Don't be anal
Labels: photography
posted at 10:49 PM
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
MWR's peninsular campaign
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A quick overview of my day yesterday. I thought it was tremendous.
- napped from 11 p.m. until 2 a.m.
- packed car with photo gear
- on the road at 3:30 a.m. to go around the Olympic Peninsula
- first stop for random photography, Satsop, just before dawn (5 a.m.)
- a few photo stops (great soft light), then breakfast at the Forks Coffee Shop around 9:30
- La Push and Rialto Beach until about noon, when the clouds burned off
- Drive up to the Hoh Rain Forest, thinking of hiking a bit away from the crowds. decided not to.
- Burger and vanilla malt at Sully's Burgers in Forks. I always get a vanilla malt on such expeditions.
- Continue clockwise around the peninsula, along Lake Crescent, around to Dungeness spit with a couple of roadside photo stops
- 30-minute nap
- Get to Port Townsend a bit after 7, saw relatives and bought some cool stuff at their shop there (e.g., a large colored-pencil drawing of a tiger in a deco frame, from 1932 . . . trust me, it's cool). Had a great dinner of mackerel poki and black cod kasuzuke, which turned out to be exactly what I was in the mood for.
- Get to Bainbridge ferry at 10:45. Next boat at midnight.
- Home a bit before 1 a.m.
- 522 miles of driving
Labels: expeditions, film cameras, photography, photos
posted at 2:38 PM
Friday, May 16, 2008
Not that your Coolpix is deficient, but . . .
Labels: photography
posted at 10:35 AM
Friday, May 02, 2008
Photo.net logic
hey bill,
Yes i'm aware the camera must be perfectly level for straight horizons :) but i'm just wondering how much i can angle my camera down (so the horizon will be above halfway) with the lense shifted BEFORE that starts taking place, get me?
Labels: film cameras, mocking others, photography
posted at 4:32 PM
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Vile purveyors of vulgar smut and filth
This April 30, 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial deserves to be quoted in full:
Readers with little girls at home don't have to be told who Miley Cyrus is. Their daughters want to be Miley Cyrus. The Disney Channel singer/actress is the star of "Hannah Montana," one of the most popular shows on TV. Her latest album is No. 3 on Billboard magazine's bestseller list. Reports estimate that she will bring in $1 billion in business to Disney this year."Essential vulgarity"? "This stuff"? (and, for that matter, "come-hither smile"?) Is there some standard I don't know about where art directors and iconic photographers are supposed to speculate about (or even concern themselves with) what may or may not "upset countless parents." And did this tame photo really "upset countless parents"? Whose even more countless kids were reading Vanity Fair? Looking at the VF website, we see that her (so-called grown-up) parents were present for the photo shoot, which appears to have taken place on a farm.
She is also 15. Thus this week's uproar over a seminude photo by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair magazine. The photo – showing Miley draped in a sheet, back bared, hair tousled, with a come-hither smile – upset countless parents who immediately grasped the photo's essential vulgarity.
Such ordinary wisdom apparently escaped every so-called grown-up involved in the photo shoot. The sophisticates at Vanity Fair defended the picture as a "beautiful and natural portrait." Absent sensible adults, Miley herself stepped forward to issue a statement saying that the now-embarrassing photo shoot was supposed to be "artistic."
Next to what crosses TV and computer screens every day, Miley's photo is relatively tame – save for the fact that Vanity Fair was trying to lower the bar on this stuff to the age of 15. Parents have enough difficulty teaching their daughters how not to expose their bodies in a vulgar way; this makes it harder. If there's good news here, it's that folks in Buffalo, Charlotte or Iowa City are still insisting on cultural norms alien to the elites of Manhattan or Hollywood.
Labels: "The Wall Street Journal editors lie without consequence", if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, parenting, photography, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
posted at 4:27 PM
Thursday, August 23, 2007
YAY!
Nikon today introduced the D3 . . .The 12.1 effective megapixel D3 features Nikon’s new FX-format CMOS sensor, measuring 23.9 x 36mm, which is nearly identical to the size of 35mm film. [LINK]This is wonderful news for someone like me who chose his Nikon prime lenses for a reason. You have no idea how many forum postings I've read over the years about how they never would do this, and the little DX sensor was great, and they were totally committed to it, and wildlife photographers loved it, and I should be excited that my 85mm is now a 127mm, etc., etc.
Good discussion here.
Labels: photography
posted at 2:10 PM
Monday, August 13, 2007
Wedding photography
Labels: film cameras, photography
posted at 12:11 AM
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Mmmm . . . delish
At the camera store today, it was a nice surprise to find that Fujifilm's latest new emulsion has finally hit the shelves. Since many serious users of slide film would tell you there is nothing acceptable faster than ISO 100, having a film like this available will be cool, perhaps especially for my medium-format use with slower lenses. The early notices are very good. How thrilling it all must be for you.
Labels: film cameras, photography
posted at 9:10 PM
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Ah, progress
The screen lets you frame shots that you couldn’t get with the camera pressed to your face. Unfortunately, the camera can’t actually focus in this mode. - New York Times, June 21, 2007 (roundup of entry-level digital SLR cameras)In other words, it lets you frame shots that "you couldn't get" if you shot in the manner of every great 35mm photographer throughout history, but, oh-by-the-way, you can't focus them.
Labels: photography, photos
posted at 3:30 PM
Sunday, May 13, 2007
It's 2027. Do you know where your baby pictures are?
My brother, one of the new parents I mentioned in the recent post about digital photography, isn't buying my pessimism about how long today's digital photos will be around. He writes:
I think you need a more detailed analysis on your blog about exactly what you think is going to happen with the digital photos. Currently JPEG is probably the most common format in the world. One can assume that 100s of millions are taken daily. You don't think that format will be supported in 20 years? I think you're crazy. At the bare minimum, there will be common and free programs to convert
your existing JPEGs to whatever format is prevalent at that time. But I've been doing computer graphics stuff since 1993 . . . (14 years ago!! Close to 20!) and all the formats that existed then exist now—PSD, TIFF, PICT, EPS, etc. Even the unusual formats can be converted with specialized software like Debabelizer. Program files (WP, Quark) may get harder and harder to open if you don't keep them updated. But standard file formats, I don't see an issue.
50 years—maybe.
And of course, if the files are lost, destroyed, deleted, etc. But of course that can happen with anything in life, including prints and negatives, which can go bad as well and usually only exist as one copy.
The following is a version of my response to him.What I see happening is that the average person's photos will become unavailable for all practical purposes through a combination of creeping technological obsolescence and human nature. You can't just look at the strongest link in a chain (the file formats, maybe) and conclude that the chain is sound.
I don't dispute the basic premise that these digital files are eternal, in theory. A row of ones and zeros is eternal. And the main file formats probably will continue to exist indefinitely, although I'm not positive about that and it seems possible that there are already issues on the horizon with JPEGs, such as perhaps they will not contain the amount of color-space information expected in the future.
It is definitely possible for a diligent person or organization to make sure all of their digital files are preserved and accessible on an ongoing basis. This is mostly the province of users who rely on their files professionally. My guess is that even the most diligent of these users carry less than all of their files forward, relying on their contemporaneous expectations about what they will need in the future. The accuracy of those expectations is open to question, naturally, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I'm predicting is that the average person's photos taken today are not likely to exist in a practically accessible form in 20 years, give or take. By "average person", I mean the 99% of the population that relies on digital photography to record memories but to whom everything my brother wrote above past JPEG would be unfamiliar gibberish. I mean the layperson who thinks that recordable CDs are robust like commercially-recorded CDs and will last forever, who thinks once something is on CD in a drawer somewhere, it's safe. I mean the person who, when he gets a new computer, transfers the main data files and puts the old machine in a closet since "some of my old files are still on there." I think I am describing most people.
When it comes to preserving their data, most of these people will end up proving the old adage "failing to plan is planning to fail." They find out that JPEGS etc. are likely to exist for the foreseeable future, and they move on to more pressing matters.
Today, a person with a bunch of digital files looks forward, if he does at all, and sees a nice gradual progression of technology receding into the future. But I think there are many, many ways that over 20 years the files can disappear or become unavailable absent great effort. As an example, I think of my own college and law-school papers, which I wrote on the old Leading Edge Model D (640K of RAM!) using WordPerfect 4.0 and MS-DOS. These are stored on 5-1/4" floppy disks. For a while after I wrote these minor works of genius, I continued to own my Leading Edge. One day, I gave it to my girlfriend's mother because it was obsolete and she needed a computer. (I didn't replace it at the time with another home machine, which means that there was a time in the pre-WWW era when I figured I had a computer at work so didn't need one at home—how bizarre that seems to me now.) I stopped having a computer that supported the 5-1/4" floppy storage medium (I can't recall if there were machines that had both 5-1/4" and 3-1/2" drives—probably, but I think most people leapfrogged directly to 3-1/2"-only setups), which ended whatever "in-house" capacity I may have had to port the files to another system. Eventually Windows replaced MS-DOS, the "DOS shell" function vanished, WordPerfect almost disappeared, Word stopped supporting that legacy file format, etc. At no point in the 20 years since I wrote the first of my college papers was there one event where they disappeared or became unreadable, yet for practical purposes they unavailable to me. And still they have not vanished. I have the floppies in a box in the basement somewhere. But even though I think from time to time that I should find a company to get them off the floppies and into a readable format before it's completely too late, that is not a priority and, realistically, probably won't become a priority at any time in the future. So my papers are on their way to really being gone. In much less than 100 years there will be no trace of them.
What happened (is happening, really) with my college papers is completely unique in its particulars and, I think, very typical on the level of practical experience.
It seems to me that some version of the foregoing will happen to most of today's digital photos. The average person is giving roughly no thought to systematically preserving images. They sit on hard drives, maybe backed up on CDRs or DVDs, all media with significant failure rates and that depend on various bits of today's technology to make them work. It's hard to predict what transition among all those of creeping obsolescence will have the single greatest impact. Perhaps when USB cables disappear. Or CDs. Today you might hear "then I upgraded to a PC that didn't have a floppy drive." What will you be hearing in twenty years?
Ultimately, I think the combination of constant technological change and human nature is what will doom (most of) most people's photos. The absolute impermanence of various recording media is a secondary concern. The stability of encoding conventions like JPEG hardly enters into it. Realistically, favorite images may be saved and a lot of others will not be. Perhaps companies like Google end up assuming (more or less by default) a quasi-archival function for the photos of average people.
It's true that "one-copy" physical media don't always last, and are vulnerable to various (individually very improbable) catastrophes. You could come up with an annualized rate at which this could be expected to happen. It is a rate that is not too much affected by lack of specific human attention. In 20 years, most of the film sitting in the backs of closets will still be fine. Any digital files stored that way will be unavailable (someone could "back out" an imputed annualized rate of decay for digital files left sitting unattended, which would interesting to see). In terms of other stuff you have around the house, film is more like a book and digital is more like a houseplant. You can keep the houseplant alive for a long time, and if you propagate it right maybe it will live forever. But the book just sits there and is fine for a long time with no attention. And how many of our grandparents' houseplants do we have? This is not a perfect comparison, to be sure, but interesting to think about.
There is an interesting online discussion post by a professional photographer who does lots of work for major clients and has been fully digital in his studio for 7+ years—a serious guy. I don't think the comparison he makes with old videotape is entirely apt, but it makes you think. His point about digital RAW files is one I had not considered. He points out that RAW (what you shoot in digitally if you are "serious") is not a standardized format at all. His basic point: "Digital is disposable in my book."
As a long-term archiving solution, recording digital images on film is accepted as one of the most reliable and stable storage methods. Here are some interesting observations from a somewhat biased source, a company selling film recorders or film recorder archiving:
Digital Data Archiving Gets Neglected
In business as in private life the long-term storage is neglected. Documents of considerable historical and sociological importance will be lost. Even in professional archiving institutions the digital archives all have a astonishingly short 'shelf-life'.
It becomes necessary after 10-15 years to transfer the entire digital archive from one storage system to another with increasing costs.
Digital Media with an Expiry Date
Digital storage media age and at a much faster rate than analog ones. CD-ROMs have been and still are one of the most popular storage media, yet they are among the least durable media we have. Egyptian papyrus or documents of medieval Europe survived for centuries.
Missing Storage Systems and Computers
Storage media develops as fast as processors. The replacement of computer generations is significant in a number of ways:
- when a system vanishes, data formats are lost
- when a system vanishes, connections and system buses are lost
- whenever a new system comes onto the market, this increases the pressure for change and the elimination of older systems.
Digital File Formats That Everyone Has Forgotten
Not only the physical durability of the media themselves and the usability of the storage media is limited, but also the file formats used for the information also change roughly every ten years.
Practically speaking, this means that every ten years when the inevitable transfer of data takes place, a certain proportion of the data won't be converted and in time will become unusable. This is of course the very opposite of what archives, museums and libraries were established for in the first place.
Here's something interesting from Stewart Brand that echoes my college paper situation:
The loss is already considerable. You may have noticed that any files you carefully recorded on 5l/4" floppy disks a few years ago are now unreadable. Not only have those disk drives disappeared, but so have the programs, operating systems, and machines that wrote the files (WordStar in CP/M on a Kaypro?). Your files may be intact, but they are as unrecoverable as if they never existed. The same is true of Landsat satellite data from the 1960s and early 1970s on countless reels of now-unreadable magnetic tape. All of the early pioneer computer work at labs such as MIT Artificial Intelligence is similarly lost, no matter how carefully it was recorded at the time. The pioneer work of today is just as doomed, because the rate of digital obsolescence keeps accelerating, and the serious search for a long-term strategy for storage has yet to begin.
I would love to get some comments on this entry. What do you think about these points? Do you think the average person will have access to today's photos in 20 years?
Labels: film cameras, if only they would listen to MWR, parenting, photography, scenes from my outbox
posted at 1:58 PM
Monday, April 16, 2007
I just don't get it
("My friends know me and my ethics, and they have no doubt this was nothing more than a stupid mistake.")Now read this.
("[S]ince January of this year, Mr. Detrich submitted 947 photographs for publication, of which 79 had been digitally altered.")Don't you wish that just once someone on the way to being caught dead to rights on something like plagiarism or digitally altering news photos would just be honest and say something like "You got me. I did it because I wanted money and didn't think I would get caught." Really, when it's inevitable that everything is going to unravel, why dig yourself in deeper with a disingenuous, self-serving blog entry?
Check out the last shot here, where he inserted a basketball into a sports photo.
To Bill Clinton's credit, he did have the sense to abandon the "deny, deny, deny" strategy once he realized there was a blue dress.
Labels: blogs, photography
posted at 12:37 AM
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Why I love film cameras, part 14
I make no great artistic claim here, nor am I saying no digital camera could take a photo like this (the Canon 5D with the 85/1.2 would do nicely). Still, I think this is a far cry from the kind of point-and-shoot digicam shots most parents generate exclusively these days. Even those who don't mind (or just don't know to mind) those flash-bathed, everything-in-focus images from the ubiquitous PowerShots and Coolpixes will be disappointed in twenty years when, for any number of reasons, they don't have access to most of their photos. This web forum post is an interesting read. The author is a very well established professional photographer.Labels: film cameras, photography, photos
posted at 5:57 PM
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
"Now you understand why American men don't stand a chance in hell with Israeli women."
Labels: photography
posted at 2:55 PM
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Classic exchange on a photography discussion board . . . and then I promise to stop
Poster A: . . . I thought that by angling the camera down a certain amount and using the shift funtion up that i'd be able to do that? but I can never get a straight horizon the the top half of the shot. is this possible or am i dreaming here . . .I understand the camera must be perfectly level, but how much can I tilt it downward? I'm not sure how thoughts like this are formed in the brain. The "get me?" is just an added bonus.
Poster B: The simple answer to your question is no you cannot do that with a swing lens camera . . . . if you want straight lines the camera MUST be level or you get the cigar look.
Poster A: Yes i'm aware the camera must be perfectly level for straight horizons :) but i'm just wondering how much i can angle my camera down (so the horizon will be above halfway) with the lense shifted BEFORE that starts taking place, get me?
Labels: mocking others, photography
posted at 11:31 PM
Classic post to a photography discussion board
I am really new at this photography thing and I have been asked to take pictures at my sisters wedding. I have a D50 with a SB600 flash I also have two lenses 18-55 and 70-300. The wedding will be at night and indoors. I need some input on what settings to put the camera since I am an ameture and really nervous. I was told to put the dial on S keep the shutter speed at 60 and the ISO at 400 and then hold really still. I want to know what to keep the focus at & if I should keep the Image quality on FINE and L all the time. I need to know what WB setting to keep in on. I know that most people might advise me not to do this since it is pretty clear that I don't know what I am doing. However, I am going to do this so I would appreciat any positive feedback. Thank you [emphasis mine]And if that's not funny enough for you, just substitute "counterinsurgency" for "photography".
Labels: mocking others, photography
posted at 8:48 PM
Thursday, December 14, 2006
A very good year
It was a very good year for the Leica M3. (The one on the Time cover has been taped up.)
Labels: film cameras, photography
posted at 12:13 PM
Monday, November 13, 2006
Why I love film cameras, part 13
Labels: film cameras, photography
posted at 12:15 AM
Saturday, November 11, 2006
"So horribly sad . . . how is it I feel like laughing?"
Far be it from me to bore you with arcane postings about photography, but this Leica M8 story just gets better and better. One of the little mysteries had been why none of the reviewers who praised the camera to the skies had noticed that it makes a lot of black objects look purple or magenta (not just synthetic textiles, as it turns out). Now there is every indication that Leica executed its own petit mal version of the Challenger launch decision, abetted by leading pre-release reviewers. Those reviewers, who didn't flag problems that numerous users noticed right out of the box, are in unenviable position of appearing either incompetent or disingenuous.
The reviewer who made a fool/ass of himself during l'Affaire Seal (not a good sign for his wisdom generally, it would seem) says he didn't notice, and even if he had noticed he would have just assumed people were wearing a lot of dark magenta and purple. This guy is a wedding photographer (tuxes), by the way, and charges money for his reviews.
Another fellow who published a glowing review on his popular website today appended "a clarification" revealing that he had noticed the image quality problems but removed references to them from his review at Leica's request:
I discovered these during my initial testing and put them in my review. I then sent my draft review to Leica, as I always do with manufacturers, for their comments. The company subsequently requested that I hold off mentioning these latter items because they were looking into them and hoped to have a response in short order. I acquiesced to this request, not wanting to delay my review, and expecting that I would be able to publish a follow-up quickly that not only mentioned these problems but also their potential solution . . . . [I]n the end I would do what I did again, simply because I felt that potential owners needed to know what I had learned in my testing, without delay. And, I would have held back again on the issues that I was requested to because that's the proper way to deal with manufacturers, who one assumes will take their responsibilities to journalists seriously. [emphasis mine]Unbelievable. I published the review with all the bad bits taken out because "I felt that potential owners needed to know what I had learned in my testing." That makes a lot of sense. "The lab rats dosed with the drug grew strong and showed remarkable gains in intelligence. I thought you'd want to know." ("P.S., 35% died of brain cancer.")
What ever happened to the good old-fashioned mea culpa, by the way? Why don't you ever hear anyone say "I took it because I was greedy and didn't think I would get caught"? Honestly. Just once would be so refreshing. My favorite remains the admission of a contestant on one of SCTV's game-show parodies, who had told screeners he was in "medical research" when he actually worked in a warehouse: "I lied . . . I thought it would sound good on TV."
Labels: photography
posted at 10:32 PM
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Why I love film cameras, part 12
Rendering of black synthetic fibersMakes it pretty hard to photograph people when certain black clothing comes out purple. Check it out. Adding a filter in front of some of the finest lenses ever made is not an attractive option.
The elimination of color fringing and the improvement of image resolution results in higher IR sensitivity. This causes some synthetic textiles to appear an artificial-looking purple.
If the higher IR sensitivity has a disturbing effect in certain applications, e.g. fashion photography, LEICA Camera AG offers its customers a special IR barrier filter. This is screwed on in front of the lens and is an ideal combination of IR, UV and protection filter. - Official Leica Statement regarding the M8
Film is a mature technology.
I do think there is art in how this warning is phrased. Along the lines of:
Due to the high spiritual purity of the Ark, users may experience facial melting. If the high spiritual purity has a disturbing effect in certain applications, e.g. world domination, Lost Ark AG offers its customers special blindfolds.
Labels: film cameras, photography
posted at 12:09 AM
Monday, October 16, 2006
Future camera paradise
I enjoyed watching the development of this thread started by a new poster claiming he actually had the coveted, unobtainable M8 in his possession. Mostly because, as a pretty ironclad rule, no one you've ever heard of posts on Internet bulletin boards (exception: Rob Thomas on certain Television Without Pity boards—one more reason you should be watching Veronica Mars). Of course, "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog," but I think by the end most of the skepticism has dissipated. I enjoyed watching how the original poster's basically humble, helpful tone (which I suspect is close to his true personality) is punctuated now and then with interestingly non-humble retorts (italicized below) to certain comments from the peanut gallery:
In case you're all wondering a) how I got it and b) if I'm telling the truth, the answer is that I have a bit of a good reputation especially in Germany and also I was very lucky in that I talked to someone at Leica who made it happen..... a VERY NICE MAN INDEED . . . .No need to read all 130+ posts, but you do have to read up through #30 for the payoff.
. . . . They also knew from B&H photo and Samy's on the West coast that I've probably owned and sold more Leica equipment over the last 14 years than you . . . have had hot dinners! I'm also fortunate enough to have some great classic Magnum prints from some of the greatest photographers of our time hanging on our walls at home so I guess it was clear to them that I did have some understanding and passion for the art.
. . . . but hey, it's small price to pay for an otherwise great life . . . .
Yes indeed.
I consider myself REALLY lucky in all aspects of life. Even luck has it's price however.
The irony of your last post is that someone as intelligent as you cannot figure out that even if my camera was a loaner and I had to buy one, it wouldn't make that much difference to me anyway! As for the name dropping, I only do it because I know it impresses you sweetheart.
Labels: photography
posted at 12:31 AM
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