The Online Photographer

The And Now For Something Completely Different Print Offer

As I mentioned a week or two ago, we're having another print sale.

But this time it's completely different. All our sales are good bargains for the buyer, we feel, but all of them are designed to earn money for the photographer and for the site (i.e., me). This one, however, is not primarily about making money. Ctein has been chomping at the bit for some time to put in peoples' hands a technical demonstration print—an actual print that shows how good a digital file can look printed relatively large (17x22"). I've been referring to it as his "Bigprint Sale."

Why? Well, you've heard the various details at various times, but Ctein simply feels that the digital prints he can make are better in quality than it's possible for him to make with traditional methods, and that he can do it with smaller cameras than many think is possible. The Bigprint sale is just a way of saying, "Look. See?"

The print is also a de facto demonstration of how good a Micro 4/3 file can look printed at a reasonably large size. That's only because Ctein happens to shoot Micro 4/3 right now...but still, he does, so it is. And it's not even the latest Micro 4/3—it was shot with the original 12-megapixel Olympus E-P1 camera and the Olympus 45mm ƒ/1.8 lens.

Ctein has fanatically worked on every single detail to lower the price to as close to nothing as he can get it. Other, bigger, more industrialized operations on the web might be able to lower prices below this, but this is as affordable as it's possible for us to make it.

Unfortunately, there is one big limitation. The print will only be available to U.S. buyers. Thirty-five to 45% of TOP's audience is non-U.S., and international buyers are enthusiastic participants in all our print sales. We are loathe to discriminate against you, but the only way Ctein can do this is to absolutely streamline his workflow to the most-efficient minimum.

However, if any domestic or international reader wants to buy a small bulk order of prints and distribute them to other readers in their own country or region, Ctein will work with you on that (as he will explain in more detail on Wednesday). For my part, if anyone decides to do that, I'll help you contact fellow readers through TOP.

As a practical matter the sale will be limited to 1,000 prints. It's not in any way a limited edition; Ctein just thinks that's all the work he can handle in a timely fashion. The sale will start on Wednesday morning and run either until Sunday at 11:59 p.m. left-coast time, or until 1,000 prints have been sold, whichever comes first.

I hope this sale will enable people who have held back from participating in past sales to participate this time.

Oh, and there won't be a Ctein column published next week (he'll be busy).

Please tune in on Wednesday morning for the details, and to see the picture.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

End Game

By Ctein

Mike and I have been discussing plans for one last dye transfer sale on TOP next year (we're not ready yet to divulge the details), which required me to go through my supply of dye transfer paper and inventory it. This is a remarkably tedious, repetitive process of closely examining each large sheet of paper by both reflected and transmitted light to catch any surface flaws or inclusions. Kodak's quality control was not the best in the waning days of dye transfer, so such precautions are necessary; half or more of the sheets in a box turn out to be unsellable.

When all was said and done, I discovered that my supplies of good paper were rather smaller than I had thought. By the end of next year and quite possibly sooner, I will have used up all my good dye transfer paper. Well, good riddance, I say. I've been bored with doing dye transfers some time now. I keep doing it because it's a profitable part of my business, but I won't cry at all at being forced out of it from lack of supplies.

This slightly surprising result had two immediate consequences. The first is that I stopped offering commercial dye transfer printing services the day after I finished my inventory. I can't afford to devote paper to new clients at the expense of existing obligations or making and selling prints of my own work.

I believe that leaves exactly one purveyor of dye transfer printing services in North America: Jim Browning in New Hampshire.

The second repercussion is more interesting to me. Psychologically, I'm now in the end game when it comes to my darkroom. I've been talking and mentally planning for a while about closing it down, by the end of next year at the latest. But the details of those plans were indefinite, and that made it feel a bit less real. Now I have a well-defined endpoint that will come with the exhaustion of limited supplies, even if I don't know the precise date of closure.

Ctein's not-long-for-this-world darkroom, in its day.

This has made it very real for me. When I recently went into the darkroom to make some dye transfer prints, I no longer found myself reflexively thinking about what maintenance, upkeep, and improvements I wanted to be doing, but about what will last for the next 12 to 20 months. If it's good for that long, and it hasn't been driving me totally crazy so far, then it's ignorable. That's a distinct change in my head.

In truth, it's a much more profound change then me "officially" giving up film for digital photography. Photography is photography, so far as I'm concerned; there is no significant difference for me between making a film photograph or a digital one. I honestly don't care about the medium, just the message.

But a darkroom? That has a substantial, tangible physical presence. For as long as I've had my own place to live, I have always had a permanent darkroom space, starting with my first apartment in 1972. By the end of next year, for the first time in 40 years, that will not be true. Do I mind? Not in the least! Finances permitting (fingers hugely crossed, here, hoping for a good sale), Paula and I will be able to take the garage space that currently includes or caters to my darkroom and build a couple of more rooms into this house. It would be nice to have a real guest room among other things. And an actual printing studio that can handle my humongous digital printer and its supplies and output in a convenient way.

Will I miss the darkroom, even one bit? Not once, not for a moment. But, man, it's sure a huge change.

Ctein

Longtime columnist Ctein sheds light into the darkness every Wednesday on TOP.

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "As someone who never made a darkroom print and who loves my large format inkjet, it still saddens me just a bit to see a truly expert darkroom printer hanging up his spurs. Watching the Luminous Landscape videos of Ctein making a dye transfer print, or Clyde Butcher making a huge black & white darkroom print, reassured me that there was still a living tradition stretching back to Edward Weston's contact prints and Paul Outerbridge's carbro color prints. It's becoming a more tenuous connection with every passing year. By the end of the decade, darkroom printing is likely to be as arcane and deliberately retro as self-coated glass plate capture."

Featured Comment by Walter Glover: "Been there and done that six years ago Ctein...and now find I have lived to regret it. Think long and hard before you reduce your darkroom option to zero. Old habits die hard and the darkroom was always more than just a production facility; it was a haven for a very special kind of contemplation, even therapy. I miss mine and am forever trying to come up with ways to even set-up to contact print some 8x10s."

Featured Comment by Jeff: "I found that selling off and donating my last darkroom four years ago was a liberating, and motivating, experience. After four darkrooms in four houses over 24 years, and after only using film, I finally decided to go all-digital prior to another house move. Only by getting rid of it all could I be all-in. Two people were perhaps happier than I: my home design friend, whom I've known for 25 years, finally able to not sacrifice her aesthetic choices due to my darkroom requirements (but still my stereo speakers and equipment); and a longtime friend and photo bud whom I gifted a nice Leica Focomat enlarger (in exchange for some much needed guidance in the digital realm). No regrets."

Featured Comment by MM: "I did the film-and-darkroom thing for 25 years. Then I stayed out of my darkroom for a few years in the mid-2000s when I was only shooting digital.

"Then about four years ago, after shooting and printing another pile of digital photographs that the client regarded as technically perfect but felt clinically bland to me, I made a realization that seems obvious in retrospect but was a huge leap at the time: darkroom printing, like shooting film, 'means' something completely different in an age when there's digital than it meant when film and darkroom was the only way to make photographs.

"I say this observation is 'obvious in retrospect' because I've since realized that there are countless analogous activities that took on new meaning in the face of new technologies: playing acoustic instruments after synthesizers were invented; driving a stick shift after automatics were invented; gardening after grocery stores were invented; walking after bicycles and cars were invented; woodworking after Ikea was invented; sending snail-mail cards after e-mail was invented; sailing after powerboats were invented; making paintings  after photography was invented....

"In all of these cases having a new, more efficient way of doing a task didn't satisfactorily replace the old way for everybody. Instead, the new way gave the old way a different meaning to those who still chose to do it the old way for the inherent satisfaction of the activity, even as they knew that their final product wasn't necessarily going to be 'better' as judged by whatever metric. (My large inkjet prints are usually far superior—and far, far easier to make—than my darkroom prints are. So?)

"Needless to say, and I've said it here before, I'm happily shooting both film and digital now (the former for personal satisfaction, the latter for my profession)—I try to keep a 50/50 balance—and I'm happily printing with inkjet and with my reborn darkroom.

"I'm not saying Ctein ever would or should consider anything similar; he knows himself and it's very clear he's done with film and darkroom. In part this could be because unlike a hobbyist he may associate the darkroom more with professional work than with low-stress personal enjoyment. And anyone who gets no more feeling of accomplishment from nailing a difficult shot with film than with digital should definitely shoot digital (it's the same principle as gardening, walking, sailing, painting, driving a stick shift, and playing acoustic instruments: if the process doesn't matter to you, do whatever gives you the best results).

"But it could also be because Ctein was born too early. In my observation, 1957 or 1958 is about the cutoff point for long-time photographers who are willing to return to analog photography. It seems that people born before then usually say, 'Did that for too long, will never do it again,' while those born after that date seem much more open to giving film and/or darkroom a(nother) go."

OT: From VHS to Virtual (Partly)

By Ctein

Digitizing the entertainment media in my house hasn't just been about audio CDs and vinyl records, as I've written about previously (here and here). Paula and I also had a couple of bookcases holding several hundred VHS tapes. A motley to be sure, including VHS, S-VHS, commercially purchased movies and TV series, and over-the-air recordings, the tapes running anywhere from two to eight hours, recorded over 25 years.

Remarkably, all were entirely viewable. But, with VHS machines becoming increasingly difficult to find and increasingly unreliable, there was pretty clearly a "sell by date" on the assemblage of entertainment, even if we didn't know just what that date was. Besides, I really wanted that bookshelf space back.

What was conceptually simple was not physically so. It was physically easy to move my turntable and preamp into the office where the computers work in order to digitize my vinyl. Not so for a VHS machine and a TV monitor. I didn't relish the idea of stringing several dozen feet of cable through the house, signal quality issues aside. Moving one of the computers into the living room where the TV lived was inconvenient and impractical. Finally, digitizing the VHS tapes was going to be a much bigger drain on my computer resources; the data bandwidth demands were substantially higher and I had several times as many hours of tape as of vinyl.

The solution I hit upon was to transfer everything to DVD first. We already owned a DVD recorder. I could plug the S-VHS output of the VCR directly into the input of the DVD recorder and turn all those tapes into platters. Them, I could digitize at my leisure on the computer using tools like Handbrake, and I'd even have the backup archive I wanted on those DVDs.

The really smart thing I did was to buy a factory-refurbished JVC HM-DH40000U D-VHS machine to play the tapes on. D-VHS was a fabulous technology; it's a shame it came along too late. Any tape, no matter what sort, looks immensely better played back on a D-VHS machine; ahh, the wonders of digital signal processing.

It was really simple. Pop a VHS tape into the JVC. Pop a blank DVD into the recorder and set the recording length to match whatever the length of the tape was (the bandwidth on a DVD is so much higher that there was negligible loss doing this). Press "play" and "record" and leave it be. Spot check the DVD to make sure it really recorded (always did). Repeat until done. Because of the miracles of D-VHS signal processing, these "second-generation" recordings looked just as good or better than the original tapes played on an ordinary S-VHS machine.

The two machines ran the better part of 24 hours a day. In a few months I had almost all the tapes converted to DVDs. Except, I'd hit a big pothole called "Macrovision." A few studios copy-protected their videotapes. My DVD recorder had copy-protection detection built into it and behaved accordingly. It was a very small fraction of the total number of tapes, maybe 30, just enough to be annoying, but enough that I didn't really feel like going out and buying new DVDs of all of them.

This one had me stalled for a good nine months. I inquired about the well-known digitizers like Dazzler and Toast, but they all seemed to be designed to detect Macrovision. Then Fry's had a sale on this.

With rebate, it was $14.95. So I figured what the hell, give it a try. Maybe I could figure out a way to hack around the Macrovision protection. Well, it turns out I didn't have to; this device was so primitive and the capture software so crude that it didn't even see the Macrovision signal!

So, an afternoon spent lugging the iMac into the living room, getting it set up, fiddling interminably with the settings in the ultra-primitive video capture software until the capture look decent, and finally I managed to transcribe a videotape.

Then it hit me. There was a much simpler and more elegant solution. I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it months earlier.

I launched my torrent client software, Vuze, and had it run some searches. Sure enough, 26 of the 30 uncooperative videotapes were freely available in pirated form as torrents! I cranked up my download rate to a megabyte per second, my upload rate down to under 1 kB per second (I'll happily take advantage of pirates; I'm sure not going to support them), and told Vuze to make it so. A week and many gigabytes later, I had digitized copies of almost all of my uncopyable tapes.

No doubt some of you are getting ready to launch fiery missives castigating me for blatant piracy. Too bad, but I don't see it that way. I own the videotapes. I just want to be able to continue watching them. I understand and appreciate the studios wishing to prevent pirating of the content; piracy is a serious problem and I am not on the side of the pirates. I very much doubt that the studios' intention was to make it impossible for me to watch, in the future, the movies I had purchased; I doubt that even entered their thoughts. (If it did, screw 'em.) It was an unintended consequence, and I feel entirely justified in circumventing it.

As for the tapes themselves? Well, no legal or ethical questions here about reselling them. Nobody wants VHS tapes! I just recycled the media.

Ctein

Ctein's media adventures and sundry flirtations with pirates are published on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "As a devoted classic film collector for (gasp) over 30 years, I feel your pain. I started in the Sony Beta era and have schlepped through each medium, yes, including LaserDisc.

"More to the recent point several years ago I, too, found myself with a couple of dozen films on VHS tape but not available on DVD. (I really do have a strong bias toward purchasing commercial films rather than trying to copy them. Better quality and the expense is negligible compared to the enjoyment of seeing good quality.) I purchased two Panasonic DMR-EZ47V dual VHS/DVD recorders to smooth the transfer to DVD. Best decision I ever made.

"But, no, there are indeed some films that are simply copy protected. In facing this hurdle I have been fortunate in two ways:

1. At my age I am no longer subject to the obsessions of my youth. I can take two giant steps back and ask myself just how important this is. Answer: Not very. I can always watch the film from the VHS side of those Panny units.
2. Enter Netflix and Amazon. There are quite a few films in Netflix streaming catalog that are not available on DVD at all. Voila! A new technology saves part of the day.

"Moral of the story: Don't drive yourself nuts."

The 2012 iPad, Part II: Bigger Display, Better Camera

By Ctein

(Part I is here)

This is the second part of my review of new iPad. I strongly recommend the first part and my previous iPad reviews to understand where I'm coming from with this device. I'm reviewing only the features that I care about, as there are an unlimited number of other reviews out there.

Resuming right from where I left off, last column...

Ultra-high-resolution displays like the iPad's can't reasonably portray graphics at their "native" resolutions, if those graphics were designed to look good on normal displays. Ordinary displays have resolutions of 100–150 ppi; the Retina displays easily double that. Consequently, if I design a thumbnail for my website that's, oh, say, 170 by 135 pixels I'd expect it to take up 1 inch square or so or so on a normal display. On a new iPad it would come out something more like 1 cm square.

iPad's rendering software upsamples the graphic to display it a more plausible size in layouts suitable for normal human beings instead of Lilliputians. Unfortunately, the upsampling looks lousy. Even my 768x1024 pixel "fullscreen" images look mediocre. The thumbnails look like, well, total crap.

For those who want technical details on dealing with this, read this. I'll be taking the brute force approach; e.g., leave the image tag heighth and width attributes alone (e.g., 170x135 px) but upload double-resolution (340x270 px) JPEGs and just let the receiving device cope.

My test page now looks great on all screens. It's going to be a lot of work, since I don't have high resolution versions of most of the full-screen images; it's back to square one to re-create them. The thumbnails, at least, I can up-rez relatively efficiently (a few minutes work apiece) from existing resources.

The problem isn't pressing; currently this matters only for the new iPad. Still, the handwriting's on the wall; it's not going to be too many years before everybody is running high-resolution displays. Consider yourself warned.

Now, let's talk about the camera.

I need to bring up ergonomics, a very subjective matter. I ask you to imagine the very best-handling digital camera/phone/whatever you've used and rated as a 10 and the very worst as a 1. Ready? Where would the new iPad fall on that scale?

About –273.

There's just about no way it's good. The iPad is too heavy and awkwardly shaped to comfortably hold in camera-using position. You can select what point to focus on and set the exposure for by touching the screen, but then you're gripping one-handed, and that hand'll cramp up really quickly. In landscape mode, the lens is at the lower right corner, where it is very easily accidentally touched while holding the iPad in a way that places your hand near the shutter button. Voila, a smear of finger grease on the camera cover glass! Rotating the iPad 180° places the shutter button right next to the "exit this application" button. Guess which one you'll be hitting by accident? Portrait mode is better but still difficult.

How does the camera perform? As the photograph of the Macbeth chart (above) shows, color rendition is really excellent. It is slightly too saturated, but the hues are spot on. A good digital camera will do better, but this is more accurate color than any film can provide (says the guy who's tested most of them). Under non-daylight conditions, such as fluorescent or incandescent light, there is a slight color cast, orangish for incandescent lamps and yellowish for compact fluorescents. It is usually ignorable. It could easily be corrected; even Mac OS's Preview is sufficient for this task.

I measure the resolution at about 1200 lines by 1600 lines. That's roughly a 2-megapixel equivalent, a bit low for a 5-megapixel camera. In film terms, that's roughly like getting 25 lp/mm from a 35mm point-and-shoot camera. Not quite at the level of "acceptable sharpness" in an 8x10 print, but close. Indeed, such prints made from the iPad's photos are passably sharp; just don't scrutinize them too closely. Remarkably, sharpness is entirely uniform from center to corner; that new five-element lens really is remarkable. It does show a bit of pincushion distortion.

The camera will focus close enough to cover smaller than a 3x4" area; on the iPad's screen, it's more than a 2X enlargement from life-size. Even with relatively low resolution, you can photograph detail as fine as the naked eye can see.

Figure 2

The iPad's exposure range measures only seven stops. This is definitely an expose-for-the-highlights camera. Let the shadows go. Automatically-determined exposure usually works well, as figure 2 indicates, but there will be times when you'll need to dial it down by tapping the screen in a brighter area. Figure 2 show off both the accurate color and short exposure range. Elmo's almond eyes and the slight pinkish tinge to the skin around his eye are faithfully reproduced while the feathers are pleasantly close to the proper shade of gray.

Figure 3

Zooming in on figure 2 to 100% (figure 3) shows the ointment's big fly. Extremely aggressive noise reduction produces that undesirable "watercolor" look. The fine detail in the feathers on Elmo's throat pops in and out of existence depending on whether it has enough contrast to survive the noise-reduction algorithm's not-so-tender ministrations. At low light levels the noise really becomes unacceptable, viz. figure 4 (100% scale). It's tolerable on the iPad screen and might be acceptable in a "drugstore" sized print. It's ugly in anything larger.

Figure 4

Even in direct sunlight, the photographs aren't noise-free, as you can see in figure 5 (full frame) and figure 6 (100% scale). The noise is fine-grained; in a print, it looks about what you'd expect from a fine-grain 35mm film. Entirely acceptable to most viewers, even me, but well below what digital cameras can deliver today. Subject matter with bold edges and tones won't suffer much from the noise issues, as figure 7 (full frame) nicely demonstrates. Although it lacks tack-sharpness, it makes an attractive 8x 10print.

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

All in all, I'd say the iPad camera's quality is vaguely comparable to a middlin' 35mm point-and-shoot (better in some ways, worse in others). That puts it well below today's good digicams and the iPhone 4S. But the camera's usable, if you don't get your expectations too high; that certainly couldn't be said of the one in the iPad2.

Ctein

Note: None of the illustrations here were massaged or enhanced, save for a slight exposure adjustment to figure 1 so that it would properly match the Macbeth chart.

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

The 2012 iPad, Part I: A Distinct Step Upwards

By Ctein

This is the latest in what will obviously be an indefinite series of reviews of new versions of the iPad as they come out. Apparently I'm hooked on upgrading. I'm okay with that.

I recommend readers look at my previous two reviews to understand where I'm coming from with this device: Why I Needed an iPad and Why I'm Getting an iPad 2. This is not a general purpose review. I'm reviewing the features that I care about and/or I think will matter to other photographers. There are an unlimited number of other reviews out there, so feel free to browse to your heart's content.

I didn't recommend the iPad 2 as an upgrade from the original iPad (even though I upgraded), nor did I see that it brought much to the table for people who weren't interested in the iPad originally. The 2012 iPad is a different beast. I think it's a worthwhile upgrade from an older iPad, with some distinctly interesting new features.

The first is one that is near and dear to my heart and obvious to me, yet invisible to you. I'm dictating this column on the iPad. The new iPad offers voice transcription so long as you are connected to the net (via either Wi-Fi or cellular) and it works extraordinarily well, considering that there is almost no way to customize vocabulary or user settings.

In fact, even though I make extensive use of specialized vocabulary, it may prove to be a more efficient way for me to write than using Dragon Dictate on my MacBook Pro. Dragon is prone to all sorts of idiosyncratic errors, including orthography (not following the normal conventions for when to spell out numbers or write them as numbers, issues with punctuation and capitalization, etc.) I spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up Dragon's mistakes. Apple's Dictation feature seems to get all this stuff perfectly. Plus, the recognition accuracy is truly extraordinary, the best I've ever seen.

The second big win for me is that the new iPad can function as a personal Wi-Fi hotspot for up to five other devices. Currently, Verizon supports that in their contract, while AT&T doesn't. I imagine AT&T will come on board, but I wasn't willing to wait, so I bought the Verizon model this time around. I don't use a lot of cellular data. Previously, I used the cheapest AT&T plan that provided 250 MB a month. A couple of times a year, when I would travel, I would kick up to the next highest (2GB) tier in AT&T. So I used to spend about $200 a year for connectivity. Verizon offers a $20 a month data plan that gets me a gigabyte per month, but it's going to save me money. A lot of the times when I travel I have to pay for Wi-Fi at a hotel for my MacBook Pro. I will not have to do that in the future, so I expect I'll save something on the order of $75 a year, along with getting about twice as much data on the iPad as I was getting the old way.

Now, about the display, which I know you've been wondering when I would get to. I did not order a new iPad in advance for the simple reason that while more pixels are nice (and the new iPad has plenty more), I'm a lot more concerned with pixel quality than with quantity. I bought my original iPad (see my first column) because I could use it as a near-studio-quality monitor in the field. If the new iPad compromised tone or color quality in any way it was likely to be a fail for me, no matter how attractive it seemed otherwise.

Well, quite the opposite! The new iPad display is better in every respect. Not only does it offer twice the resolution, which certainly is wonderful to behold, it renders exactly 100% of sRGB color space, in comparison with 70% on the old iPad. Apple has also tweaked the contrast, so the contrast curve is also now a perfect match for standard sRGB; previously it was too high. It's also slightly warmer than the old iPad's display, which was a little bit cooler than standard D65. Consequently, right out of the box, the new iPad display looks fabulous. After running it through a custom profiling in Air Display with ColorMunki, it looks even better. I am a very happy camper.

And, yes, all those extra pixels are really, really nice when reading the morning paper.

There are significant downsides to the display. The power consumption is way up on this model of the iPad, which means the standard 10W charger takes considerably longer to bring the unit to a full charge. Think something like six and half hours. With the old iPad, giving it a one-hour "quickie" over lunch would get you through the rest of the work day. No more of that (sigh). The additional power consumption also means that the unit charges extremely slowly or not at all if you are using it while it's plugged into the charger. Finally, run life is now most dependent upon screen brightness rather than CPU usage. At maximum brightness, the runtime is barely six hours. It still remains 10 hours or more at more normal brightness levels, but this is of concern if you're trying to work in extremely bright light or outdoors.

There are also some important, possibly unexpected, implications for photographers. I'll cover those next week, along with my review of the new iPad's camera.

Ctein

(Continued in Part II)

Ctein's iColumn—sorry, column—appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Does Photofinishing Have a Future?

By Ctein

Last summer I wrote "Minority Report," in which I observed that it was tougher these days to figure out exactly what kind of photographs people were making and what they were doing with them. Not impossible, not in the least, just that we had lost the easy tracking that film provided.

I didn't really get into it at the time, but if you had asked me what I thought was happening to printmaking, I would've guessed that it was probably on the decline. Nothing precipitous, just that the huge increase in the number of photographs that people were making digitally wouldn't compensate for the declining percentage that were being turned into prints. The conventional wisdom, after all, is that digital pictures are the e-slides of our era, photographs that are made to be viewed but hardly ever made to be handled.

About a year back, in fact, there was a widely cited article that described the photofinishing industry as being one of 10 industries that was on "life support." From one business perspective, it was true. The number of people working in photofinishing labs has steadily declined starting in the second half of the 1990s, long before the digital revolution ate film's lunch. One-hour minilabs popping up in every chain supermarket and drugstore eroded the dedicated photofinishing businesses. Come the digiterati and the rise of the online printing services, the big-box stores' in-house photofinishing, and home printing (not that important, dollar wise, but it takes its bite), and employment in the industry is down by 50% from its peak and will continue to drop.

That's bad news if you're a photofinishing employee or own a lab. It turns out, though, that it leads you to the wrong conclusion about printing in general. It's not dying.

It's on the rise.

In fact, it's risen every single year, with the exception of 2009-10, where there was a modest drop which more than got made up in 2011. It's a mixture of services and products: online printing services, self-service kiosks in supermarkets and drugstores, traditional photofinishers, and new products like calendars, greeting and personal note cards (those are really big growth items), online-printed albums and small books. As well as your usual small prints.

Today that's all part of photofinishing, as the purely digital printing processes, almost entirely inkjet, supplant the traditional RA-4 wet papers. Those are still major items, but the chromogenic print volume will decline and fade into insignificance. (Honestly, photofinishers have been looking to replace it for more than a third of a century, I can tell you from first-hand knowledge.)

Photofinishing as a whole is currently a growth industry, especially the totally digital side of it. Whodathunk?

When Kodak announced that they were going to continue to deemphasize and discontinue traditional photo materials and processes in favor of inkjet materials and printers, it was much decried as an act of foolish desperation by a dying company that would only hasten their demise.

I do think it was an act of desperation, and I am not remotely convinced that Kodak has either the resources or the managerial smarts to get themselves out of the rather deep hole they find themselves in. Foolish, though? I think Kodak identified one of the few industry segments where they have a realistic chance of making real money. At least over the rest of this decade. (Beyond that, who knows? The digital revolution is still far too much a work in progress for us to have any idea what the long-term looks like.)

Let us not forget that Kodak has always been mostly a photofinishing company. That was its initial model for success. "You press the button, we do the rest." Think about it. Most of its product expansion throughout the twentieth century was in an effort to establish horizontal and vertical monopolies around that business.

Be that as it may, the counterintuitive situation in the photofinishing world demonstrates how trusting one's instincts and hunches in the absence of concrete knowledge is a perilous endeavor. Often that's all we have to go on. Doesn't mean we'll be right.

Ctein

Ctein has reported on the photo industry for numerous publications over several decades. His regular weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays.

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JPEGophobia

By Ctein

As most of you know, I photograph almost exclusively in Raw format (viz. my "JPEG... Seriously?" column).

So saying, I very much enjoyed Ken's column of last Friday. Mind you, I disagreed with most of his points and feel like I could construct persuasive arguments the other way. That doesn't mean I think he's wrong, though!

(It seems to be part and parcel of today's utterly toxic political climate to be certain that someone one disagrees with has to be wrong. Me, I refuse to play in that kitty litter sandbox.)

Some readers, though, took major exception to his position, with talking points that I think are...well...wrong. Ahem. So, without naming any names, I hereby register my disagreements:

I'll start with the notion that you're not a serious photographer unless you're invested in what happens post exposure. That was stated pretty explicitly, with the argument given that serious film photographers didn't stop merely with making the exposure, but were involved in what happened to the film afterwards.

Oh, really?

Most professional film photographers I knew and knew of were photographing with slide film. I was one of the rare exceptions concentrating on color negative. Easily 90+% of those professional photographers did not involve themselves in processing film in any way. They exposed their rolls, they handed them over to the lab of their choice, and didn't pay any attention until the results came back.

I guess none of them were really serious about their photographs, then. Not like me.

Then there was the argument that allowing the camera's software to dictate the look-and-feel, as it were, of the resulting photograph was an abdication of artistic responsibility, at best, and at worst would produce substantially inferior results.

Once again, we look to those slide-shooting dilettantes of yore, who had even less control over the look-and-feel of their results. They got to choose from one of a limited selection of film types. They lived with the results. Today's digital cameras give you a lot more control over what that look happens to be than any film type of old did.

Many readers took Ken's words as a universal prescription, rather than simply a description of what he did and why he did. Despite him pointing out that these choices were camera and software dependent, only a few readers, like Oleg, took this to heart. Need I describe the fallacy in logic that goes, "Well, your description of what you do and why you do it wouldn't work for me, so therefore you're wrong?" See paragraph two.

Last, there is this pernicious myth that photography is about collecting data. Many readers pointed out that JPEG processing in-camera throws away data.

They're right. So what?!

In nonscientific, colloquial usage, "data" and "information" are not the same things. (Note: we are not talking information theory here, we're talking common usage.) Data is just the mass of factoids that get collected. Information is the stuff you care about. Unless you're doing scientific record-keeping, the purpose of photography is to go after the visual information that makes your photograph meaningful and present it to maximum effect.

If data-maximizing is your photographic goal, you'll have to give up white-balancing. Much data was sacrificed to convert the sensor-native color balance of the top photograph to that of the bottom.

Here's the important thing: any time you select for, enhance, or adjust any visual information in a photograph, you throw away data. It's unavoidable. Something as simple as white-balancing your photograph, wherever it happens in the data chain, throws away data (the mathematical transform is not lossless). You really don't want to lose any data? Then you better just accept your photographs in whatever the native color balance of your camera happens to be. Not the auto-adjusted color balance, not the manually-selected color balance. The single color temperature for which your sensor's response is balanced. If the color quality of the light differs from that, in major or minor ways, too bad. You want maximum data? Leave that white point fixed.

Beyond that, maximum-data photographs are usually boring and uninteresting. It is very rare for a full-range, linear conversion of a Raw file to be particularly interesting. Those are the settings I use for making my proof sheets, because I want to see everything that's in the file before I start messing with it. Almost none of the photographs on those proof sheets look their best in that form. Flat, low-saturation, linear-contrast photographs very rarely have the best and most meaningful visual information. Sometimes the tweaks are minor adjustments of saturation and contrast, sometimes they're wholesale major changes.

The top photograph maximizes the data captured by the camera. The bottom version is much better. Many bytes gave their lives to make it possible. (Yes, this is one of the reasons why JPEG isn't for me, but
it's not about preserving data.)

As I said, you're not likely to find me focusing on JPEGs. For me the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, and I have workflows available to me that negate most of the advantages Ken's mentions. But that's just me.

He's not wrong.

Ctein

Raw shooter Ctein's lossy expositions (never the complete data) appear on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by fotoralf: "'Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks' (Henri Cartier-Bresson). Just another notoriously unprofessional snapshooter. ;-) "

Featured Comment by Richard: "Most of the photographers I know mean 'non-destructive editing' when they talk about 'not throwing data away,' and that's why they shoot Raw. Sure if you tweak a Raw file and export it as a JPEG, you will lose data. Point is it hasn't gone forever."

Featured Comment by Kevin Purcell: "Gregory Bateson (who was a bit of a wacko) gave my favorite definition of information: 'a difference which makes a difference.'

"The full quote from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972, pp. 457–9) is perhaps even more relevant to this topic:

A difference is a very peculiar and obscure concept. It is certainly not a thing or an event. This piece of paper is different from the wood of this lectern. There are many differences between them—of color, texture, shape, etc. But if we start to ask about the localization of those differences, we get into trouble. Obviously the difference between the paper and the wood is not in the paper; it is obviously not in the wood; it is obviously not in the space between them, and it is obviously not in the time between them. (Difference which occurs across time is what we call "change".) [...]

Kant, in the Critique of Judgment—if I understand him correctly—asserts that the most elementary aesthetic act is the selection of a fact. He argues that in a piece of chalk there are an infinite number of potential facts. [...] I suggest that Kant’s statement can be modified to say that there is an infinite number of differences around and within the piece of chalk. There are differences between the chalk and the rest of the universe, between the chalk and the sun or the moon. And within the piece of chalk, there is for every molecule an infinite number of differences between its location and the locations in which it might have been. Of this infinitude, we select a very limited number, which become information. In fact, what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which makes a difference.

"Photography is all about selection and differences: that's the photographer's task in a nutshell."

Featured Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "Color photograpahy, of course, was not serious; collectors wouldn't buy it, museums wouldn't exhibit it, newspapers and magazines couldn't publish it.  Real photography was black and white.

"Seriously, I think the years wandering in the wilderness when most people did shoot slides and didn't do their own darkroom work damaged photography severely. It's really very limiting to just present what  you can capture directly in the camera (even more then than now, we have more controls in the camera than film choices provided then).

"You're all tired of hearing it over and over again, but it's true.  The negative is the score the print is the performance.

"The Cartier-Bresson quote implicitly acknowledges the importance of the chef, and hence of the printing process (what today we call 'post-processing').  He had the good fortune to be a good enough photographer that people would provide him with first-rate post-processing and he didn't have to worry about it, which is good. (Yeah, if you want to argue the extreme position of 'abnegation of responsibility,' then he was doing so; but he was at least doing so in the confident believe that a master chef was cooking what he had hunted.)"

Mike replies: Speaking of which, see the announcement I'm going to post next....

OT: Xmas and Parrots

Corrigan, as a baby, loved to be scratched.

By Ctein

Xmas reveals two unexpected characteristics of the parrots of Chez Ctein.

The first is that they don't care a fig about the Xmas tree. That's been consistent behavior amongst all the psittacines we've owned—three conures of varying types and sizes, one African Gray (the famous and previously-fabled Elmo), and too many budgies to count. All of them, to a bird, have totally ignored this bizarre artifact that appears in their midst. They're not frightened by it, they're not attracted by it, it's like it doesn't exist.

This is exceedingly abnormal bird behavior. Describing birds as "high-strung" is understatement. Their little nervous systems are stretched C-above-high-C taut; they are ever on the lookout for anomalies that could indicate danger (or opportunity). A sudden unexpected noise, a motion caught out of the corner of their eye, something in our hands when we approach the cages that they don't expect to see, even a piece of paper, any of these things can cause a panic reaction. There are old parrots and there are bold parrots; there are few old, bold parrots.

This is true even of Elmo, who has to be the most mellow, chilled-out African Gray I've ever known. It's most assuredly true of Corrigan, our yellow-side green cheek conure, who Paula and I are firmly convinced freaks out at dust motes. Screeches and alarm calls issue from him aperiodically for no reason that we can discern. Whatever danger he's frequently alerting us to is invisible to us.

Objects above birds have major threat potential. A strange object at ground level may be a prowling or slithering predator, but a strange object overhead is assuredly bad news.

So, come Xmas Eve, there are Paula and I hauling the Xmas tree into the living room, carrying it high over our heads so it won't bump into furniture or objets d'art, abruptly setting it upright barely a foot or so from Corrigan's cage (and only a few feet from the other cages), where it towers to the ceiling, and covering it with bright and shiny objects.

A typical Ctein household Xmas tree, with Corrigan's cage to the upper right. Elmo's is on the left. Why the birds should find it totally ignorable is beyond me.

There's no reaction from the birds whatsoever. They act as if it isn't even there. Elmo may be accustomed to Xmas trees, as we don't know the habits of his previous owner. The other birds have never seen one before. They are not repulsed by it, nor are they attracted to it once it's decorated. It is covered with all sorts of shinies, which are normally like catnip to a parrot—but it doesn't exist. Apparently an Xmas tree is too utterly alien for their avian brains to even register. It's the strangest thing.

Yum, bones
The second surprise is that Elmo is a serious opportunistic omnivore, with distinct carnivorous tendencies. Most parrots are opportunistic omnivores. It is generally thought that their carnivorous inclinations lean towards bugs and grubs and maybe the occasional mollusk, which are, to them, like modestly mobile small fruits and nuts. I have doubts.

Like many folks, I have the tradition of cooking a big turkey Xmas dinner with all the fixings, and then we eat it for the rest of the week until we're finally sick of it. This is Elmo's most favorite meal. The cranberry sauce, yams, wild rice, succotash, it all rocks. But without question his absolute favorite is a turkey (or chicken) thigh or wing bone.

Elmo digs into bones with gusto. He doesn't care so much about any meat on it. Instead, he goes for the joints and end caps, which he devours. Lots of fat and calcium, I suppose. Then it's onto the main course. Skillfully, he cracks the bone, peels away chunks of it and eats out the marrow inside. He works his way down it, cracking and peeling off chunks, eating out the marrow, until finally it's done. Then he requests another one.

I can tell from watching that this is instinctive behavior. There are ways that he acts around eating artificial foods that make it clear that he is adapting natural behaviors to novel edibles. This doesn't look like that. He knows exactly what to do with the medium-sized bone and dispatches it efficiently. I am quite convinced this is normal, wild behavior for him.

So what do African Grays eat in their natural environment? I don't know. Lizards? Rodents? Smaller birds? Do they scavenge the kill of other animals? None of my books have anything to say on the subject, but I am am inclined to think that when we have jokingly referred to him as our "little feathered velociraptor," there may have been more truth in that than we knew.

Ctein

Strange objects appear in the air above us on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by James B: "Ctein, I am glad to see you are still with us—Mike's post of yesterday entitled 'Ctein's Corollary' had me panicked for a moment, as I glanced and mistook the word for 'coronary.'

"By strange coincidence, the BBC today published something on a fossilised velociraptor's last meal, which was, I'm sure you have guessed, a pterosaur's wing and bones. Perhaps Elmo is merely reverting to the call of the wild?

"An old Jack Russell dog, owned by a good friend of mine certainly did react to Christmas trees. In his first year while being house-trained he was taught to go outside and do his business under a tree in the garden. You can imagine the pup's confusion when a tree was brought into the house and placed on a grass-green carpet. He thought he was doing the right thing...."

More Planned Obsolescence: Evil Lion

By Ctein

[Before we get started...want to help me do some research? I'm studying printer variability and I'm looking for owners of Epson 3880 printers who are willing to make a couple of 8.5 x 11" prints for me to my specifications. If you're willing to help out, please e-mail me at ctein@pobox.com with the approximate purchase date of your printer. I'll get back to you with details. Thanks!

We now return to the usual program in progress.]

If you're a long-time Mac user and you upgrade to Lion (OS X 10.7.x), there's a good chance at least one of your programs or peripherals will stop working. Lion will not run PowerPC-coded programs because Apple decided to eliminate the Rosetta translator.

This will be old news to some of you, but not all. To find out if this is going to affect you before you upgrade, launch About This Mac/More Info...and click on Software/Applications. Click the Kind column and your applications will be sorted by type. Scroll down the list and look for anything that says PowerPC. You may well be unpleasantly surprised.

Drivers for older peripheral equipment—scanners, printers, cameras, etc.—may never been rewritten for Intel processors. Older applications may also turn out to be PowerPC. You may, but not always, be able to upgrade them to Intel versions for some outlay of money.

This is an unsatisfactory situation, he said with extreme understatement. Apple's behavior around this one has been cheap, mean, and, frankly, stupid.

Any time there's a major OS or application rewrite, stuff breaks, and sometimes it is very difficult to repair. See Windows Vista, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite. Mind you, I'm not going to stop railing against that progressive obsolescence, but I do understand why it happens. There was the year Apple eliminated the Classic compatibility box from OS X. I've had to keep an old Mac running OS 9.2 around for the small amount of business-critical software I have that never got upgraded to OS X by the manufacturer. Part of the problem for Apple was that Classic mode never was fully functional, even in its final incarnation. When Apple decided to migrate to the Intel platform and rewrite all its core functionality for 64-bit, it's easy to see how the problems of even keeping Classic compatibility working as not-very-well as it did could became overwhelming. It interacts intimately with OS X functionality.

Rosetta is another matter. It's a translator; it converts PowerPC code to Intel code. It's dealings with OS X are much more constrained. Frankly, if I were to imagine a technical need to eliminate Rosetta, it would've happened when Apple moved from OS X 10.4 to 10.5. There was major recoding of the core functionality. But 10.6 to 10.7? This is an evolutionary product, and there are only modest issues involved in ensuring Rosetta compatibility.

This wasn't a case of Apple saying, "This is going to be really tough to do," it was a case of them saying "Screw you, we can't be bothered." That's the cheap part. I'll get to the mean and stupid part presently.

First let's dispel a few apologias concerning Apple:

1.) "It's the price of progress." No; the price of greed, perhaps. The progress from 10.6 to 10.7 didn't fundamentally break the concept or functionality of Rosetta or even require a major rewrite. This was not necessary, technically nor economically. It's a very minor development project in the total scheme of the OS.

2.) "You got your mileage out of those old programs, you might as well upgrade or find an alternative." Assuming those exist—they don't always. It also ignores the money you'll have to spend to do that and the considerable time (= money) you will have to spend installing and bringing yourself up to speed with the new software. Conservatively, an upgrade to Lion would cost me $1,000.

3.) "Why should all users have to pay for something only a minority need?" With any big-tent operating system or application, most users don't use most of the features. A major OS, or an application like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, has to include all the functionality that all their users might need, even though no user will take advantage of any but a small fraction of that. If I listed the 10 major features of OS X, hardly any TOP readers would be making use of all of them. Conversely, the majority of TOP's readers make use of some obscure OS component that a very, very small fraction of users need. That's just the way it is. Anyway, the cost of keeping Rosetta is not huge.

4.) "No one is making you upgrade to Lion." Oh, they will. If I buy a new Mac I'm going to be stuck with Lion. Worse, it's SOP for software manufacturers to not support OS's more than a generation back (the early release of Mountain Lion may throw that off for one cycle). Photoshop CS6 will run under Snow Leopard, but will CS7? CS8 surely won't. Within a few years, one way or another, this is gonna bite me.

Okay, so what should be done, given that big companies like Apple almost never backtrack on technical decisions, no matter how brain-dead they may be? Well, there is a simple and only mildly inconvenient solution. Allow users to virtualize their copies of the older OSs. VMware, Parallels, and VirtualBox can all run virtual Mac OS X; folks have hacked their way through the technical thicket to show that's the case.

Just one little problem. Apple's end-user license forbids virtualizing older Mac OS X clients, even on Apple equipment. Consequently, virtualization software does type-checking to prevent installing a Mac OS client. Usually. An interim release of VMware had a different installation interface that would allow client Snow Leopard to be installed. I quickly grabbed it and created virtual Snow Leopard machines to experiment with (figure 1). I believe the current version won't do that. I have this suspicion it was a trial balloon that Apple pricked.

It's illegal and it shouldn't be. My virtualized Snow Leopard client OS, running here under VMWare, is prohibited by Apple's EULA. Think I'm going to delete it? Think again!

Apple could enable this with the stroke of the pen by issuing an EULA addendum for the older client OS Xs stating that they may be virtualized on Apple hardware, and that Apple does not support this. That means they're not responsible if the older virtualized OS doesn't work, so no cost to them.

That's all it would take. Let me run Snow Leopard, or even Leopard, or maybe even Tiger in a virtual machine on my Mac. I get to keep all my old functionality with modest inconvenience and expense. A couple of paragraphs from Apple would solve so many headaches and it wouldn't cost them a penny. (It's not like there's a big market out there in pirating old OSs, and besides, pirates don't pay much attention to EULAs.) So far, though, they haven't budged.

That's the stupid and mean part.

Ctein

TOP runs its verbal Ctein emulator on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Thomas: "Rosetta isn't Apple's code to do with as it wishes. (Source here.)

"I'm a former software engineer who is now a patent and copyright attorney. Part of my work involves reviewing software license agreements. I'm posting semi-anonymously to make clear that I'm not soliciting clients with this post.

"It is the typical practice for software to be licensed in commercial environments for a certain term. That term might be denominated in years, in relation to other software releases, or anything else.

"Your invective at Apple would be sorely misplaced if their hands were tied.

"Say, for example, that Transitive, the owner of Rosetta, had licensed it to Apple for five years or three major releases of OS X, whichever came first. (I'm making the exact terms up, but you get the idea.) Apple would have had to go hat-in-hand to Rosetta to get a license if Apple wished to included it with Lion. Today, however, Transitive is owned by IBM. IBM might will simply not be interested in helping Apple maintain backwards compatibility or, perhaps, the necessary technical expertise to maintain this old code isn't there anymore and so IBM can't or won't license the code to Apple.

"I can speculate (and so can you) as to what really happened here, but we simply don't know. Getting nine women pregnant won't result in a baby in one month; no amount of cash is sufficient to conjure software out of thin air. Given the software patent environment of late, it is even possible that IBM wanted to license it to Apple, but another patent holder who'd given a license to Transitive/IBM refused to grant a necessary license. I doubt we'll ever know.

"If 30 years of hanging around the computer industry has taught me one thing it is this: you can't upgrade part of a system and expect that nothing could break and, eventually, you have to upgrade part of a system because old hardware will fail. In other words, find a working system and enjoy it while you can because, eventually, you'll have to find a new and different working system to replace it. Change is the only constant.

"Happy computing!"

Ctein replies: I much appreciate you posting an authoritative reference on the Transitive/Rosetta business. It's nice getting that confirmed instead of dealing in third-hand information.

That said, this is something of a red herring. As you carefully note, this is all speculation. It might have been beyond Apple's control. It might have been entirely within their control. We don't know. The real point is that they, like most of the companies in this industry, don't even care that they screw people by systematically breaking existing hardware and software. This is merely just one more example of it.

The industry has collectively decided that it's okay to constantly break our tools in the name of next year's profits. They've decided it's okay to screw us over, repeatedly. I've decided that policy sucks. I don't have to lie back and grin and take it. This isn't even close to the first article I've written about planned obsolescence in the computer industry; I've been in it for 45 years. I promise it won't be the last.

If, and I emphasize if, Apple had no choice in this matter, then Apple could ameliorate this with the stroke of the pen, by changing their EULA. That's just policy, not engineering. Policy can sometimes be changed by force of opinion. This is mine. I don't plan to stop writing about specific complaints against the computer industry's planned obsolescence policies.

North American Solar Eclipse Coming May 20, 2012

Map courtesy of NASA. You can download a much clearer PDF of this same map from the NASA website linked in this article.

By Ctein

I don't know how this one slipped past me, but it did. Maybe I've been too fixated on the total solar eclipse coming up in 2017. Be that as it may, there's a real nice annular solar eclipse in less than five months.

When the Moon passes directly in front of the sun, but the moon's too far away to entirely cover the sun, you don't get a total eclipse; instead you're left with a ring of fire rimming the black moon. That's an annular eclipse.

Annular eclipses are pretty neat, considerably more so than partial eclipses, but they're not in the same league as total eclipses. If a partial eclipse is a 1, then an annular eclipse is maybe a 4...but a total eclipse is a 999,999. In other words, they're worth going to bit out of your way to see, but don't plan a major expedition unless you're a complete eclipse junkie.

Fortunately for a high percentage of the Western U.S. population, this one will not require such an expedition. The eclipse happens a bit before sunset (approximately 6:30 p.m., Pacific daylight time). The centerline of "totality" (well, annularity, if you're gonna be picky about it) makes landfall on the Pacific coast about 50 miles north of Eureka, California. The total footprint for "totality" is nearly 200 miles wide, including both Eureka and Medford, Oregon.

The track heads southeast, passing just north of Reno and directly over Albuquerque. It finally peters out around Lubbock, Texas at sunset. As annular eclipses go, this is a pretty long one, lasting about 4 1/2 min. At the Pacific Coast, it will occur when the sun is about 22° above the western horizon. At Lubbock, the sun will be kissing the ground when the eclipse peaks.

This is good news. Annular eclipses are not, in and of themselves, especially striking photographic subjects. What makes them interesting is when you can photograph them against some kind of background. The photograph on the NASA website describing this eclipse is a nice example of that.

While not worth a major expedition, annulars are worth a day's drive. The timing of this eclipse is ideal. It's very late afternoon on a Sunday. If you're willing to play hooky from work on Monday, you can drive to a viewing spot on Sunday, grab a motel room for the night, and drive back on Monday. That's what Paula and I are going to do. Assuming you're willing to get a decently early start on Sunday, you can go see the eclipse if you're anywhere within a band bounded by Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Denver on the north, San Diego and Tucson on the south, and Dallas on the east.

Where you go will depend on where you're located and how much you feel like gambling. Ignoring unpredictable weather occurrences, your best chance for seeing the eclipse is when it's higher in the sky, as cloud cover usually increases towards the horizon. On the other hand, the closer it is to the horizon, the better the opportunities for dramatic compositions. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

Note well!
Now, this part is really important: an annular eclipse is like a partial solar eclipse; the portions of the sun that are not blocked by the moon are just as bright as always. Unless you are in a location where you're viewing the eclipse right at sunset, you cannot safely view this with the naked eye. You need a good blocking filter, or you risk blindness.

Crossed polarizers or fully-developed color/chromogenic films are not good blocking filters! They let through most of the infrared, which you can't see. You'll think it's safe to look, but your retina will learn otherwise. It is much, much more dangerous to look at the sun through something like this than to look at it with the naked eye. It's hard to stare at the sun very long with the naked eye; these faux-filters make it very easy. Check online regarding your options for proper solar viewing filters. Any good astronomy website will have many recommendations.

Note, by the way, that your camera's film, sensor, and shutter curtains will also not be terribly happy having undiminished infrared light focused upon them. It's not just your eyes you have to worry about.

For just viewing, fully-fogged B&W silver film is safe, but it's too blurry for photography. For photography, Wratten 96 neutral density filters are a good choice; they have broadband absorption and are optically very "clean." An ND 3.0 filter is a good choice in a situation like this. Caution: don't use the Wratten filter for visual viewing—while it absorbs a considerable amount of the infrared, after some considerable digging into the literature  I cannot determine to my satisfaction that it absorbs enough to make it eye-safe.

The object of your attention in an annular eclipse is no bigger than the sun; there is no extended corona to be seen. That means you'll be wanting a long telephoto lens. Each 100 millimeters of focal length gets you 1 millimeter of sun image size in the film/sensor plane. Unless you're working with an extremely small format camera try to get at least a 500mm lens, 1000mm if you're working in 35mm (film or sensor) format.

Mark your calendar, if you're anywhere close to the eclipse track. You won't be getting another chance soon.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Mathias Vejerslev: "Here's a shot I got of a partial annular solar eclipse back in 2003. I'd have to say it was worth staying up all night even for a partial, annular solar eclipse.

Photo by Mathias Vejerslev

"By the way, this image reached front page on BBC World and was sold to a few astronomy magazines within just a few hours of capture (and before I even had a chance to catch up on my sleep)."

Ctein replies: Wow, Mathias, that's one of the nicest annular eclipse photos I've ever seen. Since your conditions were similar to what a lot of viewers will have with this eclipse, mind sharing your technical data (lens, ISO, exposure, filter if any) with us, as best as you can recall?

Mathias replies: "Thank you very much Ctein. I'd love to share details. So, best I can recall I was shooting with a Canon 10D and a mediocre and slow Sigma 28–200mm zoom that wasn't even chipped for digital cameras, meaning it could only shoot wide open! At the time, it was all I had available to me in order to magnify the sun just a bit. On a tripod of course (like that would cure the smear of the bad lens).

"Now, shooting into the sun with a zoom lens isn't really very smart. Just framing real quick through the viewfinder burned semi-permanent black spots into my good eye. Don't do that, folks! Use live view or something else, never look at the sun directly!! I checked and it really is dangerous. Anyway, I documented the whole sunrise and it was quite an experience. The climax, seen here, was at sunrise, at 5:33 a.m. on May 31, 2003. The rest of the EXIF can be seen on this flickr page (click Actions > View EXIF Info).

"Like most of my 'event astronomy shots' this was shot in good comfort from my own balcony—the only trick here is knowing when to look up. Also, for those that have never witnessed a solar eclipse before, be mindful of the shadows (even in my image—see the clouds), which will take on a circle of confusion shaped like the eclipse! and of nature reacting—the chilling, the dimming of the light, and the animals acting strange. It is...quite special. Enjoy.

"P.S.: Funny how the two images I've got featured here on TOP are both eclipse shots—only the other one is lunar. Thanks again."

Myths About Megapixels (...And, Does the D800 Have Too Many?)

By Ctein

The recent announcement of the 36-megapixel Nikon D800 has brought forth a certain number of predictable reactions, a few lauding it as the Second Coming and many more dismissing the utility of more megapixels.

Most such opinions are based on mythical (or at least mistaken) beliefs about what pixel counts really mean. Let's see how many of them I can shoot down in one column.

I've written on this subject many times before, so I'm not going to present detailed arguments. I am simply going to assert facts. To keep the number of comments I have to answer to a minimum, please remember to check to see if your doubts have already been addressed in the cited columns and my comments before you take issue with my myth-busting.

-

Myth #1

The sharpness of your photographs will increase in proportion to the number of pixels.

Reality: Well, technically, the square root of the number of pixels, but that's not really the issue. Quadrupling the number of pixels (doubling the resolution of the sensor) is no more guaranteed to double the sharpness of your photographs than doubling the sharpness of the film you were using did. Image sharpness is a convolution of multiple factors. Improving sensor resolution improves image sharpness, but it won't make a proportional difference unless it is by far the fuzziest link in the chain. For more on this, see my article "Diffraction In Perspective."

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Myth #2

Getting more megapixels is just about making bigger prints.

Reality: For a minority, yes, but it's more commonly about making sharper prints at whatever size you're choosing to print. Good printers can render more than 500 PPI of fine detail and human eyes can perceive considerably more than that. Digital cameras are only about 50% efficient in terms of resolution (e.g., a 24-megapixel camera delivers about 12 megapixels of resolvable detail), so you don't have to be printing very large to see a perceivable difference from more megapixels. See "How Sharp Is Your Printer? How Sharp Are Your Eyes?"

Whether you care about that difference, of course, depends upon your needs. But the difference is there.

-

Myth #3

More megapixels inevitably means noisier photographs and/or poorer high ISO performance.

Reality: That would be true if the camera manufacturer took exactly the same chip technology and exactly the same support electronics and simply crammed more pixels into the same size chip. That never happens! Those pixel-count changes are always accompanied by other improvements in the chips and the support circuitry. If we had reached the physical limits of image quality, those improvements wouldn't be able to compensate for the additional pixels. We haven't; we're several stops away from that. New cameras frequently have higher pixel counts, lower noise, and better ISO performance, all at the same time. See "Photography at the Speed of Light" and "Something Old and Something New."

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Myth #4

It's pointless to add more pixels because lenses aren't good enough.

Reality: I have no idea where this one came from, because it's contradicted by decades of lens and camera test data. I'm going to cut through the morass of minutia-based arguments about pixel dimensions, filter geometries, and Airy disks and lay it out in very simple terms. A 16-megapixel 35mm-sized Bayer array sensor is going to resolve around 50 line pairs per millimeter (lp/mm). A 36-megapixel sensor will resolve around 75 lp/mm. Even mediocre 35mm lenses will hit 75 lp/mm at some aperture over some portion of their field of view. This is true of both fixed focal length and zoom lenses.

Decent (not at all exceptional) 35mm-format lenses can hit 75 lp/mm at just about all apertures and will do so over most of the field of view for at least one aperture. They'll show peak resolutions more like twice that. Really good lenses (not necessarily expensive ones) will be able to exceed 75 line pair per millimeter without even trying hard over most/all of the field of view and will have peak resolutions three or more times that.

Furthermore, until the lens resolution drops to only half that of the sensor, improving sensor resolution will produce an observable improvement in image resolution.

See the previously cited diffraction column and "Why 80 Megapixels Just Won't Be Enough..."

-

Myth #5

This is just a useless horsepower race by manufacturers; people don't need all those megapixels.

Reality: Sure, it's a horsepower race, but saying nobody needs it would be like saying nobody needed 120 format over 35mm or sheet film formats over 120 roll film. Most people don't, to be sure. Even more won't be willing to pay the premium. Count me in that group; I may still very well lay out a grand for the 24-megapixel Sony NEX-7, but there's no way I'm laying out $3K for the boat anchor Nikon D800. But that's just me (and, similarly, your priorities are just you).

Let's also remember that not everybody likes to compose uncropped, full frame. Actually, most photographers don't (although many digital photographers have been forced into it). If 50% more pixels affords them the opportunity to do some reasonable cropping without unreasonable sacrifices in sharpness, they will be happy campers.

In other words, it's not about you. It's not even about me.

•     •     •

It's likely I have missed some myths, but I'm sure I've done enough busting to enrage some of the myth-perpetuators. Can't wait to see what shows up in my e-mail inbox.

Ctein

Physicist, astronomer, photographer and fine printer Ctein has written hundreds of articles for dozens of magazines about the science and technique of photography over four decades. It's no myth that his weekly TOP column appears on Wednesdays.

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PX PLZ*

Notice anything missing? Read on for the answer.

By Ctein

I'm of the persuasion that feels that most decent art is capable of speaking for itself. With occasional exceptions—and there are always exceptions—I think that work that cannot be understood in its own vernacular is not successful work.

Photographs are, for the most part, meant to be looked at. If I can't appreciate it without knowing journalism's "5 Ws"—who, what, where, when, why, and how—it's likely not a particularly good photograph (of course, tautologically, photojournalism and narratives cannot be held to such stricture). The most common sin I find photographers committing when they present their work is talking over it.

I belong to a small circle of photographers who, about once a quarter, have a "print potluck." Everybody brings a dinner dish and up to 10 prints. It's a great motivator to force us off our duffs and actually make new prints. The work varies from better-than-decent to breathtaking; the group's coordinator does work that is stunning (and I would introduce you folks to it if he would ever get a friggin' website up, and yes, I'm talking about you, R.A.).

Still, everyone talks over their work. It's not just that they don't have enough confidence in their work to let it stand on its own 3-legged easel. I find it genuinely distracting. I want to concentrate on the photograph, thank you.

Those of you who know me will be astonished to learn that I, by careful and conscious effort, am by far the most taciturn of the presenters. Saying close to nothing when showing my work gets people's attention directed at the work. I wish more photographers were like me.

Which brings me to Pier 24 in San Francisco. Like so many photography museums, this was created by one man, Andy Pilara, to house his collection. It hosts long-running shows (six months or more) featuring work from his collection and from other major collections. It springs from the typical collectors' problem: if you are serious about collecting art, you will quickly exceed the capacity of your house. And if you're a really rich collector, you typically solve this problem by endowing a museum to build a wing to house your collection, or you build your own museum.

In other respects, this is far from a typical photography museum. It is free to the public, an unfortunate rarity in the United States these days. All you need is an appointment. Its doors are never open to walk-ins. Entry is by reservation only, during the operating hours of the museum (roughly 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday).

You make your reservation up to 30 days in advance, for a specific day and two-hour block of time. You will not be admitted early. You may not stay late. An attendant will come looking for you a few minutes before your allotted time has expired. They will find you, even though the museum has something like 27,000 ft. of exhibition space and two-dozen-odd galleries. That is because Pier 24 admits no more than 20 people at one time!

Most of the time you'll have an entire gallery to yourself, no distracting crowds, no concerns about getting in the way of other attendees or vice versa or distracting them with your heated artistic discussions with your visiting companion (assuming you have one...or are comfortable talking to yourself). It's your own personal humongous viewing room.

Is this what you're looking for?

The most unusual aspect of Pier 24 is that there is no textual information in any of the gallery spaces, not a single word. It is purely a photographic experience. The only identifying information is a number set into the floor in the middle of the gallery. You can pick up an exhibition book when you enter the museum. On the page devoted to that gallery, you will usually find the name of the photographer. Sometimes, not always, you will find titles for the works on the wall (the exhibition book has photographs of the walls with the hanging work for identification; the real hanging work doesn't even have identifying numbers). On very rare occasions you will find some sort of artist statement.

The experience is indescribable. Hence, I am not even going to try. I was amazed, amused, and slightly appalled at how disconcerted I was by being made to look at photographs with no external information. It was almost a compulsion to want to know something about the backstory, at least who made the photograph.

I resisted; I never looked in the exhibition book until I had thoroughly studied the work in a gallery. In most every room, that additional information didn't change my appreciation of the photograph one bit. Given how compelling the urge was to acquire that knowledge, I thought it would. The urge was real; the actual need, as it turned out, was not. In a few cases, the additional knowledge did alter my opinions and impressions but 90% of the time it turned out to be irrelevant.

A singularly peculiar and enjoyable experience. One I plan to repeat.

Check it out: http://www.pier24.org. Currently they're between exhibits; the best way to find out when the new one will be mounted (and thereby give you first chance to make a reservation to see it) is to sign up for their newsletter.

Ctein

*Yes, the XKCD cartoon is one of my favorites. (Don't forget to check the mouseover texts.)

Scheduled viewings of Ctein's verbal creations can usually be reserved for Wednesdays. It's just that the museum just happened to be closed yesterday.

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OT: The Art of Tea (for Two)...Pu Erhs

By Ctein

When I first wrote about the art of tea, I mentioned pu erhs, and several people asked me what they were.

It's no wonder. Pu erh teas have only been freely available in the U.S. for a score of years, and so are little-known and even less understood. Some of them have a unique flavor most commonly (and accurately) translated as "dirt," but describing all pu erhs that way would be no more accurate than describing all cheeses as being cheddary. The variety of flavors available in pu erhs makes them perhaps the most diverse of the groups of teas.

A new pu erh may be drinkable, but it is as likely to be bitter or astringent. Pu erh teas, though, are not merely dead dried leaves; they are chemically and biologically active. Pu erhs are supposed to age. Think cheeses and wines. The leaves continue to undergo oxidative and enzymatic changes, and they harbor microflora that further digest and ferment them. Pu erhs are eminently drinkable within a few years, but it can take anywhere from 10 years to 60 years for them to become truly brilliant. And, just as with cheeses and wines, many of them become totally forgettable.

Pu erhs come in four major types. Each type has its own broad flavor characteristics. Uncooked is traditional. The leaves are packed together, either loosely or compacted into bricks and bings (discs), where they start to age. Over the long run, uncooked pu erhs are more likely to produce the most spectacular teas.

Cooked pu erh is either gently heated or allowed to heat more from fermentation. This greatly accelerates the aging process producing a mature beverage much more quickly, but also denatures some of the chemical/biological components, so a cooked pu erh ages much less later. Like the uncooked versions, it can be aged as loose-leaf or compacted.

When it comes to brewing, pu erhs are practically bulletproof and thrive on vigorous brewing. They are one of the few teas where the universal recommendation is to start with boiling water. Brewing times range from 1 to 5 min., typically, but it's pretty much impossible to overbrew these teas. A half hour steep may produce a brew stronger than one would like (and so need a bit of dilution), but it will be flavorful, not bitter.

Pu erhs are designed for multiple infusions. I had one very nice pu erh that was only good for three brewings and I felt kind of, well, cheated. Another one was still doing well on the eighth pot. The flavor can change with each successive brew. A pu erh may be intensely dirty and smoky on the first pour and by the fifth be so grassy and fragrant that you'd think it was a floral tea. I can have one pu erh pot that I'm drinking from for the entire day, and it's like I'm drinking a whole bunch of different kinds of tea.

This unique characteristic, combined with the wide variety of flavors that pu erhs have to begin with, makes it pretty much impossible to characterize them as a group.

The ongoing aging process that makes pu erhs so fascinating is responsible for my comment last time that they are simultaneously some of the best bargains you can buy and an easy way to go bankrupt. For proper aging, the leaves are kept slightly warm (room temperature or a bit above), definitely dry, away from light, and open to air, because many of the reactions are aerobic ones. Paper's a common wrap. If you find a bing that is sealed in airtight plastic it's likely to be very cheap and of low quality.

Do not judge a bing by its cover. These are all very cheap pu erhs, colorful boxes notwithstanding. Entirely drinkable, entirely uninspiring. But with time, who knows?

Low grade but entirely drinkable bings in the 12 ounce range are available for prices between $5 and $15 in many Chinese markets. At that price, one can afford to experiment. Jon Singer picked up a very cheap bing in a market a dozen years back. Some of it was put aside and forgotten until about a year ago. When brewed up, it was so complicated and subtle that Jon and I couldn't describe it. We could pick out a slightly lemony flavor note, but it was like trying to pick one single instrument out of a large orchestra. It was as far from smoky and dirty as you could imagine.

Jon sent me a couple of these very cheap bings. They are drinkable, if uninspiring, and I've put one of them in the back of the cupboard to see what it is like in another decade or so. It'll probably be lousy, but what the heck, it was $6.

Three excellent and promising pu erhs. The two on the left came from Cha Guan and are no longer available, while the small bing on the right is one I just acquired from TeaSource.

Excellent bings and bricks go for $30–$60 when relatively young; my absolute favorite pu erh is a 500 gram brick that cost me $40 (that's enough for the better part of a year's worth of steady tea drinking). Daniel at Cha Guan (see my earlier tea post) was so proud of this find that he made it his shop's signature tea until it ran out. It's so smoky on the first pour it's like drinking a campfire, and it changes wonderfully with successive infusions. I was suffficiently impressed that I ordered a second brick and that is in the back of a cupboard. I'll see what happens to it in another decade. Truth is, I'm only a third of the way through the first brick after a year and a half.

Here's where financial madness can set in. You can acquire huge numbers of bings at individually reasonable prices. Before you know it, you have a substantial fortune tied up in dried camellia leaves (with the risk of finding down the line that you have the caffeinated equivalent of vinegar.) Happily, I do not have the collector allele in my genome. Still, one is tempted, especially when someone like Roy Fong comes back with a taster's set of eight bings, designed to appeal to a variety of palates and situations and which he has even greater hopes for when aged. A mere $350. I resisted. But I thought about it.

You don't want to know what will happen to the prices of some of these when they are fully aged, if they turn out to be as good as hoped. Really, you don't. Small amounts of the very best aged pu erhs sell for princely sums. I've never tried them; I never expect to. Fortunately, I am entirely happy with my modestly priced, delicious brews.

Ctein

Sometimes, Ctein's off-topic columns on TOP grow on you, and get better with age. If you don't like them now, set them aside for a little while. Who knows what might happen?

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Featured Comment by Mano: "Here in China (hello from China), puer tea is widely considered to be top dog, though a few years ago there was a scandal that this prized symbol of Chinese culture was actually being produced in Africa and sold in the country with fraudulent credentials. Back then you could spend the typical worker's entire year salary on a quarter kilo brick of the tea; after the African issues and other problems with hoarders and speculators the price of the tea dropped like a rock. Now anyone can get a decent aged tea for an affordable price, and it has become very common. In fact I may have a few bricks of it sitting in the back of some cupboard in my kitchen. People like to give it to each other as gifts, which get given again to other people because no one can drink all of it."

Featured Comment by Fabian: "I will check back in a decade or so, to see if I hate this article by then. Today, though, I found it to be a very interesting and inspiring read. 'Drinking a campfire' certainly sounds like something worth testing! Thanks, Ctein!"

Featured Comment by Bob Rosinsky: "I never did get the 'tea' thing. My grandfather used to drink Lipton Tea. He'd plop the tea bag into a cup and add a couple of little saccharine tablets to it to sweeten it up. He was an odd man."

Featured Comment by Jerry Lewis-Evans: "Pu erh, or a phrase sounding phonetically similar, was a phrase that cropped up on various live Frank Zappa albums. It seemed to be one of those band 'in' jokes, but being from England I always took it to be a phrase that you would say while holding your nose to indicate an unpleasant smell! Maybe he was just indicating that it was time for a tea break!"

Lenses are to Cameras as Applications are to Computers

By Ctein

I got a bit of amusement from Mike's #1 choice for "Most Desirable Camera on the Planet" a few weeks ago because only two days previously I had been thinking about that very same camera and...well....

I was out taking an afternoon walk on a lovely sunny Daly City day (we don't get many of those) with my Olympus Pen and my beloved 45mm ƒ/1.8 lens, our Lens of the Year for 2011. No agenda in mind, just walking and photographing for the idle joy of it. My mind, being free to wheel, was thinking about the review I'd just read in Pop Photo of the Sony NEX-7 and the test results I had just read at DxOMark. Not to put too fine a point on it, I found myself desirous.

That 45mm ƒ/1.7 lens sure is a sweetie. Fits me like a suede glove. But...

And why not? Forty percent more resolution than my Olympus (very nice), three stops more exposure range (very, very nice), a good stop more low light sensitivity (very...you get the idea), and a substantially better rear screen and a good eye level viewfinder. All at no special penalty in size and weight.

...I could sure use a couple of more stops of exposure range.

What's not to like! Oh, okay, I lose in-body stabilization. The world is not a perfect place. But, damn, in every other way that NEX-7 sounds like a lovely upgrade from my Olympus.

Six months ago, I'd have jumped. The only especially noteworthy lens in my kit was the Panasonic 20mm ƒ/1.7 that Mike likes so much. The Sony ZA 24mm ƒ/1.8 Carl Zeiss Sonnar-E lens would be an entirely satisfactory replacement for that. The other two lenses I owned then were nothing so special that I couldn't find comparably good ones for any camera system.

In between, though, I went on a modest buying spree and partnered up with the aforementioned 45mm. That is the lens I have a hard time imagining living without, more than the 20mm. I was torn: stick with the system I have and the lens I really like, or move to a system that is in almost every other respect substantially superior?

By the time this camera and lens become readily available, perhaps there will be other optical offerings that will resolve my dilemma. But what if there aren't?

As I've asserted in "The Lens is Not More Important Than the Camera," cameras matter as much as lenses. (No, we don't need to rehash that argument: please read the previous column and the comments there to see if you have something truly new to say on the subject. Otherwise, please consider it all said and read.) Now I was having to apply that thinking to myself, and I came to a realization: the title to this column.

If I may elaborate:

When someone asks me if they should buy a new computer, one question I ask them is what software will they have to replace on their new system. Rarely have they considered that switching operating systems definitely means acquiring a bunch of new software. Even a major system upgrade can break older programs.

Most applications have close cousins on every imaginable platform. Maybe not the same make and brand, but something else that will serve equally well. Maybe even better. There's a good chance they can get the same functionality on their new machine they did on their old—they just have to remember to budget for it.

But, what about that unique program, the one that won't run on the new machine and doesn't have a close equivalent? I've got more than a few of those that I don't want to give up. There's not always a satisfactory answer. Compelling reasons for moving to a new platform vs. loss of unique functionality.

Doesn't that sound awful lot like the kind of decisions and cost/benefit analyses one has to make around changing cameras? At least the money situation with cameras is somewhat easier. I don't have to worry about licenses, activation codes, and other nonsense with lenses. They'll fetch a decent price on the market; should I decide to sell my Micro 4/3 kit, I'll easily get enough money to pay for an NEX-7 with the 24mm lens.

Does this answer my question for me? Absolutely not. It does give me a more sophisticated and nuanced way of thinking about the problem than simply "which do I care more about, my lens or my camera?"

Given my schedule and the lack of availability of gear, I'm not likely to settle my Micro 4/3 vs. NEX-7 question for some months. Maybe by then there will be a really sweet 50–60mm NEX lens in the ƒ/2 range that will resolve my dilemma.

That would be so much better than having to make a hard decision. He whined.

Ctein

Ctein, whose weekly column appears on Wednesdays, has been choosing, buying and using cameras for 48 years.

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Featured Comment by Benjamin Marks: "I am not really sure that there is a decision to be made. Yet.

"The choice you posit is a version of the generic problem faced by all of us who are susceptible to the latest-and-greatest photo-thing. You haven't really identified any shortcoming of the tool you have; you just like the published specs of a tool that may become available. Don't get me wrong, I use the NEX cameras and the Olympus Pens (E-P2 and NEX-5 for me). But, until I started using it, I didn't realize how much I hate the NEX-5's arm's length focusing and the software driven menus/adjustments. I went out and bought a contraption called a Hoodman that I strapped to the back of the NEX-5 with a big red rubber band. Focusing problem solved, but the Oly is such a much better thought-out device, from a photographer's point of view. My point is not that the NEX-7 won't be the bee's knees in some way, but that you are caught in a 'choice' between a well-thought-out camera that you own and...a published feature set. Until you get your hands on one (and your eye to the VF), you won't really know—can't really know—whether it works for you. By the way, the NEX-5 is a living, humming example of the fact that cameras matter. Sheesh, exposure compensation can't be accomplished on the fly with the camera at your eye. The 'feel in the hand' of this tool practically killed the concept for me."

Featured Comment by David Jacobs: "Sorry to say, but...

"(The upcoming 50mm ƒ/1.4 short tele lens for the Sony NEX cameras. Note that it has 'built-in Optical SteadyShot image stabilization.')"

Featured Comment by Peter: "I am also lusting after a nice 60mm lens for that system. I'm mildly annoyed that they have a 50/1.8 planned, but nothing on the horizon for an 85/90 equivalent. Seventy-five millimeter equivalent is most definitely not the same as 90mm-e, although I could live with 85mm-e. Basically, I just want a digital CLE kit. The search goes on."

How to 'Scan' Film with a Camera—Well (Part 2)

Editor's Introduction: This week's column from Ctein, a continuation of last week's, outlines the technique needed for a procedure we don't necessarily recommend. Ctein's purpose in these columns is a) to help people who are trying this as well as b) to perhaps persuade them not to try. And, as you might understand, sometimes reading about even difficult and non-optimal technique can be interesting for its own sake. —MJ

By Ctein

Two weeks back I wrote about the gradual demise of dedicated film scanners and how that might make it increasingly difficult if not impossible to conveniently scan film photographs for digital printing in the future. Many readers expressed interest in the idea of using a good digital camera in lieu of a dedicated film scanner; a few had even tried.

Doing this really well requires knowledge and skill. If you don't care about doing it really well, and many of you don't (for good reasons, I do understand) then don't even bother. A flatbed scanner, even one a generation old, is going to do this better and a lot more conveniently. Mail-order outfits that charge circa a dollar a scan will easily beat your thrown-together rig.

Now, on to camera and lens resolution concerns.

The actual resolution of a digital camera is only about half that of the pixel count. For example, a 24-megapixel camera will produce approximately 2800 x 4200 pixels worth of resolution (assuming a 2:3 format, just for the sake of conversation). Thirty-five millimeter film is about an inch wide [film width, not frame width, ignoring perforations —Ed.], so you ought to be able to get 2400 PPI worth of "scan" resolution out of that, if you're doing everything right. Many people find that quite satisfactory. I don't, but I'm not normal people. If you pride yourself on the sharpness of your film originals and have spent good money for really good glass, you may find that you won't be either.

For larger film formats, a single camera exposure isn't likely to cut it, regardless of which camera you own. In that case, or if you own a lower pixel count camera, or if you're looking for better than merely adequate quality, you're going to be looking at stitching. Assuming you've properly addressed the alignment and illumination-uniformity issues I raised last column, this will not present a problem.

Now we come to the matter of the lens. You cannot use just any old lens for this purpose and expect to get good sharpness corner-to-corner. You need a lens that's designed to deliver flat-field coverage with uniformly high image quality at the magnification you need. If you're working copying sheet film with a less-than-full-frame digital camera, the best solution is any top of the line enlarging lens, reverse mounted. Don't know which ones are really the best? Download a copy of my book Post Exposure, which includes my list of the very best enlarging lenses ever made, so good that they're visually flawless. Search the web for a used one; with the collapse of the darkoom business, you can often find some amazing bargains.

Any of these lenses will work well down to about 1:5 magnification. Below that, things get iffy. 1:1 magnification is really the worst situation to be in; hardly any lenses perform well there unless they've been designed specifically for that magnification. Ken Werner found that of all the general purpose enlarging lenses, the Schneider Componon-S 50mm ƒ/2.8 was the best of the lot at 1:1, but it's still not great. When you're getting down in the low magnification range, you'll get better results with a lens designed for that. That would be the Rodagon D series lenses. The 120mm version is optimized for 1:2 or 1:3 magnification; the 75mm for 1:1.

This is TMAX100 film, scanned at 1200, 2400, and 4800 ppi. Observe that the film grain is still visible, although mushy even at 1200 ppi. Just because you can see grain in your scans doesn't mean they're sharp. Click on the image here to see it at 100%; the auto-resizing of TOP's blog
software masks some of the differences.

Don't imagine that you can stop your lens way down and get around its deficiencies. This is one of those cases where you really do want to be working near the optimum aperture of your lens or you'll be losing sharpness. Just because you're seeing film grain in your camera-scans doesn't mean you've got a sharp image. Film grain behaves like noise, which means it doesn't average out at low resolutions. It just gets big and mushy and lower in contrast. You can see the film grain of fine-grained film in a 1200 PPI scan; it just looks horrible, like looking at a print made with a really, really cheap enlarging lens, badly focused (see illustration above).

Well, that's everything I can think of for now. This is what you should be prepared to deal with if you want to do camera-scanning of your film and get results that are much better than you could get with an ordinary flatbed scanner. As I said at the beginning, you may not care about that or need that. That's cool; go live a happy life. But if you want really good quality scans, this is how to do it right.

Ctein

Ctein's regular disquisition on quality occurs at an approximate interval value of "Wednesday."

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Question from Marcin Wuu: "And what about dedicated macro lenses? Aren't they supposed to be excellent when it comes to sharpness, contrast and field curvature?"

Ctein replies: Depends on the lens. Some of them are really excellent—Pierce [Bill Pierce, master printer and former "Nuts and Bolts" columnist for the Digital Journalist, known universally to his friends by his surname only —Ed.] reported to me that the classic 55mm Micro-Nikkor made a damned good enlarging lens, in fact.

But many aren't. In fact "macro" is frequently invoked by lens manufacturers to mean "Anything we make that'll focus really close." Calling a lens a macro doesn't tell you any more about its quality than labeling something an "enlarging lens."

Unfortunately, while I have tested almost every credible enlarging lens ever made, I have not done the same for macros. So I can't tell you which ones in current production (if any) are really suitable and which aren't.

Featured Comment by Pierre Smith: "I must admit I have tried pushing this to the limit after my Coolscan failed. As a Macro equipment junkie I assembled a Wild camera stand for Microscopes. Leica Visoflex bellows, and 65mm Elmar. The negatives are held in a Pentax filmholder attached to a Zeiss microscope XY drive. Focusing is by a hydraulic Z drive designed for micron focusing movements. I have also used a Zeiss Luminar 65mm, and Schneider 50mm Macro and 80mm Componon lenses. Photoshop is used to stitch 4x10MP files. this resolves grain on Rollei ATP1.1 with very sharp dust particles.

"The light source is diffused to minimise scratches. I have posted some results on the Leica forum. No unsharp masking required, and it results in the smooth high resolution I prefer."

Featured Comment by Barry Wheeler: "The ASMP website of Digital Photography Best Practices has a nice page on camera scanning and links to a .pdf paper by Peter Krogh with more specific advice. I think it is a good starting point for many photographers. Here at the Library of Congress we've digitized tens of thousands of photographs, including from the original FSA negatives, using Sinar and PhaseOne and Aptus camera backs on a variety of commercial and specialized camera bodies and copy stands. While most individual photographers cannot afford our setup, they can get high quality results using Ctein's approach."

[F. Barry Wheeler is Digital Projects Coordinator at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. —Ed.]

Where Are They?

By Ctein

Okay, so my "keeping the 'X' (as in, the unknown) in 'Xmas'" column normally appears the week of the solstice. There's a good reason it's a week late this year.

I forgot.

When I did remember, I had already done my "Art of Tea" column and didn't want to run two off-topic columns in a row, so I put this off another week. Consequently, a somewhat delayed Salubrious Solstice to you all. Now off we go, into the wild blue yonder.

The title of this column is a quote from Enrico Fermi, infamously referred to as the "Fermi Paradox." The infamy lies in the fact that it is not anything like a paradox; it is simply a statement of utter ignorance. Why that is so will be the topic of this week's column.

The Fermi question concisely goes like this: there are tens of billions of planetary systems in this galaxy alone, thousands of quintillions in the observable universe. Even if only 1% of those develop life, even if only 1% of those life bearing planets develop intelligent life, even if only 1% of those intelligent life forms develop advanced technology, that's a heck of a lot of technologically-advanced, intelligent species out there. Furthermore, based upon the single data sample we have, it takes less than one third the age of the universe to go from a coalescing cloud of gas to an advanced technological intelligence. There's been plenty of time for other intelligences to evolve, several times over, and to advance far beyond us.

So far, though, we've seen no broadly-convincing evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence—and it ought to be pretty obvious. Hence the paradox.

Except it's not really a paradox. That word assumes we understand the situation well enough to see a logical contradiction. Let me illustrate. If I become reasonably convinced that millions of people every year travel by airplane, but every airport I visit and every airplane I inspect is empty of people, then I've got a logical problem. I understand air travel well enough to know that these two observations—millions of travelers, and empty airports—aren't compatible. Something must be wrong in my assumption.

But try this one on: if a god (or gods) exists, she can certainly work miracles. Yet, as I walk through the world, it does not seem to be lousy with self-evident, irrefutable miracles. So, obviously there are no gods.

Well, anyone above the grade school level can poke holes in that logic. It assumes you actually have some idea of what a god would think, what she would want to do, what would be her motivation for having created the whole shebang in the first place, etc. Most everybody with a lick of sense, whether or not they believe in a god(s), full well understands that there is no possible way they could have any idea how a god would think. You can't disprove the existence of deities by looking at an absence of miracles, because you have no way to conclude that commonplace miracles are an inevitable consequence of godhood.

The Fermi question is much more like the second than the first. To assume that advanced technological intelligence leads to either a signal, or interstellar travel, that we would recognize as such (that's important) requires making a huge number of unproven and untested assumptions about the physical universe and about what intelligence wants and does. You can create almost any scenario you want to imagine to explain the lack of observable data and at our current level of knowledge it is just as probable as any other scenario. Anything could be true. No thing in particular is very likely to be.

There is one data point we do all know something about: almost everything humans do makes no sense in any abstract, logical way. The overwhelming majority of our time, energy, and resources go into activities that cannot be explained as a consequence of intelligence. They aren't even behaviors that are typical of all species on Earth (although they aren't necessarily unique to ours). We are chock-full of species-specific behaviors that can be explained after the fact but couldn't be predicted purely on the basis of intelligence and certainly weren't inevitable on the basis of biology or evolution. They are just how we work.

Not every human being is subject to all these impulses. A sufficient majority are, across time and space, that it's pretty safe to say they're characteristic of human beings as a species. Individual exceptions noted: Dear Reader, this is not about you. Let me regale you with a short and highly incomplete list. (I intentionally leave out a couple of very obvious biggies, because I don't need them to make the point; I can do it entirely with "trivialities.")

1) Body ornamentation and decoration. Not limited to such things as jewelry or tattoos; includes hairstyling, makeup, clothes or fashion sense of any sort, whatever. All the stuff that goes into making you decide that you "look good" when you face other people.

Imagine how much time and money are expended by every man, woman, and child because they don't feel it is sufficient to simply wash up occasionally and throw on a gunnysack.

2) Food "composition," for lack of a better term. Cats find food that they can play with appetizing, but they sure don't seem to care much how it looks; we'd rather it sat still but are terribly sensitive to the aesthetics. At the high end we have things like sushi; that the low end we have the wonderful cliché movie images of slop being splashed into a tray in a military mess or high school cafeteria line. Makes you lose your appetite just thinking about it, doesn't it?

3) Acquisitiveness. The packrat instinct. Collecting, acquiring, hoarding of any sort far beyond what one can reasonably use within a reasonable period of time. It may be all those books you don't throw out, even though you're hardly likely to read them again. Or all the music you own, regardless of form and format; videotapes, DVDs, stamps, coins, barbwire, cameras or lenses that you haven't picked up in years but you might, you think. Clothing you never wear, furniture stored in the attic along with an extra set of dishes because, well, you never know. Think of how much smaller (and less expensive!) a living space you could dwell in if you limited your ownership to things you might reasonably need in the foreseeable future.

4) Pets. 'Nough said?

5) Real property/territory. Lots of species seem to do just fine without the concept of my/your real estate. Not humans. (Yes, a minority of cultures have explicitly rejected the concept of land ownership but (a) they are not the norm and (b) if the impulse weren't there, there wouldn't be a need to reject it.

6) Religious impulse. Note that this is not the same as theology. The existence (or not) of gods and the inclination to believe in (or not) gods are entirely separate. Humans are intelligent and humans have religious impulse but we have no special reason to think that one is a consequence of the other. It just is.

Now tally it all up. How much of your life, of the totality of society, is consumed and defined by satisfying one or more of these species-specific impulses?

Overwhelmingly, almost every aspect of our lives is driven by this arbitrary set of inclinations that have no connection we understand to technological intelligence. We imagine that the nature and actions of hypothetical advanced civilizations can be rationally discussed and analyzed, yet most of our own is based upon characteristics that have no rationally-predictable basis for existence. They simply are.

We think we can even start to talk sensibly about the Fermi question as being a "paradox?" We don't know enough to make sense out of ourselves. We certainly don't have clues about anyone else.

To paraphrase Pogo, "We have met the X and he is us."

Ctein

Every year around this time, TOP columnist Ctein (it's his only name, and is pronounced "kuh-TINE") puts the X in Xmas.

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Featured Comment by icexe: "Our great advancements in intelligence and technology might simply be meaningless to any far more advanced civilizations out there. Here's an example: There may be a colony of ants living under a rotted tree stump somewhere in the Amazon jungle who consider themselves the master of all they see around them. They have conquered and controlled the world they know. They may even be on a quest to find other 'intelligent' beings like themselves, but so far to no avail. Yet, unbeknownst to them, they share an entire planet with humans, who are thousands of times more intelligent and advanced, who are fully aware that such a thing as ants exist, but who simply don't care enough to ever bother looking for more of them under some random tree stump in some random corner of the world. And even if by the greatest of random chance some humans did stumble upon their nest, any attempt to communicate would be on a level completely unknown and undecipherable to both humans and ants."

Featured Comment by Alastair Smith: "As so often, XKCD put it nicely."

Featured Comment by Trevor Small: "No paradox. The reason we've seen no signs of intelligent life is that Earth is under quarantine. Out there, somewhere, is a whopping great sign that says 'KEEP OUT. INFECTIOUS DISEASE RISK. EARTH HAS HUMANS. HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS.' Or the alien equivalent. Kind of makes you feel proud of our virility, doesn't it."

Featured Comment by Mark L: "There is no doubt that there are more advanced civilations. The odds are stacked against this not being the case. The only questions are: 1) Do they know we are here and 2) what will their intentions be when they know. Let's hope that deep fried human being is not some advanced alien delicacy. And hope that a Canon 1DS can split their exoskeletal big cranium in half if they come for us!"

Featured Comment by Zeeman: "Since this is a photography site, the following begs to be added to Ctein's list of human impulses: 7) The aesthetic impulse, which drives us every day to seek or create what is beautiful. However, given the acquisitiveness of current shutterbugs, it might be that this will eventually converge with #3. Also, given the propensity of acquisitive shutterbugs to worship one among a limited pantheon of deities named Canon, Nikon, etc., the aesthetic impulse might also be headed towards convergence with religion. Now that is scarier than most alien invasion stories."

Featured Comment by Wil: "Jeez, I read to the end of that long article only to find, I don't give a damn."

Featured Comment by Skip Davis: "Sorry I am so late to comment, I was just so taken by this post that I had to think on it a bit. This one post was worth reading this site all year.... There are a lot of things to think about because of it. I am going for a long bike ride today just to enjoy this paradox called life."

Burning Our Bridges

By Ctein

Are we losing the ability to scan film?

I like my digital prints from film much better than my darkroom prints (dye transfer notwithstanding). To those of you who still like darkroom printing of film, I think that's fine! I'm not dissing what you do, heaven knows, so please don't get defensive. Darkroom printing is great! You just happen to be a minority (much as black-and-white photography is a minority of all photography); the majority of serious photographic printers out there see hybrid as the better way to go.

This particular column is for said hybrid printers. If you're either entirely traditional or entirely digital, from camera to print, you can skip this—it's irrelevant to you.

Workarounds
Two weeks back, I mentioned that my Minolta DiMAGE Multi Pro AF-5000 scanner had died and was in need of electronics servicing. I put out a call to any readers who knew of someone who still serviced this scanner. I came up with no one—neither Precision Cameras nor Mack Cameras, the only two suggestions I got, work on this model, because they don't have a supply of parts for it. This is the first time in my experience that the hydra that is the TOP Readership, with its astonishing collective store of knowledge, was incapable of solving a photographic problem. It is all too possible that there really is no one repairing the scanners any longer, anywhere (if that's not true, please e-mail me: ctein@pobox.com).

In the meantime, I was able to circumvent the problem. My scanner had started behaving erratically and then wouldn't boot up at all. After some research I ran across a posting that pointed to a failure in the FireWire interface as the source of the problem. I switched the scanner to SCSI I/O and it booted up just fine. Well, I no longer have any SCSI-interfaced computers. More online research found me a SCSI-FireWire converter/adapter. So far, it's working fine.

But what happens when something goes wrong that I can't hack my way around? It is becoming more and more difficult to economically or conveniently get high-quality film scans.

This situation is one that I honestly did not expect anywhere near this soon. The wholesale switchover from film photography is a recent phenomenon. It's about a dozen years old for medium and large format film, and less than a decade old for 35mm film. That's not a long time, compared to how long most photographers have been photographing. The majority of important photographs in the world (either to the collective consciousness or the individual photographer) are on film, and the majority of serious photographers' stock is film photographs.

It's a legacy problem that the making of new photographs doesn't eliminate. Yet, it has already become just about impossible to do medium format film scans without throwing a great deal of money at the problem or scrounging around for old hardware.

Minolta is no more and Nikon no longer makes medium format film scanners. The other major photographic manufacturers never did. There is still a high-quality medium format film scanner made: it's from Hasselblad. The low-end model starts at $13,000. Cough. Realistically, getting really good medium format film scans means either spending substantial sums of money with one of the few labs out there that still does scanning, or finding a used medium format scanner, which are in sufficient demand that they now go for about 50% more than they did originally.

If your scanner breaks, you will likely be in trouble. If you get a new computer, you'll likely be in trouble. No companies write updated drivers for these old scanners. Why should they care? You're going to have some very interesting problems if you try to run your old scanner under Windows 7 or Mac OS 10.7 (Lion). As in, you're not going to be able to! You'll need legacy hardware and software for that.

It is not going to get better. The issue here is not whether you can access an old photograph for secondary or casual use, it's whether serious photographers, who really cared about making good photographs, will have a way to make full use of the quality of those film photographs in the digital realm?

Flatbeds
By and large, flatbed scanners don't take up the slack. Many of them will scan film, but they do it at a much lower level of quality, unless you spend very large sums of money for professional-level units (we're talking about gear that most photographers have never even heard of, with prices that can easily start in the high four figures and go into the mid-fives).

I've been talking about medium format scanning but it's happening to 35mm, too. It just hasn't yet reached the crisis level. There are a lot fewer 35mm film scanners being made today than there were five years ago. I have a bad feeling that by the end of the decade, they are going to be as hard to find as medium format scanners are now, and they will be just as poorly supported.

Before I die (or give up photography) I may no longer have "access" to my 30-odd years of film photographs. Until recently I had not even imagined that this could become a possibility.

It is not a happy-making thought.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on Wednesdays. To access older columns, click on the "Ctein" category in the right-hand sidebar.

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OT: The Art of Tea

This is my tea shelf. You can only see about half of what I have; the jars are ranked three rows deep. The cardboard and paper packages contain my
pu-erh bings; the rest are various looseleaf teas in airtight jars.

By Ctein

Once again, we wander far afield from photography. If my off-topic columns are not your cup of...(oh, I can't say it), skip this column and tune in again next week.

My off-topic topic is tea. Expect several columns on this, because I'm a real tea geek. No, I'm not an expert, just a geek. I do not have a seriously refined palate and I don't know most of the descriptive vocabulary. I just really, really like my tea, and I insist upon good tea.

Tea's my major extravagance (other than living in the San Francisco Bay Area). I live on the stuff. Don't like coffee (except iced, when it's hot out). I can't abide the taste of alcohol, I don't smoke, and I've not used any drugs except theobromine. I am an effete, intellectual, elitist teetotaler, and I raise my pinky in your direction.

Lipton's, or one of its brethren, packaged in little tissue paper bags, thrown in a cup, boiling water poured over it, and steep until it's dead? That's the tea equivalent the coffee that's been sitting in the pot at your local gas station since ungodly-A.M. in the morning. It's no wonder you have to load it with mega-amounts of lemon or milk and sugar to make it palatable.

Good tea, properly brewed, is another matter. For a start, "properly brewed" generally means no boiling water (unless it's a pu-erh). Pouring boiling water on tea is a lot like making coffee by tossing the grounds in a saucepan of boiling water and cooking it for a while.

Depending on the tea, the proper brewing temperature may be anywhere between 140 and 190°F (60–90°C). Not that there's one right way to make tea. In my various books, I've seen brewing instructions for the same delicate green tea that went from 140° for 90 seconds up to 165° for 3–5 min. Still, a far cry from boiling water.

Speaking of brewing, here's a handy trick if you're caffeine-sensitive. My housemate, Paula, is very much so, as are several friends. They testify that this works. Take those unbrewed tea leaves and pour hot water on them for 30-45 seconds. Pour off that brew and toss it. Ninety percent of the caffeine goes away in that first infusion.

(Important: the results may vary considerably with the tea. While I have found this to work reliably, if caffeine is severely contraindicated for you for medical reasons, do not rely on this!)

My tea preferences lean towards the Japanese and Chinese teas, mostly greens, wulongs, and pu-erhs. Most of it costs real money. Tea prices have skyrocketed this century. Ten years ago I had an absolute upper limit of $100 a pound for tea. These days I often spend several times that, although I've discovered some wonderful and excellent teas in the $10–$50/lb. range.

Even at double digits per ounce, tea is still a remarkably cheap beverage. I describe it as an extravagance, but I'd be surprised if I spend over a dollar a day on tea and I drink about a liter a day. I need only a gram or two of high-quality tea in an individual infuser; 20 portions from an ounce is normal. I get anywhere from three to eight infusions from one portion. Compare that to the price of Starbucks, or even your local gas station coffee.

This just has to be the world's greatest tea infuser. The owners of Aroma gave me one after making a large purchase at their shop; it changed my life.

How do I brew tea? I am like a total fan of the individual PIAO 1 infuser. It makes brewing a fresh cuppa easy, no fuss and very little muss, and it's fun to play with. Measure in a teaspoon or so of leaf. Pour in water of the appropriate temperature. Let it steep for the appropriate time. Push the little button on the top and a ball valve at the bottom opens and filtered tea flows into the container. The leaf remains in the top part of the infuser.

Where do you get good tea? There are some good mail-order companies, especially ones that specialize in certain types of teas. For general offerings of all varieties and nationalities, I think Uptons is by far the best. Their catalogs are wonderful and informative. That's where I learned the decaffeination trick. You'll also learn what all the terms of art mean (Lipton's famous "flowery orange pekoe" is not some fancy varietal, it merely denotes a rather low grade of tea quality).

Unfortunately, while they're really quality teas, their tasters just don't have the same palette as I do. Consequently, I don't buy a lot from them. The very best thing about Upton is that they have small sampler packs (good for 2–3 pots) for just a few dollars apiece, so for not very much money I can try a whole lot of different teas. I regularly get samples from Upton to check out and every so often I hit on a winner, like their gyokuro kenjyo.

Most of my buying is from local fine tea shops that I visit, using the word "local" rather loosely. Here are my personal favorites:

San Francisco—Aroma—Haymen Da Luz and Ying Wu

San Francisco—Imperial Tea Court—Roy Fong

St. Paul—Tea source—Bill Waddington

Montréal—Cha Guan: La Maison du The—Daniel Ng

They all do mail-order, but the nice thing about shopping in person is that you can smell teas, often order a pot of something you want to try out, and discuss your tastes and preferences with the clerks and proprietors. Mail order, you're kind of working blind, until the proprietor gets to know your tastes. Look for one in your own city and you'll discover that a good tea shop is like a good bookstore; the proprietor will be knowledgeable, helpful, and enthusiastic about finding teas that you will especially like.

When I revisit this topic, I'll clue you in on those mysterious pu-erhs I mentioned. They are among my favorites. They were illegal in the U.S. 20 years ago and most people still don't know about them. They're simultaneously the biggest and most affordable bargains in the tea world along with being the easiest way to blow your entire family fortune. How's that for a teaser?

•     •     •

You must buy this holiday music. What does this have to do with the subject of the column? Well, Franks's first major album was "The Art Of Tea."

And now a quick free-associational, seasonal segue.

"The Art of Tea," from which I lifted this column's title, was jazzy singer-songwriter Michael Franks' second album. His "Watching the Snow" is my favorite.

Best. Holiday. Album. Ever.

Not even close to your usual psuedo-carolly, excessively-treacly fare. It plays well year-round. Check it out.

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Emily Cartier: "Sad, we can't share a pot. I much prefer black teas. I'm not terribly fussy about which exact tea garden grew it. If it's black, chances are there will be interesting flavors, and I'll be happy to drink it. Maybe we could share some herbal tisane instead? I am pretty flexible in my tastes there as well, tho' I have an abiding fondness for chamomile."

Featured Comment by KeithB: "I would have thought that you would like 'Tea, Earl Grey. Hot.'" [The favored drink of Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." —Ed.]

Featured Comment by Benjamin R. George: "I have to take exception to this generalization that 'properly brewed' tea generally means no boiling water. Green, white, and oolong teas are often ruined by boiling water, but many non-pu-erh black teas are great with it. Since you don't drink a lot of black tea, this is of little interest for you, but your readers should know that your advice is not fully general."

Featured Comment by Roger Bradbury: "I have to have two cups of tea every morning to raise my I.Q. above single figures."

Featured Comment by Robert Roaldi: "Another good Holiday album is 'The Bells of Dublin,' by the Chieftains, on which they host many guest artists."

Featured Comment by Gavin McLelland: "Mmm..I prefer the darker teas—I have always loved Lapsang Souchong—the smokey flavour goes so well with dates. Quite a treat."

Featured Comment by Richard Man: "Ctein, as you may remember, I drink a lot of tea myself. I'm glad to see a refreshing cup of, um, article this morning :-). As for the vast fortune wasted on Pu Erh, that's indeed quite a story. I won't spoiler it. Capitalism at its 'finest.' There are lots of stories about tea of course, but this is a fun one: all the tea, whether it's green or black, are from the same species of the plant. Green is unroasted while black tea is roasted and sometimes fermented (pu-erh). One of my favorite is Jasmine gunpowder. Strong and bold flavor. I confess that there is one tea that I could not like—the Lapsang Souchong—too much like drinking burnt BBQ wood, which is pretty much what it is :-)."

Featured Comment by Arne Croell: "Throwing away the first short brew was actually the standard procedure during several tastings in Chinese tea shops (Shanghai and Tunxi) that I had last year. The explanation at that time was not the reduction of caffeine but that the first infusion has a rough taste and the best flavor comes out actually in the third steeping (both for green teas and Oolongs). We could taste test side by side the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th steeping of several teas and the change of the flavors was certainly there. Personally, after trying out many teas in the last 39 years (I became a heavy tea drinker at 15), I've settled on Darjeeling first flush teas from certain plantations as my favorites."

Featured Comment by Willem: "This book really was my cup of tea: The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide by Heiss & Heiss."

 

Introduction to Digital Printing Part III

By Ctein

[Before we get started, a brief aside: My Minolta DiMAGE Multi Pro AF-5000 scanner has died and is in need of electronics servicing. Precision Camera no longer works on this model. If you know of someone in the U.S. servicing this scanner, would you please drop me an e-mail at ctein@pobox.com? Thanks! —Ctein]

This is the next-to-last (I think) of my columns on getting started in digital printing. Mike asked me if I would do some articles geared toward the folks just getting into it, and I agreed that was a good idea. The intended audience is those who haven't done any serious digital printing but would like to. In other words, this is the introductory stuff (and, to pre-answer the question I know I'll be asked again, no, there is not going to be a series on advanced printing). It doesn't matter if you have wet darkroom experience or not. If you don't have digital printing experience, this is for you.

In the first part of this series I told you about all the things you shouldn't be taking into consideration when getting a printer. In the second part I told you about what you should. This time I'm going to talk about color management. Do not run away in fear (usually a justifiable reaction). I'm going to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible.

The Monitor
First, let's talk about the monitor. Monitors cannot display tones and colors the same way they look in a print. It's only an approximation. Serious professionals (like me) use very expensive monitors, and we profile and color-manage them to make them look as much like the print is possible. They still don't look exactly like the print. For someone starting out, I don't think that level of display refinement is important. What you really will need to do is to learn how the monitor will look different from the print, and that just takes practice and experience.

I do recommend that you run the "monitor calibration" utility, if one is included with your operating system. This will produce a generally correct tone, contrast, and color balance. It's nowhere as sophisticated and accurate as full color management, but it's more than good enough at this stage.

The Printer
Now, about your printer. While I don't think color-managing the monitor is especially important, I very strongly advise it for your printer.* You remember me recommending that you find a printer and paper combination you like and sticking with it for the time being? This is part of the reason why (the other part being that you could spend your whole life just testing different papers out and never getting around to making a print you liked).

A printer does not automatically produce good color. All it knows how to do a shoot droplets of ink at a sheet of paper. The thing that tells the printer what combination of ink droplets it needs to squirt to produce a particular color is called a printer profile. A profile is basically a conversion table that tells the printer, "Hey, that RGB value of so-and-so in the image file? You need to squirt precisely these amounts of each of these inks to match it." Without a profile, a printer will produce prints much like the top one in the illustration below. With a profile, you get the bottom print.

All printers today come with canned profiles that get installed when you install the printer drivers. Those profiles vary in quality from pretty good to downright awful. On average, they score maybe a B. You can kick that up to an A. You will get markedly better color out of your printer—even the cheapest printer—by getting a profile made for it for the particular ink/paper combination you're printing with. Personally, my favorite source for profiles is Cathy's Profiles [Note: You might want to hold off on this. We're looking into it. —Ed.]. One of her excellent profiles runs $35.

Don't think because you bought a cheap, low-end printer, the profile is less important. It's actually likely to be more important; canned profiles for low-end printers are rarely very good. It's quite astonishing the improvement a good profile will make for low-end printers; it can turn them into very decent photographic printers.

To get a profile made, you print out a small set of 8.5x11" prints that contain color patch patterns, using files you download from Cathy's website. You send the prints off to her, she analyzes them, and she e-mails you back your profiles. You install those profiles on your computer. I think in the current flavors of both Windows and Mac OS, that is as simple as right-clicking on the profile file and selecting "install," but I won't swear to it.

Using profiles isn't that difficult, but I can't give you specific instructions on how to do it; sorry about that. It's different for every flavor of OS and every image processing program. So which exact buttons you have to push and which settings you have to set how? You'll have to research that for yourself.

It's worth it, believe you me.

Ctein

*(Regular readers may remember me writing about some vexatious problems I had with getting a good print that turned out to be solved by not using full color management. That was an extreme exception to the rule; for every photograph I've printed that was made worse by proper printer color management, I have printed hundreds that were made markedly better.)

Ctein's regular weekly column on TOP appears on Wednesdays.

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured [partial] Comment by yunfat: "I agree with everything said here, but would like to add [something]...If you are getting good prints, don't mess with anything, it's not worth it, and you may never get back those 'good prints' again, because you started messing with stuff." (Read the rest of yunfat's comment in the Comments section —Ed.)

Featured Comment by Robert Roaldi: "Printing has driven me nuts for a while. I don't mean getting museum quality or fashion industry colour reproduction—I mean getting a simple proof print that doesn't annoy the hell out of me.

"I own a slightly upmarket dye inkjet, an 8.5x11, 6-ink thing. Using the profiles that came with the printer and the papers from that same manufacturer, and after tracking down on the web which to use with which (because the manufacturer's documentation does not make that clear), I could not get prints that even looked remotely right. Worst for me was muddy greens.

"Then I found this print profiler utility that came with my monitor profiler; it was just sitting there on the CD. It's based on visual comparison. That is, you generate a profile based on their base files, make a test print, look at it, adjust the profile, print again, and so on, until satisfied or totally annoyed. I tried this a few times in the past two years and always got totally annoyed.

"Then two days ago, I figured out that the software has a bug, and so the test prints were meaningless. I had to get out of that utility and print from Aperture to see actual changes from tweaking the profile. Cost me a lot of paper and ink, but I can now makes prints that don't annoy me. Greens are greens.

"So, the canned profiles from the manufacturer were beyond bad, and the print profile utility combined with the driver had a bug so bad it made it unusable.

"In my previous life, I made my living writing software. What we put up with from the software we buy today is beyond belief. In no other domain do we tolerate this low level of quality control. Twenty-five years ago, I would have been fired for producing product this bad."

Featured Comment by Edward Webb: "One of the main problems with colour management for printing, in my experience, has been software and operating system updates, which play havoc with settings used to print profile calibration prints, and with print settings generally. After years of frustration, I bought an old computer (for £50) which is connected to my printer, and is never connected to the internet and never updated. I use it just for printing, and never change the workflow or the settings. I do all my retouching on a newer, faster, regularly updated computer. I have had no profile problems for two years now. My prints come out of the printer looking just like the images displayed on my calibrated screen on my main work computer. When it comes to colour management, sometimes old but stable technology is a hundred times better than new and constantly changing technology."

How to Review (or Buy) a Lens (or Camera)

By Ctein

'Tis the "Season of Spending"—at least that's what the radio commercials tell me. They wouldn't lie to me, would they? I thought I might devote this column to some consumerist advice. What goes through my head when I think about reviewing a product isn't a lot different from when I think about buying one.

Once some shiny bauble has caught my eye, the very first thing I contemplate is what I might do with it. Just what kind of photographs do I envision making with said lens or camera? Understand that this is a rather different question from the one of what kind of photographs I make in general. The answers to both questions may be the same. Case in point being the Olympus 45 mm ƒ/1.8 lens, which matches so closely how I see the world photographically. I use it for indoor, outdoor, low-light candid, landscape, urban/architecture, and night photography. Where I goes, it goes.

More commonly, the answers are somewhat different, and it's that specificity that informs one's decision-making around a purchase. Particular tools for particular tasks. For example, I didn't envision using the Rokinon 85 mm ƒ/1.4 lens for anything else but available light "candid" photography. Given the range of my interests, that's a fairly small subset of my photographic activities.

Which gets to my next point; can I imagine I'll be getting appropriate value for my money? That involves comparing the goals for the product with what it costs. I didn't see the Rokinon lens being generally useful to me. Had it been a $1,000 or even $500 optic, I probably would have removed it from my list. I'm not that interested in supporting my candid proclivities. $250, though, fell within the range of my "whim" budget.

Now, I know plenty of people for whom $250 is a substantial sum to spend on a whim (truth be told, it pushes a bit beyond the top end of my "whim" range). I also know plenty who'll drop $500–$2000 on a lens and not blink. They can indulge a much more expensive level of whimsy than me.

Everyone has individual comfort levels for price vs. functionality. It's one of the major ways you can legitimately disagree with a reviewer without even testing a product yourself. For instance, I rarely agree with Michael Reichman or Lloyd Chambers on what is a worthwhile purchase. Their photography budgets far exceed mine. It doesn't mean that I think their reviews are in any way inaccurate, but they're willing to throw far larger sums of money at a photographic problem that I am. Conversely, their standards are sometimes higher than mine. It's easier to complain about the rattle in your Camry when you can afford (and have driven) a Bentley.

I made this photograph with a small, relatively inexpensive camera. I could have made it with a large camera...but I didn't need to.

Of course the reviewer's priorities may be different than yours, which is why it is so important to understand yours. After nearly four decades of carting around a Pentax 67, these days I put some premium on portability. Using cameras that I don't mind hauling everywhere changes what I do artistically, and I enjoy the freshness (see above).

I made this photograph with a large, very expensive camera. I could not have made it with a small one. But, is the high price and inconvenience of such a camera worth it to me to make more of these photographs?

At the beginning of the year I got to use a medium-format Contax with Zeiss optics and a Phase One back for several weeks. It was great fun, and I did some really good work with it, adding several extremely fine photographs to my portfolio.

Do I want to make it my standard go-to camera kit? Oh heavens, no! Can I afford such a rig? See previous answer. Still, it has had me thinking for the better part of a year on how I might review that medium format behemoth against my Olympus Pen. Yes, it sounds like the worst apples versus oranges comparison, but after some reflection you'll see it makes a lot of sense. There's a basic consumer question in there: "I am using X; what am I missing by not moving up to Y?" Specifically for me, given that I am a smallish-camera, smallish-budget photographer, what would I gain, photographically, if I could/would get one of those medium-format rigs?

Sometimes this just breeds dissatisfaction; other times it's genuinely revelatory. Harking back to the film days, I've known of more than one photographer who, upon using a 4x5 view camera for the first time, realized they had been making themselves crazy trying to exact almost-unreasonable levels of quality from their 35mm. Many others tried it and decided they had as little interest in routinely using such an ungainly contraption as I would have relying on the Contax boat anchor.

The question, "What should I buy?" has no answers. The questions, "What can I afford?" and "What do I want to photograph with it?" do. They are your friends. Remember, shop wisely, if not too well.

Ctein

(Entirely off-topic...Steven Halpern, if you're reading this, could you please email me? I have a question about a future column for you. Thanks)

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Bob Rosinsky: "I use three cameras. Each camera is one magnitude cheaper than the next. Oly Pen EPL-1: cheapest; Sony a850: not cheap; Hasselblad H2f with 39 MP multi-shot back: expensive. As a pro and a hobbyist, each of these cameras serve a purpose. My favorite camera is the Oly Pen with the 14–42mm kit lens. It's a blast being able to have a camera with me in all situations. The Sony is great for photographing dogs and environmental portraits; the 'Blad is great for commercial product photography and fine art reproduction. Every time I pick up the Oly to take a snap, my blood pressure goes down. Picking it up and viewing the world through the nifty EVF is like taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon drive. It is fun."

Featured Comment by Jeff: "Another question I ask myself, which seems implicit in your post, is 'Will I see a difference in my prints?' For me, the benefits of a new tool may not relate to different types of photos, but rather to the quality of final product, which for me is the print. Generally speaking, I see greater gains from printing hardware and software than from any new camera and/or lens combination. (Perhaps use of Leica leaves little room for improvement, but I suspect the same would hold for most top end gear.) In my film days, the priorities seemed more on the 'front end' of the chain; now with digital there is increased emphasis on the 'back end' of the workflow. Testing new print solutions is unfortunately not as easy as renting cameras or lenses; one only knows through experimentation."

Featured Comment by Michael Bearman: "Your 'whim' budget is governed by Bearman's Laws. These may be stated as follows:

1. The amount you will spend on goods without considering the price or undertaking a cost benefit analysis is known as the spending pain threshold or 'SPT.'
2. The SPT applies to discretionary purchases.
3. The SPT level is proportionate to the unnecessary purchase desire or 'UPD.'
4. The greater the UPD the higher the SPT.
5. Importantly, the SPT is inversely proportional to absolutely necessary purchases of 'ANP.' Hence, the higher or greater the ANP the lower the SPT.
6. Finally, the SPT converges absolutely with the ability to pay for the purchase, or 'APP.' Hence, the less you can afford the purchase, the more likely its is you are to make it and vice versa. This is known as the likelihood of purchase or 'LOP.'

"Let us test these Laws by applying them to known two goods a) my wholly unnecessary new Zeiss lens or 'NZL' and b) my wife's badly needed new dress for a wedding or 'WND.' It is safe to assume that NZL has a high UPD and WND has a high ANP. Hence, NZL SPT is greater than WND SPT. It is known that in respect of discretionary goods in December my personal APP is A$1000. As SPT converges absolutely with APP, we can assume that the difference between NZL SPT and NZL APP (being infinitesimal) is zero. It follows that NZL LOP = 100%. And because UPD is inversely proportional to APP, it follows that WND SPT (being infinitesimally small) is also zero. Hence, WND LOP = 0%.

"Hence, assuming that the NZL price = $1000 and WND price = $500, I will necessarily purchase the lens because 100% LOP = ($1,000 SPT/$1000 price) and will necessarily not purchase the new dress because 0% LOP = (0$SPT/$500 price).

"And that, Darling, is why I didn't have any choice when I bought the lens I wanted instead of the clothes you needed. Really."

Mike replies: I assume she knew you were like this when she married you? [g]