Category: Photography

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.

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 notes—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.

I’m back from another trip to Geneva. I had a little more time to photograph this time. Again, I brought just the Sigma DP1. I failed to bring great weather for photography however, with one shooting session in the afternoon made difficult by high contrast sunshine followed by overcast and the second session marked by alternating rain and drizzle. Fortunately, right at the end of the day, the clouds cleared out and I had a few minutes of really nice light. Here’s one happy result.

DP Review has reviewed the DP1. As these reviews run, it’s a fair assessment. However, I don’t look at it as a flawed camera, but rather a specialist’s tool. Every time I get back and start looking through the images, I forget about how I have to adapt to the camera, happy that I can use a compact to get what are consistently some of my best images. I can put up with waiting a few seconds for the buffer to clear before adjusting for the next image. The f/4.0 and ISO 400 settings are good enough for my work.

It’s a great picture taking tool for me.

Flickr has been been a great inspiration for me over the last year and a half- the time I’ve been photographing consistently. I have a venue to show my work, getting it in front of dozens of viewers daily- more than I would if I had a gallery, more perhaps than if my work were in a museum. Of course I’m giving the views away for free and am not selling the work, but then the purpose of the art is to help myself and others see the world more acutely, not to supplement my income. If I weren’t a highly paid professional, my attitude and thus my approach might be different.

I certainly am insulated from the art world as a Flickr exhibitor. My feedback is not sales or critical assessment but rather image views. Early on I realized that for some reason my images attract many more views than comments, but I hope that’s because they’re a notch more visually challenging that the average image. My subjects, as here, are generally unimportant.

The New York Times Magazine has an article on the elements of the Flickr style: “While pretty and even cute, these images are also often surreal and prurient, evoking the unsettling paintings of de Chirico and Balthus, in which individual parts are beautiful and formally rendered, but something is not quite right over all. “

I agree that we often don’t get it “right over all”. And I think the phrase “forcibly manipulated” captures well what is not quite right. As digital cameras have reached maturity in the last few years, the digital darkroom is being explored vigorously. Some of the efforts are pleasing, but are fantastic and for me, ultimately unrewarding. But there’s a middle ground where the darkroom effects illuminate vision rather than obscure it.

Last year I wasn’t quite satisfied with my high contrast, saturated renderings of the suburban landscape. This year, with better set of tools and more sensitivity to the rules of the visual world, I’m happier with where I’m working in that zone between the real, banal visual world and the elevated language we can achieve in art.

The release of Aperture 2.1 with support for editing plug-ins is exciting. They’re working with NIK which means that we’ll have some U-point technology for Aperture. If we end up with Nikon RAW conversion, that will be even better. However, I think it’s more likely that we’ll see support for roundtripping RAW masters out to alternate converters which is what I do anyway.

In the Apple press release was this quote from John Stanmeyer:

Apple Releases Aperture 2.1 with Powerful Image Editing Plug-In Architecture: “%u201CTo date, maybe two percent of my photographs needed to be touched up outside Aperture,%u201D said John Stanmeyer, founding member of the VII Photo Agency and contributing photographer for Time and National Geographic magazines. %u201CNow that I can dodge and burn right within Aperture%u2019s new plug-in, I can%u2019t imagine when I%u2019ll have to open any other application to tone my images.%u201D “

It’s interesting that he feels the vast majority of his images only require the kind of global changes that have been available in Aperture until now. In an Apple video he talked about using the retouch for some local changes, but here is a photographer who is interacting with the real scene and the real light (whether natural or strobe) so that the image is mostly done in camera. Something to aspire to or at least to be inspired by.

As the Sigma DP1 moves into users hands, it seems that it’s engineering compromise may be becoming clear- a tendency to produce green tinted vignetting, especially wide open and close focused. This image seems to show the problem pretty well. All four corners, but in this image, more at the lower two corners, there’s a shift toward green.

In the straight conversion from the camera it’s not very noticable, but this image processed through Sigma Photo Pro 3.1 on the Mac and then adusted in Aperture emphasizes the flaw. The bump in saturation and the contrast in the affect areas make it more obvious. As a few early adopters have shown, you can fix this in Photoshop pretty easily with the gradient tool. Carl Rytterfalk has posted a video on the basic method.

The suggestion on the DPReview message boards is that this is a result of the exit pupil of the lens being so close to the sensor. It might be why we have a lens with an f/4 aperture as well. I’m reminded of the Leica M8 release and the discovery of it’s infrared sensitivies. These issues must have been well known to the design teams, but these cameras have been so critical to the companies that they are released presumably pending further fixes.

On the other hand, I think of Olympus who designed the 4/3rds system for digital to avoid engineering compromises but ended up at a disadvantage to companies that made bigger compromises to incorporate larger sensors.

This is an image I’ve been trying to make for a long time. For a long time I was caught in a semi-abstract mode of image making that I always felt was not quite true to the medium. What I wanted to create were images that were both formal compositions and had three dimensional reality.

I started by avoiding these flat compositions and working in the 3D landscape. Now, returning to these formal compositions with better tools, I find that I can make things work in a way I couldn’t before.

Thanks to a tip from Janet at Tech Ronin , I upgraded my Mac Book Pro to 4 GB for $98 from OWC. The installation took 15 minutes and I have enough RAM in the computer to move through the workflow without memory thrashing.

I have a demanding workflow now. I import, grade and select in Aperture. If I want to post-process, the RAW file is exported out into a work folder on the disk and opened in Nikon Capture NX.

In Capture NX I tend to set white balance, black and white points first. Then I adjust values across the image since the combination of working on the RAW file and the U-Point technology is my best tool kit. The changes are saved in the working NEF file and a TIFF saved of the final image.

The TIFF is opened in Photoshop where I use a growing set of tools to get light, sharpness and local contrast right. The NIK Color Efex filters, NIK Sharpener and curves are the major Photoshop Tools at this point, guided by Vincent Versace’s approach as outlined in Welcome to Oz.

I save a full PSD file with Layers intact from Photoshop along with a flattened version. The flat version gets dragged back into Aperture, completing the round trip manually. I print out of Aperture and use FlickrExport to upload to Flickr.

With 4 GB on board, I can have Aperture, Capture NX and Photoshop all open at the same time with a small RAM cushion still left. The bottleneck is processor speed, especially since NIK Sharpener requires Photoshop to be run in Rosetta emulation mode as it is not Intel native yet.

Locarno Wall, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

 

Another black and white conversion using Vincent Versace’s methods from “Welcome to Oz”. I’m still learning about how to envision the changes from capture through final processing, but the tools are so powerful that it feels that one can take images to interesting places.

 

This is a book of photographs made in the small Texas town of Vidor. While I’m not particularly drawn to the subject matter or emotionally affected by the content, I do like Anderson’s photographic style. He shot these on film with a Hasselblad on Plus-X 220 and traditional silver process enlargements.

Technically, I noted two things about the images that I’m using in my own work. First, Anderson takes a cinematic approach to the images, creating a dramatic hyper-real portrayal of the scene that is far from reality. In an interview in the book, he actually contrasts his “cinematic” approach with the straighter vision of someone like Dorothea Lange.

Second, using traditional black and white, Anderson is limited to burning and dodging. The page from the book that I’ve linked to above shows obvious traces of the dogding of the main subject. Interestingly, the messy border of the lightening of the subject creates a dramatic glow that works well as long as you don’t look so closely that you see it as manipulation. The glow from the baby’s head clearly bleeds over into the background. I too have seen in my Photoshop light painting that sharp borders often work at cross purposes to the effect. It’s better to soften the layer by decreasing opacity so that it fades to being unobvious and hence more believable.

Sadly, Michael David Murphy has had his camera and lenses stolen. One only hopes that his blogging at 2point8 didn’t make him a target for camera theft. Certainly his film cameras won’t fetch lots of cash on the market. And there’s clearly sentimental attachment to the tools.

This is something that we have lost in the digital age. My digital cameras are expensive pieces of consumer electronics. No sense forming a long-term relationship with them.