Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

Owning the Frame

I didn’t realize that Vincent Versace had started some real blogging at the Acme Educational Site. I think it’s a great idea because his ideas are very densely presented in “Welcome to Oz”. And I think that there’s lots of capture related thinking that isn’t really developed there.

As I’ve been shooting, I’ve had this thought from Vincent intruding on my process: “Own the Frame”. For as long as I’ve photographed, I’ve avoided cropping unless absolutely necessary. I try to have the discipline to compose in the viewfinder. When it looks like a picture, I trip the shutter.

But try this on for size:

VIncent Versace: “The problem is that we operate under a belief that one actually composes a photograph. Unless you are in a studio doing a still life, where you can move the objects in your image around, you don%u2019t compose a photograph, you frame it. That%u2019s a big difference in how you conceptualize your images. “

For the last year or two I’ve been afraid of capturing images like the one on this page. These formal compositions is where I started and remain a comfort zone for me. However I now have a better context for them as details of the suburban landscape. Yellow curb paint is definitely a color of suburbia. And we may not have jewel like mountains, but we have lots of jewel like asphalt.

In Praise of the Nikon 24-120mm AF-S VR Nikkor

After I posted my alphabet exercise to the “Welcome to Oz” Flickr group, I mentioned that I never bought a midrange zoom. Not that I never thought about it, but I basically gravitated back to the 24mm f/2.8 prime on the Nikon. I looked at the kit lenses, looked at the new 16-85mm VR, thought about the Sigma 17-70 Macro, but never felt I needed one until I did the alphabet exercise.

Shooting with a prime is reactive. One is presented with the view and can change angle and move in and out, but it’s a modification of the image. It’s hard to, as Versace says, “Own the Frame”. Call me an acolyte, but when Vincent said in the Flickr group that the Nikon 24-120mm was his most favorite single walk around lens, I ordered a used one from KEH.com. It seemed to be a decent match to the 12-24mm f/4 as my wide lens. Being 24mm at the wide end would match my usual walk around 24mm but give me range into the telephoto range with vibration reduction to boot.

As I looked around the net for reviews I found that the 24-120mm is an unloved lens. It is slammed as unsharp on the DPReview and PhotoNet message boards, with a few objections by happy users.

Thom Hogan damns the lens with faint praise, although admitting that he doesn’t like midrange zooms anyway:

Nikon 24-120mm AF-S VR Nikkor review by Thom Hogan: “Overall, the 24-120mm AF-S VR is much better than its predecessor, but not by enough to make me sit up and pay attention. Personally, I wish they had added VR to the 24-85mm AF-S instead of making this lens. Even so, it has found a place in my casual travels when I want to travel as light as possible (e.g., one lens, one body, no tripod).”

Bjorn Rorslett, a well respected Nikon lens reviewer subjectively calls the lens “quite soft”.

And while Ken Rockwell argues that sharpness doesn’t matter, I believe that lenses have characteristic ways of rendering scenes. The Nikon 105mm Micro renders sharp and contrasty. There’s a beauty in the details that the lens can produce, often becoming the point of the picture. Rockwell also calls the 24-120mm “not very sharp” and would relegate it to snapshots it seems.

On the other hand, Moose Peterson is a fan:

Nikon 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6VR AF-S: “Yes, I’ve read all those ‘web reports’ reporting this or that problem. Amazingly once again the lens I purchased just works, no problems. In fact, the very first day I shot with it was for a small job and it did a great job producing a dynamite 19x print right before the clients eyes. For me, that’s all I can ask for.”

For me, I offer just this one image so far. I didn’t hit the right focus on this shot, with the foreground grass in optimal focus and the middle ground curbs are not as in focus as I’d like. On the other hand, I’ve been trying to get this shot for many months and the midrange zoom allowed me to finally frame it without laying down in the street. I agree with Moose and Vincent so far. My copy is a sharp enough lens. I need to learn how to judge what DOF is going to be when I can instantly crank the lens from a somewhat wide to normal range to telephoto. My experience is that most “sharpness” issues in real world image taking are focus or movement problems.

Flaws

Here’s another Urban Motion image from London taken with the Leica M6ttl and Ilford XP2 black and white C41 process film. It’s about as flawed an image as I’ve ever put up here, but it fits with the images I’ve been collecting. Rain fogged lens, monochrome ISO 400 film with some grain, poor focus and subject motion all combined. Of course the same camera with Velvia at ISO 100 is as sharp as you like but now edged out by my D300 I think.

My M6 is still a useful special purpose tool. I’m glad that I passed on the digital M8 though, as it seemed just too flawed of a camera. But that seems old news to me now. So it’s surprising to me how much attention this review by a photojournalist in Iraq has been getting:

Leica M8 Field Test, Iraq: “Review of the Leica M8”

I will try to make this review as comprehensive as possible with samples of the work I have done with the three M8’s that I have used. This will allow others a detailed look at my experiences with the M8, most of which have been negative. Please keep in mind that there are many other photographers who like the M8.

Assessing the Leica/BW/City Project

Stop Or I’ll Shoot, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’m reviewing the body of work that I’ve shot over the past year with the Leica in black and white. I gradually moved toward Ilford’s XP2 with scans done by the local lab. I have rescanned some images and experiemented with TriX, which I scanned myself. But the look of the project seems to be XP2.

The few monochrome digital images don’t fit in with their crisp look. And the digital color from some trips have a different idea behind them, essentially an extension of the Suburban Landscape, an Urban Landscape aesthetic.

It was only recently that I discovered this theme of motion. This image doesn’t fit in, but it’s interesting. I’ve been capturing people photographing in the city for a while but most of those images so far don’t do much for me. It will probably something that I keep after.

But I am taken with these images recorded at slow shutter speed, generally 1/30 or 1/15 with moving figures or vehicles. I actually like the anonymous quality of images where faces can’t be seen very clearly, since that’s my experience of these cities. Motion, anonymity.

London and the Leica

Pedestrians, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’m always surprised when I’ve been shooting digital for a while and then get the scans from a film session. The rendering is so different and to my eye, complete. Digital images seem like starting points to me. FIlm, with it’s characteristic response curves and local contrast effects starts closer to a finished image.

This is Ilford’s XP2, a chromogenic black and white film, shot with the Leica M6 and Summicron 35mm f/2.0. A rainy day in London.

Versace’s Alphabet Exercise

T, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

In the Flickr “Welcome to Oz” group, Vincent Versace invited us to try an exercise he uses in workshops. And as it turns out, personally.

The game is to go out for an hour and shoot the forms of the alphabet. No printed letters or visual puns allowed.

I put the 105mm f/2.8 Micro on the D300 and shot for about 45 minutes. The result is here:
Suburban Alphabet May 2208.

It was difficult using the prime because I sometimes couldn’t get the angle or distance to isolate the form and, as Versace says, “own the frame”. This image, T, was one example where it did work out well.

Vincent commented that he had never had anyone try it with a prime, much less a macro. I told him I didn’t know any better. Although that’s only partly true, because as I was facing the challenges, I realized that a midrange zoom would make the task much easier in giving me shot to shot flexibility in framing. It actually was something of a breakthrough moment for me as it turned around my thinking.

Generally my eye is attracted by some visual effect. Light, form or perhaps color. I approach, put the camera to my eye and move around until I see a picture in the viewfinder. It’s one reason why I generally don’t crop my images. I’m creating the composition by positioning the camera. I’ve tended not to like zooms because I don’t know what to do with the extra degree of freedom they provide.

But if one’s visualization is one step back, as in “That wagon handle looks like a ‘T’. How do I frame it? What’s the best focal length to isolate or or show the environment?” then the FOV becomes another part of the choice and pre-visualization.

Net result is that I’ve taken Vincent’s advice and bought a midrange zoom from KEH. A 24-120mm VR f/3.5-5.6 which is his favorite walking around lens. It arrived yesterday and have already started shooting with it.

The City in Monochrome

The Lecture Before the Bus, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’m back from a relatively short trip to London. I was faced, as always, with the decision of what gear to bring. I’ve been using the Sigma DP1 on recent trips of course, but I had a series in London using the Leica M6ttl and black and white film.

In the end, I took both. The weather was not conducive to shooting. Drizzle intermittently changing to rain. Fogged and wet lenses. I was able to capture just a dozen images one afternoon. I chose the DP1 because I knew I’d have so little time that I didn’t want to carry the Leica around. I’ll convert these to monochrome as part of the series.

It will be a few days before I have the Ilford XP2 rolls developed, scanned and post-processed.

Rendering the Light

The Captivating BMW C1 Scooter, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Here’s another distracted pedestrian trying to figure out where that guy is pointing the camera.

In the original capture, the light was uninspiring and local contrast effects just weren’t moving the image into anything interesting looking. I pulled down my copy of Versace’s “Welcome to Oz”, reduced the image to 8 bit, and fired up Photoshop’s Filter:Render:Lighting Effects filter which Vincent uses in the book.

I created some stage-lit hotspot effects in the image which creates more visual interest. Once you know they’re there, its a little too obvious for my taste, but I’ve found that it’s part of my learning curve for these cinematic images. I push things beyond where they really ought to be to stay believable and then pull them back enough so that they are present but less obvious.

Flickr Diary

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Target Dumpster, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This image isn’t really a “Flickr” image. It doesn’t read well to me at small size with it’s compressed value. In the print, the vibrant red plays off well against the black and the small illuminated area at the center.

If the image isn’t suitable for Flickr, why post it? My Flickr stream is a diary for me. I can look over my output over time to learn quickly about where I’m moving as a photographer. And I’m very grateful for the audience that a public diary brings. The feedback from individuals and from the view flow is useful in context.

While I’ve been comparison shopping and comparing the iTunes music store with Amazon’s MP3 downloads, I discovered that the old ECM catalog is mostly available on Amazon now. These have been some of my favorite LPs and at 7 or 8 dollars, makes downloading attractive.

Glad I skipped the CD era on these recordings.

Compact Camera Shoot in the National Geographic

Fritz Hoffman uses a digital camera as polaroids were once used:

Editor’s Pick – Film is dead, long live film – National Geographic Magazine – NGM.com
One digital camera that Fritz does actually carry with him now is a Canon G7 point & shoot (the newest model is the G9). He tends to use it to check lighting, color balance and also as a way to make visual notesâ€”he may shoot a Chinese sign and then later have it translated.

The editors at National Geographic used one of the G7 images as a two page spread in the latest National Geographic. Hoffman prefers film because of his way of working, it seems. No distracting previews, the simple, silent interface of the Leica M camera.