On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

Doug Miller has taken
down his weblog, saying “Blogging just aint what it used to be.” Alwin Hawkins has been, in his
words, “underground”. And Dave Rogers continues
his ongoing conversation with the net, mostly urging us to be less
influenced and spend less time involved in the blogosphere.

I’ve continued to use this space as an online journal, mostly about my
photography. But I’m no longer involved in the give and take of the
online community. How did this happen?

I believe it’s because we’re no longer needed. RSS feeds and social
networking sites have assumed the role that the blogging community used
to play.

Like many, I now use Google Reader. According to the Trends Page, I’m
subscribed to about 300 feeds and have scanned about 10,000 items in the
last 30 days. There are a few key aggregators that seem to pick up on
most of what interests me in the Tech, Photo, Outdoor/Fitness and
Medicine spheres that I want to keep up with. Of course there are the
few searches a day in which I go off in search of specific information
to help with a purchase or develop a technique, but these rarely result
in new feeds or bookmarks.

I have more than enough to read, so it seems there’s no need for me and
others to be pointing the same items as everyone else. What about
personal experience? Well I can get that on message boards and reviews
on sites like Amazon. These social networking sites substitute the
community that networks of weblogs once provided. I get my feedback on
Flickr now, where a talented group of photographers share images and
discuss equipment and technique.

We early bloggers were, I think, inspired amateurs that staked out the
writable web early on. But those pioneer days are gone and the
infrastructure has gone up to support cities and suburbs. We’re finding
comfortable places to live and looking for the next adventure.

I have no doubt that we’ll find new and exciting frontiers in the next
few years. For me at the moment, it’s a rediscovery of my visual art
though digital photography and the ability to publish on the web both
here and at Flickr. I’ve learned to focus on the Now and relish the
surprises that tomorrow will surely bring.

“On Deciding . . . Better” is the online journal of James Vornov M.D., Ph.D. A board certified Neurologist and internationally recognized drug development expert, he is currently Vice President, Medical Department for Neuroscience at Medpace,  a global Contract Research Organization. He completed his Neurology training at Johns Hopkins Hospital and served on the faculty there for 10 years. In 1998 he moved from academia to the pharmaceutical industry where he worked in a broad range of CNS therapeutic indications

This site, “On Deciding . . . Better” began as one of the first weblogs hosted by Dave Winer when he opened up the web to writers with the EditThisPage community in December of 1999. While the site has served as an online technology journal, it has focused variously on decision theory, systems theory and emergent phenomena in an informal setting. Most recently, digital photogaphy equipment and technique has dominated the subject matter, reflecting personal interests.

I’m just back from a vacation trip to Italy. It was just my wife and
myself, in part celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary coming up in
October. It was a chance to use some of the many, many frequent flyer
miles that I’ve accumulated in the last few years. I had the chance to
spend many hours in a somewhat concentrated fashion making photographs.

We had the opportunity to reconnect with a special place that we had not
seen in nearly 20 years: Riomaggiore, a village in Italy that has
provided the basis for many images that my wife has in her paintings. In
a way, I was there as her photographer, to document the visual so that
she would have new references for new paintings.

Riomaggiore is in Liguria, on the Mediteranean coast that is the
continuation of the French Riveria. In the west there is the developed
“Italian Riveria”, but as one moves east, past Genoa toward La Spezia,
the coast is less developed. Just before La Spezia lie five towns which
until after WWII were only approachable by boat. A rail line and then a
highway opened them up after the war, but they remained much as they
were. Known as the “Cinque Terre”, they have been a favorite of artists
and poets. At the sea, now cut off from the rest of the village by the
rail line is the small harbor.

When I travel on business, I’m always hesitant to sit in the airport and
capture images. Somehow, on vacation with my wife as cover, I felt much
less inhibited about snapping away.

We drove from Baltimore to the Philadelphia Airport. The new
International Terminal has nice big windows overlooking the exterior and
the sky was filled with clouds. I continue to rely mostly on my 24mm
f2.8 lens with the D80. As a 36mm equivalent, it’s a very flexible field
of view that can be wide as here or close up, provide detail. I traveled
with the 24mm on the camera, my 50mm and 12-24mm f4 DX wrapped in the
backpack. No telephoto on this trip.

Since this is vacation photography, there’s an important documentary
aspect, so I’ve shot many scenics and location images that reflect a
more “straight” photography style than my personal work. I’m sure there
will be a few personal keepers in the collection.

There are so many images that it would be impossible for me to work
through them using my fine print workflow. I’ve decided to work within
Aperture until I’ve digested most of the images. I’ll then circle back
and reprocess the best through my current workflow, which is Capture One
for RAW conversion and the Photoshop CS3 for overall and local
contrast/brightness changes.

My morning routine while in Riomaggiore was to walk down from our
apartment which was at the very top of the village down to the bar which
was near its foot. The light would be breaking over the top of the
hills above the village, creating dramatic light as here.

This is the central street of Riomaggiore. There’s really just one other
road around the top of the village. This street is really a pedestrian
walk as it is gated above; only delivery trucks and official vehicles
have access to the lower village.

The regular pavers toward the left mark the newest portion of the road
which is built over the stream that used to run down the center. Until
sometime in the 1950s there was a series of bridges over the stream that
allowed one to move from one side to the other. Now the water runs
through a conduit under the street. At intervals along its length there
are grates through which you can peer down and see the rushing water.

This is the classic view of Riomaggiore from the beginning of the path
to the next town, the “Via del Amore”. Of course at noon on a sunny day,
it doesn’t really look like this. The sky should be blown out and the
colors should be without contrast.

Capturing pictures during travel is always a problem. While you can
always get up early and shoot in the morning light and then sleep until
dinner time for the evening light, do you really want to keep the camera
put away when out looking at the sights?

To capture the midday images, I stacked a polarizing filter and a
warming filter on the D80. While you’ll read all about warming filters
in articles and books from the film era, many believe that they have
lost their utility for digital since white balance can be controlled so
easily after the fact in camera or in post-processing. I think that what
they’re ignoring is that we need every chance to match the dynamic range
of the scene to the desired image so that it can be captured within the
sensitivity range of the digital sensor. On a bright day, the
combination of the polarizer to kill reflections and the warming filter
to let the weaker red-oranges come through really helps the contrast in
the scene.

Interestingly, the camera, if it relies on a through the lens light
balance like the D80 will adjust the image back if set to auto white
balance, pushing the image to the blue and removing the warming effect.
It needs to be added back judiciously to get the right look.

A late afternoon lit photograph near the Turin train station.

As I’ve worked through these Italian images, I’ve gained a little more
insight into the relationship between my photographs of walls and
streets and my photographs of objects of concern. All of the urban or
nature fragment photographs are exercises in capturing form, composition
and, generally, color. Since the image is composed from the objects at
hand, I can generally create photographs wherever I happen to be at the
time.

When I’m travelling and capturing a place, the subject is more
important, but the formal approach to form and color is just the same as
my more banal studies.

It’s an interesting tension in that the formal compositions have little
interest from subject matter- they could be captured anywhere, but the
travel photographs tend to be dominated more by the scene and the
subject interest.

I hope that there’s an underlying united vision.

This is a image captured just after arrival in Riomaggiore. It’s a viewdown the path toward our rented apartment.

This is one of the images that I captured in Italy using the Nikon12-24mm DX lens. While I’m generally quite happy to shoot with the 24mmand 50mm primes, relying mostly on the 24mm. However I had been usingthe 24mm with my film Nikon (an N80) and I thought that I ought to beprepared with a true wide angle option. For the D80 the only realisticchoice is Nikon’s 12-24mm DX zoom, a digital only lense that provides anequivalent field of view to 18-36 on 35mm film. Since I had no filters for it, I really was limited to the early morningand late afternoon light.  So at this point I see it as a special purpose lens, needed for the right situation since it’s so large and for now doesn’t correspond to how I see. The 24mm is faster and matches how I see the small views that I most often encounter.This was a site that I returned to several times during our stay. For some reason it has the feeling of a shrine, being elevated above theroad and being dominated by the central structure. As we were leaving Italy, I realized that photographing these smallpersonal gardens would be a worthwhile project. The use of foundmaterial fits with my photographic vision as does the small view thatthe garden creates. In Italy, and perhaps elsewhere, this way of lifeis becoming less common with the industrialization and globalization ofour food.

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It took me way too many big view captures to come up with this one. Iwas in a learning, exploratory mode, but I was generally more worriedabout capture the sky and the atmosphere. I should have been lookingmore at how the light was illuminating objects given how clear the skywas.In retrospect, I probably spent too much time capturing big views ratherthan documenting the village street, it’s connecting stairs and it’sgardens. I have some pretty good examples, but these images are a muchsmaller proportion of the captures.