On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

It’s so hard to go back to making poor photos again. Better to keep the hand in rather than give up.

Over the last few days I’ve posted some images captured on a trip to San Francisco. It was one of my first opportunities to spend a few hours shooting with the Sony NEX-5 in my usual travel style.

I have two requirements for a travel camera. First, it needs to stay out of my way both in use and in transit. My Nikon DSLRs are just too heavy and complex to meet my needs. I start carrying a spare lens or two with the camera and I have a kit.

I find myself making decisions about lenses, focus, exposure that are great for contemplative landscape photography, but not my photographic mindset when walking around a city.

I shoot quickly and by instinct. If something looks interesting, I’ll focus, frame and shoot. If I’m worried about the exposure, I’ll check the image on the LCD, but mostly I grab shots and keep moving. Sometimes I stop and capture people as they pass,but its the same approach- the subject is moving instead of me.

Over the past few years I’ve created images with my Leica M6ttl on black and white film. I love the look and the Leica’s simplicity fits the shooting style. I’ve also gotten great images with the Sigma DP1. Its very slow to store a RAW image and be ready for the next shot, but that isn’t a big problem when I shoot in that slow rhythm of look and capture, look and capture.

The second requirement is that the images respond well to post processing. Exposure needs to be right on and the RAW contain enough information to re-imagine the scene using Photoshop. Both the film and DP1 meet this need in different ways. Film really auto-creates the re-imagining. The visual world rendered on TRI-X is not our world,but rather one of contrast and shading. The DP1 images have a clarity and solidity that fits my visual impressions of the world well. Both are limited by either fixed focal length (DP1) or small selection of primes (M6). Other cameras just haven’t been as responsive.

The NEX-5 is my best experience yet on both needs. It’s small and light. I don’t have a camera strap on it. I can walk with it balanced on fingertips hooked around the grip. It looks oddly proportioned but its balance as a tactile object is nearly perfect. It focuses quickly and accurately. I’ve found that using it like a rangefinder works best, keeping focus set to center spot then reframing after achieving focus. The rear LCD works well to compose. I rarely crop, preferring to frame in camera, moving until the image “looks like a photograph”.

I’m also really pleased with the sharpness and color depth in the raw files coming out of the NEX-5, These images are all captured with the kit lens, a typical midrange zoom that helps with framing and relative focus when needed. I’d like a wider angle at times, but generally in the city, my game is one of getting close and isolating as in this image.

I’ll be in Europe for a longish trip next month and expect that it will be the NEX-5 that comes along for shooting during the time off.

The combination of multiple options, uncertain outcome and important consequences seem to add up to making a decision “hard”.
Decision making is hard for us compared to ants and birds not only because we care about the outcome, but we are able to contemplate the complexity of the world and imagine a future we can’t control.

“People where you live,” the little prince said, “grow five thousand roses in one garden… yet they don’t find what they’re looking for…

They don’t find it,” I answered.

And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water…”

Of course,” I answered.

And the little prince added, “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

In focusing on the decision we may lose sight of where we already are and already have.

Mindful decisions require awareness. Most decisions are made by the brain without active consideration in awareness. A select few decisions reach awareness in the stream of consciousness.

Memory also requires awareness. All activity occurring outside of the stream remains unrecorded or at least inaccessible to our narrative memory. There’s a difference between asking two different questions: “Do recall making this decision?” and “Why did you chose this option?” One requires a subjective report of recall, the second is a request for rationalization and is subject to reconstruction effects if the decision wasn’t a mindful one..

The power and strength of narrative memory depends on emotion. Interestingly it depends not only on emotion in the moment, but memory can be strengthened over time by being recalled, strengthened by being repeatedly brought back into awareness. If an action seemed trivial at the time and the decision was not made with awareness it won’t be remembered. However if that trivial event takes on great significance later, the memory of the action will be stronger and the retrospective choice made can become the memory of a decision made rather than a mindless action taken.

An thoughtless remark, barely remembered might cause the end of a friendship. Regret and guild may build a strong, lifelong memory of the seemingly insignificant words.

Emotion also drives moment to moment awareness since we pay attention and place awareness on the meaningful. We find significance in things that matter, things we care something about. Of course we’re often in an open, exploratory mindset in which nothing in particular has engaged awareness through emotional significance. In the moment we don’t know what’s important until the stimulus occurs. Stimulus leads to response and it is that space between stimulus and response in which mindful decisions can be made. How will we respond to our child’s request? With annoyance or with openness?

This seems to be a foundation of mindfulness. There’s a moment of opportunity in moving from unengaged to mindful. S
o fleeting but potentially so very important.

While I’ve recently been exploring the new cognitive neuroscience stance that mind is a verb, I’ve long believed that art is a verb. I never understood the endless debate around “Is it art?” I see art as something people do and if it communicates at some level, it can be considered art. I never saw how art could be a category of thing as the notion of art is tied to the intent of both the creator and the witness, whether the art is visual, aural or the written word.

I never stopped to consider the more interesting question of “Why art?” There is a drive among people of diverse cultures to communicate through art, a drive that appears to date to earliest origins of man. It seems uniquely human and very important. Those who make art know the urge, the need for self expression. And while some artists never publicly show their work, this seems to be borne out of fear of rejection rather than any notion of a private art. Art is communication, but why does it need to be said?

In his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson offers an interesting suggestion. Offering art is a request for affirmation. The artist is showing others how he or she perceives or constructs the world. The audience, by recieving that communication provides feedback about the artists worldview.

This at least provides a framework to explain how the most abstract of art can be a mode of communication. Perception, feeling, concepts- ideas that have no words attached can be communicated through art. Shared and providing affirmation to the artist.

It also provokes some interesting speculation about why some of us are driven to produce works of self expression. Being heard and understood is important. Producing art is intensely personal precisely because it asks others to respond not only to the work but to the vision of the creator.

I was walking down the street in San Francisco. That camera was in my hand because I wanted to show others how I see the city, how I respond to the urban landscape and the light upon objects. I choose photography because its an efficient means to show you what I saw. The essay is useful to communicate what I thought while reading Bateson on the flight home.

Sometimes the uncertainty of the world leads us not to fear but to hope. There’s a commonly expressed belief that “anything is possible”. I’ve worked closely with executives who seem to believe that they can bend the world to their desires by sheer force of will.

Of course this doesn’t work in reality. Our control over future events in a complex world is very limited. Often the path we’ve chosen turns out to be an illusory path. Generally its not a bad thing because the new perspective will usually open up new possibilities and new choices that weren’t apparent at the beginning.

At some point, the odds of success may have dwindled so much that continuing on seems pointless. Admitting defeat is painful, but embracing failure and recognizing mistakes is an important part of learning how to make better decisions in the future.

One must avoid continuing on just because of past efforts. It appears to be a deep seated tendency to consider investment when making future decisions.

There is a reasonable rule that equates investment with current value. Any object which required great effort to obtain has great value because of the cost that would be required to replace it. We have to pay more to buy a gold ring than to buy a siver ring- so we perceive the gold as more valuable than silver. We’d have to be offered more to give up the gold than to give up the silver.

Equating cost with value doesn’t always work because value changes over time. If I pay a lot of money for a diamond and then a year later the market is flooded with diamonds from new sources, my diamond will be worth less.But because I equate cost with value, I’ll feel that my diamond “should” be worth more than its current value because of what I paid. In truth,its only worth what some one else is willing to pay for it. The same effect has been seen in studies of stock market transactions. Owners of shares that have lost value tend not to sell them, believing that they should be worth more and are resistant to accept less than what they paid for them. Sadly, this prejudice leads to investors making the often poor decision to keep their losers and sell their winners, when the exact opposite may be the case. Good decisions in the past are represented by those shares that have gained in value. They may represent the successful, growing companies.

In buying and selling, only the present value should be considered. Cost is known only to the owner and has no effect on current or future value. The losses up until now are often referred to as “sunk losses”. This is money or effort that has been spent, is gone and have no bearing on current value and need to be ignored when making decisions. Its as if every day is newly created and decisions to buy or sell have to be made only on the basis of the current market and belief about the future right now.

SImilarly, past efforts and plans have no effect on the chances of success now. There is only the current situation and belief about the future. Every day is new. We must decide which way to go at every moment as if the past had not occurred. This is why a plan is only a formalization of belief about the future and may need to be changed or abandoned if events unfold in unexpected ways. Mistakes need to be embraced, not covered over. New information must be constantly evaluated for impact on expected chances of success.

Making the right decisions is necessary for success. it doesn’t matter how well one executes on the plan. If the wrong choice was made at the outset, the result is wrong.

The challenge is making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It’s not knowing what will happen in the future that makes the choice hard now.

Much complexity is illusory and really nothing more than uncertainty. The apparent complexity is in the mind. There is no complex system in the world that maps onto all that thought. In the real world, the die may be cast. We may be entirely unable to influence the state of the world. Yet we build castles of anxiety in our minds worrying about what will happen when it already has.

A large part of our brains is devoted to making sense of the world. Visual perception is of no use without object recognition. Object recognition is of no use unless objects can be categorized as animate or inanimate, food or poison. Our brains constantly pour meaning into the world.

I’m sure we do this as we percieve our own thoughts and intentions. We are each the hero of our own personal narrative. That story provides ego strength and reasons to make decisions that move the story along toward the next desired event.

But what if that story is denied us? We know that short term memory loss leads to confabulation- without access to memory of events the brain is often happy to make up a plausible tale from available facts. How about a whole world?

In a Tiny Universe,
Room to Heal – At Home With Mark Hogancamp – NYTimes.com: ” Feeling shunned by the outside world, he created his own world, a tiny society called Marwencol.
Made from scraps of plywood and peopled with a tribe of Barbies and World War II action figures, Marwencol grew along the side of his trailer home near Kingston. (Mr. Hogancamp named his new world after himself and Wendy and Colleen, two women he had crushes on.) Narratives surrounding a downed American fighter pilot rescued by Marwencol’s all-female population began unfurling against a backdrop that was nominally a World War II setting, in Belgium. The themes, however, were Mr. Hogancamp’s own: the brutality of men, the safe haven of a town of women, the twin demons of rage and fear. Mr. Hogancamp captured his stories with thousands of photographs, shooting on an old Pentax with a broken light meter. The noirish images, complete with blood flecks in the snow, are riveting and emotional.”

We always say that soap opera amnesia, forgetting personal identity, never happens. But its clear that sections of memory for personal history can be lost. Hogancamp seems to have a complex situation combining alcoholism, traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress.

Resulting in story telling. Resulting in art.

This is why I really bought the Sony NEX-5. I’ve had a Leica M6ttl for a few years and have shot some urban street photography projects with it over the years, generally on visits to UK or European cities. The Sigma DP1 often substituted, but I liked the look of film and the rendering of Leica lenses.

Because of their mirrorless designs, the micro 4/3rds and Sony NEX cameras can be used with an adaptor to mount other lens systems, including the Leica M system. They’re manual lenses, so loss of autofocus doesn’t matter. They meter at the aperture set on the lens, but with the sensor and display technology in modern cameras, that doesn’t matter either. One is no longer looking through a dim viewfinder, its an optimized LCD display on the camera’s back.

The Sony NEX-5 has two great advantages for this use. The LCD is bright and high resolution, helping frame and focus. It also detects the use of a legacy lens and provides a focus assist button on the back. Select the option and you get a 7 or 14x magnified view of the center of the image. It works very much like a rangefinder spot on the Leica. Point it at the desired area of focus then recompose. On the NEX-5, pressing the shutter half way snaps the display back to normal.

It works exactly the way I used the M6. Use the rangefinder to set focus or focus range. For most street shooting, I’d be at f/8 to make focus less critical for rapidly changing scenes. If I wanted the isolation of selective focus, it was down to f/2 and some more consideration about where the subject was or would be.

One of the reasons that the M cameras rendered so wonderfully on film was the way the body held the film so precisely flat compared to most SLRs. Loading was more of a pain, but seemed to be worth it. Now with digital sensors,we always have perfectly flat sensors, so some of the M camera body advantages are now no longer relevant. My latest set of tools have largely surpassed the film look. With the high resolution of the D7000 and NEX-5, I get better pixel quality and light sensitivity than any film. VIncent Versace’s Oz techniques with Photoshop lets me pull out any look I want given that I start with the pixel quality.

This morning was my first chance to get outside with the Leica and NEX-5 combination. My widest Leica lens, the 35mm f/2 Summicron becomes a 50mm equivalent crop on the NEX-5 with its 1.5 cropped APS-C sensor. In the street, I like the 50mm equivalent because I often don’t get as close as I’d like to a scene. I’d need to get a 24mm lens to bring back the full 35mm lens point of view. One of the reason’s I went with the Sony over micro 4/3rds is the Sony 1.5X crop compared to the m4/3rds 2X crop. The price and quality of the Metabones adaptor is great.

The light wasn’t anything special this morning, overcast with some haze around. Great for getting long tonality captures and use of some in computer lighting techniques to create a composition.

I really didn’t mean to buy a new camera. I guess I should say that I thought about it and decided not to buy a compact. I wrote about canceling my Olympus XZ-1 order because I have never been happy with a compact. I’ve been impressed with output from the current generation of 10 megapixel compacts like the Canon s95, but for the money, I reasoned that I’d always be wanting a full sized sensor. Better to use the D7000 with a prime or two than a camera that I really didn’t want to work with.

I had also looked at the micro 4/3rds cameras, but they all seemed to be too big to slip into a briefcase like the compacts or my Sigma DP1. If its too big to carry when I can’t bring the D7000 with the Tokina 17-85 mm then I wasn’t gaining anything. Thom Hogan and Derrick Story are both very enthusiastic about micro 4/3rds and similar cameras as a format that is easier to carry than a full DSLR and yet provides equivalent images.

It is Dante Stella that I’m going to have to blame for this. He wrote about the Sony NEX-5 so seductively that I had to try one. And I bought it. My local shop, Service Photo, is dropping Sony so they cut me a good deal on camera and one lens kit. I had about 15 minutes shooting with it today during a visit to Johns Hopkins and the walk yielded this image.

Why the Sony? First of all it really is small enough to drop in my briefcase during a workday like today. I would never have carried the Nikon DSLR to this meeting. The photos you see of the camera makes it look ill-proportioned, but in the hand its a nice compact package that only as large as it needs to be.

As Dante points out, the interface is atypical for a DSLR but works well enough for my style of working. While its often said to be more like a compact camera in operation than a DSLR, it seems to me more like a cell phone interface than a camera interface. As long as I can get to standard camera controls rapidly I’m fine. Aperture, Shutter speed, exposure compensation are all easily changed.

THe sensor in the camera is an APS-C, the same dimensions as the D7000. As you can see, so far the images don’t disappoint. They have the resolution and microcontrast of a DSLR.

Too things really pushed me to buy the NEX-5. First the flip up screen allows the camera to be held at waist level like a TLR. Its a stable, unobtrusive way to hold a camera. This image was taken from waist level. Holding a camera up at arms length is not a good way to get tack sharp images like this, vibration reduction or not.

The second factor is the opportunity to use my Leica lenses on the camera with an adapter. I haven’t used the Leica M6 for at least 6 months but both resist selling the Leica kit and buying an M8 or M9. The NEX requires focusing on the camera screen rather than by rangefinder, but some photographers are doing this regularly. And the Sony’s 1.5 crop keeps lenses closer to their 35mm design than the 2.0 crop of micro four thirds.

Not a typical image for me, but it wall that was on offer for the new camera in the house.