Author: James Vornov

Drain at Sunset, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I cancelled my preorder for the new Olympus XZ-1 compact this morning after some thought about whether I would really use it much. This is another image from my California trip, again proving to me that I could put the D7000 and Tamron zoom in my carry-on and capture images during a few hours of down time.

There are photographers that I respect who have been using the latest generation of compact cameras and the micro four thirds mirrorless cameras from Panasonic and Olympus as a lighter kit.

I’ve realized that I’m just not a travel, editorial or event photographer. I use my photography as a creative outlet. I return home from a vacation with photographs of stumps and storm drains. The big view location photographs tend to be uninteresting to me when I review the images.

Certainly I always wish I had more visual diary type images, but if I go out with a compact, I end up capturing what I find visually interesting, not what I want to remember.

I use my iPhone camera regularly because its connected and has geotagging built in. I can upload to Facebook for friends and family or send an email or MMS with the image. Downloading RAW files into Aperture just doesn’t have the same spontaneity.

I leave the Sigma DP1 out of the discussion because its a full size sensor compact and provides images of great quality. Its a slow, quirky camera with a slow fixed lens (f/4) and a sensor that doesn’t do well above ISO 400. But its been my travel creative camera and provided some of my best images. I also keep the Leica M6 for shooting film from time to time. But the D7000 is my camera of choice. I don’t see that adding an expensive compact like the Olympus is really going to help me capture more images.

Edge of the Ocean 2, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Another take on the subject.

These were taken looking down on the break from the Malibu Fishing Pier. The Tamron zoom is racked out all the way.

One of the tricks here is using FocalPoint to create blur that makes it look like the perspective is closer, like using a tilt shift lens to create images that look miniature.

This is one of the fundamentals of Vincent Versace’s “cinematic” approach. Capture the image knowing what you can do in post processing, but preserve everything in the capture that you’ll need for the further manipulations. On film, you needed the tilt shift lens. In the digital realm, one can easily simulate the effect.

Another principle is to add these effects enough to get the brain to look, but not beyond believability. This is really a cinematic principle. We want suspension of disbelief, not disbelief itself.

Edge of the Ocean, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I had a few hours to capture some images during a trip this week to LA. This is the ocean at Malibu.

As a workflow evolves, image capture should too. At the time of capture the are the basics of exposure, focus and composition. The post processing starts at capture. When I started capturing some simple wave on sand, I knew that I’d be working with a contrast in tone and texture between green ocean and warm sand.

Tiles Waiting, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Like many others, I’m finding the 13 inch MacBook Air a very capable substitute for my 15 inch MacBook Pro.

The two main obstacles both relate to file storage. I’ve been running a dual Aperture Library strategy for a few years now. I have a project library on the internal hard drive and a large reference library on an external FW800 disk. There’s also the slower USB drives used for Vaults. The Air lacks FireWire, so I need to use USB 2.0 to access the big library. But it works well enough to transfer a project onto the internal SSD drive in the Air. It just takes some planning and time.

The other obstacle is saving Photoshop files on the Air. Its a lot slower than the MBP. This is presumably memory and processor dependent. SInce I work in bulk with Aperture it’s not a big workflow issue, just the only big noticeable step backward in moving from one system to the other. Filter and layer speed on the 2GB Air is perfectly fine.

It’s been suggested that the SSD helps the photo workflow because it provides fast virtual memory. This may be true. In the past I’ve always had Macs hang because of paging memory to disk, a situation improved by adding memory to the Mac. An SSD may be a more cost effective way of dealing with this compared to actual RAM

Reductionism can be powerful.

Through careful study, a component of a system can be identified and its role in the function of the system defined. Manipulation of that component can be shown to affect the system in a predictable way. It’s often possible to generalize- the heart is a pump in mice, cats and elephants. At a molecular level in the brain, the established role of CREB in aplysia neuronal function predicts role of CREB in mouse hippocampus. Human hippocampus? Well we can’t know because the experiments can’t be done, but the body of available evidence generates a strong belief that it does. The scientific fact that KREB is involved in human learning and memory

These scientific theories are not facts, they are statements with a probability of being true and a complementary probability of being false. Scientists recognize this at least implicitly because the method of science is to collect additional data that will either falsify or support the theory. This data will either increase or decrease belief in the truth of the theory. Sometimes theories are completely abandoned. Our earlier belief turns out to have been unwarrented.This is straightforward pragmatism.

It’s a major mistake to ignore the probability element in scientific theory. We don’t even need to consider how reliable the data really is, the nature of these complex systems makes their significance uncertain. The influence of one system component may vary in hard to predict ways because of changes in other components.

And because statements about complex systems are not true or false, we must make decisions based on belief, the probability of the statement being true. Since just about everything we deal with is a complex system, this impossibility of knowing the future is everywhere. Uncertainty can be found in the very structure of the world.

Umbrian Wall, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

These flat, often bisected texture and contrast studies have been a constant in my images since I picked up my Minolta SRT200 in 1979. I’ve always struggled with how easily I can make these. These days I look at an image like this and simply appreciate how the image recreates the pleasure I personally have being in a receptive state looking at the world around me. Its a re-creation, a re-experiencing of a place and time now distant.

In the Frantoio, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

We’re too snow and cold bound in Baltimore for new image capture, so I’m wandering through Umbria again with these D300 images from 2009. The Oz 2.0 techniques are giving me a second chance to see and enhance the light in the captures.

Chaos Theory was developed by exploring dynamical systems in computers. Its worthwhile considering this idea of a system itself in our exploration of deciding better.

Systems theory is an approach to studying a collection of parts by considering them as a whole. Each part has its role to play and some how interacts with other parts of the system. Consideration of systems is vital to understand where uncertainty comes from in our world or in simple clockwork universes like computer programs.

There’s is a much stronger tradition in empirical science of reductionism, understanding the functioning of a system by taking it apart to study its component pieces. The contribution of the part is considered by examining the interaction of that part with other parts of the system. If the functioning of those parts is understood, an overall picture of the system is built up. For example, the biochemical processes of a cell can be understood by analyzing the metabolites and how they are processed by cellular enzymes.

Reductionism has proven an extraordinarily powerful way to understand the world. For the most part, when an enzyme is blocked in a cell, its product disappears and its precursor builds up exactly as expected. You don’t need to know much about the function of the metabolites or the habitat and behavior of the animal. The function of these components is likely to be the same in locust, rat, cat and man.

A powerful reductionist approach is to study simple systems. The study of memory in the brain of humans or even rats remains much too complicated to explain as a system. It was possible to trace the system to particular brain areas like the hippocampus by studying brain injury in man and experimental lesions in rats. But after establishing that a rat without its hippocampal formations can’t remember how to rerun a maze, how can you figure out the circuitry within the hippocampus that stores that memory? And even if you do, how do you trace that function in the full functioning of a rat in a maze with its visual input and motor output?

Eric Kandel took the approach of finding a much simpler system to study memory, choosing the sea slug Aplysia as an experimental model. This classic reductionist approach provided important insights into how connections between neurons are changed by activity and eventually many of the same mechanisms were found to be operating in the rat brain. Eventually manipulation of these mechanisms in rats demonstrated that they were critical for memory formation.

Reductionism often works well in science. It shows that a component or mechanism in one system serves a similar purpose in another system even though these systems may be too complex themselves to understand fully. This can serve as valuable information if it turns out that manipulation of this one particular component has a consistent effect on the functioning of the overall system.

I’ve just finished re-reading Mitchel Wladrup’s Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos to followup on the Chaos discussion. About halfway through I realized that the book is now 20 years old. Perhaps because it was written so close to the founding of the Santa Fe Institute and was based primarily on interviews with key figures in that exciting flowering of ideas it still provides a vivid read.

I was struck by how little impact these big ideas seem to have had on the usual way of seeing the world. Perhaps chaos, complexity and emergence have entered the language, but dreams of improved prediction tools or appreciation of principles like unintended consequences don’t seem to have been achieved. There was a feeling when the book was written that we were on the verge of new forms of artificial intelligence and new approaches to economics that would help us understand the interconnectedness of the global economy. We have Google and mobile devices like the iPad. Sadly, it seems like more of the same only faster and in more places.

I had hoped that tools of decision theory, modeling and simulation would change difficult research and development projects like drug development. In my current job I get a pretty fair overview of the industry on a daily basis and can report that little has changed.

Insights from behavioral economics and advances in cognitive science that have had less impact one we way we see the world. There’s a constant stream of media reports about the science, but little evidence that these fundamental insights are informing our discussions about human behavior and ethics.

My original impulse when I started writing On Deciding . . . Better in late 1999 was to be at least one voice discussing what I thought were important implications of decision theory and Bayesian approaches to probability theory. Over the years, I’ve explored the sources of uncertainty in the world and most recently the emerging insights of Cognitive Neuroscience. I admit that mostly I write for myself, to get ideas out into better organized form and critically review them for myself.

My view of the value of writing and publishing on the net hasn’t changed in the last decade. I have a free, universally accessible publishing platform for my ideas. I’ve been fortunate over the years to actually have kindred spirits interested enough to read and comment on my efforts. I’ve been further encouraged over the last few months finding how Twitter as a microblogging environment provides a new venue to widen that circle of interaction like a virtual interdisciplinary conference.

The world of ideas is still vibrant. Its bigger and noisier than it was in 1992 or at the founding of the Santa Fe Institute in 1984. Certainly its bigger than the world of physics was at the time of either Einstein or Newton. However, I’m brave enough to suggest that like our world, those worlds also were ruled by a power law dictating the impact of ideas.