Image: For Hockney



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.

Image: Drain at Sunset



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.

Image: Edge of the Ocean 2



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.

image: Edge of the Ocean



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.

Approaching Complexity

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

This is the essence of a complex adaptive system. Any system that is straightforward enough to be a simple adding up of the effects of each part really isn’t worth contemplating as a system. It’s a collection of independent agents. A stack of checkers of different thicknesses are such a linear system. Stack them up and the height simply adds up in a linear way.

Once the components start acting on each other and themselves, behavior becomes complex and increasingly difficult to predict based on knowledge of the components and their connections. This is not due to ignorance. Collection of more and more data doesn’t help at all. There is some aspect of the whole that is not just the linear addition of the parts.

Once a system is made of connected components that have inputs and outputs, that are processing information, its behavior can become difficult to predict with precision. It could be a mechanical system like a thermostat connected to a heating system, a computer program with subroutines, nerve cells connected in brain circuits, stock traders in a market, the atmosphere are all complex adaptive systems. The mechanical and computer level examples are the most useful for study because they are clearly in the mechanistic, Newtonian, deterministic world and yet their future state cannot be known.

The difference between an additive system and a complex system is in the relationships. Negative and positive feedback create unexpected behaviors in the system. Small effects in one component produce large effects elsewhere because of the nature of the connections which are not simply proportional but non-linear instead.

We’re surrounded by complex systems.Arguably simple linear systems are exceptions and may be idealized simple models rather than real functioning systems out in the world. As thinkers, we study simple systems or simplify the complex into idealized simple systems because they are easy to deal with in a deterministic and reductionistic manner.

We are ignorant of the state of the past and the future. That creates uncertainty. Because of complexity, even if we had perfect knowledge, we’d still be unable to know the future.

Image: Tiles Waiting



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

The LImits of Reductionism

Reductionism can be powerful.

Through careful study, a component of a system can be identified and its role in the function of the system defined. Manipulation of that component can be shown to affect the system in a predictable way. It’s often possible to generalize- the heart is a pump in mice, cats and elephants. At a molecular level in the brain, the established role of CREB in aplysia neuronal function predicts role of CREB in mouse hippocampus. Human hippocampus? Well we can’t know because the experiments can’t be done, but the body of available evidence generates a strong belief that it does. The scientific fact that KREB is involved in human learning and memory

These scientific theories are not facts, they are statements with a probability of being true and a complementary probability of being false. Scientists recognize this at least implicitly because the method of science is to collect additional data that will either falsify or support the theory. This data will either increase or decrease belief in the truth of the theory. Sometimes theories are completely abandoned. Our earlier belief turns out to have been unwarrented.This is straightforward pragmatism.

It’s a major mistake to ignore the probability element in scientific theory. We don’t even need to consider how reliable the data really is, the nature of these complex systems makes their significance uncertain. The influence of one system component may vary in hard to predict ways because of changes in other components.

And because statements about complex systems are not true or false, we must make decisions based on belief, the probability of the statement being true. Since just about everything we deal with is a complex system, this impossibility of knowing the future is everywhere. Uncertainty can be found in the very structure of the world.

Image: Umbrian Wall



Umbrian Wall, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

These flat, often bisected texture and contrast studies have been a constant in my images since I picked up my Minolta SRT200 in 1979. I’ve always struggled with how easily I can make these. These days I look at an image like this and simply appreciate how the image recreates the pleasure I personally have being in a receptive state looking at the world around me. Its a re-creation, a re-experiencing of a place and time now distant.

Image: In the Frantoio



In the Frantoio, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

We’re too snow and cold bound in Baltimore for new image capture, so I’m wandering through Umbria again with these D300 images from 2009. The Oz 2.0 techniques are giving me a second chance to see and enhance the light in the captures.

In Defense of Reductionism

Chaos Theory was developed by exploring dynamical systems in computers. Its worthwhile considering this idea of a system itself in our exploration of deciding better.

Systems theory is an approach to studying a collection of parts by considering them as a whole. Each part has its role to play and some how interacts with other parts of the system. Consideration of systems is vital to understand where uncertainty comes from in our world or in simple clockwork universes like computer programs.

There’s is a much stronger tradition in empirical science of reductionism, understanding the functioning of a system by taking it apart to study its component pieces. The contribution of the part is considered by examining the interaction of that part with other parts of the system. If the functioning of those parts is understood, an overall picture of the system is built up. For example, the biochemical processes of a cell can be understood by analyzing the metabolites and how they are processed by cellular enzymes.

Reductionism has proven an extraordinarily powerful way to understand the world. For the most part, when an enzyme is blocked in a cell, its product disappears and its precursor builds up exactly as expected. You don’t need to know much about the function of the metabolites or the habitat and behavior of the animal. The function of these components is likely to be the same in locust, rat, cat and man.

A powerful reductionist approach is to study simple systems. The study of memory in the brain of humans or even rats remains much too complicated to explain as a system. It was possible to trace the system to particular brain areas like the hippocampus by studying brain injury in man and experimental lesions in rats. But after establishing that a rat without its hippocampal formations can’t remember how to rerun a maze, how can you figure out the circuitry within the hippocampus that stores that memory? And even if you do, how do you trace that function in the full functioning of a rat in a maze with its visual input and motor output?

Eric Kandel took the approach of finding a much simpler system to study memory, choosing the sea slug Aplysia as an experimental model. This classic reductionist approach provided important insights into how connections between neurons are changed by activity and eventually many of the same mechanisms were found to be operating in the rat brain. Eventually manipulation of these mechanisms in rats demonstrated that they were critical for memory formation.

Reductionism often works well in science. It shows that a component or mechanism in one system serves a similar purpose in another system even though these systems may be too complex themselves to understand fully. This can serve as valuable information if it turns out that manipulation of this one particular component has a consistent effect on the functioning of the overall system.