The Online Photographer

Seasonal Art

By Ctein

Outdoor decorations are to Christmas what fireworks are to the Fourth of July. These exuberant displays of brilliant color and darkness-banishing light derive from, and are inspired by, their respective holidays. But after that they take on a life of their own. The enthusiastic, yet temporary, creations of private and public art are a celebration in themselves. A feast for the eyes, you can delight in Christmas decorations whether or not you observe the Yule, just as you can delight in fireworks whether or not you are a flag-waving patriot.

I've always loved Christmas decorations on a personal level, but they also intrigue me as an artist and a photographer of urban and suburban landscapes. Christmas seems to me a holiday unusually grounded in weather. Although it is celebrated all over the world, without regard to geography or meteorology, it is the quintessentially seasonal happening. All the secular symbolism, images, and archetypes are inextricably linked to a certain kind of climate typical of New England and northern Europe (hardly a surprise, there). Songs like "Jingle Bells," "Frosty the Snowman," and "White Christmas"; fir tree branches dappled with snow; Santa Claus dressed for the North Pole; snowflake, tinsel, and icicle decorations. These are all symbolic of the icy winter that comes between the fall harvest and the verdant spring.

Where I live, not so much. I made most of the photographs in my monograph "Christmas in California" within ten miles of my Daly City home, and all are located on the San Francisco Peninsula. This is one of those blessed spots that have a true Mediterranean climate. Locals consider it "cold" where I live; the ocean breezes and fog produce many days that are down in the high 50s Fahrenheit, and the nights may even get into the 40s. This is not exactly the winter that comes to mind when thinking of Christmas.

Oh, we do get snow. In the 40+ years I've lived here, since moving from New York, we've had measurable snow on the ground at least three times. White stuff that hung around long enough to have a snowball fight and make a very modest snowman. Not exactly a frequent occurrence, and it has never happened for Christmas.

This does not dissuade the locals. If anything the decorations here are even more imaginative and exuberant. Consciously or not, the folk artists who turn their houses into Christmas art (and they most certainly are art) seem intent to make up for the deficiencies in what Mother Nature has provided. Their real estate becomes a raw canvas onto which they paint dreams and desires for a joyous festival. For a few weeks these private feelings are on public display where the passing audience, including I, can delight in them. Half installation and half performance art, they spring up out of the mundane suburban landscape in December and merge back into it in January in a near-magical way: I hardly ever see them being put up or taken down—suddenly they are there and just as suddenly they are gone.

Taken as a whole these decorations have no obvious shared aesthetic despite their common inspiration. Many times I see extraordinary, isolated displays blazing away in an otherwise dark neighborhood. It's equally likely for me to find clusters of amazing constructions as neighborhoods engage in sociable, cooperative competition like some hyperchromatic, Prismacolor poetry jam. Sometimes there seem to be themes, where I can walk down a block and sense an underlying consistency or at least a subconsciously-shared artistic perspective. Others are entirely individualistic with one house's display having no connection with the one next to it other than the holiday, much like the disparate pavilions of different countries at a World's Fair. Some creations are elegant, subtle, and understated; others can only be described as (and I mean no disrespect by this) "over the top."

What these presentations do share is heart and the purpose of their creators to gift the world with a public celebration.

Christmas decorations are a very pure kind of art. They have to stand on their own, without reference to or knowledge about their artists. People reveal deep and very personal sentiments through these works, but the work isn't about them. The paradox of Christmas displays is that they are anonymous at the same time they intimately expose their makers' passions (up to a point). The dwellers in these artworks have established clear and consensual boundaries; one does not typically find a neat biography nor list of previous and upcoming exhibits posted next to the plastic reindeer.

That's why you won't find stories along with my pictures about the artists who created these lovely displays. It's understandable to be curious; I also wonder who's behind some of these displays. But artwork always has its mysteries and puzzles, and what we know of these artists should properly come from their art, not from invading their privacy.

Here is what these decorations are all about, for me: they are about the enjoyment, they are about the party, they are about having fun and a good time. I present my portfolio in the same spirit as the anonymous artists presented their creations to the world. May it bring you joy in any season of the year, brightening your days and nights.

Happy holidays to you, for whichever ones you love to celebrate.

Pax, Ctein

This essay was originally written to accompany Ctein's monograph "Christmas in California."

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I Hate Shopping!

By Ctein

Paula and I are going to have to buy a new car next year. My VW bus and her Toyota Corolla are nearing the ends of their lives. I don't drive a lot—less than 1500 miles a year; she, in turn, commutes 300 miles a week. We really need about 1.1 cars instead of two cars, but we do need that extra 0.1. And one of them needs to be really trustworthy. So one of the current cars needs to get replaced.

We went to the big West Coast auto show. I realized two things about myself. The first is that I truly couldn't care less about cars; they don't do anything for me. No aesthetic/emotional/visceral reaction whatsoever. I hadn't actually realize that before, but having all this supposedly delectable fruit dangled in front of me and not reacting to it made it pretty obvious. With very rare exceptions, it doesn't matter if it's standard or tricked out, sport or a sedan, $15,000 or $100,000. I truly don't care! It's like buying a nice hammer, to me. Does it work the way I want? That's it!

The second thing is that I hate shopping! Okay, that's not correct. I love getting cool stuff. What I hate is comparison shopping. Poring over specifications and alternatives and deciding just what the best thing to buy is. I know some people get off on that; me, I really don't like it. Gives me a headache. I just want to hand over the money for a toy and be done with it.

I probably should have known this pattern about myself years ago, but I'd not observed it cleanly. This is the first time I've gone looking for a new (or semi-new) car. Different enough in the specifics for me to see that pattern was the same, that being what this column's about. (It's not actually about cars. Oh, you figured that out, didn't you?)

Paula and I have several sanity-preserving strategies. We figure out exactly what we need (not what we want, what we need), and we make sure that list is a short one. Primarily it's good mileage, the gooder the better. Minimum capacity: Two adults with a full complement of luggage (what the Toyota was good for). We also have a secondary need to be able to carry large stuff, although that's not invoked frequently (what the VW bus was good for). We set firm price limits. If we can do much better than that, that's great! But we don't go higher than the limit without a very good reason (it's firm, not totally unyielding).

With that information in hand, we could go shopping. We did the car show in less than three hours and came out with a list of seven or eight candidates that filled various combinations of the aforementioned needs. As soon as we reached the point that we felt like we were nitpicking or going in circles, we left. It's way too easy to overthink this stuff.

The last sanity-preserving strategy is to realize there is no perfect toy. As I said, we can't quite make do with one car, (although it's close), so eventually we will be buying a secondary vehicle. Just not for a couple of more years. Be that as it may, all the vehicles we looked at were deficient in some way or another. So long as they didn't completely fail our "need" list, they didn't get rejected. Later we'll do test drives and probably winnow it down to two or three choices. Then we'll just make a decision. No buyer's remorse, no waffling, because we know we've already thought it through carefully. Trying to split hairs just causes ulcers and aggravation.

I still hate shopping. At least I know how to keep it from making me totally crazy or fall into purchase-dither deadlock.

That's it for this time.

If there's anyone who still don't see how this is on-topic, just pull out the word "car" and replace it with "camera" and substitute camera-specific features for car-specific ones. Works just as well. In fact, this is how I successfully shop for cameras.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Photogorilla: "I was just at the dealership yesterday. Thanks for helping me keep perspective!"

Featured Comment by Paul: "Luckily the car that fulfills the needs of most of us just came out. You can watch a little demonstration here."

Mike adds: Funny. Excruciating, but funny.

Taking Small Format Seriously

By Ctein

At the end of Mitch Alland's article a couple of weeks back, he wrote, "Indeed the overall performance of the GRD III helps validate the idea of the small-sensor camera as a new, serious format, in the way that 35mm was a new format when the first Leica was introduced."

That got me thinking, and I realized that I simultaneously thought that Mitch was right, but wrong.

From a technical point of view, I think his comparison is apt. I've already worked with two small format digital cameras whose image quality (for some arbitrary aggregate definition of "image quality") was better than 35mm film at all ISOs, as I've written in several articles, including "Great Expectations." Undeniably, an awful lot of world-class photographers found 35mm film adequate for doing serious work. (Mind you I wasn't one of them...but that's about me.) Why can't the same be true for small format digital cameras? So, I think Mitch is right; people don't take small format digital camera as seriously as they should.

There's no question that small-format cameras can be used for serious (ahem!) photography...but will anybody care? (photograph made with a Fuji S100fs camera with a 1/4-scale sensor, and, yes, it looks great at 11x14)

But just because they should doesn't mean they ever will. I think Mitch is wrong for non-technical reasons: the stuff that Mike has talked about at some length about what format photography settles into—the way it settled into 35mm as the dominant form and the population didn't see a need to push to anything smaller. My guess is that something somewhere between Micro 4/3 and 35mm is going to wind up as the de facto standard in digital photography. Doesn't have to be bigger than 4/3, but there's a lot of "legacy hardware" for 35mm, so my crystal ball's murky.

There also seems to be this rising expectation thing going on, with the average serious photographer expecting better quality from a digital camera than I expect to get from my 6x7 Pentax. Nothing inherently wrong with that; I applaud high standards. But, it likely precludes everyone except eccentrics like me from doing much serious work with small sensor cameras.

In which case the historical judgment will turn against the small-format sensor camera as a "serious" tool.

Let me just make it clear that I am not saying that bigger isn't better. If big floats your boat, great! A big sensor will usually (not always) produce better quality than a small one. But, remember that 8x10 wasn't the "sweet spot" for film formats, although 8x10 film photographs usually had much better technical image qualities than medium format. Medium format usually trumped 35mm. Yet, 35mm wound up dominating the world of film.

Size matters...just not always the way we think.

Ctein

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Solar Photography with a Coronado PST

By Ctein

Last column, I told you how much fun Paula and I were having with our new Coronado PST solar telescope and some of the tricks I've come up with to squeeze even more enjoyment out of it. Well, within a few days, I figured out that it was really easy to make solar photographs through the PST! I really do mean easy, not just "easy for Ctein."

You need a digital camera that has raw mode and manual focus and exposure settings; your camera is not likely to be able to focus on the monochromatic red light and relatively featureless disc of the sun, nor is it likely to accurately meter. Use an eyepiece with a rubberized eyecup, common on shorter focal length eyepieces, so that you can press the lens up against the eyecup and keep out stray light (Fig 1).

Figure 1

Set the camera on manual and focus the lens at infinity. ISO 800 and 1/125th sec seem to work well with my 5mm (shown in figure 1) and 3.2 mm eyepieces. Your mileage may differ. Leave the aperture wide open. If your camera has a burst mode, turn it on. Focus the telescope so the image looks sharp to you. Center the features you want to photograph in the eyepiece. Press the camera lens against the eyepiece and hold down the shutter release to fire off a burst of photographs; the Olympus Pen will do 10–12 raw photos before it starts to slow down.

Make a whole lot of photographs! You'll see why.

Figure 2

Okay, that was the easy part. Now it's a little more work. Don't try to evaluate the photographs in the screen on the back of the camera; the deep red light falls well outside the gamut of the display, and they're going to look featureless, a lot like figure 2, top. This is also how they'll look with the default settings in ACR (figure 3, left). Settings more like on figure 3, right, will give you an image like the one at the bottom of figure 2. Eliminating most of the color cast and increasing contrast lets you see a lot more of the detail in the prominences and what's on the surface of the sun.

Figure 3

Experiment! This column is not a tutorial and I'm not explaining exactly what the settings mean nor which ones will work best for you. Play around for yourself! I use different settings for bringing out detail in the prominences and in the surface of the sun. I usually kick the contrast way up to see solar detail, and that pushes prominences into black (figure 4). Not shown in this screenshot is that I also made the curves a lot steeper to increase contrast. Nice thing about raw; you can process photos any way you want.

Figure 4

Figure 4 shows one of the November 17 photographs I referred to in my comments to the previous column. After massaging the photo like this, I could see much, much more detail in the sun than I could through the telescope. This is a much better "view" that I could get with the naked eye. Notice all the "floaters! Almost all those dark spots and clouds are bits of dust and dirt and smudges in the eyepiece. You need to clean your eyepiece scrupulously or your photographs will be filled with these. Even Thierry's photographs aren't spotless. But, the narrow U-shaped cloud near the limb of the sun, lower right, is real. I could tell because from frame to frame it moved with the sun; floaters stay in the same place in the field.

So, why make a lot of photographs? Atmospheric turbulence! From frame to frame, the heat ripples in the air will make big changes in the sharpness of your photographs. 1/125th sec is enough to freeze those ripples, but it won't make them go away. Some frames will be extremely blurry; only a few will be maximally sharp. You will need to look through dozens of frames to find the best one.

Figure 5

Figure 5 shows one of the best frames on November 18. This was a very nice small prominence, but the seeing was really awful. I could barely make out the thin "rind" of darker spicules along the edge of the sun. Normally that rind would be very clear, even though this scope is too small to resolve individual spicules. I picked that frame out of about 200 photographs I made, and it's still not very sharp. Yes, searching is very tedious. Professional solar astronomers have the same problem—that's what students are for.

While you can expect photographs to show you a lot more detail than you can see in plages, granulation, and sunspot groups, you'll see less in prominence photographs. Our brains are really good at picking out fleeting fine detail in a wavering image; much better than the camera.

Can we do anything about that? Yes, but now it's no longer easy. You'll need a good image sharpening program, such as FocusFixer and a user-controllable noise reduction program such as Noise Ninja. (Again, I'm not going to tell you how to use these—not enough time, not enough space. I repeat, experiment!)

I took figure 5 and applied FocusFixer to it with a 16 pixel radius. This gave me the best sharpness with the fewest artifacts, but the photo was covered with "orange peel" texture; an artifact of the extreme enhancement. I used Noise Ninja with a manual selection of areas in the sky and the surface of the sun to eliminate most of the orange peel. Figure 6 shows me as much detail as I could ever hope to get under the really awful seeing conditions. Notice how ragged the limb of the sun is and the "rind" is almost invisible. But it's almost (not quite) as much detail as I could see with the naked eye.

Figure 6

I'm waiting for a day with good seeing and a great prominence. It'll happen; every day is different. That's also part and parcel of real solar astronomy.

Ctein

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Here Comes the Sun

By Ctein

A couple of weeks ago, Paula and I bought a small solar telescope. It just kinda happened.

Paula became very interested in getting a solar telescope several years ago when she had a chance to look through one and got to see solar prominences live and up close for the first time. I was less enthusiastic; many years ago I did solar astronomy professionally, so my standards for what constitutes a decent image are, well, a tad unrealistic. I doubted I'd be satisfied with low-cost gear. $10,000 or $20,000 will buy you research-grade equipment, but that's not exactly in my price range!

The Orion Telescope store in Cupertino announced an open house where they'd be showing off the Coronado line of solar telescopes. The technical specifications for low-cost scopes were not encouraging—small aperture and wide bandwidth are not conducive to serious viewing. Still, I was curious to see what the view was like through these low-end instruments. Then I could better figure out what level of unaffordable scope might make me happy.

To my surprise, I found I enjoyed the view through even the smallest and cheapest Coronado PST ("Personal Solar Telescope") (figure 1). On top of that, the price had dropped from $599 to $499. Paula and I looked at each other, shrugged, and decided we could always call it an early Xmas present (a blatantly transparent rationalization).

Figure 1

The PST has a 40mm aperture, a 400mm focal length, a 1 Ångstrom filter bandpass, and weighs 3 pounds. It's got a standard tripod socket on the base, so I just mounted it on my Bogen tilt-pan head trpod. For a scope this small, you don't need anything that fancy; pretty much any 'pod you've got lying around will do.

The PST comes with a 20mm eyepiece. That's entirely insufficient for solar viewing, except for the very largest (and rare) prominences and sunspot groups. A 10mm eyepiece is a much better choice as a standard. Normally I use a 7mm; if the seeing isn't good enough to support the 7mm eyepiece, it's pretty poor seeing. Which means that unless something really interesting is happening, I don't care. With good seeing I go down to 5mm, easy. With great seeing, 3mm. You don't need to buy expensive eyepieces: four-element Plössls are fine. With careful shopping, you should be able to pick up three for around $100.

Figure 2

There are some tricks to using a scope like this. The first is getting it pointed towards the sun. Swing the scope around until the shadow of the front hood or the adjustment ring is centered on the body of the scope (figure 2). Then tilt the scope up and down to align the sun's image in the bore sight (figure 3). The bore sight may not be perfectly aligned, and the proper position for the Sun image may not be dead center. When you find the proper position for the image, mark that spot on the ground glass of the sight with a sharp marking pen. Makes keeping the scope pointed a lot easier!

Figure 3

If you're using a tilt-pan head, tilt the scope so that the eyepiece is horizontal instead of vertical. The highly collimated, monochromatic light projected by the eypiece makes every damned floater in your eye clear as crystal. Keeping your head vertical keeps the floaters drifting a bit more and makes it easier to see the solar image. You'll still have to take breaks and move your head and eyes around to stir things up inside your eyeball.

What will you see? A deep crimson red sun, dappled with just-barely-visible granularity. The image will be dim. The telescope throws away more than 99.99% of the light! On almost any day, even in this period of low solar activity, you'll see small prominences around the rim. They change in a matter of hours or less. Solar astronomy like watching the weather. From minute to minute, the view will slowly change. We leave the scope set up in the living room and take it outdoors a couple of times a day, just to see if anything interesting is happening. Usually there is.

If you're lucky, there will be a sunspot group, which means there will be bright flares and dark filaments against the surface of the sun.

For reasons of space, I'm not going to explain how the H-Alpha hydrogen emission line filter in the PST works. See this URL instead. Normally, you'll want the tunable Fabry-Pérot etalon filter centered on the H-alpha line at 6562.8 Ångstroms. That produces the maximum contrast in solar surface detail. The PST has an adjustment ring (figure 4) for tuning the wavelength the etalon transmits. Adjusting this ring back and forth will bring out maximum detail in sunspot groups and maximum contrast in prominences along the edge of the sun.

Figure 4

This leads to a neat trick. With a scope like this, you are looking at such a narrow slice of the spectrum that modest velocities (by solar standards) will Doppler-shift the H-alpha line out of the bandpass of the filter! If you're looking at a sunspot group on the surface and you detune the filter to the long-wavelength side of H-alpha, you may start to see darker filaments and streamers appear against the surface of the sun. The reason they look dark is because their emissions are being Doppler shifted towards shorter wavelengths. That means this is stuff that's coming towards you! Similarly, you may see different parts of large prominences on the rim get brighter or darker relative to each other as you tune the etalon. That tells you the different parts of the prominences have different velocities towards or away from you. With a bit of practice and deduction, you can get some sense of what shape these "clouds" really are and how they're moving.

This, by the way, is one of the important tools that the big kids use for solar astronomy, which is why professionals want filters with bandpasses as narrow as 0.1 Å. Strange as it may seem, solar astronomers are always complaining about not having enough light.

So, am I getting $500 worth of fun out of this scope? Oh, you betcha!

More next time....

Ctein

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ADDENDUM: Dear folks, You want photographs? Okay, how about this one?

(The link is here.) I wasn't aware that this had even been an "APOD" photo* until tonight. I was Googling for some information on solar phenomena for my replies and stumbled across this. My first (and so far, only) APOD! This is a rather so-so scan of a rather brilliant print (if I do say so myself) of a rather spectacular prominence. For its time, circa 1971, it was considered a noteworthy achievement, being able to produce that much local contrast and detail enhancement without blowing out the highlights or the shadows (easy in Photoshop; not so easy in the darkroom). It ended up being on the cover of Science magazine in the early '70s. Not only my first APOD photo but my first magazine cover! (Well, nobody said how recent the photograph had to be...) If I can find my print of this photo, I'll try to make a better scan and post it.  —Ctein

*Astronomy Picture of the Day

Featured Comment by David Anderson: "Perhaps just an idea to issue a warning that no-one should attempt to view the Sun through any optical instrument unless they are using suitable solar filters. Please don't try this with an ordinary telescope or binoculars, your eyesight will be permanently damaged."

Featured Comment by Animesh Ray: "Dear Ctein, Thanks for the article, but more for the photo. I actually saw the cover in early '70s and, amazingly, remember it! I was an undergraduate student then, back in Calcutta, and I chanced upon this image of solar eruption on the cover. It was just an amazing sensation to ponder the real magnitude of these eruptions. I still remember having 'pored over' this photo for hours and dreaming about it, in the USIS library on a dingy lane near College Street in Calcutta.

"Just to revisit the old times, I looked for and found the issue of Science with Ctein's photo on the cover. It is amusing to re-read Linus Pauling's acerbic letter to the editor in that same issue!"

OT: Weird Adventures in A.I.*

Opal as a very young bird. Wish I had a photo of him "slinky-diving."

By Ctein

I was amused by a comment to one of my previous parrot columns that opined that parrots weren't so smart, 'cause they'd never invented anything.

'Cause, y'see, I had this tool-making budgie (a.k.a. budgerigar, a.k.a. parakeet).

I am not making this up.

It's hard for me to know if Opal was weird by budgie standards; I've never had a budgie that wasn't weird. I think weird is the budgie norm—they're little bundles of organic chaos. I raised Opal from a chick, hand feeding and weaning him (above). Growing up safe and secure made him fearless, not exactly a useful survival trait in a small prey animal, but whaddayagonnado?

Opal had a plastic slinky, both ends taped down in an upside-down U, on his play platform. He'd pluck at the loops; they'd go twang. Budgies do like making a racket. Opal started seeing how far he could yank them against the springiness; he'd stand on one side of the U and use the beak-over-claw hauling motion to pull loop after loop to one side of the U. The higher the tension, the bigger the twang when he let go.

One day he pulled as many loops as he could over, the tension nearly matching his body weight, hanging onto the topmost loop with his beak. Then he stepped onto the loops. Wham! The slinky sprung back over, whipping Opal over the top and flinging him onto his back on the other side. Opal flailed, flapped, and emitted that shrieky chitter that's the budgie's "I'm in danger" panic cry.

Then he jumped up, ran around to the other end of the slinky and did it all again. Pull, pull, step, twang, fling, SHRIEK. Over and over. He liked scaring himself.

But that's not the point of this column.

Parrots have trouble scratching around their eyes and their earholes with their claws, so they like using sharp protuberances as scratching posts. They're also Nature's own wood-chippers. Shredding stuff is a major time-sink for them. We regularly replenished Opal's supply of chew sticks; a block of wood would rarely last more than a week or two before it was sawdust.

We had a hamster chew-dowel (square cross-section stick about 6 centimeters long and half a centimeter cross) stuck into a block of cactus wood that was bolted to the top cage play area so the stick stuck out at beak level, for more chewing pleasure. Opal had gotten it down to a pointy stump maybe 1.5 cm long, well on its way to total demolition. I hypothesize that an itch struck, and he started rubbing his ear against the stump. I didn't see. Apparently a little grain-of-wheat lightbulb went off over that lentil-sized brain. Opal stopped demolishing the stump. He started trimming it. He evened up the sides, smoothed off corners and turned it into a nearly symmetric pencil-point of wood. This became his regular scratching stick and for the rest of his life (several more years), he never chewed away at that stick, save that he'd periodically slightly resharpen and reshape the tip when wear made it deviate from the desired form. He was still a mighty little sawdust machine when it came to other woody accessories. This one was special.

That's still not the point of the column. This is:

After a few months of observing this, Paula and I, being scientists by nature instead of normal people (to understand this difference see here), wondered if this might be subject to experiment. I decided to see if it was replicable. I stuck a fresh hamster dowel in the other end of the cactus wood. The feathered chain saw sprang into action, demolishing it with vigor. In a matter of days, all but a centimeter or so of that dowel was gone. The destruction stopped and finishing immediately began, much more promptly than before. With no hesitation at all Opal smoothed the sides, rounded off edges, and finished the point. When the second stick nearly matched the first, he stopped reworking it. He'd use one stick for scratching his left ear, the one facing the other way for scratching his right. That way he could always face towards the room when scratching an itch (that's just survival instinct—you don't turn your back on the world if you're a budgie).

Opal's tools. Once may be happenstance, but twice is definitely not coincidence.

Much else was reduced to sawdust over Opal's life, but the scratching sticks endured and were carefully maintained. When Opal died, I saved them and the cactus wood they were stuck in—it's pictured here as Opal left it.

Any animal behaviorists reading this? This one puzzles the hell out of me. It appears to meet the criteria for purposeful toolmaking, which has been observed in corvids and large psittacines. I've never read of it in something with a brain this small.

I won't go so far as to label it "invention," because I don't know how common it is for budgies to whittle points. Maybe that's a normal instinctive behavior. But maintaining and conserving a particular artifact and replicating it? That's just weird.

Ctein

*Animal intelligence

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Settling Down...or Not, as the Case May Be

By Ctein

My columns two and three back talked about a couple of logical fallacies that insinuate themselves into discussions of digital camera buying as more-or-less inevitabilities. Namely, that people would be looking for a camera that would last a lifetime (theirs, not the camera's) and that frequent upgrading of digital cameras followed from the way people used film. As I explained, those might hold for some people, but they didn't represent the historical norm and so they certainly weren't obligatory.

As a number of astute readers pointed out, those were entirely descriptive columns; they didn't discuss why and how it might be desirable to follow or ignore a particular course of action.

I meant to do that. Really. I wanted you all to think about what you need, not to react to pronouncements from me. Best way to let that happen? Don't pronounce.

This column, I'll be a bit more prescriptive, via retrospect.

I started out with Polaroid. As I've often said, it's what made me a serious photographer, and I rapidly moved through three model of camera and got into color, high-speed, and infrared film. After a few years of semi-professional Polaroid use, I got a 35mm camera. Worked exclusively in B&W for a year or so, then tried my hand at color printing. Loved it. Hated the films. Color print quality sucked in the late '60s. Felt I absolutely had to move to larger format, and so I did, acquiring a Pentax 67 only a few years after I started in 35mm.

I lucked out. The Pentax 67 proved to be my life's camera, despite the fact that I incorrectly expected to make a career as a photojournalist and to become enamored of view camera-type photography. Neither proved true, but the Pentax was still the right camera. I toyed with the idea of a 'Blad for a short time, but I had no serious interest.

Thing is, I didn't know enough at the time to be sure of making the right choice; I was too new at all of this. It was impossible to make a fully informed decision. As I said, I lucked out.

Digital cameras present some of the same problems. Despite the technology having over a 35 year history (leastwise, I've been working with it longer than that), equipment that we would consider remotely modern didn't start appearing until the 1990s, and most of us have a much shorter time of hands-on experience with it than that. And, by "us" I don't just mean end-users; I'm including the camera designers and manufacturers in that group. Collectively we're not a lot different from what I was in college—not inexperienced but far from having the mature knowledge that lets us know what we really want to be doing with a semi-novel medium.

We are mostly still figuring it out. Until we do, it's not going to be too surprising to see lots of manufacturers and people rapidly changing gear. That's just the way it works when, collectively, we're noobs.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Ed Hawco: "Speaking only in terms of the obsolescence of equipment, I still think there is a difference between how we outgrow digital and how we outgrew film cameras. The main difference is that back in the day when we felt we had outgrown that K1000 or whatever, the camera itself remained a perfectly good instrument. We'd sell it and move on to something else because our interests changed, not because the technology was obsolete. In the meantime, whoever we sold the equipment to could continue using it happily.

"With digital, we're more inclined to change equipment because the equipment has become obsolete. If we do manage to sell the old stuff, it's because some sap doesn't know it's a piece of hardware near the end of its life, or maybe they just want a cheap camera that they don't mind losing.

"The point being that in the old days the equipment was still good and usable when we were done with it, whereas nowadays cameras lose their value after only a few years, and then they become landfill.

"But like you say, we're still figuring this thing out."

Featured Comment by Oleg Volk: "Equipment upgrades are warranted when the cost of lost opportunities exceeds the upgrade cost. For example, I can get 95% sharp portrait images with 5D2 and USM 100mm macro vs. 10–15% with 10D and non-USM 100mm macro—upgrading is a pretty self-evident course of action. Keeping up with the industry demands is also necessary—stock photo sites or freelance clients won't take 3MP images as they need higher pixel count for print and even some web uses.

"P.S.: I put up a few photos of Ctein at work."

How Long Is a Lifetime?

By Ctein

The camera-maker spats that periodically appear in this and other venues often concern themselves with build quality. Certain partisans praise (or damn) certain manufacturers for the superior (or execrable) quality and durability of the goods they produce. Many mourn for the days when one could buy a camera that would last a lifetime.

Pentax 67 with waist-level finder and 90mm lens. Photo by Janne Moren.

I could sympathize. I've used the Pentax 67 system for my entire career; nearly 40 years now. Even as recently as a month ago, I was mentioning to a friend how the new Leica S2 could well be a camera that would serve me the rest of my life (putting aside the minor fact that I will never be able to afford one).

Sometime in the last month, I realized I was entirely mistaken in this notion. I will never have a camera that lasts a lifetime. Well, not my lifetime; tautologically, a camera will always last its lifetime. Reviewing the cameras I've owned for the past four decades, the average lifetime of a camera for me is about 10 years. At that point, I have beaten it to death. I am not one of those people who takes good care of his equipment. I don't intentionally abuse it, it just seems to happen. Even review equipment I get rarely survives the month in my hands without some kind of minor scuff or scratch. After that, it's all downhill.

I do own cameras that are entirely functional after considerably more than 10 years. But they're not cameras I used very frequently. Any piece of equipment I use regularly has an appallingly modest operational life.

I know there are folks out there who manage to use their gear for years without it suffering the crippling fate that mine does. In fact, I've purchased quite a bit of equipment from such people. The last Pentax 67 body I bought, from Jonathan Sachs, arrived in such perfect, pristine condition that I inquired of him if he'd either had it cleaned before sending it to me or if possibly it was a spare body that he had never used. No, it was just as he'd left it, after several years of proper use.

I hate people like that! They possess some sort of magical aura that I lack, and I resent them their good fortune (he said childishly).

Well, whatever. I've realized I can stop worrying about "lifetime" quality or usability. At least, if lifetime is defined as more than 10 years. Because, given my track record, no matter how exquisitely a camera is built nor how long a manufacturer supports it, film or digital, it's not likely to be functional in my hands for any longer than that.

Ctein

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Tips for Finding '1000 True Fans'

By Ctein

It's a few days past my birthday (74th (octal) if anyone cares), the autumnal equinox is just went by, and it's been almost 6 months since I started the "1000 true fans" experiment. Getting it up and running proved educational.

Now, before anyone gets their knickers in a twist again (a few did, last time), well, as I've said before, every column of mine isn't for everybody. Skip this and read the next article. Some of our readers are interested in this subject (we've heard from them), and other artists might want to try it for themselves—if not now, someday. I'm writing about it periodically as I develop useful information about doing it.

Now then. While I'm nowhere near supporting myself off of the donations of patrons, they are providing about a third of what I need to live on each month. That's amazingly good for this early in the project (though I still haven't figured out how to expand those numbers). It could have gone better had I understood three things ahead of time:

1. This is an impulse purchase.

People don't make modest donations or purchases after deep and careful deliberation. This is why charities make such a concerted effort to sign you up on the spot and not give you a form or phone number to respond to later. If they don't get you now, there's a good chance they won't ever.

Asking people before the launch if they'd be interested proved a mistake. Something like 120 people said they'd sign up. Only 60% signed up two weeks later. I should've dived right in and if I didn't get enough subscribers just refunded the other peoples' money.

2. People don't like billing.

Just over one third of the people who signed up wanted to pay the entire sum up front. Mind you, the low monthly fee was the "gateway drug." Many of the people who preferred to pay $108 in a lump sum instead of being billed under $9.50 a month would not have signed up if I had asked directly for $108. That low, low, rate created the impulse.

This has huge ramifications for running a project like this. The reason I went the donation/pick-your-prints-at-the-end route because I didn't think I'd have the net positive cash flow to do it any other way. Had I known better, I could have set it up as upfront-purchase/pay-in-installments and sent people art immediately. That would've avoided having to tiptoe through the PayPal minefield, and pushing some people's buttons about "donating" money.

When renewals come up next year, I'm going to change the system. People will get a print with their first payment. That'll be a different experiment; I know there are a few people who like the idea of gambling on what I might produce in the way of new art. We'll see if they outnumber the ones who are reticent to pay for an unknown pig in a future poke.

3. People will pay you more money.

A standard charitable approach is to have tiers of membership. The top tier is a decoy. When you get the letter that asks for $100, $200, $500, $1,000 or $10,000, the solicitor doesn't really expect anyone is going to give $10,000 that way. $10,000, though, sets a subconscious price level in the reader's head. A certain percentage of contributors will donate $500 or $1000, because it looks like a bargain in comparison. Without that $10,000 decoy hardly anyone would contribute $1,000; the "bargain" level would drop another notch.

I set up $9.50, $16, and $25 a month tiers. There are worthwhile benefits for signing up at the higher levels, but I created the highest tier mostly to subconsciously encourage people to sign up at the $16 level. Indeed, 20% of the sign-ups were at the $16 level, but 10% of them were at the $25 a month level!

Maybe I should create a $100 a month level? Hmmm....

Okay, that's it for this progress report. At the end of the calendar year, I'll tell you what I've learned about "taking care of 1000 true fans" and as the first year wraps up next spring, I'll talk to you about "retaining 1000 true fans."

Ctein

Ed. Note: Ctein (which by the way is pronounced "kuh-TINE," as I don't think I've mentioned recently) didn't include this, but I will: If you'd like to participate in collect-a-Ctein, here's how. I did, personally.  —Mike

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On Topic (Really!): Parrotspeak / Parrotvision

By Ctein

As I indicated in the comments to my last column, Elmo, my parrot, doesn't use words the way humans do. His listening comprehension is huge and grammatical, but his "speaking vocabulary" is only modestly more sophisticated than a cat's or a dog's. I'm not saying he couldn't learn to speak purposefully; we haven't tried to teach him to. I'm just saying he doesn't.

What I have noticed, though, is that his nonverbal communication is extensive, subtle, and very complex. It's not just about body postures and positions. He does a lot of very elaborate feather flicking and ruffling and repositioning that is clearly intended to convey information, most of which I don't understand. It's far, far more sophisticated than just fluffing oneself up or bristling like a cat does. It looks more like the way patterns change on cuttlefish. Paula and I both have a strong sense that Elmo is "saying" things that we don't understand.

I have a hypothesis why, and here is where it gets photographically interesting: Bird vision is very different from ours. Birds see in four frequency bands rather than three. The bands are more sharply defined than ours (so they can discriminate more distinct colors than we can), and one of the bands is in the near ultraviolet. As best as we can tell, birds process that information in ways similar to the way we do. For example, we confuse yellow with green plus red, because monochromatic yellow stimulates the long and medium wavelength cones the same way green plus red does. Birds have a second color, violet, where that should also occur: a proper mix of blue and ultraviolet should look the same to them as pure violet if they are visually interpreting color in an analogous way. Experiments show that, indeed, they can't tell the difference.

Consequently, birds don't look, to each other, the way they look to us. Budgies, for example, look to us to have dark blue cheek patches and pink feet. In the ultraviolet those are brilliant white (thank you, David Attenborough!), while the rest of the bird is very dark. In a few cases, researchers have UV-photographed wild species where they thought the male and females looked identical. In the ultraviolet they don't look anything alike; possibly all birds are sexually dimorphic, even if we can't see it.

Elmo's emotional state and what he's communicating is different in these three photos.
His "body language" looks very similar to us, but how does it look to him?

So, back to Elmo. Elmo looks uniformly neutral in color, save for a red tail. The "sunscreen" powder on the face is near white, the beak is near black, and the feathers are various shades of medium gray with silvery fringes. I have a strong hunch that's not at all the way Elmo looks in four-band "parrotvision."

More significantly, I have an intuition that the subtle changes in brightness I see when Elmo flicks and ruffles his feathers produce substantial brightness and color changes in parrotvision. I think there's communication going on there that I can't even perceive.

I could test this hypothesis with the right equipment. The Fuji UVIR camera, one of the UV-transmitting lenses, and a set of UV blocking and transmitting filters would certainly let me see what Elmo sees in the UV, and might even let me do a false-color simulation of what he sees full-spectrum.

I don't have that equipment, and I can't afford it. I used to have close enough friends at Fuji that I'd feel comfortable asking them for the loan of that kind of gear without an obvious review being in the offing, but I don't any longer; they've moved on or retired.

So, anyone here have an idea how I might get my hands on the gear? Somebody who knows somebody, perhaps? I figure it can't hurt to ask; you folks are collectively far more resourceful than me.

It might produce some interesting science. It might even produce some interesting art. It might produce nothing of note. Results are never certain, in art or science. It would be fun to find out.

Ctein
(Photos © 2009 by David Dyer-Bennet)

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