Rants from the Hollow

I got off to a rocky start on the 2nd day. In what turned into my start-of-the-workday pattern, it seemed to always take 45 minutes before I was able to make clean prints. After powering up my computer and Lee Anne’s printer, I started on the 60 small head shots that would be cut out and put into wooden frames that are cutout to look like a body. The kids decorated them yesterday. My first attempt came out with a couple of horrible-looking green prints that would be perfect for a Halloween party, but maybe not so good for a Christian children’s craft. I ran the diagnostic and it indicated that one cartridge was empty, and the other nearly so. Did it drain out overnight? I replaced both cartridges, and after a reboot and a paper jam, was back to printing out a stack of photos.

By the end of the first day, I’d managed to get a stack of 5×7″ pages printed with a total of 43 head shots that were later cut out in circles to insert in the stick people frames. On the second day, I started to print off what would eventually amount to almost 100 4×6″ prints. I wouldn’t have been able to mass produce so many prints in such a short time if I hadn’t brought along a laptop and a copy of Adobe’s Lightroom software.

The printer turned out to be a high-maintenance item. Besides my daily problems with feeding it cartridges (I eventually used up 6 of the 11 cartridges that I’d brought with me), the printer also needed a lot of feeding. Several times I walked away from the printer for 30 minutes to photograph and video some of the other projects, and came back to find that it had run out of paper or had jammed.

Pictures to fit the decorated frames were printed by the end of the day, so I started a second run of the pictures used for the head shots. This time, instead of printing off just their heads, I printed off the entire picture. Some of the kids had put a lot of heart into the posing process, and I figured they’d be disappointed without seeing the entire photo (also, I figured some of the older kids might not be as excited to see their head on top of a popsicle stick).

By the end of our stay, I’d made over 175 prints.

We decided that it’d be fun to stick all the pictures onto a couple of the dividers in the centre so that everybody could see everybody else’s portrait. The younger kids seemed to get a real kick out of seeing their older brothers and sisters hanging up on the wall.

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.

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.

It was claimed this month that a picture of an Iranian missile launch was doctored to look more significant. A recent Scientific American article asks Hany Farid (a researcher into digital forensics) how likely that is, and he offers several subtle clues to suggest that this image is not authentic.

Digital Photographs are inherently vulnerable to manipulation. Indeed, manipulation is an integral part of the process of capturing and reproducing an image digitally. Factors that affect the appearance of the final image are set even before a photo is captured, starting with the photographer’s choice of shutter speed, aperture, focal length, position, perspective, timing. etc. All of these are of course relevant to analog photography. Just as different films react to light in different ways, resulting in different images, the camera sensor and associated processing mechanisms output a bitmap that is not identical with the light that fell on the sensor. Before that bitmap can be turned into a visual image, it needs to be further processed, especially if it is a RAW image, which is what most pros and advanced amateurs use.

Although the journalism field has been discussing the issues and problems associated with digital imagery since the 90s, embarrassing photo ‘fakes’ have continued to leak into the major media, which has encouraged the publication of increasingly stringent guidelines. Last year, Reuters shared their Photoshop guidelines on a blog, an interesting example of transparency in the media. In it, photographers are discouraged from doing any manipulation of their photo, including exposure and white balance, and are encouraged to rely on in house experts.

This is an especially sensitive issue with Reuters after a rather obviously manipulated photo caught the attention of the blogging world, and then the mass media (a lengthy and interesting analysis of this and several other faked Reuters pictures from the same period appears on another blog). It is certainly not the case that such incidents are limited to Reuters. A Toledo Blade photographer was let go for pasting a basketball into a game shot, which turned out not to be the first time he had manipulated a picture in a way that was considered inappropriate for the journalistic context.

Photographic integrity comes down to meeting the expectations of the anticipated viewer. If the person who you intend to view your picture knew what you did to it, would they approve? If they saw a before and after, would they consider that you had attempted a deception? Would the deception be for their gain at your loss? Expectations vary widely between media. No reasonable person should expect that the photos in glamor magazines of models look anything like a live human, but in Journalism, even the suggestion of manipulation is unacceptable.

In this month’s case of the faked Iranian missile launch, the New York Times reports that Agence France-Presse picked up the original picture from a political web site, and then it was published on the front page of several American newspapers before France-Presse retracted it. In an age when newspapers are imposing ever-stricter standards on their own people, how responsible is it for a news agency to sell a picture that they copied off the web?

Technorati : Farid, authenticity, digital darkroom, image manipulation, orphans, photo integrity, photography, photoshop, trust