me.

_______________________

Ctein

*For those who might not know the reference, The Photo League was a quasi-Communist organization formed by Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand in New York City in 1936 to encourage the photographic documentation of worker activities and to provide pictures of strikes, protests, and boycotts to the radical press. The Photo League had a large membership that included many of the top photographers of the day, such as Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Marion Post Wolcott, and Ansel Adams. The Photo League was investigated by the House Committee for Un-American Activities in the 1940s, which resulted in Paul Strand leaving the U.S. to live as an expatriate in France. —Ed.

Featured Comment by Michel: "Let's not forget the bokeh fetishists, shan't we? ;) Ctein, you must be commended for your ability to kick in the nuts all the nuts who swear only by X, Y, or Z. My favorite demonstration of yours is the side-by-side comparison of condenser v. diffusion in Post Exposure: best proof that photographers kill each other for cherry stems."

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "Is the print of the pink flower a dye transfer? I know you don't exclusively print by dye transfer, but I don't see how someone could have the patience for dye transfer if the process didn't have some fetish value. —David A. Goldfarb, albumen fetishist (I'll take the egg, you can keep the chicken)."

By Ctein

Humans have a really annoying habit of dismissing that which they don't understand. I don't know if it's instinct or ego, but it's damn near universal. And it's really unfortunate, because it means they stop learning. Worse yet, they deride those who do learn and they stand in the way of intellectual advancement.

It's a strange and paradoxical thing. If you ask most folks to objectively and dispassionately evaluate their knowledge, they'll have no problem admitting there are folks in the world who know more than they do about most any subject. (The few who won't are to be shunned for one's own self-protection—their hubris is so great that they should always carry a lightning rod.)

I've never met anyone who was so smart they thought there was nothing more for them to learn. But there are people so dumb that they think so. I'm pretty sure none of them are reading this post. Honestly, is there anyone within eyeshot who thinks they know more than everyone else in the world about any subject (outside their sole, personal life, natch)? That's a rhetorical question.

By the same token, is there anyone here who really thinks that only art that has mass appeal for the "common man" is worthwhile, and all the rest is a fraud? I sincerely doubt it, too, unless someone really does think classical music, opera and ballet are con games. It's objectively provable that only a handful of a percentage of the population cares for any of these, and only some fraction of those actually understand them.

Okay, so let's take it as given that probably no one within the readership really thinks they know it all or truly believes that art is only for entertaining the masses. Can we consense on that?

Then why are any of you folks dismissing art you don't understand or don't appreciate as worthless?! Huh, riddle me that!

I've got my own answer. Deep within all of us is an Inner Yahoo. Some sort of proto-hominid vestige, a pink monkey syndrome. It's strange—better chase it off, for the good of the flock.

I'm not immune. I mentioned in a comment that by and large I don't like classical music. I think opera is simply silly. I don't get ballet at all; it goes completely past me to the point that explanations of it just sound like nonsense to me.

But that doesn't bring out my Inner Yahoo. You know what does?

Country & Western music.

My I.Y. thinks it's just dumb beyond belief, annoying as all hell, and a worthless waste of people's times, appreciated only by folks slightly more evolved than Neanderthals.

See, my I.Y.'s just as intolerant as yours. So what's the difference between thee and me? I know it's just my Inner Yahoo, and so I tell it to go to hell instead of trumpeting its ignorant prejudices to the world. Ol' I.Y.'s trying to make me look like a fool and I won't let it.

Well, I hereby liberate you all! Now you are aware of the demon within. Awareness is power; you don't have to let it out.

____________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by Tom: "Too Long text, didn't read. Probably about something I allready know, anyway. :-)"

Featured Comment by John Frendreiss: "While I never knew its name before, I’ve been aware of my Inner Yahoo for quite some time. (It’s a distant cousin to my Inner Spoiled Rotten Brat, but that’s a whole other subject.) The worst thing about the Inner Yahoo is its ability to rise to the surface at the most inappropriate times, causing me to wreck perfectly good conversations by saying things that are amazingly idiotic. Usually, even I’m stunned. As the stupidity passes my lips, I know it's happening, but by then it’s too late. While the I.Y. slinks away back to its home (which I’m quite sure is near the middle of my body, in the back) I’m left standing in the uncomfortable silence, painfully aware of the furtive glances darting between those I’ve just offended. In that one mad moment, I have become: The Outer Yahoo. No matter how lucid and intelligent my repartee may have been up to that point, my forehead suddenly grows a few inches taller, bits of food materialize on my chin, and I develop a case of flatulence that’s positively deafening.   

"Fortunately, experience has taught me to recognize the pending onset of the I.Y.’s influence and I quickly put my defenses into action. When I feel the I.Y. is about to have one of its shining moments, I simply close my mouth. I’m not always fast enough, but it’s getting away with less and less as each year passes.

"As a final thought, my I.Y. has asked me to point out that rap music is totally stupid."

Featured Comment by Sal Santamaura: "Not everyone is willing to suppress their Inner Yahoo. Buddy Rich shared Ctein's IY trigger. Reportedly, when being admitted to the hospital shortly before his death, Rich replied to a question about allergies by saying 'country music, ma'am, just country.' "

Featured Comment by Michael: "I have found remarkable value in C&W music. When I played it backward I got my truck back, my wife back, even my dog back."

Featured Comment by Lars Clausen: "Here's another angle: Maybe the art world has become (over I can't say how long) similar to the stock market, in that it feeds on its own predictions of what will become valuable. If people invest in art not because they like it, but because they think it will be worth more down the road than they pay for it now, it's no longer a question of understanding the art, but of understanding the art world. Total disconnect. Your feelings of whether a piece of art is 'good' may be right or wrong, but for pricing purposes they may well be irrelevant. The value of art is what somebody is willing to pay for it. Such a market (and I'm not saying that all art is treated that way) is something to stay away from unless you have extremely good salesman skills. Like day trading, it's a pyramid scheme that most people will lose money participating in. Notice that it is not required that the participants are aware of the scheming for such a scheme to be successfull. As long as enough people agree that a blurry photo of shit is worth a lot, it will be worth a lot. If they stop thinking it's worth a lot, the last buyer will be left with a blurry photo of shit that's worth...."

By Ctein

The definition of ISO is based only partly in the physical sensitivity of film or sensor. ISO is a judgment about what exposure will produce the best results, on average, with a particular medium of capture. ISO is a compromise.

In 1955 Tri-X had an ASA (ISO's predecessor) of 200. In 1965 it was 400. The film hadn't changed, just the official judgement of what the best exposure was. Higher exposure of B&W film produces better shadow detail, but increased grain and poorer sharpness. Shrinking film formats increased the importance of grain and sharpness in overall quality. The manufacturers decided the emphasis was too much on shadow detail at the expense of those, so ASA values were redefined. Negatives need sufficient exposure to produce shadow detail while not overly compromising grain and sharpness. Slide films must record sufficient highlight detail without having a slide that's unacceptably dark. Many negative photographers routinely "overexpose" by around a stop*. Many slide photographers "underexpose" their photos. We're all aiming for adequate information at the end of the luminance scale where the medium is most likely to fail us. ISO doesn't require you make a certain exposure; it's merely a best guess. But when ISO consistently guesses poorly for a majority of users, it ain't doing what it's supposed to.

Digital sensors have problems similar to slide films; expose more than a certain amount and there's simply no detail. Unlike slide film, digital sensor's behavior in the highlights is not at all graceful. Once the pixel's potential well is full of photoelectrons, clipping occurs. In a purely linear device, that can happen 2–3 stops above middle gray (there are ways to improve that—many cameras do much better).

At the same time as the highlights are getting clipped, there is usually detail well into the shadows, albeit with increasing grain/noise. Cheapo digital cameras can capture a seven stop range; better ones 9–11 stops. In many cameras the luminance capture range is weighted too far in favor of shadows. Especially true as we notice loss of tonal separation in highlights a lot more readily than we notice it in shadows.

From the comments I read about digital cameras (and my own modest experience) I think the digital ISO is simply too low in many (not all) cameras, often by more than a full stop. Many of us have already learned to "underexpose" as normal practice to more usefully balance highlight and shadow detail. We just set our exposure compensation dial for –1 or –1.5 stops and leave it there most of the time. This needs to be institutionalized. Digital ISO is due for reformation to provide exposures that more usefully exploit the sensor's exposure range, balancing adequate shadow and highlight range. On my Fuji Finepix s6500, changing the current ISO of 100 to ISO 250 would be about right.

Both of these photographs were originally made in RAW mode by my Fuji FinePix s65000 camera. (Click on the images to see them larger.) The one on the left was made at ISO 100 with no exposure compensation. The one on the right was made with –1 stop exposure compensation. Both of these photographs were originally made in RAW mode by my Fuji FinePix s65000 camera.

The one on the left was made at ISO 100 with no exposure compensation.  The one on the right was made with –1 stop exposure compensation. I made a curves adjustment in Photoshop to the image on the right, so that the shadows would have about the same brightness in both photographs, for comparison purposes.

The "normally" exposed photograph has blown-out highlights with little or no data in one or more channels. The "underexposed" photograph has good highlight detail and only a slight loss of clarity and separation in the shadows. So, which one would you say was correctly exposed?

There would be side effects. A good one is that you get more low-light capability. Instead of hand-holding at 1/10th of a second, you're hand-holding at 1/25th of the second. The bad is that your pictures become noisier. It's a balancing act, just as defining B&W negative ISO was a balancing act between shadow detail, grain, and sharpness.

But, digital image noise is already better than comparable speed 35 mm film in many digital cameras, and it continues to improve with each generation of sensor. Luminance capture is definitely not better than film in the highlights. I understand the current obsession among the digital newbies for low noise; I'm a fine-grain lover myself. But poor tonal placement is a worse problem that will improve less as sensors get better; it's more inherent in how the sensors map luminance values. We need a new ISO definition and we need it now.

_____________________

Ctein

*(By the way, this has nothing to do with the misconception that manufacturers overrate negative films by half a stop or so.  That's mostly due to mistakenly metering off of 18% gray cards using ISO-standard meters calibrated for 12% reflectance.)