Sah-weet. And there's a WiFi-only, non-3G model for only $139.

Check out the killer bullet points at the link...or, if you don't wanna, I'll synopsize them for you:

• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Better
• Potentially cool

I don't have $189 to spare at the moment, but I think I'm eventually a goner. Further resistance is now futile?

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:36:56 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/85511267
*** Werbepause: Buchtipp - Vom Alltäglichen zum Besonderen!

Previously in this series:
Part I
Part II

The other day I went to the optometrist for my final post-operation follow up. I was disappointed to discover that my vision had changed during the healing process. I knew that I would need glasses for reading since the procedure would not rectify that, however, I expected that I would not need glasses for any other purpose. Unfortunately, I am still left with a double astigmatism which keeps me from having the perfect vision that I want. There are lenses that could have been implanted that would have corrected that problem; however, my co-pay would have been $1,500 per eye. The insurance company's reasoning is that you can always continue wearing glasses.

...And so I will. While my vision is good enough to have the restriction removed from my driver’s license, it is not what I anticipated. When I saw the difference a prescription could make and the minimal expense, I chose to continue wearing glasses. Just a cautionary tale for all of you: many doctors will hint that the surgery will leave you with 20/20 vision; just be aware that your mileage may vary. Lens implantation is, regrettably, not a "magic bullet."

Chris

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:59:34 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/84221533

I mentioned in my brief review of Ctein's book that he was planning a sale soon, and that I'd post the alert when it started. For the next month, to celebrate the publication of the second edition, Ctein will be selling autographed copies of Digital Restoration From Start to Finish at a substantial discount. The following prices below include Priority Mail shipping and California sales tax (if due): $39.00 for California; $36.00 for the rest of the U.S.; $43.00 for Canada; and $46.00 for all other countries.

For ordering details, please go here and scroll to the bottom of the page. The sale ends August 15, 2010.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:25:48 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/84171812 Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:50:54 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/84171820
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

My laptop screen is sporting the same arrangement of Photoshop palettes as I use at home when I've got it connected up to my large Apple Cinema Display. The iPad is sitting in landscape orientation on its iSee stand with the Pogo pen in front of it.

By Ctein

As soon as I read the detailed specifications for the iPad, I had a suspicion that most people were ignoring one of its more notable features: namely, that it was likely to be sporting the best display that had ever been put into a portable device.

The day they came out, in early April, my friend Mark Richards bought one. He showed it to me that weekend. I pulled up some difficult-to-render photographs from my website and pixel-peeped like mad. The iPad had a near-studio-quality display. (Truth is I've seen studio displays that were worse; I'm just very fussy.) The iPad held gamma well with changing viewing angle, and if it wasn't running full 24-bit color with no dithering, it was faking it well enough that I couldn't tell.

I commented that if only there was a way to run Photoshop on these things, I'd buy one in a minute. When I'm away from home, I'm stuck with doing my photographic work on a laptop computer. Laptop computer displays suck. I don't understand how people can do serious photographic work on them. I make do when I'm in the field, but only for rough editing and corrections; it's impossible to see exactly what's going on in a photograph. The iPad was so much better.

Mark then told me he'd heard that there was a way to tether an iPad to a laptop as a secondary display. I cursed him loudly; that bit of information might cost me mucho dinero. How well a $10 app worked would determine whether or not I'd buy many hundred of dollars worth of hardware.

I finally had a chance to try out the Air Display app on another friend's iPad (thank you, Chris) over my vacation last month in Minneapolis. It turned the iPad a secondary high-quality monitor while running Photoshop on my MacBook Pro. The next day I went to the Apple store and bought one.

The low-end $500 model, with 16 GB of storage and no cellular network capabilities, would have been sufficient. After consideration, though, I ended up buying the 64 GB, 3G model. Why? First, this is more than merely a display. It's a self-contained computer, and it has never, ever made sense for me to buy at the low end of hardware. Second, as someone who hasn't had experience living in the being-connected-everywhere world, I didn't know whether I might care about that. It seemed foolish to get the model without cellular capability lest I discover later that I really want it and wind up replacing the whole computer. Several people impressed upon me that I'd likely find this a mighty useful feature, and they've been proved right. My price ended up nearly doubling, but whatthehell, it's only money.

Then there were the incidentals. An extended warranty (I am very bad with equipment care), a conductive foam Pogo Sketch stylus (fingers are just too fat for working directly on a photograph), and a Contour iSee for iPad (a hard clamshell with a collapsible stand that lets me prop up the iPad in landscape or portrait orientation).

There went a grand, but what did that get me? A portable dual-display rig with a studio-quality display that's touch sensitive, so I can brush directly on the photo I'm working on. Definitely worth it to me.

It's not as functional as a 12" Cintiq; there's no pressure sensitive stylus for the iPad (yet), and screen update is sluggish. But the cheap iPad's half the price, half the volume, a third the weight, and self-powered, and I'll bet the display's a lot better.

Here I'm taking advantage of the touch-sensitive screen on the iPad to do some burning in on a photograph with a masked curves adjustment layer.

The combination works well enough. It has occasional idiosyncrasies; most significantly, one has to get used to the lag time in the display update. It's not a problem in Photoshop when using brushes or working with adjustment layers—it can refresh small areas of the screen rapidly. It takes more than a second to do a full display update, so you wouldn't want to use it for anything that requires a decent frame rate or for presenting a slideshow. I do think there's a good chance that performance will improve in the future, as slow response time is the primary complaint everyone has about this category of apps.

iPad color out of the box is acceptable. Not as good as a studio monitor, but close enough for serious work, and much, much better than anything I could get in a portable device before. I can use it for making serious refinements to a photograph, which was, after all, the point.

My efforts to color manage the iPad had mixed results. Profile Mechanic Monitor didn't work at all; every time I ran it I got an entirely different result and it was always bizarre. ColorMunki worked pretty well but not perfectly. The hues and the values are very good in the profile, but the chroma is too high. Not by a lot-- if I add hue/saturation adjustment layer and drop the saturation by 20 points, it looks just about right.

If I can't figure out how to get a better profile built, I'll just start adding a -20 point hue/saturation adjustment layer as a visual filter whenever I'm working in Photoshop in the field. It may be that I'm being too fussy about this. My Apple Cinema Display, fully calibrated, is about 10 points too low in saturation.

So, I'm a very happy camper and after three weeks and still not suffering from buyers remorse. I've got a much, much better portable digital darkroom than I ever thought I'd have.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget that it is an iPad, not just a portable monitor. Maybe it'll even prove useful in other ways. Ya nevva knows....

Incidentally, if readers know of any other large-screen portable devices with near-studio-quality displays, I would like to hear about them. (But please don't tout some netbook or other portable device with the usual lousy screens; sure, they have their uses, but not for my kind of work.)

Air Display creates a wireless connection between the iPad and my laptop, so I don't have to actually be seated at the laptop unless I need the big screen. I did my sorting and editing of photographs in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW sitting on the comfy bed.

Ctein

Photographs copyright 2010 by David Dyer-Bennet. DDB made these photographs to illustrate this article while we were on a two-day photo trip over July 4 weekend up to Lake Superior's North Shore. They were posed for the sake of clarity and aesthetics, but they are not staged. This was my working setup and these were my working conditions.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning. TOP is currently on summer hours, which means late morning for the time being.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:34:40 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/83761509 Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:09:49 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/83729552 Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:19:38 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/83695989
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

Where the Economist cover is concerned, my "reading" of Obama's stance—his body gesture—is that he's listening to someone talk. Now, that could be right or it could be wrong. But the presence or absence of the person next to him pertains to that interpretation. As it happens, it reinforces it; and the absence of the "possible talker" deprives me of that interpretation, or makes it less likely, and makes me look for another one. It's quite possible that the woman next to him was not speaking and he was not listening—one commenter said that maybe he's just noticed his shoe is untied, and the picture doesn't positively refute that. But that's their reading. I can't get all the facts from a picture, but I feel I deserve to have all the facts that were actually in the picture. Because it helps with my reading.

Patricia Dalzell, Benita at Home, Hagerstown, Maryland

At any rate, I thought it was curious, in light of this aspect of the Obama cover discussion, that Ken Tanaka, whose print sale has just concluded, offered, in the comments, an extensive "reading" of the Patricia Dalzell picture above that I reported recently adding to my collection. This isn't usual, either for Ken or, in fact, for anyone on TOP, including me.

...And then, a few days later, I got an extensive reply from Pat, responding to Ken's reading of her picture. I should mention before we go on that I personally don't quite agree with all of Ken's reading in its entirety, and I have had disagreements with all sorts of people in the past about readings of all sorts of photographs. A reading of a picture is just one's personal interpretation of the likely reality; it involves intuition, experience, some detective work or responses to clues, interpretation, and maybe some educated guessing or informed speculation. Maybe even a little imagination. One thing I'm convinced of that is that some people are much better at this—at reading photographs, I mean—than others. I can tell you for sure (he said wryly) that some subset of the public insists on seeing photographs with relentless, overpowering superficiality. I even know of one critic-who-shall-not-be-named who pretty consistently "reads" photographs in ways I personally feel are always wrong! I just always find myself disagreeing, But there's no absolutely right answer with any reading: photographs are evidence, not proof.

I'll repost Ken's reading of Pat's photograph here, followed by Pat's reply:

Ken Tanaka comments: [Pat Dalzell's 'Benita'] has some overtones of the peace/love/beads/bells/communal living era. But if you look more closely a bit longer you realize that it has absolutely nothing in common with that impression. In fact it quickly descends into a rather dark mystery.

Here are the subtle elements of this image that distinguish it from the casual snapshot portrait that a three-second glance might suggest it to be.

First, that's no hippie-type thrown-together fence. It appears to be a skillfully crafted and nicely-maintained fence. It looks like there's laundry hanging to dry in the area behind the woman, suggesting a rural setting. The plantings in the lower left corner suggest that the photograph was taken in a well-tended garden/yard.

Now there's the woman. This is where all the little peripheral details culminate, as they should, to either anchor the persona of the subject or, as is the case here, to create mysterious ambiguity. She's wearing a casual working-in-the-yard-drying-laundry dress. But her shoes look too fussy for such ground work.

Next, look at her posture. Most of her weight is on her right leg, with the left receded into the shadow. This is a common, and very old device, to establish to create slight visual tension. Now look at her left hand. She's gripping that fence very tensely with one hand as if she's straining to restrain herself from some action. Her other hand is in her dress pocket. What's in there? A vibrating cell phone? A knife? A gun?

And then there's her expression that really puts the cherry on the sundae. That cocked eyebrow on an angrily confident expression is chilling. I don't want to get any closer to this woman.

No, this is no happy snap. This appears to be a carefully crafted portrait of a woman prepared to convert potential energy to kinetic energy. Perhaps she's listening to the response from her just-asked question, 'Where you been all night?' Perhaps she's confronting a pesky salesman and is seconds away from 'Shoo!' But we're left wondering what's about to happen.

The best portraits, photographic or painted, are very carefully built to use our knowledge/assumptions of human nature and/or the sitter to suggest something just outside what we thought we knew. Little haunting mysteries that tattoo our minds.

These days (the past 15+ years) women seem to have been far more skillful at such portraits than men. Men tend to shoot blunt-force-trauma sports and celebrity portraits with no more skill or depth than a beer ad. Women, by contrast, seem to generally have a far better sense of subtle ambiguity and humor. They often shoot for someone who's willing to really look at the image.

Patricia Dalzell replies: I thought the comments made by Ken Tanaka about Benita are so interesting. He is right about so many things. August Sander has been my hero since I first saw him in The Family of Man when I was 18. Of course, then I didn’t know who he was, just as I didn’t know any of the other photographers. That book was my photo education; when I went to college, women could be teachers, secretaries, or nurses, so I made my photographs in my head, and I didn’t get a camera for another 15 or 16 years. But I knew then that I wanted to make pictures that made people feel the way I felt when I looked at that book.

Benita and I met in graduate school at the University of Maryland where we studied with John Gossage. It was there I met Anne Truitt, who instructed me to look at Renaissance portraiture and sculpture at the National Gallery of Art. Art history was the turning point; it was then I began to really understand not only composition, but also how a work of art was made.

I was lucky; I lived only 20 minutes from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and one summer I went there almost every day. A professor at Maryland suggested I look at the 1903 edition of Henry Rankin Poore’s Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures. In that book I learned for the first time about the Golden Mean; at the Gallery I found the Dover Publications reprint of Composition in Art. On the ground glass of my camera I made a grid of the Golden Mean.

Sculpture began to interest me because I could really look at a piece from all sides, something that is awkward to do with a subject just standing there. My favorite piece to this day is the larger-than-life size terracotta bust of Lorenzo de’ Medici at the National Gallery. I could look at him from all sides, wonder about his broken nose, feel his strength, think about his drapery, and consider how I would do his portrait. My daughter began to tease me and asked, "Mom, are you in love with him?" When we went to Italy, I looked at the Florence statue of David in the same way. I liked the contrapposto stance and later began to ask my sitters to assume that gesture. It puts a person at ease.

An important photograph for me was Alfred Stieglitz’s portrait of Paul Strand as a young man. Before, I had only seen pictures of him in later life. This young image not only showed how he looked when he was in his prime, but his clothing in the 1919 portrait was not so much different than today’s; it could be that a viewer wouldn’t know when it was made. I could see how a viewer might be influenced by old or new clothing, look at a portrait and dismiss it and the subject as, "Oh, that was then." I looked more closely at pictures of my parents from the thirties, and began to see them as young talented people with rich potential, rather than as family saw them as the grandparents they were. I wanted to make portraits of people that were timeless; to be a witness to the uniqueness of a person and at the same time form a connection with each of us in turn.

These are all the ideas I take with me when I do a portrait. I always like to go to the sitters' own environment because what is around them tells something about who they are. Benita asked what she should wear, and I told her timeless, not trendy, nothing with writing on it.

It is so much easier to just talk, rather than get down to the scary business of actually getting the camera gear out. That means going to work, and not every photograph turns out. First, I made some pictures of Benita and her five-year-old daughter; those first shots are never the best. And then I moved to the fence. Benita said her daughter had hung the wash up and she couldn’t take it down because it was so cute. I love the fence because it creates that important diagonal line. I like a person’s eye to have something to do in a photograph and that line lets one enter the photo, if the gate were closed we'd be blocked out.

She said no one could take a good picture of her because her face is asymmetrical and her eyebrows are not in line. I told her to lean against the fence, get comfortable and take that contrapposto pose. There is always the problem of what to do with hands, but I take so long with this process that most people just give up and wait. That's when the real portrait comes. She put her right hand in her pocket, but I didn’t notice the tension on the left hand until I made the contact sheets.

I don’t like smiling pictures because the smile becomes a mask. This whole process takes at least two hours and by then no one is smiling; the relief comes when it is over. It's interesting about her shoes: they have always been a little jarring to me, but I didn’t know why. If I were doing this today, I would probably have her go barefoot, and since then, I have asked people to take off their shoes if it is appropriate.

I love the whole darkroom process from developing the film on. In my first darkroom when I took the cap off the stopbath I got chills down my back, it was so exciting. Agfa has stopped making my paper; Polaroid is out of business so I can’t do emulsion/image transfers.

Benita is a strong person, she went to Cuba when it was illegal, smuggled film out of Africa, and was imprisoned in Moscow for taking pictures. Her students love her. Since this portrait was taken she has completely changed her look; short magenta red hair, and vintage clothing. I'm going to do her portrait again this summer. Hope it works.

Ken sure got it right. —Pat Dalzell

(Posted by) Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:44:31 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/83464862 Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:01:29 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/83441715

We made a lot of progress in die Dunkelkammer over the weekend. Jim Shoemaker, the carpenter, was here both days and completed most of the wet side—I'll show you that in a few days. In the meantime, here is a brief report of progress on the dry side, mostly in pictures.

Jim bolted two 2x2's to the west wall for me. Here, a section of the wall is taped off for painting.

Painting completed. I didn't worry about all the little voids and pinholes in the concrete—you know what they say, "the perfect is the enemy of gittin' 'er done." Maybe that's not the right expression, but that's what it should be for me.

For the enlarger bench, I'm using the bottom half of a cheap wire shelving unit I bought at Menard's, the local building supply superstore (similar to Lowe's, Home Depot, etc.). It cost $60, made in China (thank you, Chinese persons), and I chose it mainly because it is about the right height and it has adjustable feet, which makes leveling easy. Er. Easier. Anyway, here I'm working on getting it level.

So here's the enlarger bench. For the top, I used an old piece of 2' x 5' butcher block I had in the basement. The shelving unit on the left is also a leftover, pilfered from elsewhere in the basement.

And in case you're wondering what that black- and cream-colored box on the shelving unit is? It's a paper safe. As you can see it has three shelves, each of which accommodate 11x14" paper (that's some old lightshot 8x10 in it now). The door is hinged on the bottom and has rather stiff springs to hold it shut. Of course it's light-tight.

The reason it's out at this early stage in the construction is this. When I'm standing where it's natural to stand while removing paper from the safe, I like the paper safe to be positioned so that my body is in between it and the direct light from the safelight. A small detail, but exposure is cumulative, more or less, so I like to be conservative when it comes to protecting the assets in the safe.

I'll tie the tabletop to the wall, via angle-brackets screwed into it and to the 2x2's. Despite the heavy tabletop and the solidity of the wire shelving base, attaching the tabletop securely to the wall is crucial for stability. Before actually doing this, I'm going to wait a few days to let the bench "settle" and then do a last check on the leveling. Here I'm just holding the bracket where it will eventually go.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:26:31 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/83441716

Our own Ctein will be teaching a one-day workshop at the Mpls Photo Center (2400 North Second Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA 55411) on Saturday, October 9: "Introduction to the Art of Digital Photo Restoration." See here for full details.

Ctein is the author of Digital Restoration from Start to Finish. If you have any interest in learning how to restore old or damaged photographs in particular, or in improving your digital processing skills generally, Ctein's workshop could be for you.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:54:18 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/83397593 Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:09:40 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/83384804
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

I just got off the phone with Ken, and he says he honestly didn't expect to sell 50 prints in any amount of time, much less six hours. And the reason he originally picked the number 50? Because the packing material he's using to ship the prints comes in cartons of 50. He bought one.

Anyway....

If people want us to, we can run a "Part II" of the print sale. Ken says he's willing to print and ship another 50. Should we do it again? Say, starting at noon on Saturday, so everyone who wants to be prepared for it will be ready? Let me know. If there are enough people who want us to, we'll do it. Even if we don't sell out the second 50.

As an aside that probably shouldn't be just an aside, thanks to all those who bought a print today!

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:00:31 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/82803693 Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:00:05 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/82766169
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

Just throwing this out there—I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in a TOP dinner gathering. No "special contents," just a bunch of photographers getting together to meet and chat.

I spoke to the manager of my favorite Japanese restaurant yesterday (I really think it's the best Japanese restaurant in Southeastern Wisconsin, and yes, I've tried a lot of the others), and he said they'd be happy to accommodate us. I'm considering an early meeting for a Sunday, say at 4:30 or a little earlier if they'd open early for us. That way people can come by for either cocktails and sushi appetizers, or an early dinner, whatever suits. The only charge would be that you'd have to pay for your own food and drinks.

July 18th seems like a good possibility for me. The restaurant is in Brookfield at Goerkee's Corners but it's right off the expressway and not a long drive from Milwaukee. I'd say it's about 50 minutes from Madison and 20 from Milwaukee.

Please leave a comment if you think you might be interested. No need to commit right now. I really have no idea if we can put a group together locally—I know we could if people could come from anywhere, but it's a bit much to ask people to travel from places like Australia, Brazil, Croatia, the U.K., and the West Coast! ...As much fun as that would be.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:04:41 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/82164427 Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:14:17 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/82093401 Fri, 02 Jul 2010 07:01:44 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/82023070 Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:20:05 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/82009912 Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:21:01 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/82009913 Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:12:32 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81983589
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

I just realized something very disconcerting this morning. Dilbert has too many fingers!

Everybody knows that cartoon characters from Mickey Mouse to Homer Simpson have three fingers and a thumb.

On the good side, Dilbert has no mouth and his hair is apparently made of flesh. So maybe he's okay, despite the freakish extra digit.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:48:44 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81421116
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

Manfrotto 209 tabletop tripod legs ($25)

By Adam McAnaney

In the comments to Mike's post "Tripod Technology," I made my aversion to tripods pretty clear. But like others I decided to try and find the smallest, sturdiest option available that would hold, at a minimum, a small SLR, yet which would be fairly cheap given the limited use it was likely to see. After trying several options, I have come up with what may just be the ideal solution.

Legs: The trick is to get legs that won't flex, have some mass to them and which sit very low. If the mini/tabletop tripod is going to fit into your camera bag, the legs simply won't be very long. Buying a mini tripod with telescoping legs is just a bad idea all-around, piling instability on instability. So you want something with solid legs. If the head of the legs is more than 3 or 4 inches off the ground, then the legs won't be spread out more than 4 or 5 inches, which means that by the time you mount a camera and lens, the setup will be very unstable. Solid legs that spread very wide will maximize your stability. My recommendation? The Giottos QU 500B Mini Tabletop Tripod* ($25) or the Manfrotto 209 Tabletop Tripod ($25) which supposedly support up to 11 lbs. That seems ridiculous for a mini tripod, until you realize just how basic and stable its design is. The legs are made of metal and very stable, and they sit very low to the ground. Only drawback: the legs really work best when they are fully spread out on a flat surface. In practice, I haven't found this to be a problem, but your mileage may vary.

Head: Again, I was looking for something cheap, yet stable, that wouldn't start to drop with an SLR attached. My solution: the Manfrotto 234 Swivel Tilt Monopod Head ($24). It, too, is made of metal and is very, very stable. It is designed for use on monopods with much heavier lenses than what I use it for. The locking mechanism simply does not loosen. Given that the unit is made of metal and is very robust, the large tightening screw just won't budge once you set it. Only drawback: it is a swivel, so you can only adjust your camera/lens along one axis. Again, I haven't found this to be a problem for my work, but then again I'm obviously not all people.*

Quick release (optional): This setup really doesn't need a quick release. I say this for two reasons: 1) The attachment screw on the Manfrotto 234 is very easy to access and operate, so attaching and removing it manually is much less annoying than with most tripods. 2) Since the Giottos/Manfrotto legs and the Manfrotto tilt head are so small, I tend to just leave this combination attached to my camera in situations where I'm using it. With the legs folded up, they provide a sort of grip for my SLR and do not interfere with my hand-held shooting. When I want to use the mini tripod, I just spread the legs and set the camera down. That said, there are people who are die-hard quick-release fans and who already have QR plates on all of their cameras/lenses. For those people I recommend the Markins QR-48 ($70), which includes a built-in bubble-level. My chief objection to this is that the quick release costs more than the legs and the head combined, yet doesn't add much in terms of functionality.

For anyone looking for a slightly more flexible setup (with more adjustable legs and a ballhead) and for whom money is no object, I would recommend the following:

The Leica Tabletop Tripod with Folding Legs ($109) with one of the small ballheads from one of the better ballhead manufacturers, such as a BH-25 LR ($175) from Really Right Stuff or a Q-Ball Q3 Emille ($300) from Markins. Both of these heads have built-in quick releases.*

But frankly, I wouldn't dismiss the Giottos/Manfrotto Mini Tripod / Manfrotto 234 combo. It is a much more flexible and stable combo than you think. On the other hand, for someone who will use such a setup a lot, even the more expensive Leica / mini-ballhead combo can seem like a bargain. To be honest with you, I would get far more use out of such a setup than I do out of my carbon fiber tripod and massive ballhead which, as I have already made clear, sits unused at home.

Adam

Adam McAnaney comments on TOP as amcananey.

*Legs identical to the Giottos/Manfrotto legs are available in a combo with a mini-ballhead in the form of the Manfrotto 709 Digi Tabletop Tripod with Ballhead ($40). The ballhead looks okay and has gotten good reviews, even from people using it with cameras as large as a Nikon D700, but I am skeptical that a mini-ballhead at this price point won't start to droop with use. For those using EVIL cameras or compacts, this might be a good option, however.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sat, 26 Jun 2010 07:21:35 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81283109 Sat, 26 Jun 2010 07:01:27 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81248682 Fri, 25 Jun 2010 23:31:34 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81232571

Tyler Monson, Not Pleased

Tyler Monson has just set up an anti-blog called 113reykjavik covering a recent 113-hour trip to Iceland.

As Tyler says, "The blog will be completed when you first see it; there will not be ongoing posts, so it is more like a book than a journal...also, like a book, it begins at the top/front and ends at the bottom/back—as Mother Nature intended."

Most of the pictures are of the urban-detail-and-doorway genre, but many repay a closer look. If your visual idea of Iceland consists mainly of scenic glaciers and black basalt* you might find his approach refreshing.

Tyler Monson, Economic Blessing

Mike

*Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:46:25 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81131961 Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:01:11 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81098723 Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:46:29 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81069431 Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:00:38 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81057713 Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:42:55 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/81019926
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

I'm sorry to report that Joe Deal, of Providence, Rhode Island, who we last talked about here, died of his illness last friday. Joe's pictures are elegant, analytical, accurate, and austere, with elements of abstraction, usually showing the raw encroachment of new development on landscape that still shows its natural contours and textures. There is an obituary at the St. Louis website stltoday.com (he was the Dean of the Art School at Washington University there during the '90s), and you can read a little about his post-New-Topographics work The Fault Zone at Robert Mann.

Sincere condolences to his wife, daughter, and father, as well as to his many students and friends.

Mike
(Thanks to Kent Phelan)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:54:02 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80934347 Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:49:21 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80923111

I live at the northernmost reaches of tornado alley, the vast expanse of the American Midwest that is plagued with tornadoes every Spring and summer. The most famous of them is probably the Kansas twister that carried Dorothy to Oz, but there are hundreds of them every year and they're not all so imaginative. For the past two nights we've had tremendous thunderstorms here.

When the big storm cells came through on Monday, the kids were planning on going bowling. I kept them at the house, which turned out to be a good idea—three tornadoes touched down locally. The largest, in the Village of Eagle just west of where we are (my son went to YMCA day camp in Eagle when he was younger), damaged more than 100 homes and completely destroyed at least six. Where we are, the warning sirens were wailing above the roar of the wind and the sky was flickering with lightning. The crackling nearby lightning hits were tremendous, like sonic booms. The rain came down in a fury—an inch and a half in an hour or so. The county is still under a State of Emergency.

The Chief of the Eagle Fire Department, Justin Heim, age 27, was at the Fire Station trying to start the warning siren manually (it's been on the fritz for some time) when the tornado struck his own home—with his wife and two young daughters inside. The house was completely obliterated down to ground level. The Chief himself, as you might imagine, was among the responders to that call. "It's gone," he said. "There's nothing there. It's like someone took the house and it's gone." Fortunately, he'd left his loved ones in a protected area of the basement before he left the house, so they were safe. A local resident allowed as how Chief Heim might have been allowed a little time to recover after he got his family settled into a nearby hotel, but he stayed on the job—and probably hasn't had a lot of sleep since. Makes sense. He's Eagle's only full-time fireman.

Everybody's playing innocent so far when asked about the non-functioning sirens, but local news quickly uncovered evidence of multiple failed inspections going back months. Fortunately, despite their absence, folks made it to their basements and no one in Eagle was killed or seriously injured.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch house, my basement's full of puddles, so no more work on the darkroom for a while.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:24:57 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80840366 Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:20:54 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80816734 Wed, 23 Jun 2010 04:04:32 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80716531
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

Anybody read any great books lately? I'm looking for what to read next....

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 08:28:46 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80433767 Sun, 20 Jun 2010 08:00:35 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80371674 Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:33:29 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80371675 Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:51:11 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80340368 Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:02:52 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80304495 Sat, 19 Jun 2010 07:01:08 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80319650
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

In the times when photographers who wanted to work and weren't rich had to have what my friend Nick Hartmann once called "The room-sized accessory"—a darkroom—extemporizing was the order of the day. People worked in every conceivable kind of space: under stairs, in extra bedrooms, closets, basements, utility rooms in office building basements—the list is as long as your arm. Many such spaces and setups were just preposterously awful, some almost to the point of parody, or hilarity.

I've gotten interested in this notion of "reverse snobbery" that came up the other day, and I do think I've always considered it a point of pride that I could work anywhere. I've worked in some nice darkrooms over the years, but I've definitely worked in some horrible ones, too—dank, smelly, ancient, cluttered, cobwebbed spaces where it would be considered cruel to confine a cat. The only darkroom I ever put together that really didn't work was in the dressing area and bathroom of a one-room studio apartment I lived in in Washington, D.C. It was cramped, awkwardly laid-out, hot, and airless—too hair-shirt even for me.

Of course, the opposite impulse sometimes prevails: people get to jonesing to build the "perfect" darkroom, custom fit to them and with everything designed exquisitely just so.

As regular readers know, I edited a photo magazine for a number of years. It was called Photo Techniques, but its previous title was Darkroom and Creative Camera Techniques (D&CCT), and before that (before the publisher acquired Creative Camera) it was called Darkroom Techniques. It was one of two darkroom magazines founded within a couple of years of 1979, the year that the home darkroom hobby in the U.S. peaked. The other title was Darkroom Photography. (Ironically, I had a hand in changing the names of both of those darkroom magazines to remove the word "darkroom" from their titles.) Anyway, the magazine I edited was still essentially a darkroom magazine when I was there, so I saw a steady stream of "perfect darkroom" articles. Some of these creations were state-of-the-art in having the latest and best of everything; some deployed cutting-edge technologies (remember Minolta's 45A pulsed-xenon enlarger head?); some were lovingly crafted with furniture-grade custom cabinetry and multiple coats of glossy paint. One was so over the top that we ran a series of articles on it in the magazine. I wish I could recall the name of the author or the articles off the top of my head, but that information is not bobbing to the surface.*

Then, in about my fourth year on the job, I began to notice a trend: people who built "perfect" darkrooms tended not to use them very much. This was a purely empirical observation. I'd contact people I know had been passionately engaged in months-long building projects and ask them how they were liking their pride-and-joy. And again and again the same answer came back: don't really get down there as often as I'd like; it's great, but I just haven't had time; work situation changed; family obligations; so forth. Finally, several years after we ran the article about the over-the-top darkroom—really, the most elaborate home darkroom I'd ever heard of—I contacted the author.

He'd moved.

He had tried to dismantle as much of the darkroom as he could, if I recall the conversation correctly, but the effort hadn't really proved satisfactory. I do remember him telling me that he had realized at some point that the building project itself was what had really interested him, not actually having the finished facility in which to do photographic work. 

Reverse snobbery maybe, but that cemented my preference for plain, unadorned, utilitarian, workmanlike spaces. Don't build too much in; let the joists and studs show; never be afraid to hammer a nail into a wall. Make do with what you have. You never want it to be so set that you can't rig it some other way if you feel like it. If something's less than ideal, shrug and get on with it. It's just a utility room, not a work of art in itself.

Extemporizing, often merely necessary, can also be a virtue. 

Mike

* Maybe it's in the famous Grad Photographica Bibliotheca, either the one of paper and shelves or the one of gray matter and synapses.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sat, 19 Jun 2010 03:13:38 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80174341 Fri, 18 Jun 2010 07:47:44 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80163599 Fri, 18 Jun 2010 04:35:58 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/80122010

By Ctein

I've just hit upon something rather cool and somewhat unexpected. Some of you will recall a column of mine from a year or so back called "JPEG...Seriously?" Well, I've found a reason for photographing JPEGs with my Olympus Pen E-P1. I can use them to get much, much better results at ISO 6400 than I could pull out of a RAW file using every trick I know.

(As usual, you can click on any of these illustrations to see them larger.)

Fig. 1. Olympus Pen RAW photographs at ISO 6400 are not lovely things. The full frame is on top, with a 100% magnification crop below. Observe the serious chroma noise, especially the horizontal and vertical stripes. © 2010 by Ctein.

As I wrote at the beginning of the year in "What Tests Don't Tell You," the E-P1 has some serious plaid chroma noise problems above ISO 800. It's great up to there, and then quality just falls off a cliff. ISO 1600 is marginal by my standards, everything above that is crap due to the chroma noise. Figure 1 shows a particularly egregious example of ISO 6400 quality in RAW mode; there's no way that I've found to make this RAW into a palatable photograph.

Now, take a look at the same photograph saved as JPEG in the camera (figure 2) . It's not perfect; there's some large low-frequency blotchiness, but that's the kind of stuff I could dodge or burn away. The chroma quality is not utterly sucking. It's usually not even this bad in most of the ISO 6400 photographs; this is just about the worst example I could come up with.

Fig. 2. The same photograph as in figure 1, but saved as a JPEG in camera. Excellent reduction of the chroma noise, but overall the picture is soft and veiled, and the highlights and shadows are blocked up. © 2010 by Ctein.

I'm truly amazed what the internal data massaging in the camera can do. If I had to, I could live with this as an okay snapshot. I don't much like that overall veiled quality, plus it's rather a shame losing several stops of highlight and shadow detail, most evident in the illuminated and dark stained glass windows and the trees).

So I said to myself, wait a minute...the Olympus can record in RAW+JPEG mode; what if I do that and then mix the two photographs in Photoshop? Start with the JPEG as the base layer, convert the RAW to a grayscale image (which almost completely eliminates the plaid problem), paste it in as a second layer over the JPEG, and set the blend mode to Luminosity (figure 3). I wind up with a photograph that has the clean chroma of the JPEG but retains most of the fine detail structure and tonal range of the RAW file. It's also a lot grainier.

Fig. 3. This layer stack combines a monochrome, noise-filtered copy of figure 1 with the JPEG from figure 2. The result is figure 4.

So, I further said to myself, what if I use my most flexible noise reduction plug-in (Imagenomic NoiseWare) to get rid of majority of the grain in the RAW layer, but not so much that I'm seriously compromising fine detail? Which leads me to Figure 4. Hey, it works! It's grainy, but the grain is even and tight. It's a nice compromise mix of the best characteristics of both source photographs.

Fig. 4. This is not half bad! Chroma noise is much better controlled than in the RAW photograph, but it preserves most of the RAW's detail and tonal range. It also has an acceptable compromise between grain and fine detail. © 2010 by Ctein.

It prints out as a fairly decent 8x10 (Mike's seen prints and Oren and Carl have seen full-size JPEGs, so they can confirm this). Nothing I would call professional quality by my standards, but more than pretty enough. It would be even better if I did a little bit of dodging and burning in on the remaining blotches; I didn't because I'm trying to show what the file really looks like. But, it wouldn't take me long to clean it up a lot more.

Best of all is that I can turn at least 90% of this merging process into a Photoshop automation. Possibly all of it; I haven't experimented with enough photographs yet. Even by hand it's very fast, but an automation would save me a whole bunch of repetitive mouse clicks.

Here are some of the better ISO 6400 results I've gotten out of this new trick (figures 5–7). Is it perfection? Of course not. But seeing as I'd previously decided this camera wasn't any good above ISO 800 I'm a mighty happy camper.

Fig. 5. RAW at the top, merged JPEG+RAW on the bottom. It's a big improvement, and the print looks even better; it's genuinely pleasing. © 2010 by Ctein.

Fig. 6. The merged RAW+JPEG photo combines most of the exposure range of the RAW file and most of the noise reduction of the JPEG. Compare the 100% sections at the bottom, RAW on left, RAW+JPEG on right. © 2010 by Ctein.

Fig. 7. My best result so far, and a genuinely good-looking 8x10 print. © 2010 by Ctein.

Ctein's weekly column appears every Thursday on TOP.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

'Kay, my reasoning here is a little twisty-and-turny, so see if you follow.

A couple of weeks ago, in the discussion following the "Letter to George" post (TOP's most popular post of 2010 so far, by the way), I boasted that I'd bought a really good tripod right out of the gate, in 1980, and had never seen the need to replace it. (Patted self on back, fortunately did not hurt arm.)

My old companion "The Beast," a Gitzo Studex that, fully extended, goes
as high as I can reach (also without hurting arm).

But then I got to thinking well, actually, that's probably only because I'm not a tripod kind of guy. I've mentioned many times that I'm not a big fan of tripods, nor a heavy user. My tripod has seen consistent low-level use over the years, but it's not an important piece of gear to me. So maybe that's the only reason I've been satisfied with the one I have.

But then it occurred to me that maybe the reason (or one reason) I don't much care for tripods is that the one I have isn't as good as I think it is. Hmm. Cart or horse?

First of all, the Gitzo is heavy. I felt sure the hammertone gunmetal main leg sections were steel—they look like steel, they feel like steel, they seem to weigh like steel—until Bryan Geyer disabused me of that notion by suggesting that I test it with a magnet to see. What do you know—he's right. They're aluminum.

The main leg sections, solid and sturdy if a little the worse for three decades
of wear, are actually not steel, but aluminum.

The Gitzo is solid as a rock, but light it is not. It tilts the bathroom scale at better than 7 lbs., unofficially. I was kind of surprised at that, too—it feels heavier. I would have guessed ten pounds. All collapsed, it's an imposing 31" long. 

By the way, that first, largest-diameter section into which the other sections telescope is technically called a "shell section," Bryan tells me. (If you don't know the name, Bryan is the founder and former owner of Really Right Stuff.)

The 3-way Gitzo Rational No. 2 head is solid but slow.

The longest of the knobs on the head is 10.5 inches long. It can be folded down almost parallel with the legs, but of course that makes it a bit slower to set up. 

The only real damage the beast has sustained in 30 years is that
the rubber knurling on two of the locking knobs is gone.
One departed only recently.

The thing is solid, have I mentioned that? And tall—with the center post extended, it goes well over my head. (That's what I wanted, back in the day, because I used it with a 4x5.) And it has lasted beautifully. As you can see from the pictures above, the legs have taken some battering, and the rubber knurling on a couple of the locking knobs has vanished, but that's it. I've taken the whole thing completely apart for a thorough cleaning three or four times—once when I had it up to its neck in fetid swamp water and I had to clean the insides of the legs lest they smell. You can see from the grime on the leg in the picture just above that the noble beast could stand a cleaning once again.

You've heard of a "quick-release"? Well, the attachment plate on the Rational No. 2 is an Extremely Slow Release.

The tripod isn't hard to use—how could a tripod be hard to use? But it's not super convenient, either. The locking knobs for the legs can come close to seizing, requiring a lot of force to release—I'm always careful not to over-tighten them. The biggest weakness of the tripod and head is something that could easily be fixed by buying an attachable quick-release plate, which I should have done long ago. What happens is that when it rattles around in the trunk or wherever, the threaded bolt can get stuck in the threaded opening through which you remove it, over at the far end of the slot in the plate. And I mean stuck—it can require pliers to free it again. That doesn't happen often, but there were at least two times that I remember when I wanted to use the tripod and just had to give up because the bolt was stuck and I didn't have a tool with me to get it unstuck.

So anyway, there's the dilemma—am I really just not a tripod guy, or would I use a tripod more often if I had one that wasn't so heavy to carry and slow to use? I decided to find out. So I've been looking into the state-of-the-art in tripods, circa 2010. What I'm learning is fascinating. Part II of this post won't show up for a week or two, but stay tuned—

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:42:18 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/79669044 Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:39:26 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/79621837
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

What I find fascinating about the foregoing discussion of printing and print quality is how often the comments bump up against what I would call "The Limits of Certainty." As much as we would like to speak with authority on how things should or shouldn't be done, or how prints should or shouldn't look, we are voicing opinions and preferences, not objective facts. It's all so virtual. We're forced to discuss prints while looking at JPEGs. We each have our own unique set of eyes and visual biases. We may be inspired to print one way on one day and perhaps another way the next. Ctein would print one of my images differently than I would, as would Mike. Which one of us is "right?"

We can discuss individual preferences, years of printing experience and artistic judgment for weeks, but what you ultimately up with is a print and a viewer. A print that the photographer is satisfied with and that the viewer enjoys enough to buy, frame and mount on a wall seems the best we can hope for. The great challenge is how to do it. Although (i.e. those who wish to produce excellent prints) all have the same goal, the most that other printers can do is give us maps to how they reached it. We then have to find our own way as best we can.

—Gordon Lewis

-

Photo by George LeChat

Mike adds: Hence the classic didactic instrument of art instruction, the "critique." In a critique, a group of artists (usually a class of students) brings examples of their own recent work (usually an assignment) and pins them to the wall. Each person's work is then discussed in turn by the teachers (if it's a class, and there are teachers) and the members of the group. Generally, all aspects of how the pictures work can be discussed, but there is no reason why the discussion can't center on print quality, as one of my classes—taught by Frank DiPerna—did. Also, although sometimes the effect of regular critiques is to lead to the formation of a group taste, it's just as usual for individuals to put themselves into some other relationship to the group—to try to provoke the group, out-do the others in some way, or hold back one's "real work" and put up dummies, so to speak, to protect oneself from criticism. The relationship can always be learned from by the individual, if he or she so chooses. At the Corcoran, where I got my degree, there were always two teachers, who often voiced conflicting opinions—to undermine the idea that any teacher held the "correct" answer just because he or she was the teacher.

I thought critiques were fun, interesting, and helpful enough that I tried to extend them past the end of art school. My graduating class met a number of times for group critiques in peoples' homes after we graduated. The problem was that many of us were by then preoccupied with making a living, and didn't have time or energy to make new work, so, increasingly, people would show up without any new work. Our momentum eventually dissipated.

In Washington, D.C., where I taught, I also used to get people coming to me saying things like "My friend -------- took your class at -------- and she loved it. If you ever teach another class, will you please let me know?" I'd encourage those people to organize a group of a few friends, and we'd meet in somebody's home, use slides, and hold critiques. I had become an itinerant teacher.

I've never quite taken to the idea of the "camera club," where, typically, larger groups of people get together to compete and award prizes, sometimes in separate categories, sometimes with an "expert guest" who is responsible for bestowing the brass rings. I was asked to do this once, and I found it vaguely unsatisfying—plus, I awarded top prize in three of five categories—the judging was blind as to the identity of the participants—to the same guy, which was very unsatisfying to the group, which would have liked to have seen the coveted prizes distributed more equably. What can I say? He was better than the others. If I were going to start a trend, like the Lyceum movement encouraged by Emerson or Vincent and Miller's Chautauquas, I'd suggest photographers start small critique groups. Realistically speaking, though, it's too heavy a commitment to be practical in modern life; this isn't the nineteenth century any more.

Mike

* "Chacun à son goût" is French for "To each their own taste." Title suggested by Mr. O. Grad. I can't reproduce diacritical marks such as the accent grave and circumflex in headers on TOP. Flyer from jebabb.us, advertising a Chautauqua in Corbin, Kentucky in 1926. Although Chautauquas were allegedly for self-improvement and adult education, entertainment played a part too. I particularly like Ellsworth Plumstead, the Dean of Impersonators, and the lady saxophonist.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:14:26 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/79379128
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

Harold Edgerton, Stonehenge at Night, 1944

This is really quite cool. "...The idea of a stroboscopic light-bay opening up in the base of an aircraft and illuminating scenes of human prehistory from above is breathtaking—as if dropping illuminative ordnance into a world of darkness, far below."

From the post "Stonehenge at Night, 1944," from Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG. 

Mike
(Thanks to Phil Aynsley)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:09:19 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/78772326 Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:47:16 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/78772327 Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:07:47 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/78762926

I think you can probably get the gist of this article from the first paragraph: "It's hard to explain a mind-blowing mess like this one, but AFP is suing a Haitian photojournalist for 'antagonistic assertion of [his] rights' after it distributed his news-breaking earthquake photos all over the world without his permission."

The article, at PDN online, is called "Insult to Injury: AFP Suing Photographer It Stole Images From." The photographer has some culpability, too, as you'll see.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:40:52 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/78732675
*** Werbepause: Poster Union - mach Dir Dein Bild!

Antique Ingraham "Magic 7" Clock, photographed with a yard-sale Kodak Recomar 6.5x9-cm camera, Fuji Velvia 50 in Rada 120 adapter. © Jim Hughes, 2010

By Jim Hughes

This past winter, having finally settled into our new home, a 1920 Arts and Crafts bungalow, I became obsessed with finding an appropriately mature clock. It had to be wind-up, of course, and melodious chimes were a prerequisite. We needed something antique but gracefully simple, large enough to be seen from a distance but small enough to fit the space I envisioned for it atop one of the many mission-style bookshelves I had erected to hold our newly moved collection of books. There is no room in this small house for towering Grandfathers!

After considerable searching, I found what I was looking for in a sprawling barn of an antiques mall a couple towns away from ours. The clock, hiding in a dark corner, was a traditional mantel model. It was named the "Magic 7" on the still intact instruction label glued inside the hinged rear panel. Made by E. Ingraham of Bristol, Connecticut, the clock had evidently survived nearly a century of loyal family timekeeping until it was picked up at an estate sale and made available for sale, and rebirth.

I was told the clock was in working condition, but when I got it home and wound it up with a misfitting key, it tick-tocked for a few seconds at most and promptly stopped dead. After much fiddling with the intricate maze of brass gears and wheels, conveniently accessible though the back panel, I got it running again—but only temporarily. I tried again and again. Each time it would run a bit longer, but ultimately go silent. Finally, well into the night, I fashioned a long, tapered stick, found my wife’s sewing machine oil, and, by alternately dipping and dabbing a tiny bit at a time, proceeded to carefully lubricate every bearing point I could reach. Then, using constant pressure from a finger, I forced the most recalcitrant (and slowest moving) gear forward. My finger went numb eventually, but the improvised encouragement, to my surprise, had the desired result.

This time around, to paraphrase John Cameron Swayze, the old clock, having taken its licking, just kept on ticking as its miniature pendulum finally began to swing rhythmically and relentlessly. It was music to my ears. All that was left for me was to visit a local old-clock repairer a friend recommended and rummage through his winding-key drawer to find a match—one that included the required second tiny socket for making fast-slow adjustments. That trial and error process took another month, but the old Ingraham now keeps perfect time—almost as good as any modern quartz movement—as long as I remember to wind it every seventh day (I know, the clock’s face says "eight day," but there seems to be no manufacturer’s 800 number that I can call for an explanation).

What does this Luddite’s clock have to do with photography, you may well ask? Think about it. Aside from a certain aesthetic appeal, its design is such that, with no clock-repair experience whatsoever (aside from having dismantled my grandfather’s pocket watch when I was seven, after which it ran at triple speed!), I was able to get the Ingraham running properly using my own two hands and a little logical ingenuity. In other words, this clock, being analog and mechanical, was designed and manufactured in a completely transparent manner.

There was a time when I intuitively understood the way cars worked, as well, and would not hesitate to undertake most engine repairs myself. I remember tuning the twin carburetors on a 1956 Mercedes 190 SL by putting an inverted funnel to my ear and listening to the sounds their various needles and orifices made. Try that with today’s electronic computerized beasts. I couldn’t afford the tools required, let alone the schooling needed to use them.

The Day It Rained Bubbles in Maine, photographed with a Fuji GS 645 on Fuji Velvia 50. © Jim Hughes, 2009

I'm afraid I feel the same way about cameras. The more mechanical, from my perspective, the better. I don't want to think about Modes and Histograms (although I do understand the latter's value, just as I do regularly apply Curves when I scan my transparencies and print Dye-Subs via Photoshop), and I certainly don’t want a bunch of tiny buttons and wheels, not to mention menus and submenus, getting between me and a picture when I'm shooting. Call me old-fashioned.

A few months before purchasing the clock, I happened upon a small cardboard box full of photo stuff at a yard sale. Even folded closed, I recognized the camera: a 6.5x9-cm Kodak Recomar 18, the smaller brother of the 9x12-cm Recomar 33 that had been my first serious camera back when I was 12 or so and the local camera-store proprietor in Connecticut convinced me "the lens alone is worth the price." For $25, the camera’s fixed 135mm ƒ/4.5 Kodak Anastigmat—in truth, I learned much later, a rebranded Schneider optic—was indeed worth that, and considerably more.

Recomars weren’t really your typical Kodaks. They were precision instruments made at the Dr. Nagel-Werk in Stuttgart, Germany, the same factory that designed and produced the superb Retina line (one of which, the IIa, I still regularly use). Recomars were made from 1932 to 1940, and the original list price in this country for the Model 18, with its sharp if uncoated 105mm ƒ/4.5 lens, was $40.

Back in 1949, I used film packs with my "new" Model 33. Pull a paper tab, "advance" the film. I scale focused or squinted at the groundglass back, which provided a dim and grainy upside down image, of course. Not only was using the camera real work, but I couldn't afford the luxury of bracketing single sheets of film. So I quickly learned how to properly expose and compose with some sort of precision. In fact, I used that camera through high school, even taking our Yearbook "candids" with it. Just imagine running up and down the sidelines at football games with your bellows camera on a tripod! Talk about visualization.

Amber Alert: My Twin Is Missing, photographed with a Fuji GS 645 on Fuji Velvia 50. © Jim Hughes, 2009

These days, little computers buried inside plastic cameras do much of the grunt work, focus included, but I find myself unwilling to relinquish any sort of control over my pictures. It was with the Recomar, after all, that I learned how to see photographically. I still have that camera, but I now shoot mostly color, and 9x12 color is not a specialty film even Freestyle carries.

But back to the yard sale. In that box was not only a pristine "baby" Recomar, looking for all the world like a miniaturized view camera, but a batch of accessories: a six-inch cable release apparently sold with the camera originally, a groundglass back with a nice folding leather hood, a film-pack adapter loaded with still unexposed film, two unopened boxes of Kodak Super-XX (expiration date, October 1943) pack film, and six single-sheet plate holders bearing handwritten tape labels such as "Panatomic-X, Loaded 2/24/41" and "Super Ortho Press 100, Loaded 2/24/41." On one of the latter labels the word "Posed" was overwritten.

Unfortunately, all of the holders were now empty. I would have loved to have seen pictures, but none were included in the box, which apparently came from a house on the Maine coast, perhaps a fishing village, that had recently been emptied out in an estate sale. The photographer whose equipment this was evidently had been at the very least a serious hobbyist. He or she took meticulous care of everything, which was in perfect working order. Even the Compur shutter, which sounded pretty accurate to my ear. Mint, as they say. And all for $8 (I checked Ebay and found a Model 18, sans holders, for $328). At least in my instance, the gear found a good home.

One day, I will see what I can do with the unexposed pack film. In the meantime, I went on Ebay to see if I could find a roll film adapter. For $40 (not quite the bargain that the camera "kit" was!), I was able to buy a Rada 120, also, it turned out, in near-perfect condition. I loaded it with Fuji Velvia 50, then waited for an opportunity to use the set up. Time passed. Finally, the day came when the Ingraham "Magic 7" clock was up and running.

So what could be more appropriate, I thought, than one antique (me) photographing a second antique (the Ingraham) using a third antique (the Recomar)? So that’s what I did. The result appears at the top of this post.

But wait, there’s more in this particular time capsule. Last September, a photographer friend here in Maine, knowing my preference for rangefinders (my primary shooters since 1968 have been a pair of Canon 7s), asked if I’d be interested in one of her old cameras. She had transitioned completely to digital, and this medium format RF camera had been just sitting in a drawer for several years. Last she remembered, it had had a film transport problem, which was why she stopped using it in the first place. That, and the fact that in her recent work, she was more interested in macro and longer lens work, and this camera, a 6x4.5, had a fixed "normal" length lens.

Of course, I said yes. So one day she and her husband met my wife and I for breakfast, and she handed me the camera: a Fuji GS 645, a model introduced in 1983 (I remember that Bob Schwalberg had raved about it in the penultimate issue of the original Camera Arts). Over the next few years, it was supplanted by newer versions, but this one, a true clamshell folder with a bright-frame, parallax-corrected viewfinder, had always been the most compact. And its 75mm ƒ/3.4 Fujinon lens had been widely praised.

A quick inspection showed that the years, and the owner, had been kind to this camera. But when I ran a dummy roll of film through it, I realized that there was indeed a serious disconnect between the very smooth and convenient (for a street shooter) thumb advance, and the frame-counting and shutter-cocking mechanism. The counter needed five or more frames for the shutter to begin firing. Unacceptable, obviously. So I opened the back, turned on a desk lamp, and stared. Eventually, I saw what might be causing the problem. The narrow band of foam in the body’s light-trap channel had begun to disintegrate, turning into a gooey mess. It had fouled a little spring-loaded lever that protrudes from a small opening in the channel and in essence tells the camera when the back is closed.

With needles, dental picks (I use them for woodworking!) and some rubber-cement thinner, I managed to remove all the foam, including a few gobs that had worked their way into the camera’s innards.

When I reloaded the dummy roll, everything worked perfectly. So in went a fresh roll of Velvia 50, which took me a couple weeks to shoot. I just carried the camera slung under a shoulder, as I would one of my 35mm rangefinders, popping it open and lifting it to my eye when a picture seemed to appear in front of me. I have included three photographs from that first roll. Think of them as finger exercises (a good way for any photographer to stay in shape, by the way).

Across the Street from Rite Aid's Window, photographed with a Fuji GS 645 on Fuji Velvia 50. © Jim Hughes, 2009

Unfortunately, it is the only roll I’ve been able to expose with the camera so far, because on one of the frames I noticed what appeared to be a ghost. Not being a believer is astral spirits, I again opened the back. This time, I put my eye right into the film plane and aimed the extended bellows, not the lens, directly at the brightest light in the house. And there was the culprit: not one, but two fairly obvious light leaks.

I Googled internet groups and discovered that the bellows was this camera's weak point. Unlike the rest of the camera, it was cheaply made (actually felt like coated cardboard) and not designed to withstand the twisting motion required each time it was opened and closed. Replacing a bellows in a small camera is not my idea of fun, so back to the internet. Everyone who'd encountered the problem mentioned one repair facility, Camera Wiz in Harrisonburg, Virginia, whose highly regarded proprietor, Frank Marshman, told me over the phone that he had one reliable supplier of quality leather bellows, in London. He had a few other Fujis awaiting repair, and he was about to place an order. He said he’d call and tell me when to send the camera.

That was a few months ago. In the meantime, it seems, the supplier went out of business. But, Frank informed me, two of the craftsmen, the ones who actually did the fabrication, had decided to go into business for themselves. So I waited some more. This week Frank said to send the camera since the bellows was enroute.

I like this camera so much that I have been happy to wait. In the interim, my other, much older bellows cameras, the 75-year old Recomar and the nearly 60-year old Retina IIa and Super Ikonta B (not to mention my bellowsless 42-year old Canons with vintage screw-mount lenses), are holding up just fine, thank you very much. I should fare so well. Even just ten years from now, I doubt if you'd be able to show me a digital camera from today that hasn't made it to the scrapheap.

Okay, so maybe it is time for me to get with the program and go digital. But the only camera I’d consider is the Leica M9, I’d have to relearn a bunch of stuff, and I doubt my pictures would be any better, or even different. Besides, I like holding my slide sheets up to the light. I can see the images directly and immediately, and study my selects in great detail on my lightbox with a loupe. I certainly can’t do that with a CD or DVD (and I know my film will still be readable when said digital files have long since faded into oblivion). Besides, I have the sinking feeling that my digital files will always be obscured by increasing layers of technology.

Of course, I could save a lot of money by not having to purchase film and pay for processing—but at my conservative shooting rate, I’d have to live another 58 years to be paid back the $7,000 I’d be spending for the Leica! That would make me the world's only 131-year old photographer....

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sun, 06 Jun 2010 22:14:05 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/78652712

Regular readers will recall our posts about Brian Duffy, one of the three leading lights of 1960s photography in Britain who later simply walked away from it all. We really only pointed to the excellent BBC video about him online, and our doing so was notable only because, as the photographer's son Chris Duffy later put it, we "pointed gazillions of people to the documentary" and crashed their server.

The video is still there (with more robust hosting)—to get to it you go to the Duffy website > Exhibits & Links > Play Documentary—and is still well worth seeing, if you haven't. But Duffy himself succumbed to lung disease last Monday.

Eamonn McCabe penned an obituary at The Guardian.

Our condolences to his family and friends.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. ]]> Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:27:38 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/78595280 Sun, 06 Jun 2010 07:49:45 +0200 http://rssmix.ru/visitor/getfeed/Id/1040/Item/78580318 Copyright Jim M. Goldstein, All Rights Reserved

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