Category: Suburban Landscape

It’s actually hard for me to believe how much mental energy I’ve devoted to deciding whether or not to capture images with the Nikon P5000 compact digital. On the one hand I can have it everywhere, all the time. On the other hand, the image quality just doesn’t compare to either the Leica / chromogenic BW film system or the Nikon D300. On the other hand, I’m less serious with the P5000. I don’t evaluate exposure or work subjects the way I do with the serious cameras.

When issues are so undecidable, I tend to believe that the goals are unclear. These various image capture systems result in entirely different results for which I have not set relative values. The single dimension that they vary on is portability, Decision theory would dictate that I chose based on that dimension and accept the varied results as the outcome of deciding on the basis of whether I can carry the kit.

Against the Slats, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s small book “The Dip”. And a very small book it is. His thesis, if you haven’t read the book, is simply that success general follows a pattern of initial results followed by a long “dip” of challenges and fewer rewards that can lead to great results. If you can get through “The Dip”, you graduate into a rarified class of the best where scarcity leads to disproporational returns.

The book helped me see my work career in a perspective that I had never taken before. While I enjoy clinical and scientific work immensely, there have times- years long sometimes- that have been stressful and seemingly without reward. Yet because of them I stand in a somewhat privileged place in my profession, having more that 20 years of research experience in Neuroscience, having worked with outstanding colleagues at outstanding institutions.

Somehow in the last year or two, I’ve taken on the challenge of digital color landscape photography. While I was pleased with images I created two years ago with the Olympus E-1 and excited about images with the D80 a year ago, I now have knowledge and tools at my disposal to create images that I could not have achieved then. The Archive pages in Flickr are a nice way to review progress over time.My “eye” or stye has not changed much, nor has my choice of subject matter. But I now can evaluate the light in a scene and think about how the camera sensor will respond. I’ve now started to think ahead to how I will deal with image problems in post-processing.

I have enough experience with “The Dip” to know that I’m in an exciting early phase where knowledge is not that hard to come by. I only have 295 photos up on Flickr, so every image I process is a significant learning experience. At some point the tools will be familiar enough that they will fade to the background and I’ll be faced with the slower improvement that comes with perfect practice.

However, I do have one strong disagreement with Godin’s approach. For the sake of the thesis, he presupposes that this path of progress is a linear journey with a clear destination from the outset- to be the best in the world. My life experience has taught me that one never knows where the path will lead. Thus it’s most important to focus on one’s immediate choices and continue to grow in skills and experience. I wasn’t planning on working for a global CRO as a therapeutic area leader, but here I am. I built a skill set and it suits this companies needs now.

While the contrasting patterns of slats and shadows were what drew me to capture the image, it’s the purple shadow vs. green wood that interested me as I brought it up though Capture NX and Photoshop. I took this with the Nikon D300 and the 105mm VR Micro. These details are a nice break from the wider landscapes I’ve been capturing with the 12-24mm f/4 DX and the 24mm f/2.8D.

But all I was trying to do was create an image that spoke more elequoently of the surprising beauty to be found in the wood of the porch outside of my kitchen here in suburban Baltimore. Certainly I’ve adopted a strategy of collecting images and improving my skills to generate a portfolio of a dozen or so strong images. I have no idea what my lie beyond that relatively short term goal.

I captured some images this afternoon. I thought it would be nice to give my Nikon 105mm f/2.8 Micro VR a workout as I haven’t used it much since I bought it a few months ago. Image harvesting was tough because most of the larger scenes had too wide of an intensity range to get the kind of image I want to work with these days. And it was a bit too cold and blustery to go and get the tripod to play with putting multiple exposures together. But there was a bucket in the shade with these leaves soaking in rainwater on top. Since I think the image is a nice representation of what I’ve been trying to acheive over the last few days, I thought it would be worthwhile to document the post processing workflow.

Since I still can’t use Aperture, the RAW files are copied into a reference folder on the image hard drive. I’m browsing in Capture NX, which is a bad idea, but I don’t want to open Bridge as yet another program. Capture NX just shows the embedded JPEGs and takes a few seconds to render the NEF into a full resolution image on screen. So I’m selecting promising images and and opening the NEFs to evaluate focus. I picked this one out of the series because of the composition, reflection of the sky and the grid-like pattern at the center.

Here’s the out of camera conversion, Picture Control: Vivid

Once I’ve selected one to work on, I modify overall exposure, white and black points and color cast with Capture NX as I believe that these manipulations are best done on the full 14 bit RAW file. I also use the U-Point color point adjusments to create the right relative values in the image. If the problem is uneven lighting on one side of the image or the other I’ll fix it with a gradient, like using a graduated filter. Capture NX’s control of gradients is very nice- easier than in Photoshop for me.

Here’s the image after adjustment with Capture NX:

After saving the image as a 16 bit TIFF, I open it in Photoshop. My first step is to optimize tonality using George DeWolfe’s method of desaturating and creating a curve that places the values so that they create a good monochrome image. Color gets in the way, so you desaturate, adjust the color, then add it back in.

And with the color added back in by hiding the desaturated version:

This was frequently where I stopped processing in the past, but as you can see from the image at the top, I’ve done more selective control of tone and saturation using techniques I’ve been picking up from Vincent Versace’s book, now including some of the Nik Color Efex filters.

Ever since I started working seriously to put together a portfolio I’ve been stopped by my lack of a good solution for putting together an online portfolio. I use Flickr and this site as a working notebook, but I know that I need some pages that are representative of my work. And I’ve really only wanted something very simple with an index page and full images of just 9 to 12 images for each project.When I first started using Aperture, I thought that its Web Gallery feature would be a great way to incorporate a gallery into my general workflow. But as anyone who’s explored it has found, there are just a few templates. They are very nice looking, very professional and suitably simple. But there is no way to add links or text to the pages within the templates. I read about editing the templates, but it seemed beyond what I really wanted to do. So I explored many of the other “simple” solutions and liked none of them.This morning however, I ran across this on the O’Reilly Aperture site:

Derrick Story: Sometimes You Just Have to Code It Yourself But on the Index pages I want to provide a hot link to the parent site, The Digital Story. I hadn’t found a way to create that link in Aperture (although maybe one of you know how), so I’ve been coding it myself after generating the gallery.

It’s a simple solution for someone like me who is going to be creating a new gallery pretty infrequently. I can create a block of code for the the sidebar on the index page and paste it into the Aperture generated code with a text editor. And once I feel like I’ve settled into a stable format, perhaps it would be worth editing the template itself.So here it is: The Suburban Landscape: Color Photography.

DSC_4660.fpw, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I post processed this Nikon D80 image only because I wanted to compare it to the black and white images I’ve been working with lately. Desaturated, this image looks very similar. With the bright late spring acid greens added back in, it gets more prosaic. It’s not as strong a composition as the best of the recent black and white, but I took the lesson from it nevertheless.

It’s a different language for me. Color is more difficult, since the form and light have to support what the color informs.

Via The Best of Photography on the Internet:

R A N G E F I N D E R M A G A Z I N E :
Embracing the Future?With a Mindful Eye on the Past

“This may be one of the advantages of coming out of a photographic background where I had three fixed-focal-length lenses,” laughs Meehan. “I learned what telephoto effects were and what wide angle effects were. And when the zoom lens came in, I didn’t forget these things!”

There are three worlds of photography on the internet, as in much of life, the Be world, the Do world and the Have world.*

The Have world is the circle of gear and camera review sites. It is characterized by posters either talking about their lack of equipment needed to produce great work or about the failures of equipment they do possess. In this world, if you have the equipment (and the gallery or contacts or assignments) you can do the great work and thus be a recognized and rewarded photographer.

Then there’s the Do world of photography on the internet. We’re all about tips and tricks and workflow. Spot, centerweighted or matrix metering? Off-camera flash? Photoshop masking and layers? RAW vs JPEG? We have so much, but we don’t know what to do! You can find examples of fine photographs made with compact digitals. Equipment doesn’t matter,so what do I do?

Finally, there’s the Be world. I find that the sites in this world are written by photographers who consistently produce work that they like. They focus simply on how to be a photographer, thus they do what a photographer does and have the satisfaction, recognition and rewards that result from the combination of their talent and hard work. Along the way, there’s striving to do better, being a photographer so the tips and tricks are collected as wisdom to be a better photographer as one’s own processes are honed through the activity of being a photographer. And when one is photographing a camera is generally necessary, so the choice of equipment is made by envisioning who one wants to be as a photographer, and what would such a photographer do and what would you need to have to be that photographer.

As photographers we all get equipment lust. The acquisition process should always start off with asking, “What will this equipment allow me to do that I can’t do now?” I find it helps stave off the urge to acquire in order to have the equipment to do the work and be the photographer. It helps me refocus on who I’m trying to be and what would that photographer do. The equipment is for the doing, not the having.

*I picked up BE-DO-HAVE principles from a consulting group. I have been unable to find it’s origin, but it seems to have been codified in the self-actualization movement. It’s used by many (EST, Chopra, Dr. Phil) but never credited to anyone. Perhaps it’s lack of clear origin makes it sound like it was discovered by the author or movement using it.

DSCN0506, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Another Coolpix P5000 image from last evening, this an ISO 800 capture. The subject has better tonality than the image I posted yesterday. Now I ask myself: If I were limited to this camera, would it provide good enough images? It’s small enough that I could fit it in my seat bag on bicycle rides or on in a pocket on non-photo walks.

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Originally uploaded by jjvornov

I’ve just shot, developed and scanned three rolls of Kodak’s CN400BW. In an earlier burst of enthusiasm, I had bought a 10 roll pack. My first experience with scanning on the Minolta was disappointing and I ended up with some scratches on the film. This time I had the film developed and scanned on the local Noritsu machine at National Photo here in Baltimore. The results are much more impressive.

There’s a difference in feel between the Tri-X, the Ilford XP2 and the Kodak CN400BW. My overall preference right now is the Kodak, but I have to admit I rated it at ISO 320, ending up with denser negatives that have less grain than the XP2 which I rated at a straight 400.

The delight in a way is that an image like this required no post processing at all.