The Online Photographer

Fun with Soft Focus

Yesterday's post about lenses that aren't terribly sharp might have made you think of premium soft-focus portrait lenses like the Cooke PS945 or the Rodenstock Imagon. Or, if you're not a large-format kinda person, maybe the Lensbaby or the Holga. As you probably know, there's a whole toy-camera aesthetic out there known by the general name of Lomography, after the website of that name and the Lomo camera. I've never liked diffusion filters—it's just a very false look, to my eye, especially the kind that selectively makes whites all glowy—but maybe you will.

Nothing wrong with playing with any of those options, of course. With many such options, people get into a "now I'm doing soft focus" mindset, and turn it up to 11 (moar cowbell)...they just go way over the top, and make pictures that are grossly smeary or fuzzy. We humans have a great fondness for excess.

Personally, I've always felt that if a viewer notices an effect, then it's been ladled on too heavily. That goes for the oversharpened eyes that Amin was complaining about (sharpening in general, actually); any of the standard tricks for making faces or bodies more appealing in Photoshop, like making the eyes bigger or the legs longer; soft focus; saturation...anything. The viewer should sense the aesthetic impression but not recognize immediately how it was achieved. That's just my opinion.

And to experiment with soft focus, you don't really need to buy anything. As long as you have a UV or clear protective filter for your lens, you can experiment.

Try putting "dots" on the filter with a black Sharpie. You can try even dots all over the filter, or leave the center clear and make the dots more dense toward the edges; then try shooting at different apertures. Don't like what you did? Just rub the dots off (or scrape them off with a single-sided razor blade) and start over again. More dots or fewer, larger or smaller, all creates different effects. You can use a hole punch and black construction paper cut in a ring shape to construct an Imagon-style "spherical" soft focus effect filter, mimicking the one in the picture at right. Too much? Too little? Try again. (Note that whenever you have any soft of center opening or gradation of effects on the filter, different apertures will yield different effects. If you're shooting digital, it's easy enough to try them all.)

Can't you just do it all in Photoshop? Maybe. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.

Using old or bad lenses is a useful trick, although you're dependent on the particular lens you find. Christopher Bailey used to use a Nikkormat with a cracked lens and stuck shutter (it only worked on "B") to make his night shots, and was out of luck when his car got broken into and the "special" broken lens got stolen! The irony is that it wasn't worth anything to the thief, even though it was worth a lot to Chris.

Everybody knows the trick of smearing vaseline on the filter (maybe just at the edges) or stretching a nylon stocking over the end of the lens. Again, too heavy-handed for my taste—what you usually create is not a subtle image modification but an EFFECT that shouts at people NOW I'M USING AN EFFECT!!! My advice—worth what you paid for it—is "think subtle." Just shade it one way or another. Tap your viewer on the shoulder rather than bashing them over the head with a brick. 

If nylon stocking material is too much, the fabric store is your friend. Find some loose netting to put over your filter. Note that white and black fishnet have different effects on the image. (Colors, too.) See what you can find. Try cutting a small hole in the center of the netting and just using it on the edge, then trying shots at different apertures. 

Once you get an effect you like, you can add it to your bag of tricks, and use it when you need it. For the most part, though, it costs very little to experiment. Even if you never use any of the effects again, you'll come out with a better understanding of visual effects and how images work.

Mike

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ADDENDUM: Oh, I almost forgot: you used to be able to make homemade diffusion filters by spraying hairspray on a plain glass or UV filter. Put the filter on the ground and spray the hairspray into the air and let the tiny droplets drift down on to the filter. Allow to dry, and use. More diffusion, more hairspray. When you're done, just wash off the filter.

This was a tip dating back to the era of beehive hairdos—it was hoary when I was a pup—and I'm not sure hairsprays are still the same kind of thing. Experiment.

Solar Photography with a Coronado PST

By Ctein

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

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

Figure 1

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

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

Figure 2

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

Figure 3

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

Figure 4

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

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

Figure 5

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

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

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

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

Figure 6

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

Ctein

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Where Was the Photographer Standing?

I had a brief conversation with Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai the other day about how bad many people (even photographers) seem to be at reading facial expressions in pictures. We both agreed it's something a lot of viewers seem remarkably blind to. Another thing people seem especially bad at reading in photographs is the participation of the photographer in the scene and the implications of where exactly he or she had to have been when the picture was taken.

The exception seems to be photographs taken from tall buildings or from flying machines, looking down. "Now where were you when you took that?" is the usual response to the only aerial shot in the portfolio I show most often. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to be something most people concern themselves with*—the common assumption seems to be that the camera is an omniscient eye and it's perfectly explicable, if not natural, for it to have been where it was.

I thought about this again yesterday when reading about Elliott Erwitt and encountering again his once-famous picture of the laughing lovers in the rear-view side-mirror. (I say "once famous" because I don't think it's particularly well known any more, except perhaps among older photographers—even though it's on the cover of his Personal Exposures.) I've never liked that one, particularly. The first time I saw it, many years ago now, I blurted out something like "who is he, the hook?"

My friend who showed me the picture said, "what?"

Photo by Elliott Erwitt

I was referring to an old campfire story that circulated widely when I was a boy (and may still, I don't know) about a pair of lovers in a car in the woods where an axe-murderer with a hook for a hand is known to be roaming. In one variant of the story, they end up falling asleep in the car and, in the morning, awake to find the hook hanging from the door-handle. (I guess you know this is an older story, because only old-fashioned car door handles would have a place for the hook to hang.)

Anyway, that's why this picture has always struck me as unsatisfying—because I instinctively place the photographer in it. He'd have to have been virtually a stalker in order to take such a picture naturally. The picture was a setup, not a candid. That seems obvious to me at a glance.

If it's not a setup, then it's disturbing, rather than all happy, sunsetty and romantic.

Eyes, balls, and a camera
One of the funniest—and most cogent—answers to my question the other day about the three things you most need to practice your photography was provided by a reader named Nick, who said "eyes, balls, and a camera." Amen, brother Nick. A little crude, but that nails it.

My teacher and mentor Steve Szabo, who had been a top photojournalist for The Washington Post before retiring to become an art photographer with a view camera, once showed us a photograph of a Central or South American peasant wedding that amazed me. Nobody else in our class responded the way I did, but all I could think of when I saw it was "where were you when you took that?" The picture was taken during the ceremony from directly over the priest's shoulder, with the bride and groom and all the guests in attendance. When I put Steve in the scene it just stunned me. Steve answered my question by saying he'd just walked right to the altar as if he had every right in the world to be there, and started photographing. He said it almost with a shrug: "It's just what you have to do." I've mentioned before that I could never have been a photojournalist because I would never have the stones to do things like that. Or, more accurately, the confidence to pull it off without creating an unpleasant spectacle. Some people can; not I.

A lot of the work of photographing is getting yourself to where the picture was taken—whether that's Simon Roberts setting up his tripod on top of his strategically-parked motor home, or Jim Nachtwey wandering the scene of 9/11, or the indefatigable Robert Cameron, who died last November 10th at the age of 98, up in a helicopter above a big city in good light. But most viewers, most of the time, are perfectly happy to collude in the illusion of the omniscient camera, and simply ignore the implications of the photographer as a presence in the scene.

Candid photography as misdemeanor
Another story I think about in this context is one I had occasion to tell the other day when I had a lunch with a local reader, Jack McD. (Jack also let me "unbox" his new gray Leica M9—way cool—but that's another story.) It was a picture taken with a wide-angle lens, looking directly down on two sunbathing young women dressed in bikinis. The women were both asleep on the grass, and they each had the back strap of their bikini tops open so as not to ruin their tans. The picture was taken by a woman I taught with briefly many years ago. She was small, quiet, and unprepossessing in her manner, even though she was actually quite assertive in terms of how she actually acted. Here's more or less how that conversation went:

Me: Do you know these girls?"

She: No. They were just sunbathing in the park.

Me: Were they really alseep?

She: Yes.

Me: So how did you take this?

She: I just walked over and put one foot in between the two of them, and leaned in.

(In other words, she was straddling one of the sleeping young girls in order to get herself in position to take the picture.)

Me (laughing): Do you realize how fast I'd be arrested if I tried to do that?

I'm 6'2", and I weighed 200 lbs. at the time, and if it's been a while since I've had a haircut I somewhat resemble Ted Kaczynski's post-capture mugshots. If I tried to take a picture like that of two sleeping teenage girls who were strangers to me, it would practically constitute assault. All I could picture was one of them waking up to find me hulking over her, and the scream she would have let out as a result!

No credit
As photographers, we're preoccupied with where we were and how we felt when we took our pictures. In fact, I think a lot of photographers often allow their memories of how hard the picture was to get to affect their editorial judgment about how good a picture it is. (A clue: it has nothing to do with it. A great picture can be a toss-off, and one you work and work to get can still suck. You've got to detach yourself from all that when you edit.) But it's not something you get much credit for from viewers. They take it for granted—if they even think about it at all.

Mike

*There's one other exception—the moralistic and unreasonable one that we discussed recently about the common kneejerk reaction to a photograph of a crime or atrocity in progress—"how could he (or she, or you) just stand there?" In a sense, though, that also assumes a sort of omniscience—it assumes the photographer as omniscient actor, as if anyone who could intervene in a scene enough to photograph it should also have the power to alter the event, whatever it was—even though that's seldom the case.

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ADDENDUM: Doug Boller sent me this, an outtake from a late '70s project of his, calling it "a confluence of reflections"...the man in the mirror is Steve Szabo! Quite a coincidence considering the contents of this post....

Featured Comment by Ben Rosengart: "Movies and television have trained us not to ask about the camera-wielder. IMHO."

Featured Comment by Ed Nixon: "I always thought that Erwitt picture was a self-portrait (with friend). Still do, even after reading this post. My interpretation does a better job of explaining where he was than a 'stalker' theory. Why would he have to be looking through a camera, particularly given the obvious attributes of the lady in question?"

Featured Comment by David Lykes Keenan: "Elliott told me that this particular picture was not immediately seen as he reviewed his contact sheets. He 'found' it some time (years?) later. He also told me that he knew the couple in the car."

Featured Comment by David Brookes: "I like your Steve Szabo story, Mike. Before I retired I was an Anglican priest, and I was taking a wedding service one day in a small church in the North of England where I was Vicar. It was a small church with no side aisles, so it was impossible for a photographer to move to the east end unseen: for that reason no photographs were ever taken from behind where I was officiating.

"One day, however, a vestry door had been inadvertently left unlocked, and the wedding photographer sneaked his way in. Unfortunately this particular fellow had a bad limp and walked with a stick: he also used a Mamiya RB67. You can imagine my surprise when I heard this three-legged creature clumping across the church behind me, followed by the crash of the Mamiya's shutter (which, for your younger readers, sounded like someone dropping a tray of cutlery).

"Needless to say this particular photographer was banned from my church after that!"

Featured Comment by Andreas Manessinger: "The image is also on the cover of one of the best albums ever made, Fairground Attraction's glorious 1988 debut 'The First of a Million Kisses.' I knew the image long before I knew the photographer."

Featured Comment by Robert: "This is a quote from a recent Erwitt lecture I attended, regarding said photo: 'The story about this picture is that I discovered it 25 years after I took it. I happened to be looking through my contact sheets and thought that it might make a nice print. I advise everyone to look through their contact sheets.' Later he related how the couple were friends of his, and someone tried to sue him claiming to be one of the subjects. He produced the contact sheet with the rest of the photos and never heard from the person again."

The Great White Squirrel

My normal reading diet consists almost exclusively of nonfiction (most recently Lance Armstrong's War, because I've been on a cycling kick), but every year I try to read one great classic of literature. In recent years I've read things like David Copperfield, Native Son, Treasure Island, and In Cold Blood. I have Proust and The Grapes of Wrath on the shelf, waiting. Last year I tried to read Moby-Dick for about the third time in my life. Alas, Ishmael and I don't get along; I realized the other day my ambition had been inadvertently harpooned—I set the book aside one day and just never took it up again. The fate of all too many books. Fiction, to echo what Richard Hugo said of flying, is unnatural.

Ironically, I lapped up the two current non-fiction books about the historical incident, Thomas Farel Heffernan's Stove by a Whale: Owen Chase and the Essex and Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, as well as the first-person account of the Essex that Melville was familiar with, Owen Chase's The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex (The Essex, if you don't know the story, was the only real whaling ship ever attacked and sunk by a mad whale. The meaning of the story has changed somewhat nowadays; in light of the remorseless factory ships and the sad tragedy of overfishing, some of us find ourselves inclined to root for the whale). 

Melville.

But I know the story, of course. The brooding, Old Testament prophet of a whaling captain, Ahab, obsessed with the albino whale who took his leg, intent upon revenge at any cost.

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me."

Which brings me to the albino squirrel.

Months ago, in June I think it was, I caught sight of a white squirrel in the alley adjacent to ours. I turned up the alley in the car, gave chase, and just glimpsed his tail as he disappeared behind a fence. I meant to walk up there later with a camera, and see if I could get a shot of him to post on the blog. But of course I forgot about it.

The days of the summer passed by. Had it really been a white squirrel? It might have been an apparition. Or a cat.

Then, months later, pottering about the neighborhood on my new bike, which I love, and have named Gruesome—no, not Pequod—I saw the white squirrel again—unmistakeably, this time, from my perch high atop my two-wheeled crow's nest. He was gamboling happily by the side of the road, in plain view, some two blocks from where I'd originally espied him. Again, poor wretch that I was, I had no camera with me. I swear to God this was the reason I subsequently bought the handlebar bag for the bike which I wrote about in this watery vastness not long ago—so I could take the camera on the bike. The white squirrel was the reason. I'm not saying I've been obsessed, at least not Ahab-level obsessed, but I had in mind that one day I was going to encounter the elusive white squirrel again. I intended to be ready. Well, sort of ready, given that I don't have a zoom or a tele. As I've reported, I went on several rides with the GF1 nestled in the bag's well-padded hold.

It's an internet truism that "the best camera is the one you have with you," but it's a lesson I don't think I'll ever entirely learn. Last weekend we were enjoying what around here is called "Indian Summer," a brief warm respite at the end of the autumn—summer's last gasp before the frigid nor'westers arrive. On one of those balmy days I interrupted my work at the computer to drive Zander to band practice at a friend's house. The friend lives near the dog park, and Lulu, who knows exactly where she is whenever she gets within a mile of the park, made such a fuss that I gave in to her pathetic whimpers and whining and we made an unplanned stop. I've taken too many pictures at the dog park, so it's normally no hardship to be there without a camera, but wouldn't you know it—being that it was probably one of the last warm weekend days of the year, our local dog owners were out in force that day. The one time I didn't have the camera with me, and there were more people and dogs at the park than I'd ever encountered, and not by any small margin. There must have been 150 dogs meandering happily around, if not 200, and half again as many owners.

A lovely sight, if you love dogs. I would have liked to have a picture or two to remember it by. So on the way home, I was once again castigating myself for not bringing the camera, because the fact is that you just never know when you're going to want it, when—you guessed it: there he was, unexpectedly, in the grassy strip beside the busy road—the white squirrel! Where was my weapon? I could have turned the corner, departed the ship—er, the car—stalked him, maybe gotten lucky. But no camera. I felt the mute admonishments of all you TOP readers at the back of my mind. Lesson learned that day, yet again—once, and then again, an exclamation point added, like the stinging of the lash-end.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.

So anyway, the other day I sent the Panasonic GF1 back to its owner. As if on schedule*, a boxlike brown truck hove into view on the swell of our hill, and a box fetched up on the lee side of the porch—a Sony A850 to test, courtesy of B&H Photo.

Alas! The A850, beauteous though it undoubtedly is, will not fit in the handlebar bag. 

I took Gruesome on several long rides during our warm spell. Because the Sony is too big for the bag, no camera, again, on these rides. On one occasion, I beat to the top of a long hill, and turned into a cemetery there. At the back edge of the cemetery I was surprised by an unexpected view. The grateful dead have a spectacular vista, from their hilltop, of the industrial side of town. The light was delicate and lovely; I regretted, again, that I didn't have a camera with me. And of course, all this while, I continually had it in the back of my mind—since I don't have a camera with me, I'll probably see the white squirrel—.

But I didn't.

Yesterday, I did something else that I too often do—another lesson that I never learn. I drove back to the cemetery, in the car this time, with the camera. I had it in mind to re-create my first encounter with that fine view, and make a panorama with the Sony. This never works; no matter how similar the conditions seem, the light is never the same. I took a few pictures, here and there, a headstone, a statue, a bush. Nothing much.

And then, as I was walking back to the car, I froze—there he was! Me with a camera in my very hand, and the Great White Squirrel was not twenty yards away, frolicking among the tombstones! I had him!

"Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"

I stalked steadily toward him, and he took refuge in a bush. Which might afford some protection for him from me, but not from the camera. Alas, he seemed to realize this as suddenly as I did, because the infernal little bugger leapt for the ground and made a run for the tallest nearby tree!

I made a quick snapshot**, and then he was up it. 

He's canny, the White Squirrel. He never showed me more than the edge of his head, as he watched patiently from behind the body of the tree. He seemed to know I was after him, and he had a much better reason to be patient than I did. And of course I only have a 50mm lens for the Sony. I waited a while, wandered off, returned. No wildlife photographer I, this was the best I could get, because it was the most he showed of himself, the whole time:

But it was him, all right! A detail:

Down to his beady red albino eye.

He really is a cute little bugger. You're just going to have to take my word for it.

But don't think it's done between us yet. I still have a date with the Great White Squirrel. I'll get a halfway decent picture of him one day, or my name's not Ahab—er, Mike.

Mike

*Well, all right, actually it was scheduled.

**The word "snapshot" was first applied to photographs by Sir John Herschel, the Victorian polymath who discovered the image-fixing properties to hypo. It originally meant a shot by a hunter who, surprised by a sudden encounter with game, quickly snapped shut his broken shotgun and fired without taking careful aim.

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Does the Camera Really Add Ten Pounds?

By Cecil Adams, World's Smartest Human

Dear Cecil:

I've often heard people say "the camera adds ten pounds" when they're photographed. Is that just an excuse or is there any truth to it?

Emma

Cecil replies: No question there's an element of denial here. Since you're not looking at yourself most of the time, it's easy to maintain a self-image reflecting the svelte physique you had ten years ago, as opposed to the corpulent wreck you've become. But that's not the whole story....

READ ON at straightdope.com

(Quote from the article: "I knew a photographer who swore by the rule 'Never use a lens whose focal length, in millimeters, is less than the weight of the woman.' Sexist thought? No doubt. Just saying it's a guideline you might want to keep in mind." Now there's a rule I've never heard before. I thought I'd heard 'em all.)

Mike
(Thanks to Keith B.)

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Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "I'm okay with the camera adding extra pounds. It's the hair that the camera somehow subtracts that bothers me."

Featured Comment by Pavel: "Do we mean to say that a woman must be disguised into skinny, to be at all attractive to herself and others?

"On another tangent, I used to always worry that airbrushing away, often with a heavy hand, signs of age, would offend a woman. After many years of experience I somewhat sad to say that I have yet to meet that person with the rigorous standard. They are all ecstatic—even if no person recognizes the praised results for a current photo instead of their own faded memories of self.

"I think we are tackling all of this from the wrong end...but hey...I don't want to be a more starving photographer that I already am."

Featured Comment by Sean: "Actually I think we need reminding that big can also be beautiful.

Jen Davis, Untitled No. 11. 2005, from "Self Portraits"

I'd say that’s some random excellence right there, Mike."

A Little Lesson in Aerial Photography

Our friend Jim Richardson, in his blog, has a nice account of taking this picture, and of planning aerial photographs in general. Jim's blog takes pictures mostly from his work for National Geographic and tries to give a down to earth, nuts-and-bolts look at how they were made.

"The latest," he writes, "is about an aerial photograph of wheat harvest for our 'Great Plains' story, in which I go into considerable detail about the rigors of aerial photography from a small plane. It also emphasizes the importance of capturing moments (even from the air) by studiously predicting when they are going to happen. It's not a romantic view of photography, just what you have to do to make it happen."

Mike
(Thanks to Jim)

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Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "When I was in high school I would take aerial photos of crops on my family's farm. We would take the doors off of a Citabria and I'd take pictures out the door. Between the placement of the doors and the struts and me in the backseat and 120mph of wind buffeting me, the pictures sucked for any other purpose than seeing how the center of the sunflower field was doing. In retrospect I think it was all just an excuse to go flying with the doors off the plane. I hadn't thought of that in years, and now I can distinctly remember the smell of avgas and the farm."

Featured Comment by Hikari: "I had once the chance of taking photos from the window of a small plane and got sick after 30 min. smelling the gasoline and looking through the viewfinder. From that day I really appreciate the work of these kind of photographers."

Featured Comment by Tim F: "Tip from someone who has done this all of once: do not ask the pilot to fly as low as he can if you only have one pass. I was looking up at telephone poles."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "Any discussion of aerial photographers would be incomplete without giving full credit and fawning admiration for my own aerial hero, Georg Gerster. Long before Yann Arthus-Bertrand took the world by storm Gerster was showing us what art aerial photography could be. He has built up an enormous body of work of simply stunning images.

"Once, years ago, I had the honor of working with him, when we were doing the 'Day in the Life of America' and I was one of the assigning editors. Georg Gerster was assigned to me and I remember sitting there asking him what he wanted to do. Simply and professional he said, 'I want to do what you need done.'

"Quite a guy, and not a bad photographer."