The Online Photographer

Random Snap: Jeff Bridges

Director Joel Coen with cinematographer Roger Deakins on location filming True Grit. Photo by Jeff Bridges.

In keeping with Oscar Weekend, check out Jeff Bridges' behind-the-scenes panoramic photos of the making of True Grit.

•     •     •

Oh, and an urban myth alert: you might hear yet again this weekend the old canard about how "three billion" people watch the Oscar broadcast. No such thing—that was merely one wag's long-ago estimate of the total population of all the countries where the Academy Awards are broadcast. Lots of people watch the Oscars, but it's never been among the top most-viewed shows. Major sporting events hold most of the records (the Packers' recent Super Bowl win is #1 in U.S. history, and seven others in the U.S. Top Ten are Super Bowls). Complicating the issue is that no one tracks worldwide viewing—it's only done country-by-country, and only in some countries. In the U.S., the M*A*S*H finale—which unfortunately wasn't very good—ranks highly, and in the U.K., Princess Diana's funeral drew a large viewership. The best guesses put the global TV audiences for the Oscars at 40 to 60 million. The true number is probably nearer the low end of that range, and count people who watch only part of the broadcast (nearly everyone—most of whom will be rooting for one of the subset of films they happen to have seen. I saw The King's Speech yesterday, and will definitely be rooting for that).

Personally, I think there should be a Bizarro Oscars where they rate and give awards for movies that came out five or ten years ago. Of course, that would have little commercial value to the studios (or would it, now that DVD and streaming video are so big?), but it takes a little perspective to know what's good. Oscar often gets it wrong, chiefly because they're trying to appraise the merit of films that are too new. (Will anyone be watching Black Swan ten years from now?)

Which means that right now we'd be debating the merits of these films. (Ah, well, maybe it's not such a good idea after all...although The Man Who Wasn't There, which I was talking about just yesterday, happens to have come out in 2001.)

Mike
(Thanks to Marty)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Random Snap: Can't-Escape Cake

By Mike Plews

Shooting from behind yellow police tape is a working reality for a local news photographer like me. So I was pretty tickled to get sent to cover the Hy Vee Food Store cake decorating challenge at the mall in Council Bluffs here in Iowa. Thirty of the finest local pastry chefs doing their very best on cookies, cakes and cupcakes. The light was lovely and everyone was in a good mood.

So what was the first cake I walked up on? Take a look—a frame grab from my trusty Sony EX1R:

Sheesh...can't escape.

(This was part of a salute to the local CSI unit and the whole thing was actually pretty cool.)

Mike P.

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Random Snaps: Pete Tsai

Worth a smile: Pete Tsai took a picture of his friend Bea through Vivian Maier's camera. Clever idea.

Mike
(Thanks to Jeff Goggin)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

113reykjavik

Tyler Monson, Not Pleased

Tyler Monson has just set up an anti-blog called 113reykjavik covering a recent 113-hour trip to Iceland.

As Tyler says, "The blog will be completed when you first see it; there will not be ongoing posts, so it is more like a book than a journal...also, like a book, it begins at the top/front and ends at the bottom/back—as Mother Nature intended."

Most of the pictures are of the urban-detail-and-doorway genre, but many repay a closer look. If your visual idea of Iceland consists mainly of scenic glaciers and black basalt* you might find his approach refreshing.

Tyler Monson, Economic Blessing

Mike

*Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Send this post to a friend

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

The Picture on the iPad

Photo by Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach is a photographer I've been aware of literally since art school. He's been working for many years and has created an extensive body of work, mainly of western (U.S.) landscapes. His first-ever commercially licensed photo, "Pyramid Lake (at Night)," from 2004, above, used to be his own personal screensaver—and now it's the official background photo for the iPad. It was taken by the light of the moon on an Indian reservation in Nevada.

Misrach had been in negotiations with Apple, but the rollout came as a surprise. "'I was in bed watching Inglorious Bastards [sic] when I got a call from Jeffrey Fraenkel, my dealer in San Francisco, and he said, "Do you know what's going on live here?"' Misrach told ARTINFO. 'I was totally shocked. Naturally my other galleries started calling and my family was all atwitter....'"

Nice work if you can get it! ARTINFO has the happy story.

And speaking of the iPad, I wonder if the device might become the default portfolio presentation device for photographers. Seems well suited. I've read all sort of accounts of inventive portfolio implementations over the years—including one photographer who used a service that made placemats! As in, for the dining room table. After discovering that conventional laminations scuffed and aged too easily under rough handling by clients, he found that the "placemats" wore like iron and were impervious to scratches and hazing, so a box of his photos so treated became his working portfolio. Another photographer had all his work reproduced as 8x10 transparencies which he mounted with black mat board surrounds. He would visit Art Directors and other potential clients with a portable light box in a briefcase. Showing his work wouldn't have been a casual experience, but must have made a memorable effect. This was innovative when I heard about it in the '80s, but I think it became a common enough method of presentation in subsequent years—the photographer I remember had custom-made his own lightbox-briefcase, but I vaguely remember a commercial version for sale at one point.

The iPad seems tailor-made for portfolio presentations to potential clients. Not sure it would work as a drop-off, though.

Mike
(Thanks to many tipsters)

Send this post to a friend

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured (partial) Comment by Eric: "Short answer for me is yes. Photos are just beautiful on this thing (my company is developing software for them so we have a few around here). They really pop. I'll still make prints, but just due to the sheer ease of portfolio maintenance the iPad is the way to go. The black Apple iPad case just seals the deal for me. Once you put the iPad in that it's as nice as a portfolio as I've ever used."

Featured Comment by JackM: "I have used a laptop for a portfolio presentation and hated the keyboard. The iPad is superior. Apple is already talking about a smaller iPad; I already want one bigger. But that is in part because I like placemat-sized portfolios. As much as I like the iPad for stills, it is even better for video. Prints in a portfolio have always been possible, but video in a portfolio required a screen. Now we have one. By the way, your blog looks much better on the iPad than on the iPhone."

Featured Comment by Marc Rochkind: "When I first started up my iPad, I thought those star trails were scratches. A few others have commented on this as well. Regarding the iPad for showing photos: It's easy to move photos from, say, Lightroom to the iPad, in case anyone is wondering. No need to go through iPhoto or anything like that. (You sync with iTunes, but you don't load the photos into iTunes. Once you set up the drop folder, the rest is automated.) There's no information I know of about color management on the iPad. I assume sRGB is what you use for a profile. Someone asked here yesterday, I think, about calibration. No way to do that at this point, and probably will not be a way unless 1) Apple has supplied suitable application-program interfaces (APIs) and 2) special hardware is made that interfaces to the iPad's connector. I think both are unlikely."

Featured Comment by Ailsa: "Interesting that Misrach thinks the decision to use his image may have been made at the last moment. The same thing happened to Ian Cameron, a photographer I know who's based in the north of Scotland. A few years ago he was up working very late one night, when his phone rang. It turned out to be someone from Apple HQ, asking for permission to use one of his images as wallpaper for the iPhone—which was being launched the next day. I get the impression Ian was pretty much able to name his price. He never told me how much he was paid for it, but I believe it was a pretty tidy sum. Here's Ian's website."

Readers' Rambles

Tyler Monson ran across this in the picture-frame aisle at Target. "Obviously a Nikon F (Photomic T) but note the position of the model's finger—on the top of the shutter advance lever and not the shutter release next to it! Thought it might amuse you." Always. Prop-meisters, do thy homework!

-

Mark Kinsman made it down to the opening of the big Eggleston show at the Art Institute of Chicago. While waiting in line to get his copy of William Eggleston's Guide autographed, he took this shot of Eggleston signing a picture. The show runs until May 23 in the new Modern Wing, and I will definitely be going.

If you don't have the Guide, you ought to. Love it or hate it (and I'll warn you, there are those who hate it), it's one of the two or three dozen most important and influential photography books of the past sixty years. When you limit the category to photography in color, it moves into the top dozen. Eggleston, the apotheosis of the snapshot, edited by Szarkowski, the most astute and astringent of art photography's connoisseurs. A happy confluence and one of those books I treasure. The original is worth $400 now, give or take, but the "facsimile" edition is just as good to look at, and you can buy yours clean and new and untouched, for now.

Mike
(Thanks to Tyler and Mark)

Send this post to a friend

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...

A Little Guy Who Loves his Mom

I did this portrait recently for my next-door neighbor, of her with her middle child. His expression in that third frame really makes me smile. I think I'd title this "Now here's a guy who really loves his Mom."

The conversions were done to look better larger, and they do. The pictures were taken with the Pentax K20D and the splendid new DA* 55mm ƒ/1.4 SDM lens (yet another of the many gorgeous made-for-digital primes from Pentax). I had a few focusing issues with the lens—nothing too bad, but enough to notice—and, oddly, it's too sharp for portraits at most apertures; by ƒ/4 the sharpness is overwhelming. The beauty of an ƒ/1.4 medium-telephoto is that you have a certain narrow window for choosing your degree of unsharpness: the first few clicks of the aperture ring are subtly less sharp than the middle apertures, allowing you to pick the balance you like best. I learned this from a series of test portraits made with the Pentax 85mm ƒ/1.4 by Bruce Dayton. He showed an aperture-range set of pictures of taken of his young daughter. Some commenters, inevitably, liked the sharpest shots best, but I thought the perfect aperture was ƒ/2: it had just the right balance of detail without the harshness or hard-sharpness of the middle aperture. (My pictures here were made at ƒ/2.8.)

It's funny, but from the 1890s and until the First World War, photographers prized lenses for their unsharpness: when artists found the lenses that gave them just the right degree and quality of unsharpness, they treasured them like jewels. This attitude survived until the 1940s among portrait photographers. The unsharpness of their lenses of choice was considered by many portraitists an indivisible part of their aesthetic signature.

For the record, I've always believed that a somewhat unsharp portrait lens is actually more accurate than a clinically sharp one. Not more accurate to the forensic reality, perhaps, but truer to the way our brains perceive faces: we are very good indeed at seeing faces, and we tend to reflexively emphasize the enduring features that permit us to recognize individuals. The corollary is that we ignore those aspects that we know to be transient, impermanent, or trivial: oiliness, blemishes, and the very fine details such as skin pores or fine hairs that obscure rather than enhance recognition. We really do see these less readily than the camera does. So when you make a portrait somewhat less sharp, you are making it more true to way were perceive. This might seem counter-intuitive to the literal-minded, but remember, we don't see with our eyes—we see with our eyes and our brains. Perception is greatly in the mind.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Random Snap

Panasonic G1, G Vario 14–45mm lens at 14mm, 1/400 sec. ƒ/9 ISO 250

I have to admit I kinda like pictures with the photographer's shadow in 'em. I like "mistakes." Dogs are good, too.

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Featured Comment by Len Salem:

Featured Comment by Gary Smith: "I normally try to avoid taking shots like this. However, just occasionally, not only can they work, you pretty much can't avoid them! :-)"