The Online Photographer

MTF Representation

I thought people might be interested to see this graphic of a set of MTF (modulation transfer function) measurements. I got it from Manfred Lai's Gallery. What's interesting about it is that by linking it to a representation of the 35mm frame, the illustrator makes it more clear than usual what the MTF chart is representing.

On this chart, they call image height "distance from center," which is more intuitive, and, helpfully, they distinguish the distance from the the optical axis ("center") to the edge of the film, 18mm, and the distance to the corner, which is 21.63mm (the hypotenuse of a right triangle with sides of 18mm and 12mm). On both graphics here, the difference between the two is a bluer, less purple color, allowing you to see clearly what part of the MTF chart records the transfer performance into the corner of the frame. You can see why the corners are often considerably less sharp than the edges.

The word "radial" for sagittal also helps a bit—this is the line that shows the contrast transfer for line pairs placed parallel to the radius in the test target.

Another point about MTF not often acknowledged is that to really describe a lens, you would need charts for several apertures and several distances. As far as it goes—giving information for 10 and 30 lp/mm at infinity and ƒ/2.8—this particular chart describes a very good lens indeed, although one important piece of information is missing—just what lens it is!

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Mike

Featured Comment by Jan: "If you're into Canon lenses and MTF charts, the book EF Lenswork III is a great resource. It not only describes the design and intended segment of each lens Canon makes, but also has MTF charts for all of them, including wide-angle and zoom variants for zoom lenses."

Mike replies: I second Jan's recommendation. The section on optics in EF Lenswork is one of the best short treatments of the topic I know of, and I've seen a lot.

Which Came First, 'On' or 'Off'?

Many people have emailed to alert me to Errol Morris's latest article in the Times. In this one he's concerned himself with how our—well, how Susan Sontag's— interpretations of pictures might be built around incorrect assumptions. Since the larger argument hinges on which picture was taken first and which second, Morris spends a great deal of time and energy analyzing that question, and ends by asking readers to help.

Perhaps appropriately, many of the comments (there are now well over 700 of them, making the entirety difficult to read through) are mistaken. Many people simply don't know what they're looking at—while thinking that they do.

First, I think all the many comments analyzing the alleged "shadows" are mistaken. Below is an enlargement (to pixel visibility) of the large TIFF of the print made available by the Library of Congress. As you can see, there are no clear sunlight shadows cast by the cannon balls at all. As a darkroom expert with 25 years of experience, I'm reasonably certain that what people are interpreting as "shadows" are in fact the result of one of the two pictures having received less exposure than the other. Albumen glass-plate photography is a double-negative process, so when the plate (negative) is exposed a little more, the print then has to be exposed a little more also, since the negative that received more exposure has more density. This naturally affects the tonal relationship of the so-called "shadow" areas of the picture (the dark tones), which expand or contract somewhat along with less or more negative exposure, respectively. But this effect is not evidence of actual specular shadows created by the sun. Just looking at the detail of the cannon balls in the "ON" photo confirms that there are no definitive shadows to analyze (analyzing the shadows, n.b., is different from analyzing the lighting).

Secondly, several comments (for example, #296) try to analyze the prevailing lighting by looking at the image of the sky. Although a perfectly natural impulse, here again is an example of the perils of non-expert interpretation.

Albumen plates were highly blue sensitive, which meant that many times when the plate was exposed for the ground features, the sky was exposed past the threshold of reciprocity and became unnaturally mottled. For this reason, 19th-century landscape photographers often painted out the sky on the plate itself (think White-Out!) and the sky then prints as a featureless white (or rather, it prints as "paper base," which was often a cream or sepia color). See American frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1867-1874, by Joel Snyder of the University of Chicago (Aperture, 1981) for more depth on this topic.

I’ve enlarged the Library of Congress TIFF of the "ON" Fenton print in Photoshop, and I can’t see if Fenton actually did this or not in these particular pictures, but that might just mean that he did it skillfully—the featureless white sky, so typical of 19th century landscapes, is a strong clue that it was done.

Ironically, an excellent example of this is Alexander Gardner’s picture of the dead Confederate sniper at Devil’s Den, another picture that is frequently cited as having been set up by the photographer (there is considerable evidence that the body was moved and that the weapon is not a sharpshooter's rifle). If you look at the TIFF of that picture from the Library of Congress, you can clearly see the brush marks where he painted out the sky on the negative. So any attempt to analyze the weather conditions on the day the Fenton pictures were taken by looking at the "skies" in the picture are most likely to be fruitless, if not actively misleading.

I do find one major anomaly in the article itself: after he quotes a lengthy passage from one of Fenton's letters, the author summarizes "the facts as expressed" in the letter, five in number, but he leaves out the fact that is most conspicuous—which is that Fenton is witnessing cannon balls bounding up the road and coming to rest near him, in one case literally at his feet (which he then picks up to bring back to his wife as a souvenir). Why Errol Morris would ignore this evidence of Fenton's own testimony is mystifying, unless it's just the typical critic's attitude that photographers are trained monkeys too stupid to know what's in their own pictures.   

As for Errol Morris's main question—which of the two photographs was made first—I find myself 65% convinced by the excellent analysis by Wendy Ju of Stanford, although I think it's likely that the truth cannot be known to any reasonable degree of certainty. Incidentally, perhaps the world's leading expert on comparative photographic views has posted a comment—it's #703. And he agrees with Wendy Ju.

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Mike

ADDENDUM: I think the larger point here is that we need to be very conservative about extrapolating from  conclusions based on assumptions. Incidentally, I don't think (as some of the commenters in the Times thread claimed) that investigations like this one are trivial. We can't investigate thoroughly every single statement of claim ever made by a scholar or critic in the course of them making an argument, but that makes it more important, not less, that we investigate one or two every once in a while; it has the effect of keeping writers honest and making them think twice before they jump to a conclusion or state a claim—and of keeping our own skepticism sharp.

Very few people come to the same conclusion I do, which is that OFF came first and ON was the later exposure because the valley was under bombardment at the very time Fenton was there, and Fenton and his assistant had the camera set up just beyond the range of the cannon. Maybe that wasn't so; but the comparison of the photographs makes it seem unlikely that the cannonballs were placed by Fenton trying to make his picture more dramatic, because in the ON picture there are more cannonballs in road and in the ditch, and if the two of them were out there rearranging things for pictorial effect, a) why wouldn't they take balls from the ditch and put them in the road, and b) why would they add more balls to the ditch instead of placing them somewhere more visible?

In any case, I think it's really curious that both Errol Morris and so many commenters ignored what Fenton himself says in his letter to his wife: "...I brought the van down & fixed the camera & while leveling it another ball came in a more slanting direction touching the rear of the battery as the others but instead of coming up the road bounded on to the hill on our left about 50 yards from us & came down right to us stopping at our feet. I picked it up put it into the van & hope to make you a present of it." Notice that he says "instead of coming up the road"—in other words, other cannonballs were coming up the road (and it's perfectly logical that the road would be what the gunners were aiming at) and this anomalous ball he's talking about is remarkable to him because it rolled over the hill on the left and made it all the way down to where he is standing. This makes it seem evident to me that the road was being bombarded during the time that he's there with his camera set up. It also explains why  he bothered to stay at the site for an hour or an hour and a half after taking the first exposure.

Of course, if that's so obvious, then why isn't everyone else saying the same thing? So I could well be wrong. (I always have tended to grant more credit to photographers themselves than many viewers—and critics—are willing to do.) All we really know is that the greater weight of the photographic evidence itself supports OFF before ON insofar as we can tell. —MJ

'A Degree Can't Hold Your Hand'

By Erin Martinelli

I am currently a 24-year-old student in my junior year of study at Oregon State University. I am working on my BFA in photography and was shocked to read the statistics in the T.O.P. post "Creative Livings," especially because they are so drastically different from graduate stats from OSU. Known mostly for its sciences, OSU actually has an excellent art school. Each and every professor is also an established pro in their chosen field. Though my class will sadly be the last to get a BFA in photography at OSU (the program has been terminated), I feel fortunate that both photography profs are not only extremely successful professionals, but have also both written books about photography and truly "know their stuff." When I receive criticism from them, I absorb every word of it. My skills as a photographer have drastically improved since starting the program. Of the 16 seniors to graduate last year, all 16 had extremely prestigious jobs lined up. One, for instance, is now employed as a photographer for CBS and another is working with one of the top equine photographers in the nation.

Photo by Erin  Martinelli, Oregon State University BFA Program

I guess that what I'm trying to say is that perhaps the school one goes to does play a part in their future success, and a degree may not be for everyone...however, there are many who don't utilize their degree and that is why they have failed in the field. My best friend, for example, graduated with a BA in Art from the University of Oregon only to work at Bi-Mart and now as a secretary at a medical office. To be honest, though, there are tons of opportunities out there for her...she just doesn't have the drive to go out there and pursue them.

Therefore, I think that a degree does come in handy if one wants to learn from professionals and has a mind that is open enough to realize that they know very little in the big scheme of things. School is also a great place to make connections and meet others in the field. Still, they student must also have the drive to do what it takes to succeed in the field. Almost anyone can get into art school and graduate, but I think that people assume that a degree is a free ticket to success. In reality, it is merely a chance to expand one's knowledge. A degree (at least at OSU) gives students the tools and experience to be a great photographer. But isn't this all that any school is expected to do? My father graduated from a great law school and worked as the Assistant D.A. in San Francisco because of some connections that he had. Still, he quit practicing after a few years. It wasn't because the school had failed, it was because he is lazy. I'm not in any way implying that those artists who don't make it professionally are lazy, but...a degree isn't going to hold the hand of its recipient and babysit them. I fully plan on getting my MFA once I am done with my BFA...not for the degree but for the experience. I want to better my skills so that I can use my drive and motivation to get my company off of the ground. I am not under the illusion that it will be an easy and smooth road. I have been through a lot in life and I know that few things are easy. But certainly, a little motivation goes a long way. For example, this past summer I checked Craig's List every day for free-lance jobs. I ended up with a lofty paycheck for several weddings. I don't think that I am a "great" photographer, but I put in the leg work. Graduates can't expect a degree to do that for them. In the end, school is for learning...it's up to the individual to do the rest.

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Erin Martinelli

Featured Comment by Doroga: "You now, in our country (Belarus) we do not even have a place where you can study Photography and receive at least a B.A. At least you have a choice."

U.C. Santa Cruz Closes Its Photo Program

Ansel Adams (second from right) and other great photographers taught at UCEx in years past

Instructors at the University of California Arts, Design and Humanities Extension received the bad news via a .PDF file from Vice Provost of Academic Affairs Alison Galloway. It began:

Dear Arts, Design & Humanities Instructors:

I recently assumed the leadership role for UCSC Extension. As a self-sustaining unit affiliated with UC Santa Cruz, University Extension provides continuing education services for our citizens.

In the months preceding my arrival, a careful assessment of financial viability was conducted of the programs offered through Extension. Over the past few years, we have accumulated a debt that now exceeds $30 million dollars. As a result, the organization must take a number of immediate corrective actions.

Our analysis revealed that many Arts, Design and Humanities courses were unable to cover the costs associated withtheir delivery. After much consultation and long deliberation, we made the difficult decision to close the Arts, Design & Humanities program at the end of the Fall quarter....

Tim Baskerville on The Nocturnes Night Photography Blog quotes Mark Citret: "It's the end of a great program that has seen the likes of Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Al Weber, Henry Gilpin, Morley Baer, among others, teaching over the last 40 years. That leaves the Northern California photography community with no University level workshop programs."

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Mike  (Thanks to Susan Nichols)

Joe McNally's Fireman

(Click on image to enlarge)

Photographer: Joe McNally
Camera: Nikon D3
Shutter speed: 1/10th sec.
Aperture: ƒ/16
Focal length: 56mm
Exposure mode: manual
Exposure metering: multi-pattern
Sensitivity: ISO 200
White balance: cloudy
Image quality: JPEG fine
More samples

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Mike (Thanks to Albano)

Kenji Nagai, 50, Dead Today in Burma

Above, Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagai lies dying in Sule Pagoda Road in Rangoon, Burma. Still-sketchy reports out of the violence-torn country indicate that Nagai, a videographer working for the APF news agency, was killed today by Myanmar government troops as they fired on innocent unarmed civilians. Poignantly, and heroically, he continued to try to record the violence even as he lay dying, as shown in a series of pictures on the Evening Standard (U.K.) website. The vicious crackdown by the military dictatorship followed seven days of peaceful pro-democracy protests initiated by Buddhist monks. Nagai was the first journalist and the first foreign national to die. Tokyo will protest to the Myanmar government.

Our deep condolences to the family, friends, colleagues and countrymen of Kenji Nagai.

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Mike

Cliff Mautner Gets His Mitts on a D3

Ace Philadelphia wedding photographer Cliff Mautner has posted his first "from the front line" Nikon D3 pictures. A quote from his introduction: "My first impressions, as expected, were mind blowing. To be brief, I'm stunned at how responsive this camera is and I didn't believe there was much room for improvement to the way the D2xs handled. I was clearly wrong. The focus, feel of the shutter, focus point selection, enormous LCD, auto white balance, dynamic range, color rendition, and a few other things have all been written about and touted, but nothing prepared me for the incredible quality of the files out of camera. In addition, the high ISO performance, which was also talked about, is nothing short of revolutionary."

He's promising a full review soon.

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Mike (Thanks to Cliff for permission to use his picture)

The Feeler

A life in art—the Voice chats with Peter Schjeldahl, art critic and pleasure addict

by Christian Viveros-Fauné, The Village Voice

"What Turns Shy Boy Into Sex Killer?" A fantastic headline concocted by 20-year-old cub reporter Peter Schjeldahl for the Jersey City Journal circa 1963, the unlikely phrase tumbled through my skull's traps and chutes as I sat down to a season-opening lunch with The New Yorker's ace art critic. "Killer turns into shy boy?" Nope. "Art critic turns into sex killer?" Plausible, but not here. "Shy boy turns into killer art critic?" Now we're getting somewhere!

-                                  Peter Schjeldahl by Mary Barone

While the cliché of a killer from the wheat-growing hinterlands is standard Hollywood fare (cue picture of Robert Blake), few stories are as improbable as Schjeldahl's real-world transformation from small-town literary hick into major-league aesthete. A North Dakota-born, Minnesota-raised book nerd besotted with  poetry—as youths eternally were before the Beatles—Schjeldahl dropped out of college, weighed his meager options, then literally drew lots to decide which of four major U.S. cities would host his budding, taciturn genius. New York won out—thank- fully for generations of readers who've been weaned on his generous insights, capacious taste, and sparklingly clean prose.

Landing in Hoboken, Schjeldahl first applied himself to beat journalism while writing poetry. Admittedly "too self-conscious to be a good reporter," he soon learned from folks he fell in with—Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara—that art writing was something else poets could do to earn money. This led him, legend goes, to place a pay-phone call to Thomas Hess, then crackerjack editor of ARTnews magazine. Schjeldahl breathlessly pumped his nonexistent qualifications. "Never mind all that," Schjeldahl says Hess shot back. "Just write me a letter telling me what makes you think you're qualified to walk into a gallery where some poor bastard has his paintings and tell him they are no good."

This, in a nutshell, is how Peter Schjeldahl, America's most important living art critic, came to write about art....

READ ON

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David Emerick

Featured Comment by Yuanchung Lee: "Boy, it's been a long time since I've read a critic (the author) write something so sycophantic and uncritical about his/her subject. Just over the top, no? As for Schjeldahl, he is not to my taste. His writing is not at all clear; though it is not the jargon-laced prose used by many Art critics, it is obfuscatory nonetheless. I admit to often finding it difficult simply to understand what the heck he is trying to say. In fact, before reading this article, I had assumed that Schjeldahl was not a native English speaker, given the oddness of his writing. But the poetry background kind of explains it. I prefer art criticism that explains, clearly and concisely, why the work in question is good / interesting / complex / important (or not). One has to mine Schjeldahl's writing to find the one or two sentences—admittedly illuminating and delightful, often—that actually performs this basic function."

Qualities and Properties

Robert Roaldi, whose comments inspired Ctein to write "The Bar Also Rises," left the following comment yesterday morning in that thread:

What partly prompted me to write about equipment standards in the previous comments was something that I have seen here, in Luminous Landscape ,and other places. Someone writes comments about pixel level noise in a camera model or other, then adds that that noise would not be seen in any final print so it's not worth worrying about. Then forum contributors consume megabytes of disk space doing precisely that: worrying about it. In the end, do I know any more than I did before? I don't know.

I fully understand the need to pursue excellence. Pushing manufacturers to do better for less money is perfectly fine, so far as it goes. I guess I am just a little sick of trying to decide what is meaningful and what isn't. I can't buy one of each model and test for myself.

Although we supposedly have great consumer choice, in my experience it is mostly a shelf space illusion. I recently decided to replace my 6-year old inkjet. There are dozens of models avalable, with relatively small differences in features that distinguish them. Would I be able to tell the difference between Canon's 5-colour model for $99CDN vs one of their 6-colour models for $199CDN. Who knows. I know that no store near me would let me bring both home for a week for me to test. So I bought the 6-colour one because of a test site that is linked from TOP (or was anyway). There are hundreds of equipment tests on the web and my final choice was made almost by flipping a coin. Would I have been equally served by the 5-colour $99CDN model? Maybe, but I will never know.

It seems to me that there are two main issues here, separate but both interesting. Regarding the issue of noise, I've always tried—with limited success, I'm afraid—to get people to look a little ways past technical properties and see them as qualities. This goes for pretty much any technical property you can name—resolution, noise, whatever it is. The first question to ask in order to vector in on the point would be, assuming you could get a camera that was completely noise-free, what then? Would this improve your pictures? The answer, I suppose, is that it might. More likely, it would work with some pictures and not be important for others. but it doesn't help at all to answer any of the main questions, which are, what are you going to take pictures of? Why? Once you've shot the pictures, how do you tell which ones are better and which not so good? Unfortunately, the technical goal of complete freedom from noise doesn't help you at all with any of these questions. Once you found the Holy Grail of a noise-free camera, maybe you could think of some things to do with it that would be enabled by this quality. But the problem is that it doesn't really help, in most cases—an indifferent snapshot with zero noise is still an indifferent snapshot.

I used to try to make this argument with regard to lens resolution on the Leica User Group, again with very limited success. Endless discussions would flow ever onward, never ceasing, about this and that lens and which one had ever so slightly more resolution than the next, at which aperture, and under which conditions. But the bigger question—why is resolution good and what do you need resolution for?—was seldom addressed. Some people, being argumentative and skilled in forensics, could invent plausible scenarios in which resolution would be desirable, and a few people actually had legitimate requirements for it—for instance, an aerial photographer who needed his pictures to show objects on the ground, or a surveillance photographer who needed to be able to read car license plate numbers from great distances. I'm not claiming it's unimportant absolutely, therefore. But unfortunately we do tend to get sidetracked into great disputations about technical properties that might ultimately be irrelevant, or very close to it.

The corollary to the question is, does noise ruin photographs that would otherwise be good ones? A couple of weeks ago I dug out some old digisnaps that I made with my long-gone Sony F-707. Take another look at two of the pictures along with a couple of details of the noise:

 
Grimmy in the Kitchen

(Detail of noise in the area above the doorway—click image to see larger)

Dan the Fireworks Man

(Detail of noise in the area just to the left of the figure—click to see larger)

As I think you'll agree, this is flagrant, excessive, flamboyant noise. But does it really matter to the pictures? Painting should have taught us by now that the structure that makes up the image doesn't really matter to the image itself and how it communicates as art.

Lucian Freud

Egon Schiele

...Or rather, the structure of the image does matter, but there is no intrinsic value or ranking system as to what is better and what is worse. More detail, less detail? Grain, no grain? Accurate color, expressive color? Regarding the noise in the two photographs, any given person might be able to articulate why it is bad. And of course it can be damned most effectively by resorting to taste: you can say you don't like it. But the truth is that the noise doesn't ruin either picture. Maybe it enhances them. More logically it is just neutral; it is just there. But it doesn't affect either picture's ability to communicate. So, really, when we talk about noise we are just distracting ourselves, distancing ourselves from the real questions; "noise" as a topic may be about photography, but it is not about photographs.

If we really want to talk about pictures we'd almost need the language of poetry. We'd talk about time, ghosts, loss, relationships, strangeness and familiarity, aging, aspiration and longing, places to be, subjective response, meaning, experience, love, all sorts of things. It's a language we don't really know. But the fact remains, it is just as possible to take a wholly successful, excellent, outstanding picture with a sensor that has tons of noise, as it is to take such a picture with a sensor that has no noise; it is just as possible to take a great picture that has almost no resolution as it is to take one with very high resolution; it is just as possible to take a great picture with a lens that distorts badly as it is to take one with a lens that does not distort at all; and the list goes on to all the other technical properties that we concern ourselves with so happily. We should not lose sight of that.

A book about food
As for Robert's other topic—choosing a printer—I sometimes think that the best book I've seen about this and similar topics—like choosing a camera, for instance—is a book about food by Marion Nestle called What to Eat. That might well sound strange (and maybe it is!), but the confusion and capitulation that Robert describes are wholly intentional. You're not supposed to be able to make an easy choice, or a logical one, either. You're supposed to be left with the feeling that you haven't adequately investigated all of the shopping options and opportunities, even after you've purchased your printer and taken it home. What to Eat talks intelligently about marketing issues that each one of us supposes we are above, and yet that each one of us can also acknowledge to be effective to the point of malevolence in its influence on the public at large. The choices of what to eat (the omnivore's dilemma) are effectively infinite, and the need to shop for (or at least to acquire) more food is ongoing and ever-immediate, so how you're influenced to make your own choices—and what entity your choice benefits—is like a broad-brush picture of the fine-line issues involved in finding a printer, or scanner, or digicam.

This does relate to the noise discussion to an extent, because when we get lost in discussions about sensor noise and what's best and what's less good, we're really functioning as consumers, and possibly allowing our roles as consumers to overwhelm our roles as photographers, creators of art, reporters, documentarians—that is, however we use photography and whatever we use it for. Does anybody who cares about photographs really want to be closed off from all the pictures he or she will ever see that have low resolution, or sensor noise, or that in some other way violate the accepted precepts of good shopping? That would be sad, not to mention aesthetically bankrupt. Indeed, a large number of successful artists tend to share a certain attitude toward consumerism—namely, that they set it aside or apart, they set themselves outside of it, and they don't talk about it. It's a way of refusing to be limited by it, refusing to accept its dictates, refusing to accept its hegemony over their own creative activity. It's an attitude most of us would be wise to acknowledge more often.

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Mike

Quote o' the Day

"People ask me how to get into Magnum today, and I roll my eyes and say, 'You wouldn’t believe it.' It’s a complicated process. But in 1949, which is when I met Bob Capa, if he said your photography was kind of interesting, that was probably the key to getting in. Now it’s very Byzantine. It’s like getting into Skull and Bones. Back then it was simple."
-                                                                                                                     —Burt Glinn