On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

Tonight’s sunset captured by the D300. I spent about 45 minutes about a half mile from my house at the Baltimore Beltway. There’s a road that fronts the Beltway that connects two exits with the fenced of beltway on one side and a barrier wall on the other. At this time of year the setting sun rakes down the road illuminating the brush between the road and the fence.

I’m pushing these color images beyond just the high saturation and high contrast I’ve been doing over the last year and trying to capture and emphasize light itself. I’m concerned more about atmospheric effect that beauty or accuracy. I think I’m joining the “Photography Is Dead” movement.

Wishful Thinking: Should Artists Give the Audience What They Want?Conventional marketing wisdom says you should be ‘customer focused’ and do your best to satisfy consumers’ wants and needs. But it’s a different story when it comes to creative work. Many of the most successful artists achieved fame by provoking and offending public taste.

Killing Photography in the digital age seems to be a good way to provoke the audience.

[Update: The Flickr photo has been replaced with another version. It’s a nice feature of Flickr that’s either relatively new or I never noticed before a few months ago. I’ve decided that while Capture NX is good for many things, Photoshop can be used for more subtle but no less effective manipulations. I’ll bet that both end up in the tool kit. Capture NX for RAW conversion and basic tonal changes and Photoshop for selective enhancements.]

How the Fog Obscures, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Today it started out foggy and warming in Baltimore. Tonight we’ve got rain, wind and the chance of thunderstorms. I grabbed this image this morning as I returned to the D300 and 12-24mm lens as my working standard.

Over the past year I’ve found that posting images on Flickr and here, with my journal thoughts here, has been valuable in developing the work. At the same time, I realize that when I’m posting images nearly every day, there’s a dilution both of quality and stylistic integrity.Recently David Allen Harvey of Magnum put out a call for portfolios from his weblog’s readership. He received 250 portfolios and commented that “Most of you need a serious edit”. Similarly, Dave Beckerman gets inquiries from aspiring art photographers but when he looks at their online portfolios he finds the same lack of editing.Perhaps one needs to present work in progress as distinct from finished work. The idea of 6 to 10 strong, related images as a set appeals to me.

I think this will be the end of my Nikon P5000 experiments for a while. I explored image quality and speed for shooting monochrome images over the last week or two and came away satisfied.

The controls and speed on the P5000 are fast enough if you work at prefocusing. Since you can chose aperture and the sensor is so small, it’s easy enough to get good depth of field with a prefocus. The quality is good and has it’s own sharp, full of depth signature look. It’s very different from the way the Leica draws a scene, but the P5000 is tiny and provides a digital workflow at low cost.

On my next trip I plan on bringing the P5000 along in addition to the Leica and trying some city street scenes for comparison.

I’ve written before about how George DeWolfe’s Fine Print Workshop was an important influence in developing my current high saturation, high contrast style for color photographs. DeWolfe has an interesting view on the value of destructive editing. He has no patience for the dozens of layers that most PhotoShop gurus would have you use for “non-destructive” editing. DeWolfe advises flattening images and painting directly on them, using the history brush in an interesting way.

After hearing VIncent Versace on a number of Podcasts (The DIgital Story, Digital Media) I took a second look at Versace’s “Welcome to Oz”. I had flipped through it months ago, but couldn’t really penetrate its message. But perhaps I had become more receptive, because i went ahead and purchased it finally.

It’s been slow going since Versace uses masking layers for his selective edits. So I’ve worked on using selections and local changes in tone and color.

This image was edited with Capture NX, using the brush selection tool to substantially change the image. It may be a powerful enough set of tools to largely replace Photoshop. It works well enough with Aperture since the saved RAW file, the NEF, contains all of the edits within it. Aperture can’t render the edits, so a TIFF or JPEG needs to be generated to go into Aperture to serve as a representation of the current edit state of the image.

I think that the one aspect of Versace’s ideas that I find most appealing is the idea that at the time of capture one should be previsualizing the final image. As I’ve written here before, there’s always an unanticipated transformation of reality into the captured image. So there’s a second previsualization at the time of evaluation of the image when starting post processing.

In this image, I decided that the two triangle forms should dominate, one light and one dark. with masking I was able apply changes to the forms that achieved something like what I imagined. There were further unexpected transformations along the way, but I had that idea about where I wanted to go.

I’ve written before about how George DeWolfe’s Fine Print Workshop was an important influence in developing my current high saturation, high contrast style for color photographs. DeWolfe has an interesting view on the value of destructive editing. He has no patience for the dozens of layers that most PhotoShop gurus would have you use for “non-destructive” editing. DeWolfe advises flattening images and painting directly on them, using the history brush in an interesting way.

After hearing VIncent Versace on a number of Podcasts (The DIgital Story, Digital Media) I took a second look at Versace’s “Welcome to Oz”. I had flipped through it months ago, but couldn’t really penetrate its message. But perhaps I had become more receptive, because i went ahead and purchased it finally.

It’s been slow going since Versace uses masking layers for his selective edits. So I’ve worked on using selections and local changes in tone and color.

This image was edited with Capture NX, using the brush selection tool to substantially change the image. It may be a powerful enough set of tools to largely replace Photoshop. It works well enough with Aperture since the saved RAW file, the NEF, contains all of the edits within it. Aperture can’t render the edits, so a TIFF or JPEG needs to be generated to go into Aperture to serve as a representation of the current edit state of the image.

I think that the one aspect of Versace’s ideas that I find most appealing is the idea that at the time of capture one should be previsualizing the final image. As I’ve written here before, there’s always an unanticipated transformation of reality into the captured image. So there’s a second previsualization at the time of evaluation of the image when starting post processing.

In this image, I decided that the two triangle forms should dominate, one light and one dark. with masking I was able apply changes to the forms that achieved something like what I imagined. There were further unexpected transformations along the way, but I had that idea about where I wanted to go.

One of my photographic goals I set about a year and a half ago was to break out of my preference for shooting flat, formal compositions. I had tended to avoid objects in three dimensional space including photos and landscapes.

While I still shoot lots and lots of these straight down compositions, I think that the concerns are more about light and shape definition than simple formal abstract concerns.

I worked on this image a bit because I want to push my use of light further. I like using off camera flash or, as here, found selective lighting effects. I did a significant amount of burning and dodging on this image to strengthen the effect.

This was my most successful black and white capture using the Nikon P5000 yesterday. f/5.3 at 1/3 sec with VR at ISO 800.

The compact camera creates yet another style of shooting which I could perhaps call point and shoot. While the camera creates nice exposures when set to an auto mode, it takes just as much consideration to get a really good image as it would with any other camera. With the narrow dynamic range, shooting JPEG there is a big difference between the D300 and this camera. An even bigger difference between this and film, where tolerance for less than perfect exposure is even greater.

There’s no real issue with image quality really. It’s just that it takes more care and less spontaneity is possible with the camera.

At The Online Photographer, Michael Johnston discusses black and white photography books. Like him, the Ansel Adams books were where I learned technique, reading very little else when I started back in the early 80’s. In fact, I don’t remember reading anything else and I have no books in my collection from then other than the Ansel Adams ones.

More recently, George Schaub’s “The B&W Digital Darkroom” proved useful as I began using digital capture to artistic ends. In general, I will forever be indebted to George DeWolfe for “Fine Print Workshop” as it played a role in creating my current style. Vincent Versace’s “Welcome to Oz” is now percolating though, but will take some time to incorporate. I think that all three of these books are in the intermediate to advanced category, going beyond how to why.

Nikon tells me not to use Capture NX with OS X Leopard 10.5. It seems to be working fine for me, so I’m ignoring their advice, working only on copies of the original RAWs out of Aperture.

This is truly amazing for me. Nikon has provided the new D300 picture controls in Capture NX to be applied to any RAW image. Here’s a shot from last spring’s trip to Italy processed through Capture NX set to Vivid. The image is so much more vibrant than what I see in Aperture! The color and sharpness of the D80 are really very, very good. The D300 bests it for me in functionality, metering and Active D-Lighting, but I won’t hesitate to go light and fast with the D80.