Author: James Vornov

Making the right decisions is necessary for success. it doesn’t matter how well one executes on the plan. If the wrong choice was made at the outset, the result is wrong.

The challenge is making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It’s not knowing what will happen in the future that makes the choice hard now.

Much complexity is illusory and really nothing more than uncertainty. The apparent complexity is in the mind. There is no complex system in the world that maps onto all that thought. In the real world, the die may be cast. We may be entirely unable to influence the state of the world. Yet we build castles of anxiety in our minds worrying about what will happen when it already has.

A large part of our brains is devoted to making sense of the world. Visual perception is of no use without object recognition. Object recognition is of no use unless objects can be categorized as animate or inanimate, food or poison. Our brains constantly pour meaning into the world.

I’m sure we do this as we percieve our own thoughts and intentions. We are each the hero of our own personal narrative. That story provides ego strength and reasons to make decisions that move the story along toward the next desired event.

But what if that story is denied us? We know that short term memory loss leads to confabulation- without access to memory of events the brain is often happy to make up a plausible tale from available facts. How about a whole world?

In a Tiny Universe,
Room to Heal – At Home With Mark Hogancamp – NYTimes.com: ” Feeling shunned by the outside world, he created his own world, a tiny society called Marwencol.
Made from scraps of plywood and peopled with a tribe of Barbies and World War II action figures, Marwencol grew along the side of his trailer home near Kingston. (Mr. Hogancamp named his new world after himself and Wendy and Colleen, two women he had crushes on.) Narratives surrounding a downed American fighter pilot rescued by Marwencol’s all-female population began unfurling against a backdrop that was nominally a World War II setting, in Belgium. The themes, however, were Mr. Hogancamp’s own: the brutality of men, the safe haven of a town of women, the twin demons of rage and fear. Mr. Hogancamp captured his stories with thousands of photographs, shooting on an old Pentax with a broken light meter. The noirish images, complete with blood flecks in the snow, are riveting and emotional.”

We always say that soap opera amnesia, forgetting personal identity, never happens. But its clear that sections of memory for personal history can be lost. Hogancamp seems to have a complex situation combining alcoholism, traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress.

Resulting in story telling. Resulting in art.

Remain in LIght, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This is why I really bought the Sony NEX-5. I’ve had a Leica M6ttl for a few years and have shot some urban street photography projects with it over the years, generally on visits to UK or European cities. The Sigma DP1 often substituted, but I liked the look of film and the rendering of Leica lenses.

Because of their mirrorless designs, the micro 4/3rds and Sony NEX cameras can be used with an adaptor to mount other lens systems, including the Leica M system. They’re manual lenses, so loss of autofocus doesn’t matter. They meter at the aperture set on the lens, but with the sensor and display technology in modern cameras, that doesn’t matter either. One is no longer looking through a dim viewfinder, its an optimized LCD display on the camera’s back.

The Sony NEX-5 has two great advantages for this use. The LCD is bright and high resolution, helping frame and focus. It also detects the use of a legacy lens and provides a focus assist button on the back. Select the option and you get a 7 or 14x magnified view of the center of the image. It works very much like a rangefinder spot on the Leica. Point it at the desired area of focus then recompose. On the NEX-5, pressing the shutter half way snaps the display back to normal.

It works exactly the way I used the M6. Use the rangefinder to set focus or focus range. For most street shooting, I’d be at f/8 to make focus less critical for rapidly changing scenes. If I wanted the isolation of selective focus, it was down to f/2 and some more consideration about where the subject was or would be.

One of the reasons that the M cameras rendered so wonderfully on film was the way the body held the film so precisely flat compared to most SLRs. Loading was more of a pain, but seemed to be worth it. Now with digital sensors,we always have perfectly flat sensors, so some of the M camera body advantages are now no longer relevant. My latest set of tools have largely surpassed the film look. With the high resolution of the D7000 and NEX-5, I get better pixel quality and light sensitivity than any film. VIncent Versace’s Oz techniques with Photoshop lets me pull out any look I want given that I start with the pixel quality.

This morning was my first chance to get outside with the Leica and NEX-5 combination. My widest Leica lens, the 35mm f/2 Summicron becomes a 50mm equivalent crop on the NEX-5 with its 1.5 cropped APS-C sensor. In the street, I like the 50mm equivalent because I often don’t get as close as I’d like to a scene. I’d need to get a 24mm lens to bring back the full 35mm lens point of view. One of the reason’s I went with the Sony over micro 4/3rds is the Sony 1.5X crop compared to the m4/3rds 2X crop. The price and quality of the Metabones adaptor is great.

The light wasn’t anything special this morning, overcast with some haze around. Great for getting long tonality captures and use of some in computer lighting techniques to create a composition.

I really didn’t mean to buy a new camera. I guess I should say that I thought about it and decided not to buy a compact. I wrote about canceling my Olympus XZ-1 order because I have never been happy with a compact. I’ve been impressed with output from the current generation of 10 megapixel compacts like the Canon s95, but for the money, I reasoned that I’d always be wanting a full sized sensor. Better to use the D7000 with a prime or two than a camera that I really didn’t want to work with.

I had also looked at the micro 4/3rds cameras, but they all seemed to be too big to slip into a briefcase like the compacts or my Sigma DP1. If its too big to carry when I can’t bring the D7000 with the Tokina 17-85 mm then I wasn’t gaining anything. Thom Hogan and Derrick Story are both very enthusiastic about micro 4/3rds and similar cameras as a format that is easier to carry than a full DSLR and yet provides equivalent images.

It is Dante Stella that I’m going to have to blame for this. He wrote about the Sony NEX-5 so seductively that I had to try one. And I bought it. My local shop, Service Photo, is dropping Sony so they cut me a good deal on camera and one lens kit. I had about 15 minutes shooting with it today during a visit to Johns Hopkins and the walk yielded this image.

Why the Sony? First of all it really is small enough to drop in my briefcase during a workday like today. I would never have carried the Nikon DSLR to this meeting. The photos you see of the camera makes it look ill-proportioned, but in the hand its a nice compact package that only as large as it needs to be.

As Dante points out, the interface is atypical for a DSLR but works well enough for my style of working. While its often said to be more like a compact camera in operation than a DSLR, it seems to me more like a cell phone interface than a camera interface. As long as I can get to standard camera controls rapidly I’m fine. Aperture, Shutter speed, exposure compensation are all easily changed.

THe sensor in the camera is an APS-C, the same dimensions as the D7000. As you can see, so far the images don’t disappoint. They have the resolution and microcontrast of a DSLR.

Too things really pushed me to buy the NEX-5. First the flip up screen allows the camera to be held at waist level like a TLR. Its a stable, unobtrusive way to hold a camera. This image was taken from waist level. Holding a camera up at arms length is not a good way to get tack sharp images like this, vibration reduction or not.

The second factor is the opportunity to use my Leica lenses on the camera with an adapter. I haven’t used the Leica M6 for at least 6 months but both resist selling the Leica kit and buying an M8 or M9. The NEX requires focusing on the camera screen rather than by rangefinder, but some photographers are doing this regularly. And the Sony’s 1.5 crop keeps lenses closer to their 35mm design than the 2.0 crop of micro four thirds.

Not a typical image for me, but it wall that was on offer for the new camera in the house.

For Hockney, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

In the documentary, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, the painter David Hockney talks about how shadows were the reason why he moved to California from rural Britain.

His father was a fan of Laurel and Hardy. In those films, Hockney saw clear sharp shadows all the time, even if the setting was Christmas. He decided he wanted to live in a place like that, where the sun shone and, I think, illuminated the world.

Whenever I arrive in LA, I’m struck by the quality of light. Its as unique as the Old Masters light in The Netherlands and the Renaissance light of Italy.

I recall when I captured this I became aware of that quality of light and tried to capture it in the images, bringing it through the post-processing as well.

The refined approaches of Vincent Versace’s new book,Welcome to Oz 2.0: A Cinematic Approach to Digital Still Photography with Photoshop are contributing to my ability to communicate the quality of light. I’m working on making it my own since my goals are to emphasize the experience of light in a particular place.

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