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.

Value or Goals?

It’s a basic tenet of decision theory that one cannot make a decision unless one clarifies what are desirable outcomes. After all, if you don’t know what you want, then all choices are equal and there is no way to decide. Actually there’s no reason to decide and one should just go with the flow.

But I often confuse myself by mixing up values and goals. Values are broad an directional feelings about what’s important. And since some values are more important than others they are quantitative and scalable. Goals on the other hand are specific desired outcomes generally bound in time.

Goals are frequently artificial and often lead to bad decisions. For example, if my goal is to be on time to pick my son up at school, then I’ll chose to drive more aggressively. I can’t see which of my values supports that goal and the means to achieving it.

Failure

Glen Alleman at Herding Cats has it right:

Doing stupid things on purpose is not the same is a highly unlikely event occurring – a long tailed distribution. The effect on the economy may be the same, but had the modelers at the rating agencies simply included the possibility of a negative direction for the price of homes they would have seen this coming.

I started On Deciding . . . Better in late 2009 to discuss the philosophy and techniques of decision making. I had been introduced to the techniques of Decision Theory through my work in drug development. In the end, mastering the techniques took me in a different direction, understanding the nature of uncertainty itself.

Over the last decade, I’ve had little opportunity to directly apply the analytic tools, but instead have read more widely in neuroscience and linguistics.

The tools of decision theory are a set of models that are useful in making uncertainty more explicit. I remain convinced that our mental models are the primary drivers of perception and a basic neurological mechanism behind our conscious experience.

It makes sense that the accuracy of our mental models is the most important determinant of success. Not our planning or the quality of our data, but how well the consequences of current choices.

Remember to Capture Too Many Images

Painter’s Pots, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’m finally getting around to processing and posting the images from the family vacation out west.

I remember thinking when I captured this image that I could create hundreds of abstracts at Yellowstone’s hot springs. But the truth is I didn’t. In fact i’ll end up with only two or three posted images. There was the family and my personal experience of place competing for focus. But I really thought I had shot more images.

It’s been rare that I ever load images into Aperture and think i’ve overdone it. Almost always there’s regret that I didn’t find 30 minutes or an hour to focus on image capture.

Kertesz and Cropping

I was lucky to have a free afternoon in Paris to catch the first full Kertesz retrospective in Europe. Early on, Kertesz made contact prints mostly, but later on reworked some of the negatives using an enlarger. It reminded me of my early days using film when I’d load paper in the easel and move the paper and enlarger until I had improved the composition.

At some point in my digital work, I really stopped cropping as a discipline to compose in camera. Seeing what Kertesz did has inspired me to start cropping images again. I’ve chosen the 8.5×11 format to maximize print area just as I used to crop to 8×10 or 11 x 14 photographic paper.

A crop of a city tableau:

The Sky

Good Enough RAW Processing

Interesting:

Software Week Recap
Let’s get the dirty work out of the way right up front: I no longer recommend Capture NX2 as the best NEF raw file converter

These days I capture images of three types:
Nikon RAW files from the D300
Sigma RAW files from the DP1
JPEG files from various sources (processing lab scans, iPhone, etc)

I continue to use Aperture as my image database. Its fast and integrates well into my Apple product ecosystem.

The one drawback is that Apple doesn’t support the Foveon RAW files, so they need to be converted in the Sigma program in bulk before being brought into Aperture. Then if I want to tweak the RAW conversion, I need to find the RAW file which is not managed in Aperture and create a new version. However with the great exposure control of the DP1 and its exposure latitude, that’s been very rare. Once or twice, I’ve done spit RAW conversions, where I create a version for highlights and one for shadows to merge both in Photoshop.

Thom’s assertion that Aperture’s conversion was now the equal of Capture NX2 certainly suggested that I should take a second look at the quality of what Aperture does, since I could potentially drop a step to directly move the file to Photoshop for editing.

Its always interesting to contemplate how to make these comparisons, since the conversion is only a starting point. An apparent relative defect in conversion, like flat rendition, could become an asset for later editing stages. So logically, one should take an image down each of the paths independently, all the way to print or web display, and compare.

Oz Revisited



From Paris to Oz, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

While rating and editing the images I captured in Paris with the Leica, I got Photoshop up and running again for the first time in a while and pulled Vincent Versace’s “Welcome to Oz” off the shelf.

I tried hard to get a strong impression of direct light on the left in this image while maintaining that great Velvia saturation. I’m fond of these Velvia city images and will probably keep on working this angle rather than returning to the TriX classical route just yet.

The Magic of Film



Bus Stop, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I just got the scans of the 5 rolls I shot with the Leica M6ttl in Paris a few weeks ago. This is the jpg of a slide, Provia I think, straight off the CD. The dimensionality and tonal range of well exposed film just blows me away every time.

About half of the images are color, half are TriX.

Compact cameras



Walk, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

While waiting for a few rolls of TriX to be developed and scanned, I borrowed my son’s compact for comparison. Its the Canon SD780 IS, an incredibly small camera with a decently wide zoom range (33-100mm 35mm equiv) close to my usual range with the Nikon D300.

Image quality is really quite good for such a small camera. It makes me wonder about whether I should consider one of the newer compacts as a carrying camera since my output is so low and I generally don’t have a camera with me unless I’ve gone out specifically to capture images.