The Online Photographer

Oil Shots

I don't know if you're like me, but on a new day with the camera in my hands again, I can feel stopped-up, hesitant, embarrassed. I feel a certain resistance to raising the camera to my eye and taking that first shot.

When I feel that way, the way I get over it is to shoot. I've always considered the first roll of film to be a sort of 3-in-1 oil for my shooting brain. With digital, what's the equivalent? 36 shots doesn't quite do it. Almost. More like the first 50 shots on the card.

Once you get over those first 50 shots, you're flowing. Shooting begets shooting. You get over any hesitancy, clear away the crud of lack of confidence. That rusty reticence fades.

First task when I go shooting: get those first 50 shots on the card as quickly as possible. Only then does the metal-on-metal stop squeaking and grinding. Then you can get down to it.

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Mike

Talk About Bounce!

Bounce, n., a positive collateral effect arising from attention elsewhere, as in a sudden rise in traffic on a website following an article about it, or a sudden rise in sales of a product resulting from a positive review.

Talk about bounce—our friend Kirk Tuck, first introduced to denizens of the web back in 2001 when he wrote a long and thoughtful review of the Leica M6 on Photo.net, has written a book, published by the longtime photo how-to specialist Amherst Media, called Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography. (I have the book sitting here waiting patiently in my review queue.) Well, the other day, it was positively reviewed on Strobist.com by another friend, David Hobby, and directly afterward, Kirk reports, it shot up to #22 on Amazon's best-seller list.

Note: that's not #22 on Amazon's photography bestseller list. That's the main list, as in, all the books Amazon sells.

Now that's impressive.

Granted, the bounce—well, that degree of bounce—didn't last long. When I looked this morning, Minimalist Lighting was #200 and falling, although that's still pretty impressive for a photography title.

You may or may not be aware that Amazon's real-time bestseller rankings are almost a focus of obsession with many authors. I know writers who check the status of their book sales like some investors keep tabs on the stock market. And there are novelists who would kill for #200 for any length of time, much less #22. For instance, #22 this morning is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the sophomore effort and first novel by Dominican-American author Junot Diaz that just won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In any event, I think we can dub David the Oprah Winfrey of photography books.

______________________

Mike

Mark Hamburg Leaves Adobe

Jeff Schewe reports at PhotoshopNews that Mark Hamburg last week left Adobe to work for Microsoft. Hamburg was the second engineer at Adobe hired to work on Photoshop, after Thomas Knoll, and is considered one of the architects of Photoshop, which he worked on until v. 7.0. He is the founder and primary engineer of the Shadowland Project, which became Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

There are rumors wafting about the 'net that he will not be working on imaging at Microsoft, but that he'll be part of a crack team being assembled to look at the MS OS from the ground up in the wake of the, er, mixed reception given to Vista. Rumors. (Interestingly, Jeff Schewe says, "Mark doesn't do Windows all that well, he's quite the Mac bigot.")

Mark Hamburg was named inventor of the year by the Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association in 1999 and was elected to the National Association of Photoshop Professionals' Hall of Fame in 2003. We thank him for his services to photographers and join the chorus of those wishing him well.

Jeff Schewe, Mark’s last walk down the Adobe halls (on his way to his Adobe HR exit interview)

More: Martin Evening's article at Lightroom-News.com

______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Michael Reichmann)

Then and Now and Here and There

Youngme—Nowme
One of the really interesting aspects of photography—and one of the few of aspects of it that hasn't been exploited fully, although Nicholas Nixon's portraits of the Brown Sisters and the famous and excellent Rephotographic Survey Project leap to mind*—is its fascinating ability to compare subjects through time.

"Youngme—Nowme" winning entry by "pebble_it"

It's interesting that in written fiction, especially before the rise of the importance of film rights, it was commonplace for authors to track characters through large chunks of their lifetimes (think Pip in Dickens' Great Expectations), or even chronicle families through several generations. Early films tried to follow that lead, with decidedly mixed results. "Movie time" comes into conflict with novelistic time in various ways. You can apply a heavy armor of old-person makeup to an actor, like Dustin Hoffman playing the superannuated version of Jack Crabbe in the film "Little Big Man," and of course it's a commonplace in movies to have a similar-looking kid play a character-when-young, with the familiar, portentous jump through puberty denoting the shifting of gears from backstory to main story. Recently, the TV show "Cold Case" has had some success (also some lack of success) casting different actors to play the same character at different points in their lives. But for the most part fictive film-making runs into problems with spans of times that are too much longer than, or different than, the time it took to make the film.

Film and television even run into problems the other way too—witness all the sitcoms over the years that expired because the cute kids grew up (and the sitcom families who mysteriously acquired an additional cute kid as the original families aged, e.g., "The Cosby Show"), or the now excessively matured actors in the Harry Potter movies. Part of the genius of animated shows like the long-running "The Simpsons" (my son loves the Simpsons) is that Bart and the others can leap forward or backward in time on occasion but also effortlessly (and apparently eternally) stay the same age; there is even one animated sitcom, called "King of the Hill," where the story lines almost never depart from scenes that could be played by human actors, the advantage of the animated ones presumably being simply that they're more tractable and unchanging (and probably have less onerous salary demands). Honorable mention under this heading goes to all the aging A-list actors who can't seem to wean themselves away from vanity leading man roles despite the fact that they've gotten too old for the parts. Although I guess they play the parts in real life, too, so maybe they think it's normal.

In any event, check out Color Wars' popular "Youngme—Nowme" series…that is if your friend/relative who forwards to you all their favorite wacky internet jetsam hasn't emailed the link to you already. A brilliant, simple idea, obviously fun for some of the participants. I'm not much for the cutesy stuff, generally, but if some of these don't make you smile you've got a hard heart. Don't neglect to click on "View Entire Gallery" at the link. Comparos like these emphasize the ticking of the cosmic clock, but they're charming.

Sinister parallel
And in a sort of dark-side counterpart to the Youngme—Nowme photo pairs, there are a slew of videos on YouTube chronicling the alarming physical deterioration of meth addicts. The comparisons, sometimes sensationalized and doubtless meant to serve as deterrents, are nevertheless both genuinely frightening and frequently also poignant, reminding us again, if we need to be reminded, that none among us, when we're young and healthy, intends to go on to ruin our own lives, our health, our bodies; yet it happens.

John Kennerdell, from Mekong Express

Studio Hatyai
Our old friend John Kennerdell (John wrote one of the original bokeh articles for me at Photo Techniques a decade or so ago) has recently revamped his website entirely. Reserve some quality time for Studio Hatyai—there's some really wonderful stuff in these portfolios. My favorite is probably Mekong Express (shot, by the way, with a Canon 5D and 35mm ƒ/2 EF lens, made to mimic a Minolta Autocord or something similar loaded with Plus-X), but it's not easy to choose.

Working with the light in Newlyn
Hugh Symonds sent me a link to some pictures he took with a Zeiss 25mm ƒ/2.8 lens an a Nikon D3. I couldn't tell much about the equipment, but I liked the pictures quite a lot. It made me wonder why, with all the arty stuff and scenic stuff on the web, more people aren't convinced by the merits of good, solid documentary. Anyway I liked Hugh's pictures and maybe you will too.

Caught in the act
And finally, our own Carl Weese was recently caught in the act by a newspaper photographer while covering a local anti-war demonstration. He says, "...when the presumed Marine One (or a decoy)** flew over the site of the protest I dropped low to shoot the protesters holding their signs up at the aircraft. I saw Jim Shannon of the Waterbury Republican-American aiming right back at me to shoot the protesters from the front." Here's Jim's picture, grabbed from the paper's website:

Photo credit: Jim Shannon, Waterbury Republican-American

That's Carl crouching by the road, K20D in the business position. Typically, Oren (T.O.P.'s barely-visible Mandarin Advisor) zeroed right in on the fact that the lady on the right appears to be commemorating the scene with a vintage Pentax Spotmatic. I, for my part, also probably typically, was tickled by the fact that the lady on the front left has made a veritable craft project out of her sign, complete with artfully-arrayed bombs and a peach color scheme to complement the word "IMPEACH." A nice, friendly, color-coordinated sort of anti-war protester—she probably has a hand-knitted "Eat the Rich" tea cozy at home. Funny, and somehow touching.

_______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Albano and many others for the "Youngme" link, Hugh, John K., and, as ever, Oren and Carl)

*I could kick myself for never buying the now rare and prized Second View when it was available—I thought about it enough times—although you can now buy the latest update of the project, Third Views, Second Sights without any trouble.

**The Presidential helicopter, for those of you in other countries.

Featured Comment by Adam Isler: "You should really add Diego Goldberg's "The Arrow of Time" to this compendium—it traces a single family over the course of 31 years (and counting), on the same date each year, starting with the parents and including the three children, all now grown."

Scandale du Jour

It seems that perfectly innocent young girls keep growing up to be women who like sex, an ongoing commercial and social problem. The latest scandale du jour revolves around a just-revealed Annie Leibovitz portrait of one Miley Cyrus in this week's Vanity Fair that is causing outrage and concern among parents from coast to coast. The 15-year-old Cyrus, star of Disney's relentlessly wholesome and even more relentlessly profitable "Hannah Montana" franchise, was pictured by Leibovitz in a pose that is unrevealing but, well, unwholesome. The problem? Young girls look up to "Hannah Montana" as a role model, and parents do not want them thinking that they might grow up to be women who like sex.

The solution proposed by T.O.P.? Better role models. We have an obvious suggestion. She's smart. She's progressive. She does well in school. She takes fashion cues from Barbara Bush (the pearls). She's a vegetarian. True, she's orange, but that's probably the carrot juice. She plays jazz saxophone, fer cryin' out loud—how cool is that? And although a dalliance with Milhouse is sometimes suggested, it has never been hinted to be unwholesome. Finally, after seventeen years of being eight, it appears highly unlikely that she is ever going to do anything so inconvenient and potentially commercially disastrous as mature. D'oh! Perfect.

_____________________

Mike  (Photo credit: Vanity Fair)

Featured Comment by Cyril: "I hate to disagree with the editor of this site but my vote goes for Dora the explorer. At least she knows how to dress, and she's even been going green lately—now how cool is that for a role model. Of course she also has an unclear relationship with a monkey wearing rubber-boots, but I'm sure she can explain."

Coda:

Miley Cyrus and Annie Leibovitz. Photo Credit: Vanity Fair magazine

Pentax K20D Report—Part III: Color, Tone: New Features

By Carl Weese

Last time we looked at some test results working with RAW files. Of course not everyone likes to work with RAW. The K10D offered two flavors of JPEG: Natural, and Bright. While not quite Baskin Robbins yet, the K20D has expanded the line of JPEG flavor offerings considerably. These are accessed from the Function button (not the general menu) and include: Bright, Natural, Portrait, Landscape, Vibrant, and Monochrome. Mono lets you select modes that mimic filter effects: None, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, Magenta, Blue, Cyan, Infrared Color. You can punch in warmer or cooler toning of the monochrome image and customize contrast and sharpening.

In each of the color modes you can alter the starting point and punch in your own changes to Saturation, Hue, Contrast, and Sharpness. The various modes are in themselves simply pre-set suites of these settings. Natural looks good to me, especially if the Contrast setting is backed off one or two clicks. In fact that looks very close to the ACR 4.4.1 interpretation of the RAW file on my defaults (which use slightly lower black point and contrast settings than Adobe’s defaults). If I need to shoot RAW+JPEG in order to have immediate access to non-RAW files, that’s the setting I will use. All of the others are variations on the theme of “how I don’t want my pictures to look.” Hyped-up candy-apple color. To someone else of course these may be nice bright colors that look just right.

Going back to that white-clipping test on the RAW files, the Natural JPEG mode will mimic the results of that test, but without the benefit of ACR’s Recovery function. That is, there should be full detail through 2.3 stops above the middle, but then clipping will set in and be quite severe at +2.7. So these JPEGs will have less retention of highlight, less reach into the high values than RAW files even on default. The Pentax Photo Lab software will observe these settings in presenting you a default view of a RAW file, but of course since it is RAW you can make any changes you want; the camera settings serve only as a starting point. The other JPEG flavors will reduce the tonal range even more—this is the tradeoff for the questionable benefit of snappier contrast and higher saturation. Happily, none of these settings have any permanent effect on the RAW files, so if you want to play with these controls I recommend setting the camera to RAW+. I admit I’m curious to see what happens with the monochrome settings and will report when I’ve had a chance to play.

Here’s a really novel feature that I’m only going to describe briefly because it would take a lot of testing and experience to get a handle on it. The K20D offers “expanded dynamic range.” What’s that, you say? Let’s look in the manual: “By using the Expand Dynamic Range function, you can expand the light level expressed by the CMOS sensor pixels, making it more difficult for bright areas to occur in the image.”

Right….

To turn it on, you go to the ISO settings through the function button, then hit the function button again to toggle from normal to “D-Range 200%.” When you do, ISO settings below 200 become unavailable. JPEGs shot with d-range on show a big increase in ability to hold apparent highlight information. I say apparent because, while there’s an enormous increase in how far up you can expose without clipping (farther than a RAW file on defaults) there’s something funny about the color information. Like using a massive amount of Recovery in ACR, this appears to be extrapolated rather than direct data. Another serendipitous accident: when I first ran a highlight test with d-range on, I neglected to reset a manual WB setting from a previous test. This resulted in a slightly yellow color in the test run. The normal JPEG files showed this warm bias from mid value up to +2.3, above which they clipped. The d-range JPEGs held off clipping all the way to +3.7, but the color had lost its yellow cast, gone nearly neutral, by +2.

Pictures of actual subjects consistently show an effect on JPEG files from the d-range feature, but the effect varies greatly depending on the subject and brightness range of the scene. In high contrast situations like backlight or harsh cross-lighting, the feature can give a dramatic improvement. On more normal subjects it can sometimes give a strange HDR-like appearance. Mid-tones are generally raised, but shadows are almost completely unaffected. In many cases the blending effect reduces color saturation. If you want to play a real game of concentration, you could try testing those jazzier JPEG flavors like Bright and Vibrant combined with d-range.

Here's the clutter next to my imaging computer, harshly lit by a desk lamp. The histogram from a JPEG shot on Natural  shows clipping of the highlights (this low rez view hides how high the right side of the histogram goes up the wall).

The 72 ppi sRGB screen grab of a shot at the same settings but with d-range turned on probably won't show much improvement on your monitor, but look at that histogram. There is a major improvement in the highlights and upper middle tones, though no real change in the shadows.

Here’s what I think is going on. They call it 200%, and you lose the first stop of normal sensor ISO range. I think the camera is doing a form of HDR on the fly, combining the basic data of a shot at ISO 200 (for example) with the highlight detail that would have been captured at ISO 100. The effect is tricky. It’s quite difficult to get exactly the same look by adjusting a RAW file in ACR, although it’s easy to get a similar, just-as-good-or-better result. For anyone who has to shoot JPEG files it would be a good idea to get a handle on this feature because the improvements in some situations are very real. But I don’t think it should be used as a “set it and forget” default option. One last point on d-range: unlike all the other picture flavors offered by the K20D, this one affects RAW files. Not anywhere near as much as JPEGs, but RAW files shot with the feature turned on hold a little more highlight detail than with it off. You can avoid clipping at +3.3 with less, almost no, Recovery. The effect is even slightly different for PEF and native DNG captures. So it looks as though both the sensor and the JPEG engine are participating in this game.

Getting smarter
Now on to some reactions to actual picture taking with the K20D. The first thing I noticed examining folders of files in Bridge was that the camera’s automatic white balance has gotten a whole lot smarter. Accurate AWB is vital for shooting JPEGs since substantial color correction of an 8-bit file is bound to cause quality losses. With RAW a bad AWB just forces you to fix it, there’s no loss of quality (an exception is if you were setting your exposure using a tri-color histogram and the WB was so far off that, once corrected, you get clipping in a channel that was unclipped at the wrong WB). But it’s nice to open a folder and see a slew of consistent captures without spending the first part of a work session changing the temp/tint settings of every other exposure. While on this, a nice touch is that the camera lets you fine-tune the AWB. The default setting was too green and too warm for my taste, but through the function button it was easy to open a color box and move the hot spot left and down to adjust the color to my preference. ACR tracks this change and shows the adjusted color as long as WB is left at the default “as shot.”

Spinos Pawn Shop, Waterville, Connecticut

(Auto white balance, auto (program) exposure on multi-segment metering, DNG on the defaults in ACR run through my usual web-posting batch action.)

The next thing I noticed was that the multi-segment pattern metering also seems to have had its IQ raised. Exposure compensation is needed less often, and when needed, you don’t have to use as much. I’m actually having to re-train myself to dial in less compensation with the new camera. Of course the fact that there is a bit more overall dynamic range than offered by the K10D may be helping the meter by giving it a broader target to hit.

Next installment will be after I’ve had a chance to do a lot more actual picture taking.

_______________________

Previously:
Pentax K20D Report Part I: Focus
Pentax K20D Report Part II: The CMOS Sensor

_______________________

Carl

Carl's website 
Working Pictures
WPII

What Do You Shoot?

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Apple Riding a 51% Jump in Mac Sales

By John Markoff, The New York Times

San Francisco—Signs of a consumer slowdown abound in the United States, but Apple customers appear not to have noticed.

Buoyed by unusually strong Macintosh sales, the company grew notably faster than the rest of the computer market worldwide in the first three months of the year. Revenue increased 43 percent from the same period a year ago, the company reported. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, characterized the quarter as the strongest in Apple’s history....

READ ON at nytimes.com

_____________________

Mike

Not So Fast

It appears that yesterday, I was guilty of the common mental error of believing what I wanted to believe. I like the idea of Adobe DNG (digital negative)—a vendor-independent raw standard that works across platforms and promises unlimited future support. The DNGs I was shooting with the K20D were opening up in my older copy of Photoshop, and they looked great.

But appearances can be deceiving. Go into ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) and look at the numbers in the "White Balance" box, and you'll notice they can be way screwy—on my DNGs, temperature was 7000 Kelvin for one picture and tint was +97 for another, in fairly neutral light. That's not right. Carl tells me that's because the LUTs (lookup tables) are not proper for the camera and the raw file is not being unpacked properly. He wrote about this last year in his series of posts on the K10D, when he noticed the raw files didn't behave right until he got a version of ACR in which the K10D was supported.

So, even if you're using DNG, it's still necessary to use a version of ACR (or whatever raw converter you choose) that specifically supports the K20D (or whatever camera you own). With Adobe products, you need ACR 4.4 or Lightroom 1.4 to get K20D support. ACR 4.4.1, the latest version, is not compatible with versions of Photoshop prior to CS3, although it is usable with updated copies of Lightroom and with Photoshop Elements later than version 4.0 for Macintosh and 5.0 for Windows.

Carl is currently shooting PEFs (that's Pentax's proprietary raw file type) because they're smaller files, then immediately converting them to DNG using Adobe DNG Converter, which is a free download.

____________________

Mike  (Thanks to Carl for setting me straight)

Johnston's Theory of What-to-Buy

Hope you're not getting jaded about the K20D-fest here at TOP, because we've still got a ways to go yet. Carl's next installment will be published on Monday morning.

In the interim, he's asked me to post the following:

"The Pentax Browser and Photo Lab software disc that shipped with the K20D/K200D has a problem. It can't carry out an installation on Macs. The solution is to go to www.pentaximaging.com, locate the K20D product page, scroll to the bottom and click software update. You can then download the software with installer. The download and installation just went successfully with an iMac G5 and iBook G4."

Personally, I've been advocating for cameras that shoot DNG (Adobe Digital Negative, an open-standard raw format) for a long time, and the K20D has a menu setting for native DNG. Select it, and you're done. The files open right up in my not-so recent copy of LightZone and in my aging version of Photoshop. They'll open in Lightroom, too. Done and done, as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure our brain trust (i.e., you readers, collectively) can come up with a dozen reasons why it might be better to use some other workflow for raw capture, but personally I'm not the type to make exhaustive / neurotic comparisons of the myriad ways of getting from capture to picture editing app. Irresponsible reviewing not to examine all the possibilities, you say? Well, heck, I still haven't learned all the features in Photoshop. I don't know about your life, but my life's too short.

[Note: I'm afraid I have to go back on these statements somewhat. I've since had some problems with DNG files in programs where the specific camera I'm using, the K20D, is not supported. So please don't assume from my comments here that opening the K20D's native DNG files in programs in which the K20D is not supported will be problem-free.]

Six is good
The weather here has been lousy for two days, so I've been discouraged from shooting more with the DA 35 Macro, despite a rather uncommonly itchy shutterfinger (hey, that's the title of my friend Gordon's new blog). So here's one more example from the other day.

This was taken with the lens wide open at ƒ/2.8, ISO 400. My friend Nick, among many other things, is my one degree of separation from Henri Cartier-Bresson, arguably one of the two greatest photographers of the 20th century—Nick knew Henri personally.

Based on this one shot alone, I might rate the 35 Macro's bokeh at about a 6 wide open, in terms of my standard Bokeh Ratings. That's good for wide open.

And here's a detail of a little area of Nick's right shoulder. (Here we go—blatant pixel-peeping.) To be honest, I don't know how to ensure that any given TOP illustration will reliably open at a set magnification on your monitor (I've probably been told, and forgot), but if you click on this, it should be somewhere around 150%. At any rate, it shows the tight, clean, film-like grain that Carl was talking about the other day (Part II —> Noise).

Johnston's Theory of What-to-Buy
So, don't I have anything more to say about the camera itself, apart from the lens? I'm sure I will—not having enough to say is something of which I'm seldom accused. But I'll mention my basic impression based on my new theory of what camera to buy.

Recently I've been trying to analyze my camera-buying advice to actual individuals, compared to what they actually bought. I came to the realization that a) I'm usually trying to get people to buy bigger cameras, and b) people will almost always actually buy based on size—they'll buy the biggest camera they feel they want to deal with.

For some people, having a camera in the cellphone is just as much as they want to deal with. They already carry a phone, a personal organizer, an iPod, this'n'that little electronic gewgaw, and they just don't want to carry an extra thingy for picture-taking, even if it's the size of a pack of playing cards.

One step up, and you find the people who will carry the camera that's the size of the pack of playing cards, but they just don't want to move up to something the size of, say, the Canon G9—because it doesn't fit in a shirt pocket. That disqualifies it for them. Then you have the people who will deal with the G9 but not, say, the Olympus E-410. Next comes a slew of folks who will deal with an entry-level DSLR but not the mid-level ones. And so on.

At the apex of this taxonomy are pros, who not only carry a camera body "the size and weight of a telephone book," as I once put it (exaggerating as usual), but maybe even several of them.

Curiously, Ansel Adams—the other greatest photographer of the 20th century, in my view—was asked incessantly what kind of camera he used (I confess I asked him that myself—lame!). He had a standard answer: "The biggest one I can carry!" When he was young and vigorous he carried an 8x10 view camera, and in his later years, the "biggest he could carry" was a Hasselblad medium-format outfit.

There's an obvious penalty for choosing a camera that's too big: it sits at home.

So anyway, that's my new theory of camera-buying advice: I'm going to advise people to carry the biggest camera they feel they want to deal with. I haven't made very many actual recommendations based on this new theory yet. I'll let you know how it goes.

So anyway, all the foregoing is a very long-winded preamble for my very first first impression of the K20D and 35mm Macro: I think the combo is really just at the outside edge of bigness for me. It comes up to the very verge of being too big but doesn't go over.

One thing I learned about my Konica-Minolta 7D and 28–75mm zoom was that it was just plain too big, speaking for my own self. I just didn't like carrying it places. I resisted taking it with me. I never got over that. But with the K20D I've already caught myself climbing into the car and thinking, crap, better go get the camera—what if I see something? So far, I'd rather have it with me than not…this being the crucial test of Johnston's Theory of What-to-Buy.

More soon. In the meantime, have a nice weekend, and good light.

____________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Bill Pierce: "Different raw processing programs (Photoshop vs. Capture One Pro, for example) can actually interpret camera raw files a little bit differently even when they are DNG files rather than the proprietary raw files that a lot of cameras produce. I'm sure the folks who produce these programs would say the difference is significant and their program is best. I've just found them different, not better or worse, for the kind of photography you and I do. Let's put it this way—the difference is far less than shooting the same scene on Kodachrome, Ektachrome and Fuji—and we didn't use to whine when we did that."