The so-called discovery of Vivian Maier’s work has triggered quite a storm of conversation out there in the ether. I’m not really sure what to make of it, but it did make me realize that I like photos from the 50′s and 60′s.
People weren’t so pretty back then.
OK, maybe not – a lunar exlipse on the solstice is pretty cool. But it is a fair amount of waiting, and staring at, and shooting… the moon. A big round rock in the sky.
Really, after you capture a few frames, what else is there? Everything else, in fact.
In other words, show the moon in its environment: with stars in the background, or in its relation to other celetial bodies (coming soon, I’m still processing that one), or the landscape (also coming soon), or the neighbors.
Meanwhile, at the neighbors...
In this case: while waiting for a long-exposure shot to finish, I was playing around with my Canon G11. Took this – it’s a slow shutter, and completely hand-held. What I was trying to capture: a lightly cloudy evening, with surprising shadows, and… the neighbors ignoring the eclipse & watching TV, instead.
Yes, the blue light you see is coming from a TV.
It seems that Lloyd Chambers has made a bit of a splash on the TOP site. He’s offering a sort of online book about perfecting sharpness, but it’s sold as annual subscriptions. Comments on TOP’s post aren’t really leaning in the direction of giving Lloyd a positive review, either.
I’m a bit torn on the subject. I admit to not being a fan of online learning, and I expect “books” to be purchased. Electronic books? Garbage, to me. I want my cellulose interface.
This isn’t really a book, though – even though it’s described as one. It seems to be more like online non-interactive instruction. A subtle difference, to be sure.
Ultimately, I’m not sure why people even care. It should be easy enough to grab a one-year subscription & save copies of any content that you care about. Even though that may not be strictly legal, I doubt that anyone could possibly get a conviction so long as it’s used for personal use. Shoot, a typical browser will cache the content.
So I’m torn, but I’m thinking I’ll go for it. Ultimately, I’ll doubtlessly save copies of text that I find useful, and read what I can stand. And maybe print off a bunch of pages so I can stand to read it in the first place.
At the very least, at least the money is going to the content creator, not the publisher.
Pulled off my first full 2x push on TMAX the other day. I’m sure my perspective is a bit off due to lack of familiarity with the film, but my initial reaction is positive. I’m surprised at how much detail survived. Take a highly extreme snow image:
'Twas a snowy day
(image straight off the scanner)
Going with black and white film for the last few months has definitely changed how I look at the world. It’s something I’d recommend for pretty much everyone, if only for a short while. I’m definitely seeing tonal changes more, and the nature of having to guess on exposures has tightened up my eye for the opportunities around me.
For example:
Snowy scene
Before I would have seen the same thing, and appreciated it every bit as much. But now, I see the scene and have the tools to pull it off (and yes, this was with digital – was out taking pictures for a family project)…
This isn’t the only thing done to the photo in this post, but it is an example of how a small tweak can do a lot for a photo:
Fogscape
In this case, I started with this photo (Flickr). Look closely & you’ll see that this is a crop from the upper-left. The rendering? I opened curves in Photoshop. Grabbed the curve near the middle and moved it around. The dark side had this cool effect.
I’m finding that simpler really is better these days…
Not a review, but a thank you to a company that’s doing it right: HDRSoft. Instead of pulling a trick from the pockets of a Microsoft. or an Apple, or Adobe, they’re effectively giving away upgrades to Photomatix Pro 4. Bought Photomatix 3? 4 is yours. I bought Photomatix 2, but I still received the upgrade – courtesy of purchasing after March 2007.
In this day & age, it’s refreshing to see a company that rewards loyalty and doesn’t overdo it in the charging department.
This was going on across the street when dropping my daughter off at her school:
Building on Fire
It was a pretty busy scene, so long I did not linger. Better to get out from underfoot than add to the difficulty of saving lives.
Still, it was good to have a relatively decent camera with me. As I’ve mentioned before, when missing opportunities, that one should always carry a camera. A good one, even – cell phone cameras, even the iPhone, aren’t up to this particular task.
“Owning more than one lens assures that you will always have the wrong lens on the camera for any given picture”
-T. Orland’s Compendium of Photographic Truths
This seems to be one of the great truths that I’m experiencing these days. It’s getting harder to get out the full SLR kit with lenses, save for specific activities. Most days I’m running around with the LX3, it seems – and on full wide-angle mode. Despite the zoom, I’m using it as if no zoom existed.
Some of this is mindset, I suppose. When I have too many choices, I get option lock. With fewer choices, I tend to just make ‘em work.
This is likely a good lead-in to my next project: going back to film. I’ve decided to do a short trial run similar to TOP’s Leica for a year challenge. The purpose isn’t really to follow what Mike Johnson is recommending – although I hope to get some of the same benefits. Rather, in my case: having always used labs to do processing, followed by jumping into digital, I never had the chance to develop my own negatives. Or to make my own prints. Or to get back to the original ways of how this was done.
Overall, my goal is to gain the skills it would take to be an old-time war photographer. Take a fully manual camera and a wad of film into the field, use it over the course of several days, and return for developing. Or even create a make-shift development kit on premises & process there.
We’ll see where this takes us.
Now a month & a half later, I find myself reminiscing about the hour or so that I spent at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. The feature at the time was rock & roll, and I managed to see many original items that were only dreams beforehand.
Mind you, I’m not a big fan of Rock & Roll photography in general. But to see Annie Liebowitz’s work in person (including the final portrait of John Lennon)? To see the images of Jim Marshall? It was astounding. Seeing the work of people I could only dream of living up to.
But that wasn’t the biggest takeaway. The biggest shock to me came when I noticed that two similar photos (sorry, I forget the ones) hanging side-by-side were processed in totally different ways. One was a classic silver gelatin print, the other a modern giclée (harumph. Bubble jet crap.).
Here’s the thing: I’ve been brought up believing that the best detail can only come from a printed page. Here I was looking at two images at relatively low ISO, and there was *no* functional difference. Not in the shadows, not in the highlights – nowhere. In fact, I would have placed the bubble jet at a slightly higher quality than the traditional print.
So now I’m a bit confused. Perhaps it was the processing, but I suspect that these days it just doesn’t matter. High-end printed images are just as good.