Rants from the Hollow

A famous photographer was invited to dinner party at the city apartment of a woman known as being something of a gourmet cook. As he entered the house, the hostess gushed over him and his work, exclaiming “You must have some very fine camera equipment to produce such fine pictures.”

After the party started to wind down, the photographer made the proper thank you to the hostess for the evening, saying “that was a wonderful meal. You must have some very fine pots and pans to produce some fine dinner like that.”

When people look at my pictures, they often ask me what camera I use, sometimes commenting on the rich colors, or sharpness. I don’t want to be rude, but you shouldn’t expect that your pictures will look like mine, just because you buy a camera like mine.

For what its worth, I’m using a Canon 20D DSLR that I purchased in 2005. A mid-range SLR that is getting a bit long in the tooth, it fills up a heavy little backpack when I include 3-4 somewhat expensive lenses, Canon’s high-end electronic flash and a bit of other gear.

My camera is always set to capture images in RAW. This is a a camera-specific format that captures all of the sensor info, which bears some explanation. Virtually all digital cameras output JPG or ‘jay peg’ either exclusively or optionally. This is a compressed format that contains a lot fewer data than your camera’s sensor collected at the time of exposure. When you choose to use camera-generated JPGs, you are allowing your camera to make a number of aesthetically-relevant decisions about the appearance of your image, including color balance, exposure, contrast, and sharpening. When you shoot in RAW, you retain as much data as possible, so that it can be effectively applied when consciously making decisions on exposure, color, contrast, and sharpening after-the-fact in your digital darkroom. This takes more time, but gives you much, much, more flexibility, and most serious photographers do it. You can spend a lot of time on a single picture.; hours, and even days. Press photographers often shoot RAW and JPG simultaneously, so they’ve got something they can immediately upload, but also have a ‘digital negative’ that they can use later for an enhanced version.

It should also be obvious that taking the photo in the first place requires the application of knowledge and experience, in addition to the making of aesthetic judgments on subject, timing, field of view, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO sensitivity, and lighting.

All of that said, the bigger your camera, the more likely you are to get better pictures. No camera can make aesthetic decisions on your behalf, and I’ve seen plenty of lackluster photos taken on high-end camera gear, but the better the camera, the more likely that it will get the exposure correct, freeze motion, be in focus, and be free of distortion. Although its effect can be somewhat ameliorated by several hundred dollars worth of software, lens distortion degrades the quality of pictures taken with less expensive gear, and avoiding it is one of the reasons why my normal lens is inconveniently heavy, and costs more than an entry level DSLR & lens combined.

Buying a Stradivarius won’t turn you into a world class violinist, but if you have some talent to see and capture interesting images, a cheap camera will hold you back. In any craft, the more experienced you become, the better able you are to take advantage of sophisticated tools. A $500 wood plane won’t turn an apprentice into a cabinet maker, but a $50 plane would often prevent a master woodworker from reaching the full potential of their art. You should purchase something commensurate with your skill level. Today’s entry level DSLRs are pretty darn good, and very reasonably priced. Instead of buying a mid-level camera with the maker’s cheapest 18-55mm zoom, spend less on the camera and buy a better lens. Or consider getting a bridge camera, which is similar in layout to a DSLR, but is smaller, and avoids the need for changing lenses.

MAKE SURE YOU’VE GOT THE SOUND TURNED UP SO YOU CAN HEAR THE WORDS.

This represents a couple of experiments. I created this slideshow from pictures I took during a weekend in Istanbul last month, using Adobe Lightroom to process the RAW shots, and ProShow Gold to create the slide show and add music. This version in Photodex’ proprietary .px format, which requires a plug-in (it should download automatically if you need it). The second part of the experiment is that this AV presentation is hosted on my web server, and mashed into my blog, and that it plays right inside this post (with no annoying YouTube logo).

You can view this in full-screen, but native resolution is 640×480. I’ve also uploaded one to the Photodex server, which probably has better Internet connectivity than heiserhollow.net does, and will show at a higher res.

For my parents and co-workers who found it impossible to download Photodex’s plug-in, here’s a version in Shockwave that is less attractive and less reliable, but more likely to function.   If all else fails, or you really want to take some time to look at higher-res 1280×1024 versions, you can view the photos in my photo gallery. Note that you can access a non-animated, non-musical slide show from a link at the bottom of that page.

I’d like to upload more of these–let me know if you have problems, or what you’d rather see. Too big? Too slow? Too small? Too technically difficult?

I managed to mostly stay pretty close to home during the first half of the year, but after Kirk left for college, travel kicked in with a vengeance.

Including the US and UK, work has sent me to 14 countries and at least 29 different cities this year. Going to Bulgaria with Young Life was a 15th country.

Work doesn’t normally take me to the US on business, but I was in Vegas, Salt Lake, LA, San Jose, San Francisco, Cleveland, Akron, and Cincy in 2008.

I’ve seen the inside, and outside, of a lot of hotels, and its usually dark outside.

Watts Memorial in Postman Park

I was pleasantly surprised today to learn that one of my photos had been selected as the Picture of the Week on a photo website that I’ve been frequenting lately, Photosig.

Unlike photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Pbase, the primary purpose of Photosig is to critique photos. Anyone is allowed to upload 1 picture every 72 hours at no cost, and then the picture is critiqued by other Photosig members. To encourage members to perform critiques, the recipient other viewers of their photo, have the opportunity to rate critiques as being helpful or not. Receiving a certain number of critique helpfulness points ups your upload quota.

I’ve been experimenting with a wide variety of different photos, both B&W and color, in a variety of genres and styles. A few of my favorites have been well received, while others have been roundly ignored. There have also been a few shots that I considered highly experimental which have attracted a lot of attention. Funny.  I can get a list and sort it either by number of times a picture was accessed, or the number of points it has been given by critiquers. Surprisingly, those two numbers are not directly correlated. There are some that only a small number of people view, but a higher percentage of those viewers feel compelled to write a short critique and award points.  You can see all my uploaded pictures here.  I’m having fun, and I’m learning a lot, both from reading the critiques of my pictures, and from giving it.

For the past year, I’ve enjoyed membership in the Bracknell Camera Club. The speakers, and competition judges, for that matter, seem to be chosen on the basis of how colorful they are. At least from my POV, growing up in America, some of these crusty old analog dudes are…..unusual.

We had a neurosurgeon speak once. He did beautiful B&W photos of symphony performers, and in his oh-so-received accent he explained that he was actually a very simple man who used the simplest gear possible: a Leica with an F/1 lens. I’m never sure if the English actually are polite or not, but nobody snorted out loud.

A more recent speaker (in calendar terms, not age), was a bit more wired, and he actually used our club digital projector, raving over the potential offered by PowerPoint as a slideshow platform. He animated lines across his photos to demonstrate how in spite of his being a completely intuitive photographer, when you looked at his photos, you had to agree that he was instinctively following well-recognized principles of composition. It would be unfair of me to quote him as having said “One doesn’t tweak.” What he actually said was, and you have to imagine an outdated sort of BBC English that is no longer taught (nor received), “Well, of course I use Photoshop, but just for minor exposure and light balance changes. I do not tweak.”

In terms of either the digital or the analog darkroom, just what constitutes a tweak?

I grew up using an old-fashioned darkroom. Thanks to an extremely talented and dedicated teacher, Judi Coolidge, my high school had a serious journalism program, with one of USA’s consistently rated yearbooks and a weekly, multi-page newspaper. You quickly learn that journalistic photography is about coming up with the goods as requested, on time. When you are sent to cover a story, the editor is planning on using your picture, and if you fail, for either technical or aesthetic reasons, then everybody has a problem.

You try your best to expose correctly, and develop the film properly, but if you screw up, you do what you can to make a usable photo. Once you’ve got a negative in hand, there are a lot of decisions to make with exposure, contrast, dodging, and burning. I actually spent a lot of time reprinting other people’s pictures, and sometimes had to use 5-grade high contrast paper to try and make a decent picture out of muddy underexposed images. Was that tweaking? If so, then long live tweaking.

A few years ago, it was all the rage for artsy photographers to file out their enlarger’s negative carrier so that the edges of the film showed, demonstrating that their photo was framed in-camera exactly as printed. What kind of a strange little contest is that? Books and magazines are generally not publishing pictures using the exact aspect ratio of the cameras which took them, so most published pictures are cropped. Does it truly improve the viewer’s aesthetic experience when they know that the photo wasn’t cropped? For that matter, why should the viewer care how many layers I used in Photoshop?

The only thing that counts is what is on the final print. Certainly it helps to optimize the capture and reduce the need for later manipulation, but ultimately, only the photographer knows.

At the top of this posting is a photo I took last year on a Young Life service project to an orphanage in Bulgaria. It was a harsh place, and the kids in the Tran orphanage had a difficult time of it, but for a week, the kids on our service project managed to connect with them.

This picture to the immediate left is closer to the original, but it still has undergone a lot of processing, and it should be pretty obvious that I removed a large brown splotch on the wall. We had just primed the walls, but no amount of primer was capable of fully covering the filth that had been allowed to collect on this wall. From a journalistic point of view, I would probably have left the splotch in, although I’m not certain of that. I don’t think anyone can doubt that as an aesthetic effort, and one that properly portrays the mood of these two girls, the ‘tweaked’ picture at the top of this post, is superior. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the shadow under the redhead’s chin is darker in the ‘original’ than it is above. More tweaking on my part.

The ‘original’ file created by my camera is in camera RAW format, and it cannot be viewed by a human being without being processed in a way that affects the colors, exposure, and contrast. I used Adobe Lightroom to adjusted white balance, exposure and color as my starting point. Then I used CS3 to clone out the splotch on the wall and lighten the shadows, along with a couple other ‘tweaks’ that you wouldn’t notice.

I do feel that much of the power of this picture lies in its authenticity, and that it would be wrong to make substantial manipulations. The redhead actually does have paint all over her fingernails, having ‘helped’ us do the hallways of the orphanage. The other girl was recovering from eye surgery, paid for by a Christian charity. If she had been paying me for a professional portrait, she might have expected that I would open up her eye and align the pupils of both–I really don’t know. I’m comfortable that what I did to the picture was appropriate, and does not misrepresent the lives or spirits of these teens. I tweaked the picture, and I’m proud to admit it.

Lots of photographers like to brag that they capture the picture in camera, and that their pictures don’t need any additional processing. Well, you can still buy transparency film, and as long as you don’t scan it or print it in a darkroom, then you can claim that you didn’t tweak it. Last I heard, a couple guys in Paris had bought up the last of the small-format Polaroid instant film, but even much SX-70 photography is subject to after the fact ‘tweaking.’

The fact is, you can’t reproduce either a film negative or a digital one without making multiple aesthetic decisions about the output appearance. That holds true for journalism and documentary photography as much as it does for purely abstract photography.

The question of what constitutes representational truth and integrity is a deep one, and I’ll be exploring it, and look forward to discussing it. But it isn’t about tweaking. This is a picture. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

I spent 2 days of my vacation configuring Adobe Lightroom on my dad’s laptop. We are members of a unique generation, having been forced the hard way to learn how to coddle and configure computers, our parents are totally dependent upon us to ensure that they can send jokes and urban legend links to their retired friends. Our kids use Macs, and don’t need to know how they work, and don’t care.

Configuring Lightroom on my own PC in Feb 07, and actively using it ever since gave me some painful but useful lessons in Digital Asset Management (DAM), that were reinforced thru my experiences helping Dad actually make use of his year old license. He didn’t feel sufficiently motivated to do more than dabble with it, relying on Bridge CS3, although he actually has over 10,000 digital images. Believe me, if you have over 10K photos, you need some sort of DAM software. And you need to be comfortable with the way computers work in order to plan your asset management strategy (and fix it when you get it wrong).

Starting from a Mess

Over the years, Dad had been collecting external hard drives like baseball cards.When I arrived, he had 3 of them connected to his laptop–1 for ‘up to 2006′, 1 for ‘mostly 2007′ and 1 for ‘mostly 2008′. Some directories were duplicated, but nothing was actually backed up. When I finally finished, he had a coherent storage process, and a consistent backup process.

Consolidating and Simplifying

We bought an additional external drive (yes, a 4th one), so we’d have one for a backup. We retired 2 of the drives, making sure that the H: drive had copies of all the pictures, and the backup drive, in conjunction with the two smaller retired drives, between them had a copy of all the pictures, too. I took the biggest drive, and consolidated all the pictures on it, creating directories:

H:\2006
H:\2007
H:\2007
H:\SubjectX
H:\SubjectY
H:\SubjectZ

The last 3 names are just meant to represent several subject specific directories that I created for themes Dad repeats consistently. A series of event directories ended up in each of the years, which is the same system I use. I’ve found its reasonably easy to locate specific events and subjects, even if I have 50 or so a year. People who shoot hundreds of pages a day, and have bunches of subjects, usually setup Lightroom to automatically download files into the hierarchy Year\Month\Date. It really doesn’t matter how you organize files on your hard drive, because Lightroom mostly hides those implementation details from you. Just be consistent so you can access them outside of Lightroom if you need them.

Importing Into Lightroom’s Catalog

At this point, I made a tactical error. Instead of importing everything on H:\ into Lightroom, I imported each of the directories on H:\. This meant that it was impossible to create any directory at the top level, at least using the Navigator in Lightroom (yes, I can think of several ways to do it, but why burden Dad with that?). So I rearranged the catalog such that it started at the top of the drive. Now Dad can periodically right click on H:\ in the Navigator, choose ‘Synchronize,’ and be sure that no matter what he might of have done in Bridge, it’ll get picked up and incorporated.

The New Photo Download Process

To download pictures, Dad connects both the backup and the H: drive to his laptop. I configured Adobe Lightroom so that it automatically starts the Import process whenever a Flash card is inserted. Dad chooses the directory he wants the files imported into, and leaves the rest of the configuration alone. Its set to copy the files onto his H: drive, and copy a backup onto the other external drive. When he’s done, he disconnects the backup drive. He’s under strict instructions to not do any editing of files on that drive.

He leaves the keyword field blank. Or at least that’s what I told him to do. I find that its far too easy to inadvertently leave keywords from a previous import, putting spurious meta data into your pictures. Keyword in Grid View after you’ve got them all imported. That’s one of the tricks to Lightroom, making sure that you’ve put enough meta data into your pictures so that you can find them. I’ve got a bunch of presets for setting location, and a couple for setting the creator field. I can locate everything I’ve done for the past 5 years by country, state/county, and (usually) city. I keyword them heavily. Personally, I like to give them unique names that at least summarize the place or event, but I try not to rely on file names as a way to locate files. Its just too clumsy.

Because Dad still anticipates making heavy use of Bridge, I setup Lightroom so that it always makes XMP sidecar files for his NIKON RAW files. This way, Bridge and Lightroom can share the same ACR settings, along with keywords, color labels, etc. (Using DNG would arguably be cleaner, but that’s another discussion.)

When I left, Dad was sorting thru his pictures, tagging them and occasionally moving them–all within Lightroom. He can easily sort them by time (no, I didn’t show him how to edit the capture time of scanned photos), and is well on his way towards finding his favorites based on rating, and subject. Once you’ve done the planning, config, and initial import, your most of the way there. As long as you discipline yourself to put in the meta data, you, and your descendents, will always be able to find the right photo.

Technorati : DAM, Digital Asset Management, digital photography