The Online Photographer

Bob Shell Found Guilty

A Virginia jury this afternoon found Bob Shell guilty of the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter and seven other counts in the accidental death of his friend, model Marion Franklin, the Roanoke Times has reported. The jury declined to convict him of the more serious charge of homicide.

Shell is the author of 24 books on cameras and photography. Although he has published articles in many magazines, he is best known to photographers as the former Technical Editor and later Editor-in-Chief of Shutterbug magazine. He transformed Shutterbug from its roots as a newsprint classifieds rag into a major international newsstand magazine.

The details of the case against him were sensational. Best known as a boudoir and glamour photographer who was often criticized for his plainspoken pictures in Shutterbug of what one writer called "local girls in their underwear in the woods," Shell had been turning his attention more to nude and fetish photography when the then-19-year-old Franklin, among other things a bondage model, died of an accidental overdose of morphine in his Radford, Virginia, studio. Among other lurid charges, police alleged that they confiscated photographic evidence of Shell having sex with Franklin after she was dead.

The defilement of a corpse charges were dropped late in the trial. Shell steadfastly alleged misconduct and incompetence on the part of police and prosecutors during the investigation, who he claimed lost and altered evidence and repeatedly impeded the defense. The prosecutor in the case tried to paint him as an older man who was infatuated with the younger woman and drugged her in order to take advantage of her. Shell has maintained that, to the contrary, he and Franklin were in involved in an ongoing relationship, a claim backed up by the fact that his wife was in the process of divorcing him at the time of Franklin's death in part because of the affair. 

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UPDATE: The jury has recommended sentencing of 32 years, 6 months in prison, on charges of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of distributing morphine, possession of morphine, distributing diazepam, two counts of attempted animate object penetration, and one count of attempted forcible sodomy. The charges carry a minimum of 6 years to a maximum of 131 years. Shell is currently 60 years old.

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Mike

A Short Course in Photography

We know too much about how pictures look and should look. And how do you get around making those pictures again and again?

—Garry Winogrand

Regularly, people ask me how they can learn more about photography even though they may never have taken an art course. For a while I get enthused about the challenge. I think it would be possible to recommend a carefully selected and sequenced "reading course" that would require the autodidact to find and read (or look at) no more than about 20 books.

What kills the project, every time, is that the books just aren't available. Of the twenty I come up with, only a handful are still in print. Maybe another handful could stand to be substituted for current books without losing too much. But finding a final handful would be dicey even at a big city or large university library.

If I were teaching an actual class, I could procure one copy of the difficult-to-find books and either photocopy the most relevant chapters or have students come in and look at the pictures. But that would only work for a small, localized class (and it can put a lot of wear on valuable, hard-to-replace books). And then I start thinking about individual essays or artists' statements and multimedia sources like videos, and I give up.

One source that's come to my attention lately is this video of Garry Winogrand teaching (there's an alternate site here). It was brought to my attention by O.C. Garza in his excellent essay about his experience as a student of Winogrand's at the University of Texas. (At the link, the .PDF download for the rather lengthy article is just above the pictures.)

Winogrand's importance to the course of photographic history and his influence on American art photography in the second half of the 20th century is difficult to overstate. In some respects it outstrips the important of his pictures. I wish I could also recommend that everybody read Chapters six and seven of Jonathan Green's American Photography: A Critical History along with it. But, naturally, it's out of print. In any event, I suggest you listen carefully to what Winogrand says in this video and try to take it in, even if you're one of those people who aren't convinced by his pictures.

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Mike

Around the Web Today

A hint: this picture was taken in 2001.

Imaging heavy hitters joining Adobe, according to John Nack—including one of the guys responsible for "content-aware image resizing." I suppose that technology does make sense for Photoshop, but it makes me wish I'd started out with LightZone and nothing but LightZone.

J.D. Powers' 2007 Digital Camera Ratings seem unaware, ill-informed ("pro-sumer" DSLRs "starting at $1,500?" Huh?) and arbitrary (Nikon 5 stars, Canon 2?). I hope its car ratings are better than this.

The new Henry Peach Robinson. How's that again about digital being no different than optical/chemical photography? Now we just need a digital Jerry Uelsmann.

Megapixels, Shmegapixels: Just in case you're dying to learn mammoth wet plate and tintype, amongst other antiquarian delights. Note that September workshops are still open.

Bob Shell's murder trial is in its final day, according to the Roanoke (Virginia) Times. Bob, for you newbies out there, was the longtime editor of Shutterbug magazine.

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Mike  (Thanks to David Emerick, Albano Garcia, Dave Kosiur, Edd Fuller, Ailsa McWhinnie, and Glenn Brown)

...And the Damn Thing Is, I Want One

Crafts are making a comeback.

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Mike  (Thanks to Mike Sisk)

Carl at Camerawork

Carl Weese, Tharptown, Coal Township, PA

Camerawork, a gallery dedicated to photography in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has announced "Coal Country," an exhibition of photographs by Carl Weese.

September 6 to October 2, 2007
Opening Reception September 7, 2007 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Carl Weese has been photographing the anthracite coal country of Northeast Pennsylvania since 2001. His efforts began in Centralia but soon moved beyond that community to surrounding towns. The pictures in this exhibit were made on 8x10-inch or 7x17-inch film using traditional fully-adjustable view cameras (a Deardorff built in the 1950s and a Korona dating back to the 1920s). The resulting negatives are traditionally processed, then scanned and printed on an Epson printer using highly stable pigment inks on cotton paper.

More information about Camerawork gallery and the "Coal Country" exhibit.

Carl Weese, Trautwine Street (the Mayor's house)

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Mike

Olympus E-3

Pictures and news of the Olympus E-3, the very long-awaited replacement for the pro E-1, have just begun to filter on to the World Wide Web. (That demo lens is a 12–60mm.) I'm afraid I don't know the official embargo date for the announce- ment, but we're probably getting close now.

Here are some of the features you can expect:

• 10 MP with greatly improved high-ISO performance
• In-body IS that Olympus claims will surpass any yet seen (it claims up to 5 stops)
• Pop-up flash with wide-angle coverage
• Articulated LCD with live view
• Wireless flash control
• Sensor dust-reduction (as on E-1)
• Improved AF that Olympus says will be appreciably faster than the D200 or 30D
• 100%, 1.15X viewfinder with –3 to +1 diopter
• Splash- and dust-resistant body construction (as good as E-1)

Also, there are four new Supersonic Wave lenses planned and a compact 2X converter. The lenses include a 14–35mm ƒ/2 that will be available next Spring and a 12–60mm ƒ/2.8–4 due in October.

(Despite the "pro" label, Olympus expects the E-3 to compete with the Canon 40D and Nikon D300, so look for roughly comparable pricing.)

Estimate on the hands-on press event is October, with shipping to begin probably in November.

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Mike (Thanks to Carl)

Once in a Red Moon

A couple of weeks ago we posted some helpful hints about photographing the lunar eclipse, which took place last night under clear skies here in the Midwest (and perhaps also in your area). Jan Klier took up the challenge and wrote about his experiences on his website. With pictures, of course.

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Mike

Test Your Color Sense

"This is a collection of 9 interactive color games. Or rather, exercises disguised as games. These exercises aim at providing some fun while at the same time helping you to learn how to classify colors."

I got all of these right the first time through, but then, I'm good at this sort of thing. I really don't know whether people are more likely to find this trivial or difficult, but it's a good test and kinda fun!

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Mike  (Thanks to David Emerick)

Blog Notes: New Site Passes 1 Million Mark

This is the 150th post on T.O.P. 2.0, and as I write it, at about 2 p.m. on Tuesday, we are passing the 1 million mark for page views on the new site since the first post on June 2nd. Yesterday we set a record for page views in a single day at the new site, at 22,579, probably because recent posts have referred people to archived pages and readers are looking at more than one page on the site when they visit. In addition, 2,213 people looked at one or more pages via feeds, and there were 2,466 unique visitors to the old site on Blogger (it continues to draw traffic despite being inactive because search engines refer web surfers to its archived content).

Many, many thanks to both regular and occasional visitors for helping to make The Online Photographer such a goin' concern! I enjoy it and have a lot of fun with it. At the moment I'm on three separate deadlines (a job application, a grant application, and a magazine article due), so things might remain a bit quiet for another 24 hours or so. But, to paraphrase the Terminator and Beck Hansen, I'll be beck.

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Mike

Added to the Archives

A few more olde-timey tidbits added to the archives this weekend:

Two of the eventual "Ten Great Photographs" from the old site...go to:

-         -Cameras Page > T.O.P. Ten Lists > Ten Great Photographs

"Ten View Camera Makers"...links...go to:

-         -Cameras Page > T.O.P. Ten Lists > Ten View Camera Makers

"Ten Best Black and White Movies" also resurrected from the old site...go to:

-         -Cameras Page > T.O.P. Ten Lists > Ten Best Black and White Movies

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Mike

The Sunday Sermon: A Short Short Story

This week's off-topic divertimento is a very short story of single parenthood called "Never Get Married."

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Mike

Just Posted—Book Reviews

I've just posted two new book reviews, the first fruits of my call for writers (see the "Write for Us" link in the right-hand column). They are:

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Robert Doisneau by Jean-Claude Gautrand, reviewed by Bruce Robbins. Bruce is a reporter for two Scottish newspapers—The Courier and the Evening Telegraph, both Dundee-based. He's also been a photography nut for 30 years and has a blog which focuses on taking pictures with Pentax digital and film cameras. He lives in Carnoustie but is working on an escape route to the South of France.

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Mastering Black and White Digital Photography by Michael Freeman, reviewed by Andrew Gibson. Andrew is a hobbyist photographer. You can learn more about him and his writing by visiting his blog, where he writes about travel photography among other things.

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I'll have another couple of additional new reviews posted soon. Meanwhile, my thanks to Bruce and Andrew for these!

You can always access new reviews by clicking on the "Book Reviews" link at right.

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Mike

Featured Comment by Andy Ilachinski: "Here is a scoop, that as far as I know has never been revealed before: in Doisneau's famous 1950 photograph 'Kiss by the Hotel de Ville' that graces the cover (but with the left hand side cut off), the man wearing the beret and standing in front of the light post, to the left of the couple kissing, is my dad! His name is Slava Ilachinski, and he passed away only a few years ago. Slava was a remarkable artist, and had a posthumous exhibit of his works in his boyhood town of Taganrog, Russia, last year. Here is what he looked like a few years before he died (with a sampling of his work)."

The Magic Bullet, Revisited

Just added to the archives: The Magic Bullet, a column from 2005 that remains apropos today, especially in light of the dazzling recent new camera announcements from Canon and Nikon.

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Mike

Size Matters

By Ctein

A friend offered me such a good deal on his Epson 9800 printer that I couldn't pass it up. Learning to print 44 in. wide has been an educational experience in ways I didn't entirely anticipate.

I did anticipate clearing space. The sucker's big. It's 4 ft. high, over 5 ft. long, and over 2 ft. deep. Fortunately, we have a garage that has accumulated many unneeded possessions over two decades (Daly City houses lack amenities like attics). Paula and I tackled the garage and with relatively little trauma had cleared a 6 ft. by 6 ft. open space for this printer.

But the harsh reality is that I'll be needing a lot more square footage. How about large flat surfaces on which I can lay or hang prints, with good lighting? Think about it...just where would you put a 3 x 4 ft. print (which is by no means the largest print I might make) for inspection? Worse yet, where would you put two of them if you wanted to compare successive generations of work?

I'm accustomed to handling fiber-base photographic prints up to 20 x 24 in. I almost never damage a print. I instinctively know how much stress and strain the paper will take. Inkjet roll paper prints have a curl to them that doesn't want to let you lay them out flat; there's no safety margin for stress and it's really easy to put a kink in a large print. In fact it requires constant concentration to avoid it.

I'm learning; I ain't there. I can now pretty comfortably handle 30 x 40 in. prints, but I made a 40 x 74 in. print for Laurie Edison and I managed to screw up the first one. No creases, but I didn't take into account the sheer weight of the paper and I scuffed the surface lifting the print out of the printer basket.

I'm still working out the best way to roll and unroll prints and store and ship them. Drafting tissue looks like a good interleaf; if I cut it longer than the print, I can tape the rolled up prints closed by taping the tissue to itself.

In my big prints even grain (pixel)-level flaws become glaringly obvious.  I'm having to go over images pixel by pixel at 100% scale and get rid of every single bloody defect I can see on the screen. It takes me at least one test print to catch them all; I always miss something.  Even starting with a clean file it's a day's work to prep an image, and almost all that time is spent spotting. Bored now!

I'm going to have to rescan any negatives I want to put in a large portfolio because my previous scans just aren't good enough for really large prints. It seems that every four or five years I have to do new scans. Each time I do it I try to engage in such "scan overkill" that I will never have to do it again. A handful of years later my needs have expanded beyond my wildest imaginings. This time I'm scanning at maximum resolution, which hits me with 800 MB files from my 6x7 cm negs. I don't need 800 MB files right now, but I sure need 400. Which means....

I'm going to have to get a new computer. My 32-bit machine is simply not adequate for this; nowhere near enough RAM. Photoshop works, but it's horridly slow. I'm hitting memory limits on making really large prints that I haven't figured out work-arounds for.  I've got to go 64-bit soon. So a new MacIntel is in the offing. I need a new laptop, which will limit me to 4 GB of RAM, but it'll be a zillion times faster than what I've got now.

It's a real learning experience. Oh, joy.

More About the New Nikons

Damned if it's not going to rain again today, if the gray sky is any indication. I don't mean to complain, because I know a lot of people have gotten far worse in recent days, weeks, and months—in other parts of this country as well as in England—but, man, have we ever gotten hammered lately. It's been raining for six days. We haven't had a chance to get the grass cut in between downpours. Every day I think, well, it can't rain again today. I should stop thinking that.

A few more thoughts about the new Nikons:

Oren pointed out that Rob Galbraith says of the D3, "Nikon promises a dynamic range bump of 300%." Carl responded that that seems to be a claim about JPEGs, implemented in software, rather than any  property of the sensor itself that will show up in RAW files. This has got to be the next big push in sensor development, so it's encouraging—well, a little—even if it is mostly marketingspeak for now. Rob also says "the D3 easily has the best viewfinder to grace a Nikon digital SLR."

Speaking of which, Kent points out an interesting spec on the D300's sheet: its viewfinder is more or less identical to the excellent ones in the D200 and D80, except that it offers 100% coverage instead of 95%. This is a first in a mid-tier DSLR and shouldn't go untrumpeted.  

Also, fast though the D3 will doubtless be, a couple of specs at least leave the D300 looking mighty good in comparison: D3 turn-on time, 12o milliseconds; D300, 130 ms. D3 shutter lag, 37 ms; D300, 45 ms. Mirror blackout on the D3 is 74 ms., D300, 100 ms. There are many other measures of speed and responsiveness, but for the D300 to be this close to the D3 in these three measurements bodes well.

Elsewhere on the web, Diglloyd has posted some thoughts about the D3 on his blog, and Matjaz from e-Photographia has posted a report, with pictures, from the giant press rollout in Tokyo. (Why don't I get invited to these things? Oh, well.)

And about that rain? I can't find any outright claims in the Nikon literature, but the press release does say, "the D3’s comprehensive array of rubber gaskets and seals protect vulnerable entry points from dust and moisture." Good thing, if you live where I do.

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Mike

'Content-Aware Image Resizing'

I did link "content-aware image resizing" the other day (in the post "Around the Web Today," paragraph 7, that begins "Antonio D. is right..."), but it was too subtle, and escaped the notice of some readers, because I awoke this morning to find no fewer than nine emails tipping me off about it, adding to the three or four per day I've gotten over the past few days. Although naturally I thank all those people for their kindness in sending me tips, I don't want to continue wasting their time. So I guess I should say that yes, I've seen it.

Ctein chimed in about it in the comments:

I love it!

It comes from nearly forty years of seeing my pictorial photos flopped, cropped and overwritten with effin' type fergodsakes, with no respect whatsoever given to the content or aesthetics. And this by the editors of photography magazines who are ostensibly giving service to photographs as entities of inherent worth. My photos, though? Nothing but 'design' elements, to be disrespectfully massacred as suits the whim of layout.

At least this tool will let them do it with some semblance of visual and compositional quality.

I'm sure he excepts me from the list of editors who did that to his photos. My policy when I was editing Photo Techniques was to try to run pictorial photos straight, although it's true that we overwrote blurbs on cover photographs, including Ctein's. (That bet was off when it came to pure technical illustrations.) I'm not sure I'd want some researcher poring over my old magazines to see if I truly did what I'm claiming I did, but I tried.

Oh, okay. We actually showed Ctein's cover picture sideways...

But anyway, I don't love this "content-aware image resizing" crap. I'll spare you the belaboring, since we just recently flogged a similar subject to within the proverbial inch of its life, but to me this is a form of auto-fakery that will further erode whatever integrity photographs still possess. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it's wrong for me given my philosophy of what photography's all about, and I won't say it's bad, just that it's bad in terms of the principles I try to abide by when I picture the world as a photographer. Upshot: it's humbug, in my opinion. Bah.

Okay, now, thanks for all the emails about this technology, but that's all I have to say about it for now.

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Mike

P.S Longtime readers will recall that I used to refer to myself as a C.I.T., or "curmudgeon in training." I'd say I've graduated to being a bona fide curmudgeon now, wouldn't you?

Nikon D3 and D300

Hot on the heels of Canon's 40D and IDsMk3, Nikon has introduced the first two models of its new range—the D300 and D3.

The big news is that the D3 (most probably the "high speed" camera meant to compete with Canon's 1D series rather than with the 1Ds) is Nikon's first full-frame camera, boasting a true full-frame 12.1-megapixel CMOS sensor designed by Nikon and made by Nikon's-not-saying. The large sensor size and "reasonable" pixel count make for a generous 8.45 micrometer pixel pitch. The story of the camera will doubtless be in the FX chip and its 14-bit EXPEED image processor, but there are a couple of other items of note. Nikon has developed a carbon-fiber composite shutter said to be good for 300,000 actuations. The new 3" LCD has almost a megapixel of resolution and is visible far off axis. And the D3 is said to be blazingly fast, improving on the already super-fast D2xs. In terms of startup time (120 milliseconds), shutter lag (37 milliseconds), and mirror blackout (74 milliseconds), the D3 is claimed to be the fastest DSLR ever made. The camera has a Live View mode, takes two CF cards, and allows for the use of any DX lens, which automatically crops the sensor to 5.1 megapixels.

I'm also pleased to see that it sports a 100% viewfinder with 18mm eye relief and a diopter correction range down to –3.

Imaging Resource has posted the full press release, and Rob Galbraith has a great discursive introduction to the new camera and what's what.
 

PhotographyBay has posted an interesting "History of the Nikon D3," which tracks all the rumors of the new camera all the way back to 2003. Kind of fun to compare various pundits' predictions against the actuality, now that it's known.

The D3 will sell for $5,000 and will ship in November.

The D3's Little Bro
The D300, an improved D200, will feature a 12.3-MP CMOS reduced-size sensor. It also has the 14-bit EXPEED processor, 51-point AF system, and 922,000-pixel 3" LCD. It's expected to sell for around $1,800. Here are a couple of pictures:

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Mike

Hat to the Max

Speaking of Max Roach, as we were the other day, after his passing, you've got to check this out—it's a shorter version of the legendary high-hat solo he performed on "The Tonight Show."

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Mike  (Thanks to Bob Burnett, Bron Janulis, and Fred Kaplan)

H.C.-B.

Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1947. Photo by Arnold Newman.

Today is Cartier-Bresson's birthday. He would have been 99.

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Mike

Focal Length 'Equivalents'

There is a lot of misunderstanding out in the world of photography about focal length, aperture, field-of-view (FOV), and depth of field (DOF). If there's one thing I hate arguing about, writing about, and educating people about, it's these topics—especially DOF. Misunderstanding of DOF is ineradicable. Arguments always follow assertions about it. It was that way in 1910, and 1940, and 1980, and it's that way now, and it will be that way in 2030 and 2050—regardless of what I or anybody else might say about it, now or ever. I edited a technical magazine about photography for six years; take my word for this.

When "translating" a focal length, all we're doing is bringing back a FOV crop to a context that is more or less readily understandable to people because it's familiar and/or standardized. With digital's multiplicty of format sizes, it's become conventional to "translate" FOV crops into 35mm equivalents—and it amazes me that anyone still questions this, since it's a widespread practice with digicams, many of which use the 35mm equivalent focal lengths in their menu systems or even engraved on their lens barrels.

When I write that a 150mm ƒ/2 lens on 4/3rds format is "equivalent" to a 300mm ƒ/2 lens in 35mm, no, the actual focal length of the lens hasn't changed—it's still 150mm. And no, the aperture doesn't change either. You don't have to "translate" that ƒ/2 to ƒ/4 or ƒ/5.6 to "be consistent." There's one thing that does change, and that's DOF, and yes, you would have to stop down the lens on the larger format to get the same DOF for identical scene FOVs—but aperture is not primarily a control of, or a measure of, DOF; it's primarily a measure of exposure. It's highly misleading to say that a 150mm ƒ/2 lens in 4/3rds should be "translated" to a 300mm ƒ/5.6 in 35mm just because the DOF of those two apertures might match more closely. DOF is a "side effect," one might say. As an exposure control, ƒ/2 is ƒ/2 is ƒ/2. For a given exposure, aperture is independent of format. 

When "translating" focal lengths, all we're talking about is FOV. It's true that it's not rigorous. We do it that way because we don't have a better way to do it. We don't all have any other concept in common. And it's not even possible to come up with a completely rigorous scientific nomenclature, because aspect ratio matters as well. If you want to "translate" lens focal lengths as a means of understanding FOV between, say, 8x10 film and 35mm film, you have to choose whether you're going to compare the long dimensions, or the short dimensions, or the diagonal measures—and none of the three results in an exactly accurate equivalence.

For myself, for instance, I always compare the longer dimensions of different formats to each other, but that's because that's how I see. How "wide" a lens is to me depends on how much it takes in from side to side, not on its height when held horizontally.

So let's say I want to know what a 110mm lens on 2 1/4 square format would be in 35mm terms. A square MF neg has an image area of  56 x 56mm, so I'd compare the long dimension of the 35mm film to the square and I'd "translate" the focal length/FOV to about 70mm in 35mm terms. There would be some height "added" to the square, is all. (When Lee Friedlander was asked how the Hasselblad he switched to was different than the Leica he previously used, he said something like there's more sky.) But someone else might be more sensitive to image height. That person might compare the short dimension of the 35mm frame to the square, and might be more comfortable thinking of that 110mm lens as being "equivalent" to about a 50mm lens on the 35mm, but with the ends cropped off!

Who's right? Neither, obviously. (Well, actually, both, but neither more than the other.) And to compare the film diagonals is not completely rigorous either, since that's just a rather crude means of splitting the difference.

The point is that it's just best not to get too bent out of shape with FOV "equivalents" and focal length "translations" and all the attendant issues that come up in their wake. It's just a rough, seat-of-the-pants means of giving you a general idea of the angle of view the lens is going to take in. It's no more important than that. And that really isn't worth arguing about.

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Mike