The Online Photographer

How to Make a Good Proof Sheet

By Ctein

Some of the feedback I got to my last column led me to realize that a lot of readers don't know what constitutes a good proof sheet. To put it succinctly: A good proof sheet doesn't make your photographs look good; it shows you what's in your photographs, conveying as much information as possible about the content of your negative or digital file.

Now that we're into the digital age, not everybody uses proof sheets. Many photographers prefer to work with their photographs entirely on-screen. For a variety of reasons, I still find proof sheets extremely valuable. Every photographer's preference is entirely personal and idiosyncratic. If your choice is to work on-screen, that's fine with me—I'm not going to belabor my choice or debate the two approaches. If you're curious to know the way I do it, however, this column might interest you.

Proof sheet photographs are a lot like RAW digital files. They tend to be flat, dull, and lower than you would like in contrast and saturation. Show an untrained viewer your proof sheets and they will be unimpressed with your photography. There will always be a few exceptions; occasionally a photograph will be so striking that it stands out no matter how it's reproduced. I have a few of those in my portfolio. But by and large the vast majority of your portfolio-quality work won't fall into that category. A photograph that looks striking in a proof sheet will likely prove to be a winner—but most of your winners won't look striking in proof sheets.

Darkroom proof sheets are usually, but not always, contact prints from the original film. Hence they are often referred to as "contact sheets." I prefer to say "proof sheets" because this isn't always the case. For example, a lot of workers, myself included, learned the trick of putting three strips of 35mm film in a 4x5 film carrier and enlarging by a factor of two to print nine 35mm frames on a single 8x10 sheet of paper. It makes studying the details and visualizing the final crop a lot easier. Also, the tonal placement is closer to what you'll expect to see in a final (enlarged) print.

For normally-exposed negatives, the usual procedure to making a proof sheet is to choose a paper grade substantially lower than the one you would normally print those negatives on. In color work, that simply means finding the lowest contrast paper you can that's on the market; there aren't a lot of choices. In black and white work, it means dropping at least a full paper grade below whatever is normal for you. The exposure should render middle grades approximately correctly, but blacks should not look solid black; there should be a clearly visible difference in print density between the unexposed edges of the filmstrips and the entirely clear area between strips. If your negatives are unusually dense, you won't be able to maintain that difference and there will probably be some blocking up in the shadows, but it still will be a lot less than you would get in a normal-contrast print.

Here's a tip that will speed up your printing if you're making contact proof sheets. Set up your enlarger as if you were making a typical enlarged print from one of your negatives, say an 8 x 10 from 35mm film. Set the lens aperture to some plausible value for your printing. The exposure time you end up using for a decent contact sheet, combined with the way the individual frames look on the sheet, will give you a pretty good idea of what your starting exposure settings should be for making enlargements. Write the proof sheet exposure information on the margins or back of the sheet for later reference.

Fig. 1

If you're proofing digital files, enlargement is entirely virtual. I settled on 15 frames/sheet. It puts the same number of photographs on a proof sheet that I got from contact printing my 645 negatives, which is big enough for me to see what's really in the photograph. I still use the Contact Sheet II automation in Photoshop, because it's what I know  and it works for me. Figure 1 shows my control panel settings. (Most image processing software will give you some way to generate a proof sheet, but I don't use these other ways, so please don't pepper me with questions about how to set them up correctly.)

You'll notice in the control panel that I set the effective size smaller than a full page. I did that so that it left room on an 8.5 by 11 sheet for me to punch the edge of the page for a three ring binder and room at the top for me to add title and date information about the "roll."  I have a simple little action in Photoshop that takes the proof sheet, expands the margins accordingly, and lets me type information into a text layer at the top of the page.

Since I work 99% in RAW format, all my photographs get massaged by Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) before Photoshop merges them into the proof sheet. The default settings for ACR are not ideal for reviewing photographs. They produce a pleasing image, but it's too contrasty and it doesn't show the full range of information in the RAW file. Kind of like the difference between looking at a camera JPEG and a camera RAW file, although not that extreme: The JPEG looks attractive, but the RAW file shows you what's there. Figure 2 shows the settings I saved as my default settings in ACR. The two important differences are that I've added 20 points of highlight restoration, which is enough to  avoid excessive clipping in the highlights without significantly compressing the midtones, and I've moved the black level slider all the way down to zero. Also check the Tone Curve Point tab in ACR to make sure that the "Linear" curve is selected.

Fig. 2

That's pretty much it. Not rocket science. Not even really bottle-rocket science.

Making decent proof sheets doesn't have to be a burden. I'm happy to say that although I am years, even decades, behind making enlarged prints of all of my very best photographs, my proof sheet files are 100% up to date.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column, which was delayed for one day this week, will appear once more on Thursday (next week), and then will be switching to a new time slot—Wednesdays on TOP.

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How to Judge a Photo Contest

I've had to oversee a number of photo contests in my time, but there was only one where I got to set the rules and parameters myself. In that one, we had several judges, but my decree was that each judge got to pick his or her own first-place winner, with no interference from any of the other judges. Each judge picked a radically different picture—in fact, radically different kinds of pictures—but even after the passage of well over ten years, I still think all the prizes went to very good photographs. And, because each co-winner was chosen by a single judge who bore sole responsibility for the decision, the judges' defenses of their choices were articulate, positive, and impassioned.

I still think that's the best way to run a photo contest. Committees might not always make bad decisions—sometimes what you want is caution and consensus—but committee decision-making doesn't suit the exercise of aesthetic judgment. Time and time again, I've watched as committees of judges wrangled and disputed over their preferences. Strong advocacy is often counterbalanced by strong negativity. Everyone has to make concessions. What ends up happening is that a compromise is reached that everyone can live with...but unfortunately it's also often a choice with which no one is 100% happy.

It's different with juried shows. There, the jurors tend to become political, and to reach accommodations with each other—"I'll let yours in if you let mine in." That's a function of having more slots available. But I'll bet if any four of the people who write for TOP had to agree on just one picture to single out for a prize, we'd have a lot of trouble.

Here's an exercise in delectation. Let's say you're a contest judge with a prize of, say, $2,500 to bestow on some lucky photographer. And whatever you choose will be seen by thousands of people who wouldn't otherwise see it. You alone are charged with finding, from any source, a single photograph that you think is remarkable enough to deserve such special distinction.

What would you choose? Anything come to mind?

I'm not sure I'd know where to start.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Joe: "I was a judge several times in two different national photo competitions—coming to a consensus to pick three to five winners each time—and I came to the opposite conclusion from you, Mike. I found that it was bracing to have my choices challenged and have to defend them. And I found it really valuable having to articulate my disagreement with another judge's choices.

"At the very end of one competition, when we were down to the very last few candidates, another judge and I were baffled by the third judge's choice, and we spent quite a bit of time debating our stances. I probably learned more about my own prejudices and preferences in a half hour that day than in the year that came before.

"I've developed a better appreciation of photography through those experiences—I would hope all the judges felt the same way.

"But actually your complaint was more about the results of the judging process, right?

"I do think the results of those competitions were better for the discussions we all had. Each time I've judged, 90% of the rejects were easy and quick, and we always ended up with a small group of excellent photos from which the winners were chosen. Though picking the winners was always hard, that's a testament to the high quality of the finalists. I was really glad to have others to compare notes with, and bounce ideas off. I've judged where I could have tossed a coin to select three winners from six or seven final contenders, because they were all so fine. A little discussion was very helpful in that case."

Unethical Cropping?

As a follow-up to the "KGB'd!" discussion:

Ctein noted in one of his comments that "As for immodest cropping, yes that can (and in fact has, at times) violate ethics by eliminating substantial elements of importance to the veracity of the scene."

Unlike adding or deleting pictorial elements, cropping is to a much greater extent a "gray area" in photojournalistic ethics (a subject on which I am not an expert, by the way). It's a given that every photograph is "cropped," literally, or effectively by the mere act of pointing the camera, and it's a form of possible non-objectivity that we're used to and that everyone assumes. (And, of course, one that's most often done just to fit an image to an available space.) And yet Ctein's right. Here's an example of a crop that changes meaning. In my opinion that's an example of an unethical crop.

We should have a contest...like one of those contests where you have to change the meaning of a word by changing only one letter, or the meaning of a phrase by changing one punctuation mark: change the entire meaning of a famous picture using just a crop. Here's my offering:

And in case you're not smiling at that, here's the whole picture.

(I added the lettering just because I didn't want to unleash into the wilds of the internet such a gross misrepresentation of Weegee's picture, lest my Bowdlerized version take on a life of its own.)

Before the comments start, a reminder: when we talk about the ethics of cropping, we're only talking about journalism, not all kinds of photographs. The rules are different.

Mike
(Thanks to Peter Erbak)

ADDENDUM: A reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this comparison, which should make it more clear to all that the issue with the Economist cover is not a matter of cropping (and that an even longer lens would still not have made the cover shot possible as an unmanipulated image).

ADDENDUM #2: A number of people have forwarded to me other Economist covers that are clearly illustrations, such as this one:

I still call foul on the Obama cover, however, despite not being keyed in to the Economist's typical practices. The reason is that the illustration cover is obviously an illustration: not one person in a thousand would mistake it for an objective, unaltered photograph. But, as Ctein put it, "The President photo...looks exactly like a straight, unmanipulated photo and that is how people will read it."

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "What I find most troubling about this type of digital manipulation is that it allows for an insidious double standard. Large organizations such as The Economist can justify the image manipulation to their readership as photo illustration. They have lawyers on retainer to protect them against claims of factual distortion. The individual photographer who tries the same approach, however, is much more likely to catch hell if and when caught. No wonder so many photographers these days are caught stepping over the line: The line is always moving. The question is, who's moving it and why?"

Featured Comment by Jim Hughes: "As we all know, things are rarely as they seem, especially in publishing. I don't know where you found your 'uncropped' Weegee 'Critic,' but it too was cropped. Look again; it is rendered in an almost square format, and Weegee of course photographed with Graphics, 4x5 format. I have a framed print in my living room of that photograph, enlarged on an 8x10 sheet but keeping its typical 4x5 dimensions. But I already knew, as your version shows, that in my print, the bottom was cropped off. Your square shows more of the elegant ladies' garments, and more of the so-called critic's much plainer coat. Years ago, at one of the NY auction houses' pre-sale exhibits, I saw, and handled, a full-frame, uncropped and probably very early print of that image that included significantly more in the background behind and to the right of the three players in this famous drama, including, as I seem to remember, at least one other (rather indistinct) person."

Mike replies: Jim, your indistinct person on the right is there, along with three rather distinct persons on the left! See below....

Featured Comment by Pat C: "Mike, Check out this, which I found simply by feeding your cropped version to TinEye.com. It seems even your uncropped image is a fairly heavy crop too!"

Mike replies: Ah, beautiful. I like that one best. But now we're in to the dark night of "what Weegee intended." A photograph is like a statement, and the statement is the photographer's to make (although often with the "collaboration" of an editor or some other person). The crop I chose is similar to the way the picture appears in Naked City (at least as I remember it there—I don't have the book at hand). But then, if that shows more than the original print Jim owns, who decided to crop it that way for the book? An editor might have. What was Weegee's intention? Seems clear he was after the juxtaposition of the fancy ladies with the poor one. Surely the title ("The Critic") is his—check out this one that he signed, presumably (!) shown whole and entire:

Heading the Other Way

I don't want to steal Ctein's thunder or step on his toes*, but his post yesterday inspired me—I took the money I earned on his recent print sale** and bought a Mamiya 7II and an 80mm ƒ/4 normal lens, and 20 rolls of Tri-X 400. (The link is to a new camera, but I bought a used one, for about half that price.)

No decision, though.

Frankly I already have several medium-format film cameras—just nothing that's really "taken." Maybe the Mamiya will. (If not, I'll turn it around—pace my comments about Leicas a while back, I figure the most I'm really risking is a few hundred bucks.) I just keep feeling the urge to get back into film again in a serious way.

I can find no reason to say goodbye to digital, though. I've been enjoying the Panasonic GF1 which is now my #1 digital camera. (How could I not? It's the DMD, the camera I said I wanted way back in 2005.) I'm even slowly learning how to use it, despite its absurd overabundance of features...I really do pine for simple, stalwart devices that are more controllable. (The more features something has, the less in control of it I feel.) I'll probably never not fumble with that horrid dial + button kludge, but meh, you make do. Nothing's perfect.

The one feature it doesn't have that I really miss is IS. I consider myself committed to the lens—the lovely Lumix G 20mm ƒ/1.7 ASPH. hits the sweet spot for me—but I'll replace the body as soon as something just as good that has IS comes out.

A more serious decision has been looming for me—the decision to get back into darkroom work. Not for the future, though—for the past.

Chicago Convention Center, about 1995

For better or for worse, I shot 35mm black-and-white for some 20 years, from 1980 to 2000. (I was in art school from 1982 to 1985.) I have no idea how to count accurately, but I probably have between 50,000 and 80,000 negatives from those years, all told. And yet I've never truly redacted that work in any meaningful way. Of course I have great junk heaps of prints hither and yon, but nothing consistent enough to call a portfolio, never mind a single portfolio that truly stands as the Best Of all that shooting.

Until recently, photo paper had become a problem. Most of my negatives are Plus-X and Tri-X, and there aren't a lot of papers any more that "fit" the curves of those two films. My last "standard" (i.e., favorite) paper, Agfa Multicontrast Classic, is gone. But ever since the new Adox MCC (a clone of the Agfa paper) came out, it's been looking like an opportunity to me—possibly even a rather urgent opportunity—the chance to print a "master set" of the best 60 or 80 pictures from my 1980s and 1990s.

So here's what I've been thinking: set up a darkroom in the basement. Over the course of a leisurely year or two, print small editions of my best 60 or 80 pictures, maybe eight or ten of each. Of each batch, keep a handful, and offer another handful for sale on TOP.

I won't flatter myself that the world will beat a path to my door to buy my old snaps. But if I offered, say, five prints of each picture for a low enough price, maybe there'd be enough interest to keep the project solvent.

And then, at the end of that road, who knows? Maybe a book of some sort.

Ironically, the biggest problem I foresee when I contemplate this project is whether I'd have the discipline to stick to the task. I've always been curious, and I'd rather learn something from a failure than rehearse a success. I tried to do just about exactly what I'm talking about here in the mid-'90s—make a master portfolio of my life's work—but I couldn't stick to the hits. I'd get interested in negs I'd never printed, even if I knew they weren't great, and go exploring. Who knows whether another decade and a half of maturity—and the de facto end of my film photography in 2000—are enough to focus my fundamentally wandering mind?

No decision yet. But the idea is certainly percolating.

Mike

*I've always loved the "block that metaphor!" tidbits in The New Yorker. The most recent one: "'When someone really gets their back against the wall and a white knight appears, the tendency is not to kick the tires as much as you should.'" Funny.

**I get a "gallery fee" of 20% for publicizing the sales here. The rest stays with the artist.

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Jim Richardson's Twelve Days of Christmas

Photo: National Geographic

Jim Richardson's frame no. 10,525

Things are going to be a bit quiet on TOP this weekend while I work away on some stuff for next week. First full week of the New Year and all.

In the meantime, our friend Jim Richardson is holding a party over at his place. The picture above stands alone as a spectacular landscape—it was taken in the Scottish Hebrides. Its significance is that it forms the opening spread of Jim's feature "Edge of the World" in the January 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Jim writes, "My story on the Hebrides is just out. I'm blogging over at Working Photographer about the process by which each of the pictures in the layout came into being. There will be twelve posts, one for each of the eleven pictures and a final homage to the pictures that didn't make it. These will run one a day."

The series started with this picture on the 31st. Very interesting insight as to how a magazine feature gets put together. Have a look—and don't forget to check back in the days ahead.

Mike

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UPDATE: Don't miss Jim's extended comment in the comments section. —MJ

Endings and Beginnings

By John Kennerdell

It’s easy to know when a job is done: it’s when you get paid. What’s harder is to decide when it’s time to wind down a long-term personal project.

In 1998, a Japanese aid agency asked me to take some photos of schools and hospitals in rural Cambodia. I’d spent time in Phnom Penh but hadn’t ventured much into the countryside, partly out of safety concerns, partly due to the wretched roads. Helping push your bus through knee-high mud lost its appeal a long time ago.

But we did this trip by riverboat, and it was a revelation. Half the country seemed to be water, served by a vast fleet of elderly boats and impossibly colorful boatmen, porters, and passengers. It felt like a ticket back to the 1950s. I did the job but then stayed on another week just to shoot this waterworld.

My experience has been that we don’t choose our best subjects. They come to us, insistent and demanding. Here was something visually exciting, culturally significant, and likely to fade into history once the road system improved. There was no question but that I had to try to document a bit of it. What to do with the photos, well, I'd work on that later.

So for ten years I kept going back, usually at my own expense. Again and again. Until, sure enough, the boats began to shrink in size and number. The weird and wonderful cargo—pingpong tables and disco balls, looms and livestock, Chinese generators and teakwood beds—grew rare, then pretty much disappeared. Old fellows in fedoras gave way to young ones in baseball caps.

The feeling had been building, but it didn’t hit with full force until one day a couple of months ago. I was on a favorite dock—still a lively little place—but things just weren’t happening. It was as if I were trying to recapture my own best shots and not quite pulling it off. Another photographer fresh to the scene no doubt would have thrived on it. For me, it simply felt like time to move on. Yes, I’ll happily go on shooting the Cambodian boat scene whenever I come across it. I’m just not going to organize large chunks of my life around it any more. Time is finite, and too much else awaits.

As if to prove the point, on the way back to my hotel, crossing the big new bridge over the Mekong, I happened to see an impromptu volleyball game on the shore directly below. Not a subject I’d ever given a thought to, but it was a nice angle and within a few frames I found myself thinking, hmmm, Asian street sports...this could have potential. The start of another project? Well no, probably nothing that ambitious. But who knows? It’s just good to feel a little of the old excitement in a new context. The best subjects and the best shots, one always likes to think, are yet to come.

John

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Featured Comment by Semilog: "The volleyball player may be my favorite photo ever to appear on TOP. Gorgeous, like the very very best dance photography."

Looking for the Photographer

I've spent a very enjoyable couple of days looking at two-and-a-quarter square pictures by searching for various TLRs in flickr's "Hive Mind" feature (which also, incidentally, finally gives me a way to use flickr that I can tolerate). I tried to contact some of the photographers, thinking that I might post a few of the pictures I particularly liked here on TOP, but it seems few people answer their flickr mail, or whatever it is that's taking my messages to them. Or maybe they just don't want to be bothered, I don't know. Too bad, anyway.

The Hive Mind (a random partial page with "Mamiya C330" as a filter)

There's a certain junky quality to looking at semi-random collections of pictures by different photographers. It makes me realize that when I look at collections of pictures, I am typically seeking the personality or the sensibility behind the pictures. I'm looking for the photographer: trying to see what subject-matter passions he or she might have, trying to detect, over the course of many pictures as a body of work, what his or her taste and visual sensibility is.

Obviously, one must consciously not do that when looking at aggregations of work by many photographers. The upside is that such collections have a dynamism and a vitality that is often missing—or more subdued—in more self-conscious portfolios by single photographers. A Robert Adams book or a Daido Moriyama book is all Adams, all Moriyama; the sensibility is much stronger. But the variety is much less. A "hived" group has everything all together in a jumble: all sorts of styles, all sorts of subjects, all sorts of ways of seeing, black and white and color side-by-side. With TLR shots, even different time periods are represented as well, as people upload work they did ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. Even some of the obvious failures as single images have something to contribute when they're looked at in the context of a much larger whole. It makes me think of what Dr. Johnson said of the Metaphysical Poets, that famous first phrase much loved by Eliot: "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased."

It makes me want to edit a book of selects. The imposition of an overarching editorial sensibility, even in the absence of a guiding artistic one, along with (of necessity) a much tighter edit, could make for a dynamic and enriching aesthetic experience indeed, for the viewer of such a book. It would please. There's no market for that, I suppose.

Self portrait, poring over pictures. The time stamp reads 2:26 a.m.

Two thoughts occur. One, trivial, is that looking at work like this tends to emphasize the coherence provided by the use of the same camera throughout. The other, more profound, is something I think I see and might just be imagining: the work done with the cheaper cameras seems more interesting, less conventional. I fantasize that that's because the cheaper cameras are being used by younger people who are newer to photography. There's an exuberance there, a sense of real exploration. They're pictures made by people who haven't yet learned what you're not supposed to take pictures of. The pictures made with very expensive cameras show a more staid, conventional, less exploratory, more technically perfectionist mindset, like a sixty-year-old driving a Ferrari cautiously. There's a higher boredom quotient. It's a premise that would be hard to prove, but it's the sense I get, anyway.

Mike

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Format Size vs. Print Size in Film and Digital

As long as I'm retelling old stories, and since Howard Cornelsen brought it up in the comments to the previous post—and while there's still a bit of rosy afterglow to the "Fun with Medium Format" post left in the Western sky—I thought I might share again an account of some historical investigations into format and enlargement sizes, one an experiment done by a friend and one done by me.

Every photo writer, and most every serious photographer, has at one time or another exhaustively tested one or another aspect of photography. Real, comprehensive experiments, I mean, rather than the usual gambit of doing some reading, collecting some anecdotes, putting a wet finger to the wind of popular consensus, and adding enough personal trials to simulate comfort. None of us can test everything ourselves, however, so we rely on each other. I first realized this when I read a now-very-old article by George Post in Darkroom Photography magazine (which I later wrote for myself) called "Shake It Up!" The article was about agitating film. At the time, I was big into doing my own experiments and seeing for myself, but after reading George's article, I realized, in one of those little epiphanies we all have every so often (in cartoons, the light bulb lighting up above the character's head), that George had done more work investigating agitation methods than I would ever duplicate if I had nine lifetimes, and that I would be better off "evaluating the evaluator" and accepting their conclusions if I thought they were trustworthy. I adapted George's conclusions to my own needs, and never looked back. I remain grateful to all such investigators, from Richard J. Henry to Ansel Adams to Ctein, from all of whom I learned much.

Two tales told by actual prints
The first of these two tests was carried out by my friend Jim Sherwood, with whom I've lost touch. Jim's work at the time (he photographed dense, busy, chaotic scenes, often of the aftermath of natural disasters) was made with color negative film in a Pentax 6x7, and he made 16x20-inch Type C prints. That's the same basic process drugstores used to make 3R and 4x6" prints from snapshot cameras, except that Jim used a $10,000 Hope processor and made his prints himself. His question was simply whether he might be able to get away with using 35mm instead of 6x7. He conducted these tests sometime around the beginning of the 1990s.

What he did was to optimize his 35mm technique, remain casual with his 6x7 technique, and compare the two. For the 35mm, he used the best camera and lens he could find—his Leica; the slowest, sharpest, most saturated color negative film he could find at the time; and he used a tripod. For the 6x7 he used VPS, a 100-speed (i.e., medium speed at the time) color negative film of good color and what we now call "dynamic range" but only so-so sharpness and saturation, and he hand-held the 6x7 SLR camera.

What he found was...

Editing by Magic

Carl's recent posts about editing and the comments they've evoked have brought up so many thoughts that I could probably write five long posts about it. If not ten. (If you just blurted out, "oh, no!" never fear, that wasn't actually a threat.)

One thing leapt to mind. I've been taking golf lessons recently for the first time in my life (it's never too late for golf; it is too late for platform diving), and one thing my pro keeps saying is "make it yours." That is, he wants me to work out things for myself. And of course, each of us needs to "make our own" a great many facets of our pursuit / passion / profession / hobby / diversion of photography, starting with how serious we're going to be about it and what our aims are. The comments to Carl's posts make it clear that a lot of people have developed their own methods of editing. Which of course doesn't mean that it still might not help to talk about it.

I wanted to post a sort of counterpoint to Carl's article, in order to point out that he's talking about working out a method and then following the method through. He's not saying, "use the software I use, follow my method slavishly."

Sorry about this overlong preamble, but I also need to make a disclaimer: I'm not a guru. My way is not the right way. So don't take what I'm about to tell you as gospel; don't even take it as a recommendation, unless you want to. I'm not trying to tell you the "right" way to do things, even if I believed there was such a thing, which I don't.

Get to the point, Mike!
Anyway, when I had my chops up, here's how I worked. I developed either one or two tanks of film (three rolls of 35 exposures* each per tank) once every few nights. (Less in winter, more in summer.) I'd hang the film in the closet to dry, clip it and put it into PrintFile pages the next morning (this was my most hated photographic chore, by the way), then, when dark fell, I'd make proof sheets. (My darkrooms, always crude affairs, were almost never light-tight enough to use when the sun was out.)

In looking at the proof sheets, I had a couple of rules for myself. First, I had to loupe every frame. Second, I had to mark between one and six pictures per roll. It didn't matter if it was the stupidest, ugliest roll of useless pictures I'd ever taken, I had to find at least one frame to workprint. And I strongly resisted making workprints of more than six frames per roll. Oh, of course if I really, really had to see that seventh or eighth frame, I'd do it; but the reason for the six-frames rule was that if I marked 20 frames or 25 frames on every roll, it would be too much work to workprint (and too expensive), and I'd procrastinate and never get to it. So I had a method: every frame that interested me under the loupe first got a single cross mark in the corner; if there were more than six, I had to winnow them down to six, then I would put a second cross-mark, making an "X", on the ones to be printed.

Do you see that those "rules" were just an effort to cope with my particular psychology, my personal weaknesses? I didn't want to be tempted to throw a roll aside just because there wasn't much good on it; I knew I'd miss some good frames that way. I had to force myself to deal with every roll when workprinting. And I didn't want to trigger my tendency to procrastinate. These are my own personal solutions to my own personal idiosyncrasies. They have no more significance than that.

I was an effing ninja at workprinting. I could make twenty prints in an hour just cruising; thirty to forty an hour if I was trying. After years in the darkroom, I had no trouble looking at the neg against the safelight and setting the time and contrast to "good enough" with nothing more than a glance. Most of my workprints look pretty good, too, if I do say so.

Workprints. I made a gazillion of these over the years. No exaggeration**.

So here's the thing I started out to say: I have to have prints in order to edit.

And here's why. If I took, say, fifteen of those 8x10 workprints and taped them all up on the wall, they would all look more or less the same to me at first. And I'd look at them. Then I'd look at them some more. And some more. Gradually, I would start to get interested in a few of them more than others, and some would begin to drop into the don't-care category. And this is the mystery: after about three or four days of looking at a batch of workprints, chances are I would love two or three of them and not care at all about the rest. 

How did this happen? I really have no idea. Still don't, to this day.

But I could depend on it.

I finally decided that it was just not entirely conscious. It's not like I was "deciding" which pictures were "good" and which weren't; it's just that some of them had that "it," whatever it is that I personally happen to find gratifying about photographs, and the others didn't. 

There have been all kinds of things I've learned about myself along the way. For one thing, "good" pictures—the solid, good-looking, pictures-that-look-like-everybody-else's-good-pictures pictures—seldom made it for me. And, the things I liked were often quiet, sometimes too quiet for others.

I sometimes liked failures, too...pictures that were intriguing for some reason but...well, bad. I had a separate category for these, called "significant failures."

Sometimes I'd put 20 prints up and, after three days, it had become obvious that none of them were any good. That was always dispiriting, but it wasn't all that unusual.

So what accounts for that magical "sorting" process that almost always occurred half a week or so after I slapped a bunch of seemingly identical-quality workprints up on the wall and just looked and looked and looked? I just don't know. I only know that it was the way my brain worked when it came to photographs. 

Paper is wealth
The end of the process was that when I could spare the time and the money (paper was wealth, for most of my adult life; I almost never had enough paper) I would go into the darkroom and make a fine (finished) print from the negative. I always had a reputation as a fine printer—it was how I made a good bit of my living for a good long stretch, and I'm happy to say that some prints made by me reside in some very prestigious museums and collections—but I never enjoyed this part quite as much. It was too final, and few fine prints were fine enough, if you get my drift. I probably only made "finished" fine prints out of, I don't know, maybe a third of my sorted "selects." In a sense, there was no reason to—I didn't have shows, and nobody bought them. I was just doing it because I liked it. (Same reason you play golf. Who cares except you?) But workprinting for me was the center around which everything else revolved. I loved seeing what the negatives looked like, and I loved anticipating the magic "editing" process that would follow. 

I can't do the same thing on the computer screen. I have no good method there. That's not a value judgment, not an anti-digital comment. It's just a fact. I need prints on the wall. I need to be able to do lots of looking. It's just the way I am.

I've never counted exactly, but I believe I have about 85,000 negatives***, and although I've lost or left behind most of the workprints I've made, I probably have a few thousand of those hanging around the house. I really should be responsible to that work, and attempt to edit a book of pictures out of it—maybe even two. It's another one of those things I've always put off to "someday." That's the kind of task that requires that you be systematic and organized, and I am neither. I'm not looking forward to trying. But...someday.

I hope it won't be hard to see how very different Carl's method of editing a large set of digital captures (something I've never even done, because I've never made a large set of digital captures) is from my method of working with rolls of 35mm film.

We're all different. You've got to make it yours.

Mike

*Only 35 frames fit on the kind of PrintFile sheet I used, so that's how many pictures I shot on a roll, never 36.

**Well, slight exaggeration.

***Sounds like a lot, but it only averages to about two and a half rolls a week over twenty years.

ADDENDUM: A great tip for those still doing 35mm black-and-white. If you happen to use an Omega or LPL 4x5 enlarger (the latter being the best enlargers ever made, and now imported into the U.S. by Omega, formerly by Saunders, they of the easels), get yourself an LPL 4x5 glass carrier (has to be the LPL one, the Omega won't work). If you cut your negatives in strips of six, and you carefully overlap the clear sprocket-holed edges of the film, you can just fit nine 35mm frames into the carrier. Then you can enlarge all nine frame together onto whatever size sheet of paper you can afford and want to handle—11x14 or 16x20. Four sheets and you've done a roll of 36. It replaces both contact sheet and work prints. I could never quite get it together to work this way, but I always wanted to. It's very luxurious and very nice.

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Featured Comment by Gary: "I agree about the importance of work prints, but I still find the digital work flow to be a big improvement to that of 35mm film.

"The thing is, I don't use on-screen viewing to replace the work print stage, but rather the contact sheet stage. The curse of 35mm is that you can't really see what you've got squinting at a contact sheet with a lupe and so, must make enlargements of many frames just to see what's there. Doing the initial viewing on screen seems a big improvement to me.

"With digital, the second stage (work prints) is still there and just as important, but getting there is easier. And not just with regards to selection, but physically, too. I can shoot JPEG or JPEG + raw, use the JPEG for intitial viewing and make a workprint from it at the push of a button. Keep the raw for the final print if needed.

"I'm amused when I sometimes hear people on forums ask how they can make a contact sheet from their digital files."

Zen Slap

By Carl Weese

Some of the comments to my recent post about editing made me realize that I was writing from an underlying assumption about the nature of editing that is not necessarily obvious to the reader. The comments recommending various ways to edit out mistakes remind me of something important in my photographic life from about twenty-five years ago.

I had the opportunity to show David Vestal in-progress work on a personal project. At that point I had been intensely involved with photography for two-thirds of my life; I had been a working professional for a dozen years. David spent time with the pictures, and then, instead of talking about them directly, asked about my editing. "Do you look for mistakes, and get rid of them? Or do you look for good stuff to hold on to?"

I was dumbfounded, like after the Zen master's slap upside the head. There was no middle ground, no gray area, no way around it: I had never in my life thought of the editing process as anything but taking a berserker's broad-axe to the shoot, eliminating anything that showed the slightest weakness, the least flaw or error. David recommended I start over from scratch with this material, and look for all the good things instead of editing by fault-finding. Once the pictures with good stuff in them were found, I could start to decide whether each one had, on balance, enough good stuff to outweigh any bad stuff I would previously have rejected it for. This was a radical change of thought. Instantly, I knew he was right.

What I've come to understand in the years since, is that editing by fault-finding traps you into what you already know, so is an impediment to discovery and advancement. From the beginning I'd been suspicious of "rules," but editing by negation sneaked a bunch of stupid rules right past me and into my practice. To edit by fault-finding is to encase yourself in foregone conclusions—you might as well be insisting on The Rule of Thirds, or Single Center of Interest—but to edit as an exploration of the take for what actually worked, for what you found that you didn't already know, is a voyage of discovery. It's a crucial difference.

Carl

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Editing a Large Set of Digital Captures

By Carl Weese

One of the really positive things about digital capture is that in a situation where you'd like to shoot freely, digital "free film" lets you shoot with downright reckless abandon. (Of course capture isn't completely free: memory cards cost money even though you get to reuse them, and you need to store multiple copies of your capture files, preferably on more than one kind of media, but that's still almost free compared to film and processing.) Not all situations call for high volume shooting, and it is possible to overshoot. Working too quickly, making too many captures without thinking clearly about them can result in getting everything except the right shot. But there are plenty of times when there are many things to photograph and more than one worthwhile viewpoint or moment for each, so the card starts to fill up with a lot of captures. This can become quite a headache once all those pictures are downloaded to the computer.

The trouble with a dense forest of captures is how to find the best trees. There's also the issue of "what was I really trying to do with this shoot?" That question may not apply to conceptual artists who start with an idea and set up a shot for the camera, but for any photographer who likes to work by going out into the world just looking for the unexpected, the unedited take can be completely confusing. The whole collection is overwhelming so the trick is to slice it into manageable chunks. The chunks I look for are "Situations" (the word "Subjects" might seem more descriptive for someone else's work but I'll coin the Situation usage here). A weekend excursion to an interesting city, or a road trip, or a wedding or a soccer game—just about any shoot that results in a large number of pictures can be divided into Situations.

To illustrate my approach to editing large sets of pictures I'll show screen grabs from the Bridge module of Photoshop CS3 because that's the browser I use. You can find equivalent tools in other browsers and adapt my suggestions accordingly. I'll show the folder holding my shoot from a day spent at a country fair a few weeks ago. In Bridge, I set up a Workspace that has some housekeeping panels on the left, a large pane with twenty good size thumbnails on the right, and a Preview pane in the middle. The selected thumbnail shows at a more legible size in the Preview pane.

First I want to get a general feel for the shoot, so I scan through the whole folder by selecting a thumbnail in the top row and then using the keyboard down arrow to advance, which means I see every fourth frame I've shot. That way I'll probably see at least one capture from each Situation I worked on. I'll move sideways if needed to catch situations that have only one or two shots, but the idea is a rapid overview of the whole folder at Preview size.

Next step is to start over again at the beginning. In the first screen grab there are five frames of "the giant pumpkin Situation," frames 6–10. Frames 11–15 are of "the poultry barn Situation." I use the right/left arrows to flip through each set quickly, first to last, then last to first, like a rapid back and forth slide show, all the while staring at the Preview window. Don't use the mouse to select the thumbnails or you'll have to keep looking away from the Preview pane. I'm not trying to do a detail-oriented analysis here but to get a gestalt impression of this slice of the shoot. Often one shot just stands out as best, so I "rate" it with a single star (Bridge allows five rating levels, 0-4). Sometimes two or three are in really close contention so I mark more than one. If I don't really like any of them I still find the least unsuccessful shot and give it a star, so the Situation itself remains in the tentative edit. I work all the way through the shoot, not necessarily in one session! When you find it hard to pick the best shots, or to see where the Situations should be divided, go do something else for a while.

(As an aside, if you can find the discipline, put off this whole process for a while after making the pictures. The great Josef Sudek said he didn't look at his pictures until at least six months after shooting them, because he wanted to encounter just the picture, not his memory of the situation he made it in. Deadlines are one of the negative things about professional photography, a bug, not a feature, so if you have the luxury of waiting, take advantage of it.)

Once I've gotten all the way through the folder, I filter for the single-star pictures, and Bridge hides all the rest. I'm not deleting anything, just hiding the potential out-takes.

The full take of 671 pictures has been reduced to a much more comprehensible 131. Almost every frame represents a different Situation. By looking at the work Situation after Situation I begin to get a much clearer idea of what I was up to during the shoot. I see my thought process, I can decide which ideas, which trails I was following, were the most productive. Where I still have more than one shot marked from a Situation, it can be helpful to switch from viewing the choices sequentially to a direct comparison, so I select both at once and Bridge displays two good size Previews.

The next step is to start from the beginning again and start putting two-star ratings on the best Situations, then filter again to show only these. Up to now I've just been looking for good pictures, good picture Situations, in a general sort of way. But now it's important to think carefully about intention and audience. My thought about these pictures was that I'd like to use them on one of my blogs, WPII: Pictures in Public. This has a big influence on the next step in the edit. For example, a picture that depends on lots of tiny details won't work in a little 800-pixel wide blog presentation. Another good picture might not fit with the theme of the blog, in which case I might mark it with three stars, indicating "good shot, but not for WPII."

Now it's time start over once again, to work through this much tighter edit of two-star files. At each one, I remove the filtering so I can see all the frames that I shot in each of these best Situations. My initial choice may have been wrong. More important, I now understand the shoot much better from the exercise of finding the best Situations, and that may influence my choice of what is really the most important shot in each. A picture that didn't seem the best before may resonate well with a picture from another Situation, which means it now becomes the better choice if the pictures are to be collected into a group or series like a succession of blog posts. Now is also the time to look for small technical flaws like focus or movement errors. If the picture that seemed best in step one is off focus, but step two told me the Situation was one of the best in the shoot, there may be another frame that gets what I really care about getting from the Situation.

Filtering for the double star files hides everything except the pictures selected to post at the blog. These can be copied to a new folder and run through a batch action to prepare small JPEGs for posting. Bridge also allows you to place color "labels" on individual files. If I had another potential purpose for these pictures, say a brochure promoting the fair, the final tight edit for that could be labeled red. Then filtering for double star would bring up the edit for my blog, filtering for red would bring up the edit for the brochure, even if some pictures appear in both edits. Note that "the pumpkin Situation" in the first screen gab above doesn't make it to this edit—I like the shot but it doesn't fit the theme of WPII.

That's my process, in detail, for editing large groups of captures. But it's the process, not the details, that matters. You can use any file management system and adapt its tools to the purpose. To review, the first step is to slice the take into bite size chunks by dividing the shoot into groups of pictures, then make a tentative pick of the best picture in each group. Then pick the very best of these, or the ones that fit a specific intention or audience you have in mind. Finally, go back and compare each of these survivor pictures with the rest of its shooting Situation and make sure it really is the best choice. Editing a large folder of files can seem like a daunting task, but this process not only cuts the task down to size, it gives us an opportunity to learn about our pictures. Long before the advent of digital capture, David Vestal wrote that one very good reason for photographers to print their own pictures (in the traditional darkroom) was to learn about them. Editing a large take on the computer can also be a valuable learning experience rather than mere drudgery.

Last note—the longer you let this process take, the more time you let pass between shooting and editing, or between the editing steps, the better your edit is likely to be.

Carl

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Featured Comment by Ken White: "I recently put together my first large scale (for me) portrait project using a similar multi-pass filtering technique. In my case I started with four years of images in 12 different folders. I went from over a thousand images down to 43 for the final selection. The process of filtering the images and looking at them in great detail helped me see problems and opportunities that will be reflected in my next project. It was a great learning experience."

Featured Comment by Mike in Montreal: "Here's what I do:

1. Pre-shoot checklist.

2. Go to event/interesting location.

3. Shoot at the speed the situation requires. 'Chimp' religiously.

3a. Allow myself to get sidetracked.

4. Sit somewhere. Use camera to edit out junk.

5. Go home. Edit out more sub-grades using camera.

6. Remove card. Load remaining images to a subfolder.

7. Bring into Lightroom using safe all-purpose pre-set.

8. Divide into categories using 'Collections.'

9. Using 'Print' module (with large single-shot template), flip through each collection, assigning the color Yellow to the keepers (based on whatever criteria suits the moment).

10. Filter to Yellow only, develop each image, assigning the color Green when I'm 95–99% satisfied with the result. Not all the Yellows make it this far.

11. Now I look at my Greens as a photo editor would (the print module makes a nice light table) and choose what will best make the story. Mark these as Blue.

12. Final tweaking of the Blues, send to Photoshop.

"I developed this method over time on my own, based on my own quirks and habits. When I read other photogs' workflows, I feel a vague anxiety, so I'm not recommending my approach to anyone here. Mr Weese's tips offer good clues, as do mine, but shooters must find their own way from concept to presentation. Preferably one that keeps the creative process flowing and doesn't throw up psychological obstacles."

Flow Structures, Wrinkled Circles, and Teddy Bears in Space

The Winning Photo: Ben Sheppard and Robert Howshall's Pebble Project

Photo contests are a dime a dozen (and typically $10 to $30 a shot), but here's one that's a little different: the Nokia Photography Competition at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, in the UK. The criteria: "We are searching for an image that relates to research or teaching in the Department or engineers out in the field, which may be beautiful, fascinating, intriguing, amusing, or possibly all of these things." Check out the winners for yourself (noting that this is one case where reading the descriptions adds to the pictures).

Mike
(Thanks to Ted Johnson)

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An Aerial for Your Portfolio

I'm far from an expert in aerial photography, but I just wanted to add one small comment to the previous post: having one aerial photograph in your portfolio can be a real plus for you, and I recommend it. For many years I've had just one single aerial photo in mine*, but people almost always linger over it and ask about it.

In general, photographers want their portfolios to say "I'll do anything," and that's usually a mistake. (Have I written a post yet about why you should never have one wedding photograph in your portfolio? If I haven't, I've been meaning to.) Your portfolio should target a specific clientele and work to convince that clientele that you're the absolute best person for the job at hand—it shouldn't be a hodgepodge of jobber work of various kinds. However, having a token aerial shot might well be the exception to that rule. It really does say to clients "I can do anything" in a meaningful way. Generally, amateur photographers who do casual pro work once in a while aren't trusted with the budget for a plane or a helicopter. An aerial implies that you were trusted with just such a important job—even if you weren't!

Adding one aerial shot to your portfolio isn't as hard as it sounds. You might have a friend who flies. Small planes and helicopters can be rented for not that much money. And there are even things like biplane rides at air shows and tethered hot air balloon rides that can get you way up in the air for very little inconvenience or expense. Best of all, while it's just as hard to get a great aerial shot as it is to get any other kind of great picture, getting a good one is fairly easy...lots of things look more interesting from high above, as most of us know from peering out the window of a descending airliner when the air is clear and the light is nice.

A shot not many of us could get: Door Gunner Looks at Baghdad, by John Camp

Anyway, I highly recommend adding an aerial shot to your general portfolio. It's unlikely to get you any work shooting them, but it says good things about you all the same. 

Mike

*I'd show it to you if my darned scanner worked, but oh well.

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Featured Comment by Dave: "As a former flight instructor I can tell you that if show up at your local airport, a flight instructor will be happy to help you take aerial photos. Most flight instructors will do just about anything to log additional flight time. A photo flight is considered a cherry assignment for a starving flight instructor. It beats teaching someone how to land.

"Some tips to get the most out of your photo flight:

1) Plan ahead—an hour of flight time will cost from $60–$120. You'll not want to waste a minute. Spend at least an hour with your pilot planning the photo mission. The pilot will need to have a plan for navigating to the photo site and dealing with local air traffic control.

2) Schedule to fly during good lighting conditions. Early morning or late afternoon.

3) Get some latitude and longitude info from google maps. Most aircraft are now equipped with GPS. If you come prepared with lat and long data you'll save the pilot a lot of work and possible wasted flight time.

4) Ask if you can fly the plane. A flight instructor won't mind handing the controls over for awhile and teaching you some turns or something more exciting if you're brave."

Featured Comment by Steve Renwick: "As a Cessna driver, I'd like to add a few comments.

"Make sure that you and the pilot are on the same page at all times, i.e., you both know how low the plane will fly, you ask before opening the window, etc. Never surprise the pilot.

"If you are not accustomed to small planes, it would be a really good idea to take a ride without your camera at first, just so you know what to expect.

"As somebody else said, looking through the viewfinder whilst going in circles is a very good way to upset your stomach. Don't try to tough it out, as that won't work. Look up at the horizon and ask the pilot to fly straight and level for a while. A little delay is better than the alternative."

Featured Comment by Stan Semuskie: "I agree with your comment about the aerial photo in your portfolio. A couple years ago I received a call from Forbes.com to shoot a photo of the home of one of the richest guys in the U.S. I was kind of taken aback by the request, and asked if the person would set up the shoot. She said just rent a plane or helicopter, find the house and take a picture. I still wasn't convinced that I could do it so I called the local airport, in Hillsboro, Oregon, and much to my surprise I could rent a helicopter with a pilot for $125/hr, and they would only charge me for what I used in 6-minute increments. I did the job, used up the whole hour and shot much more than the house—I also shot my company, my house, and all my friends' houses from the air. It was one of the best experiences I have had.

"By the way, the person whose house I shot was Phil Knight (founder of Nike). He just happened to live in my town of Hillsboro, and I was lucky enough to get the job from Forbes. I would recommend anyone to call around and see what it costs for an hour of air time. I think many will be very much surprised at how inexpensive it can be."