The Online Photographer

MTF Representation

I thought people might be interested to see this graphic of a set of MTF (modulation transfer function) measurements. I got it from Manfred Lai's Gallery. What's interesting about it is that by linking it to a representation of the 35mm frame, the illustrator makes it more clear than usual what the MTF chart is representing.

On this chart, they call image height "distance from center," which is more intuitive, and, helpfully, they distinguish the distance from the the optical axis ("center") to the edge of the film, 18mm, and the distance to the corner, which is 21.63mm (the hypotenuse of a right triangle with sides of 18mm and 12mm). On both graphics here, the difference between the two is a bluer, less purple color, allowing you to see clearly what part of the MTF chart records the transfer performance into the corner of the frame. You can see why the corners are often considerably less sharp than the edges.

The word "radial" for sagittal also helps a bit—this is the line that shows the contrast transfer for line pairs placed parallel to the radius in the test target.

Another point about MTF not often acknowledged is that to really describe a lens, you would need charts for several apertures and several distances. As far as it goes—giving information for 10 and 30 lp/mm at infinity and ƒ/2.8—this particular chart describes a very good lens indeed, although one important piece of information is missing—just what lens it is!

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Mike

Featured Comment by Jan: "If you're into Canon lenses and MTF charts, the book EF Lenswork III is a great resource. It not only describes the design and intended segment of each lens Canon makes, but also has MTF charts for all of them, including wide-angle and zoom variants for zoom lenses."

Mike replies: I second Jan's recommendation. The section on optics in EF Lenswork is one of the best short treatments of the topic I know of, and I've seen a lot.

Which Came First, 'On' or 'Off'?

Many people have emailed to alert me to Errol Morris's latest article in the Times. In this one he's concerned himself with how our—well, how Susan Sontag's— interpretations of pictures might be built around incorrect assumptions. Since the larger argument hinges on which picture was taken first and which second, Morris spends a great deal of time and energy analyzing that question, and ends by asking readers to help.

Perhaps appropriately, many of the comments (there are now well over 700 of them, making the entirety difficult to read through) are mistaken. Many people simply don't know what they're looking at—while thinking that they do.

First, I think all the many comments analyzing the alleged "shadows" are mistaken. Below is an enlargement (to pixel visibility) of the large TIFF of the print made available by the Library of Congress. As you can see, there are no clear sunlight shadows cast by the cannon balls at all. As a darkroom expert with 25 years of experience, I'm reasonably certain that what people are interpreting as "shadows" are in fact the result of one of the two pictures having received less exposure than the other. Albumen glass-plate photography is a double-negative process, so when the plate (negative) is exposed a little more, the print then has to be exposed a little more also, since the negative that received more exposure has more density. This naturally affects the tonal relationship of the so-called "shadow" areas of the picture (the dark tones), which expand or contract somewhat along with less or more negative exposure, respectively. But this effect is not evidence of actual specular shadows created by the sun. Just looking at the detail of the cannon balls in the "ON" photo confirms that there are no definitive shadows to analyze (analyzing the shadows, n.b., is different from analyzing the lighting).

Secondly, several comments (for example, #296) try to analyze the prevailing lighting by looking at the image of the sky. Although a perfectly natural impulse, here again is an example of the perils of non-expert interpretation.

Albumen plates were highly blue sensitive, which meant that many times when the plate was exposed for the ground features, the sky was exposed past the threshold of reciprocity and became unnaturally mottled. For this reason, 19th-century landscape photographers often painted out the sky on the plate itself (think White-Out!) and the sky then prints as a featureless white (or rather, it prints as "paper base," which was often a cream or sepia color). See American frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1867-1874, by Joel Snyder of the University of Chicago (Aperture, 1981) for more depth on this topic.

I’ve enlarged the Library of Congress TIFF of the "ON" Fenton print in Photoshop, and I can’t see if Fenton actually did this or not in these particular pictures, but that might just mean that he did it skillfully—the featureless white sky, so typical of 19th century landscapes, is a strong clue that it was done.

Ironically, an excellent example of this is Alexander Gardner’s picture of the dead Confederate sniper at Devil’s Den, another picture that is frequently cited as having been set up by the photographer (there is considerable evidence that the body was moved and that the weapon is not a sharpshooter's rifle). If you look at the TIFF of that picture from the Library of Congress, you can clearly see the brush marks where he painted out the sky on the negative. So any attempt to analyze the weather conditions on the day the Fenton pictures were taken by looking at the "skies" in the picture are most likely to be fruitless, if not actively misleading.

I do find one major anomaly in the article itself: after he quotes a lengthy passage from one of Fenton's letters, the author summarizes "the facts as expressed" in the letter, five in number, but he leaves out the fact that is most conspicuous—which is that Fenton is witnessing cannon balls bounding up the road and coming to rest near him, in one case literally at his feet (which he then picks up to bring back to his wife as a souvenir). Why Errol Morris would ignore this evidence of Fenton's own testimony is mystifying, unless it's just the typical critic's attitude that photographers are trained monkeys too stupid to know what's in their own pictures.   

As for Errol Morris's main question—which of the two photographs was made first—I find myself 65% convinced by the excellent analysis by Wendy Ju of Stanford, although I think it's likely that the truth cannot be known to any reasonable degree of certainty. Incidentally, perhaps the world's leading expert on comparative photographic views has posted a comment—it's #703. And he agrees with Wendy Ju.

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Mike

ADDENDUM: I think the larger point here is that we need to be very conservative about extrapolating from  conclusions based on assumptions. Incidentally, I don't think (as some of the commenters in the Times thread claimed) that investigations like this one are trivial. We can't investigate thoroughly every single statement of claim ever made by a scholar or critic in the course of them making an argument, but that makes it more important, not less, that we investigate one or two every once in a while; it has the effect of keeping writers honest and making them think twice before they jump to a conclusion or state a claim—and of keeping our own skepticism sharp.

Very few people come to the same conclusion I do, which is that OFF came first and ON was the later exposure because the valley was under bombardment at the very time Fenton was there, and Fenton and his assistant had the camera set up just beyond the range of the cannon. Maybe that wasn't so; but the comparison of the photographs makes it seem unlikely that the cannonballs were placed by Fenton trying to make his picture more dramatic, because in the ON picture there are more cannonballs in road and in the ditch, and if the two of them were out there rearranging things for pictorial effect, a) why wouldn't they take balls from the ditch and put them in the road, and b) why would they add more balls to the ditch instead of placing them somewhere more visible?

In any case, I think it's really curious that both Errol Morris and so many commenters ignored what Fenton himself says in his letter to his wife: "...I brought the van down & fixed the camera & while leveling it another ball came in a more slanting direction touching the rear of the battery as the others but instead of coming up the road bounded on to the hill on our left about 50 yards from us & came down right to us stopping at our feet. I picked it up put it into the van & hope to make you a present of it." Notice that he says "instead of coming up the road"—in other words, other cannonballs were coming up the road (and it's perfectly logical that the road would be what the gunners were aiming at) and this anomalous ball he's talking about is remarkable to him because it rolled over the hill on the left and made it all the way down to where he is standing. This makes it seem evident to me that the road was being bombarded during the time that he's there with his camera set up. It also explains why  he bothered to stay at the site for an hour or an hour and a half after taking the first exposure.

Of course, if that's so obvious, then why isn't everyone else saying the same thing? So I could well be wrong. (I always have tended to grant more credit to photographers themselves than many viewers—and critics—are willing to do.) All we really know is that the greater weight of the photographic evidence itself supports OFF before ON insofar as we can tell. —MJ

'A Degree Can't Hold Your Hand'

By Erin Martinelli

I am currently a 24-year-old student in my junior year of study at Oregon State University. I am working on my BFA in photography and was shocked to read the statistics in the T.O.P. post "Creative Livings," especially because they are so drastically different from graduate stats from OSU. Known mostly for its sciences, OSU actually has an excellent art school. Each and every professor is also an established pro in their chosen field. Though my class will sadly be the last to get a BFA in photography at OSU (the program has been terminated), I feel fortunate that both photography profs are not only extremely successful professionals, but have also both written books about photography and truly "know their stuff." When I receive criticism from them, I absorb every word of it. My skills as a photographer have drastically improved since starting the program. Of the 16 seniors to graduate last year, all 16 had extremely prestigious jobs lined up. One, for instance, is now employed as a photographer for CBS and another is working with one of the top equine photographers in the nation.

Photo by Erin  Martinelli, Oregon State University BFA Program

I guess that what I'm trying to say is that perhaps the school one goes to does play a part in their future success, and a degree may not be for everyone...however, there are many who don't utilize their degree and that is why they have failed in the field. My best friend, for example, graduated with a BA in Art from the University of Oregon only to work at Bi-Mart and now as a secretary at a medical office. To be honest, though, there are tons of opportunities out there for her...she just doesn't have the drive to go out there and pursue them.

Therefore, I think that a degree does come in handy if one wants to learn from professionals and has a mind that is open enough to realize that they know very little in the big scheme of things. School is also a great place to make connections and meet others in the field. Still, they student must also have the drive to do what it takes to succeed in the field. Almost anyone can get into art school and graduate, but I think that people assume that a degree is a free ticket to success. In reality, it is merely a chance to expand one's knowledge. A degree (at least at OSU) gives students the tools and experience to be a great photographer. But isn't this all that any school is expected to do? My father graduated from a great law school and worked as the Assistant D.A. in San Francisco because of some connections that he had. Still, he quit practicing after a few years. It wasn't because the school had failed, it was because he is lazy. I'm not in any way implying that those artists who don't make it professionally are lazy, but...a degree isn't going to hold the hand of its recipient and babysit them. I fully plan on getting my MFA once I am done with my BFA...not for the degree but for the experience. I want to better my skills so that I can use my drive and motivation to get my company off of the ground. I am not under the illusion that it will be an easy and smooth road. I have been through a lot in life and I know that few things are easy. But certainly, a little motivation goes a long way. For example, this past summer I checked Craig's List every day for free-lance jobs. I ended up with a lofty paycheck for several weddings. I don't think that I am a "great" photographer, but I put in the leg work. Graduates can't expect a degree to do that for them. In the end, school is for learning...it's up to the individual to do the rest.

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Erin Martinelli

Featured Comment by Doroga: "You now, in our country (Belarus) we do not even have a place where you can study Photography and receive at least a B.A. At least you have a choice."

U.C. Santa Cruz Closes Its Photo Program

Ansel Adams (second from right) and other great photographers taught at UCEx in years past

Instructors at the University of California Arts, Design and Humanities Extension received the bad news via a .PDF file from Vice Provost of Academic Affairs Alison Galloway. It began:

Dear Arts, Design & Humanities Instructors:

I recently assumed the leadership role for UCSC Extension. As a self-sustaining unit affiliated with UC Santa Cruz, University Extension provides continuing education services for our citizens.

In the months preceding my arrival, a careful assessment of financial viability was conducted of the programs offered through Extension. Over the past few years, we have accumulated a debt that now exceeds $30 million dollars. As a result, the organization must take a number of immediate corrective actions.

Our analysis revealed that many Arts, Design and Humanities courses were unable to cover the costs associated withtheir delivery. After much consultation and long deliberation, we made the difficult decision to close the Arts, Design & Humanities program at the end of the Fall quarter....

Tim Baskerville on The Nocturnes Night Photography Blog quotes Mark Citret: "It's the end of a great program that has seen the likes of Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Al Weber, Henry Gilpin, Morley Baer, among others, teaching over the last 40 years. That leaves the Northern California photography community with no University level workshop programs."

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Mike  (Thanks to Susan Nichols)

Joe McNally's Fireman

(Click on image to enlarge)

Photographer: Joe McNally
Camera: Nikon D3
Shutter speed: 1/10th sec.
Aperture: ƒ/16
Focal length: 56mm
Exposure mode: manual
Exposure metering: multi-pattern
Sensitivity: ISO 200
White balance: cloudy
Image quality: JPEG fine
More samples

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Mike (Thanks to Albano)

Kenji Nagai, 50, Dead Today in Burma

Above, Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagai lies dying in Sule Pagoda Road in Rangoon, Burma. Still-sketchy reports out of the violence-torn country indicate that Nagai, a videographer working for the APF news agency, was killed today by Myanmar government troops as they fired on innocent unarmed civilians. Poignantly, and heroically, he continued to try to record the violence even as he lay dying, as shown in a series of pictures on the Evening Standard (U.K.) website. The vicious crackdown by the military dictatorship followed seven days of peaceful pro-democracy protests initiated by Buddhist monks. Nagai was the first journalist and the first foreign national to die. Tokyo will protest to the Myanmar government.

Our deep condolences to the family, friends, colleagues and countrymen of Kenji Nagai.

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Mike

Cliff Mautner Gets His Mitts on a D3

Ace Philadelphia wedding photographer Cliff Mautner has posted his first "from the front line" Nikon D3 pictures. A quote from his introduction: "My first impressions, as expected, were mind blowing. To be brief, I'm stunned at how responsive this camera is and I didn't believe there was much room for improvement to the way the D2xs handled. I was clearly wrong. The focus, feel of the shutter, focus point selection, enormous LCD, auto white balance, dynamic range, color rendition, and a few other things have all been written about and touted, but nothing prepared me for the incredible quality of the files out of camera. In addition, the high ISO performance, which was also talked about, is nothing short of revolutionary."

He's promising a full review soon.

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Mike (Thanks to Cliff for permission to use his picture)

The Feeler

A life in art—the Voice chats with Peter Schjeldahl, art critic and pleasure addict

by Christian Viveros-Fauné, The Village Voice

"What Turns Shy Boy Into Sex Killer?" A fantastic headline concocted by 20-year-old cub reporter Peter Schjeldahl for the Jersey City Journal circa 1963, the unlikely phrase tumbled through my skull's traps and chutes as I sat down to a season-opening lunch with The New Yorker's ace art critic. "Killer turns into shy boy?" Nope. "Art critic turns into sex killer?" Plausible, but not here. "Shy boy turns into killer art critic?" Now we're getting somewhere!

-                                  Peter Schjeldahl by Mary Barone

While the cliché of a killer from the wheat-growing hinterlands is standard Hollywood fare (cue picture of Robert Blake), few stories are as improbable as Schjeldahl's real-world transformation from small-town literary hick into major-league aesthete. A North Dakota-born, Minnesota-raised book nerd besotted with  poetry—as youths eternally were before the Beatles—Schjeldahl dropped out of college, weighed his meager options, then literally drew lots to decide which of four major U.S. cities would host his budding, taciturn genius. New York won out—thank- fully for generations of readers who've been weaned on his generous insights, capacious taste, and sparklingly clean prose.

Landing in Hoboken, Schjeldahl first applied himself to beat journalism while writing poetry. Admittedly "too self-conscious to be a good reporter," he soon learned from folks he fell in with—Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara—that art writing was something else poets could do to earn money. This led him, legend goes, to place a pay-phone call to Thomas Hess, then crackerjack editor of ARTnews magazine. Schjeldahl breathlessly pumped his nonexistent qualifications. "Never mind all that," Schjeldahl says Hess shot back. "Just write me a letter telling me what makes you think you're qualified to walk into a gallery where some poor bastard has his paintings and tell him they are no good."

This, in a nutshell, is how Peter Schjeldahl, America's most important living art critic, came to write about art....

READ ON

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David Emerick

Featured Comment by Yuanchung Lee: "Boy, it's been a long time since I've read a critic (the author) write something so sycophantic and uncritical about his/her subject. Just over the top, no? As for Schjeldahl, he is not to my taste. His writing is not at all clear; though it is not the jargon-laced prose used by many Art critics, it is obfuscatory nonetheless. I admit to often finding it difficult simply to understand what the heck he is trying to say. In fact, before reading this article, I had assumed that Schjeldahl was not a native English speaker, given the oddness of his writing. But the poetry background kind of explains it. I prefer art criticism that explains, clearly and concisely, why the work in question is good / interesting / complex / important (or not). One has to mine Schjeldahl's writing to find the one or two sentences—admittedly illuminating and delightful, often—that actually performs this basic function."

Qualities and Properties

Robert Roaldi, whose comments inspired Ctein to write "The Bar Also Rises," left the following comment yesterday morning in that thread:

What partly prompted me to write about equipment standards in the previous comments was something that I have seen here, in Luminous Landscape ,and other places. Someone writes comments about pixel level noise in a camera model or other, then adds that that noise would not be seen in any final print so it's not worth worrying about. Then forum contributors consume megabytes of disk space doing precisely that: worrying about it. In the end, do I know any more than I did before? I don't know.

I fully understand the need to pursue excellence. Pushing manufacturers to do better for less money is perfectly fine, so far as it goes. I guess I am just a little sick of trying to decide what is meaningful and what isn't. I can't buy one of each model and test for myself.

Although we supposedly have great consumer choice, in my experience it is mostly a shelf space illusion. I recently decided to replace my 6-year old inkjet. There are dozens of models avalable, with relatively small differences in features that distinguish them. Would I be able to tell the difference between Canon's 5-colour model for $99CDN vs one of their 6-colour models for $199CDN. Who knows. I know that no store near me would let me bring both home for a week for me to test. So I bought the 6-colour one because of a test site that is linked from TOP (or was anyway). There are hundreds of equipment tests on the web and my final choice was made almost by flipping a coin. Would I have been equally served by the 5-colour $99CDN model? Maybe, but I will never know.

It seems to me that there are two main issues here, separate but both interesting. Regarding the issue of noise, I've always tried—with limited success, I'm afraid—to get people to look a little ways past technical properties and see them as qualities. This goes for pretty much any technical property you can name—resolution, noise, whatever it is. The first question to ask in order to vector in on the point would be, assuming you could get a camera that was completely noise-free, what then? Would this improve your pictures? The answer, I suppose, is that it might. More likely, it would work with some pictures and not be important for others. but it doesn't help at all to answer any of the main questions, which are, what are you going to take pictures of? Why? Once you've shot the pictures, how do you tell which ones are better and which not so good? Unfortunately, the technical goal of complete freedom from noise doesn't help you at all with any of these questions. Once you found the Holy Grail of a noise-free camera, maybe you could think of some things to do with it that would be enabled by this quality. But the problem is that it doesn't really help, in most cases—an indifferent snapshot with zero noise is still an indifferent snapshot.

I used to try to make this argument with regard to lens resolution on the Leica User Group, again with very limited success. Endless discussions would flow ever onward, never ceasing, about this and that lens and which one had ever so slightly more resolution than the next, at which aperture, and under which conditions. But the bigger question—why is resolution good and what do you need resolution for?—was seldom addressed. Some people, being argumentative and skilled in forensics, could invent plausible scenarios in which resolution would be desirable, and a few people actually had legitimate requirements for it—for instance, an aerial photographer who needed his pictures to show objects on the ground, or a surveillance photographer who needed to be able to read car license plate numbers from great distances. I'm not claiming it's unimportant absolutely, therefore. But unfortunately we do tend to get sidetracked into great disputations about technical properties that might ultimately be irrelevant, or very close to it.

The corollary to the question is, does noise ruin photographs that would otherwise be good ones? A couple of weeks ago I dug out some old digisnaps that I made with my long-gone Sony F-707. Take another look at two of the pictures along with a couple of details of the noise:

 
Grimmy in the Kitchen

(Detail of noise in the area above the doorway—click image to see larger)

Dan the Fireworks Man

(Detail of noise in the area just to the left of the figure—click to see larger)

As I think you'll agree, this is flagrant, excessive, flamboyant noise. But does it really matter to the pictures? Painting should have taught us by now that the structure that makes up the image doesn't really matter to the image itself and how it communicates as art.

Lucian Freud

Egon Schiele

...Or rather, the structure of the image does matter, but there is no intrinsic value or ranking system as to what is better and what is worse. More detail, less detail? Grain, no grain? Accurate color, expressive color? Regarding the noise in the two photographs, any given person might be able to articulate why it is bad. And of course it can be damned most effectively by resorting to taste: you can say you don't like it. But the truth is that the noise doesn't ruin either picture. Maybe it enhances them. More logically it is just neutral; it is just there. But it doesn't affect either picture's ability to communicate. So, really, when we talk about noise we are just distracting ourselves, distancing ourselves from the real questions; "noise" as a topic may be about photography, but it is not about photographs.

If we really want to talk about pictures we'd almost need the language of poetry. We'd talk about time, ghosts, loss, relationships, strangeness and familiarity, aging, aspiration and longing, places to be, subjective response, meaning, experience, love, all sorts of things. It's a language we don't really know. But the fact remains, it is just as possible to take a wholly successful, excellent, outstanding picture with a sensor that has tons of noise, as it is to take such a picture with a sensor that has no noise; it is just as possible to take a great picture that has almost no resolution as it is to take one with very high resolution; it is just as possible to take a great picture with a lens that distorts badly as it is to take one with a lens that does not distort at all; and the list goes on to all the other technical properties that we concern ourselves with so happily. We should not lose sight of that.

A book about food
As for Robert's other topic—choosing a printer—I sometimes think that the best book I've seen about this and similar topics—like choosing a camera, for instance—is a book about food by Marion Nestle called What to Eat. That might well sound strange (and maybe it is!), but the confusion and capitulation that Robert describes are wholly intentional. You're not supposed to be able to make an easy choice, or a logical one, either. You're supposed to be left with the feeling that you haven't adequately investigated all of the shopping options and opportunities, even after you've purchased your printer and taken it home. What to Eat talks intelligently about marketing issues that each one of us supposes we are above, and yet that each one of us can also acknowledge to be effective to the point of malevolence in its influence on the public at large. The choices of what to eat (the omnivore's dilemma) are effectively infinite, and the need to shop for (or at least to acquire) more food is ongoing and ever-immediate, so how you're influenced to make your own choices—and what entity your choice benefits—is like a broad-brush picture of the fine-line issues involved in finding a printer, or scanner, or digicam.

This does relate to the noise discussion to an extent, because when we get lost in discussions about sensor noise and what's best and what's less good, we're really functioning as consumers, and possibly allowing our roles as consumers to overwhelm our roles as photographers, creators of art, reporters, documentarians—that is, however we use photography and whatever we use it for. Does anybody who cares about photographs really want to be closed off from all the pictures he or she will ever see that have low resolution, or sensor noise, or that in some other way violate the accepted precepts of good shopping? That would be sad, not to mention aesthetically bankrupt. Indeed, a large number of successful artists tend to share a certain attitude toward consumerism—namely, that they set it aside or apart, they set themselves outside of it, and they don't talk about it. It's a way of refusing to be limited by it, refusing to accept its dictates, refusing to accept its hegemony over their own creative activity. It's an attitude most of us would be wise to acknowledge more often.

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Mike

Quote o' the Day

"People ask me how to get into Magnum today, and I roll my eyes and say, 'You wouldn’t believe it.' It’s a complicated process. But in 1949, which is when I met Bob Capa, if he said your photography was kind of interesting, that was probably the key to getting in. Now it’s very Byzantine. It’s like getting into Skull and Bones. Back then it was simple."
-                                                                                                                     —Burt Glinn

If Guys Wrote Advice Columns

My friend Mary sent me this joke this morning. Maybe this would be what the world would be like if men wrote advice columns; plus, it seems to bear on some recent comments about technique vs. "vision."

A woman writes to "Dear Fred," an advice columnist.

Dear Fred:

I really need your help. I was driving to work, and I was only a block from home when the car stalled and would not re-start even thought I had  plenty of gas. I walked back home to discover my husband prancing around the house in my make-up and underwear. He tried to say that he was just out of underwear, but finally admitted he had been wearing my clothes for about a year. He lost his job 18 months ago and has been near-suicidal with depression. I don't want to push him over the edge, but I am really at a loss as what to do. I can't eat or sleep. Please help.

Signed,

A worried wife

Dear worried wife:

It sounds like a problem with the fuel injector. I would take the cap off, wipe down all of the connections and replace any worn caps, and try to restart it. Check the hoses for leaks, and change the spark plugs. Good luck.

Fred

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Mike (Thanks to Mary N.)

Around the Web this Morning

I really do like these guys, and here's another reason why. Jernej Burkeljca, who describes himself as "a sporadic member of the team (with long intervals of inactivity)," says "I especially love it when Zeljko Bozic decides to test stuff under extreme temperatures and radiation in nuclear powerplant labs," like this, with the followup here. Ya gotta like e-Photographia.

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This wonderful shot was taken just last night at a jazz club in ol' Saint Louie, of the 82-year-old (but undimmed and undiminished) Roy Haynes. I really do love photographs of jazz musicians: they're so expressive, and they come complete with a mental soundtrack. This shot was taken (with a Canon 5D and EF 135mm ƒ/2 lens, at 1/30th and  ƒ/2.8, ISO 1600) by my buddy Kent Phelan, a businessman who has a long history of involvement in photography as a committed amateur. In my not-so-humble opinion, it wouldn't be out of place in a monograph by any of the great jazz shooters. (Kent said Roy really cooked, and that the date was soul-cleansing. Who could doubt?)

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Eolake Stobblehouse casts an interesting perspective on the recent Anthony Lane Leica article in the "Style Issue" of The New Yorker in "Girl with a Leica."

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If you're one of those who still haven't gotten on board the RAW bullet train (along with me and pretty much everyone I know, that would be), then Michael Tapes' new video "RAW Without FUD"* "Should make the light bulb go off for JPEG shooters who are not currently interested in RAW," as Michael puts it. There's a Sample Chapter online. Check it out.

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Ansel Adams...car photographer? That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's not too far from the novel perspective on the Master's work offered by Blake Gopnik in a recent article on washingtonpost.com. Adams's landscapes "may show nature," Blake writes, "but the first thing I see in them is the Great American Automobile. When I look at 'Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,' I see the Pontiac station wagon Adams was driving along Highway 84, at 4:49 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1941, when he caught sight of an old-time Spanish settlement in his rear-view mirror, then screeched to a halt to capture it on film. In the pueblo pictures, I see the fancy Buick that Adams drove 2,400 miles in 1927, speeding him and its wealthy owner from their homes in San Francisco to the Southwest and back. Those magical pictures of Yosemite put before me all the vehicles it took to haul the 200 hikers of the Sierra Club—the young photographer was an assistant manager for its outings—to the trailhead."

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The Spanish Civil War is almost a forgotten war in much of the world, since it was so quickly overshadowed by the much bigger conflagration that followed it. But it was an important conflict for the left against fascism—George Orwell joined the fighting, was shot through the neck and nearly died, a close call that still gives me existential chills. Even more forgotten is Gerda Taro (right), because she had the bad luck to perish in the conflict at the very young age of 26. She was the first woman to photograph combat from the front lines and the first female photographer to die at war. The International Center for Photography is rectifying our neglect of forever-young Gerda with a major new retrospective. The Times article about the show, by Felicia R. Lee, is eloquent and informative.

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Finally, a big pat on the back and several attaboys to Gordon Buck, who took my post "Reify and Redact" back in July to heart. According to his most recent blog post, he's now completed—completely!—the portfolio he set out to make back in July. Stout.

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Mike  (with thanks to many friends)

*FUD = fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

The Bar Also Rises

By Ctein

Before I get started on this column, I have a request from a reader that I'm sure some folks here can help with. Please don't post responses here; e-mail them to me at ctein[at]pobox[dot]com. Thanks very much!

"I would like your advice on purchasing a slide & film scanner. I have thousands of both and value my time, so I'm willing to pay more for a faster and higher-quality one. I'd like to keep it under $2000, but will go higher ($3K) if there is a significant advantage. Any recommendations?"

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Robert Roaldi raised some interesting issues in his comments about the Canon G9 Review. If digital cameras have reached 35mm standards, at what point can we say, "Enough is enough?"

Food for thought. Just what do 35mm standards imply? The picture above is the very first color print I ever made (probably; my record keeping was not impeccable in 1970. It might have been the second or third.) It's an 8x10" print from 35mm Ektacolor, cropped to fit the paper. Below is an enlarged section from that print.

Within months, I pulled all my savings and bought my first Pentax 6x7. Why? Because I couldn't make a  color print from 35mm that came close to my grain and sharpness standards. Keep in mind that my preferred B&W film was Panatomic X. The quality of color negative films of the time was more like Tri-X. If that was the very best I could do, I was not going to be a happy camper.

There was always Kodachrome II, but making really good prints from slides required very advanced printing techniques involving contrast control and color correction masking. In truth, that didn't change until digital printing came along. (With all due respect, anyone who thinks they make good prints from unmasked chromes on Cibachrome or Type-R materials is not using the same definition of "good" as I do).

But, by the late 1980s slow color negative film had surpassed Kodachrome 25 in both fine grain and resolution. By 2000, film of any speed that was only a sharp as Kodachrome 25 would be considered a low-resolution film. One could routinely make 35mm photographs that were as fine-grained and sharp as what I could do with medium format 30 years earlier.

This did not stop photographers from wanting further improvements in films. Medium format quality in 35mm is quite wonderful, but why not hope for large format quality? We're nowhere near the ultimate limits of photographic quality, where any further improvements would simply not be perceiveable. We have surpassed "good enough;" we're far from "can't get any better."

Digital, having reached an affordable parity with film, is taking up this challenge. Some low-priced digital cameras produce less grain (noise) at higher ISO's than the comparable 35mm films, although they may not be better than low-ISO 35 mm films. The midrange and expensive digital cameras better even those. But, medium format is more of a tossup, and we haven't reached an economical large format quality level yet.

What is remarkable and noteworthy is that there's nothing fundamental that prevents us from doing so.

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Ctein

Featured Comment by Jean-Pierre Grüter: "As a professional photographer I compared the Phase One 39MP Back with 4x5 inch Film (Hasselblad Scanner) because I have to produce often huge prints like 1.1m x 1.5m. I did this test one year ago and ended up in buying a Hasselblad Scanner. If you scan at the highest optical resolution of the scanner you get a file with 80MP. I found that I got more information in those scans than in the Phase One files. The huge prints are sharper and hold much better together; it feels more realistic. The digital files when highly enlarged look like watercolor paintings but they keep more details in the shadows and in the highlights. If you shoot with 4x5 inch Provia 100 film you have less dynamic range but more resolution and very crispy images. As I do a lot of architecture photography I need wide angles. Here I was very disappointed about the possibilities of the Phase One Back and the available lenses."

Carl Zeiss 28mm ƒ/2

Carl Zeiss has quietly introduced a new lens into the lineup on its website, a 28mm ƒ/2 for ZF (Nikon F) and ZK (Pentax K) mounts. The lens has 10 elements in 8 groups, is 94mm long including caps, weighs  530g, and takes 58mm filters.

This lens will be of particular interest to people who shoot reduced-sensor DSLRs who want a normal prime lens of the highest quality. But it's an interesting introduction for film shooters as well. Historically, lenses of this focal length and speed have not sold well enough to offer manufacturers much encouragement, but they are useful enough to photographers that the low-level demand for them is steady and usually outstrips supply. Accordingly, apart from the AIS Nikkor which has been pretty consistently available, 28/2's in other mounts have been elusive. The various Pentax versions have been only intermittently available and seem legitimately rare on the used market, and the Zeiss version for the old Contax/Yashica SLRs, also prized, has always been expensive for a used lens. I've recently been hunting for a bargain Minolta AF version for my K-M 7D, with little success.

Among my large backlog of things to do is a review of the Zeiss 35mm ƒ/2 ZF lens, but suffice to say it's the best 35mm lens I've yet used, which is saying something, since I've used a lot of them. I'm impressed to see this 28mm stablemate appear.

The sample below is from the Zeiss website.

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Mike (Thanks to Oren)

ADDENDUM: To answer a reader's question, I contacted Zeiss to ask why these lenses are not available in Canon EF mount. The answer is that the EF lensmount is patent protected and Canon "has not been interested" in licensing the mount interface. The patents on both the Nikon F bayonet and Pentax K bayonet mounts have expired, so they're in the public domain.

Zeiss points out that these lenses can be used on Canon cameras with adaptors made by companies such as Novoflex and Fotodiox, although you'll lose automated functions like auto-aperture-stopdown.  —MJ

Candid Camera

The Cult of Leica

By Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

Fifty miles north of Frankfurt lies the small German town of Solms. Turn off the main thoroughfare and you find yourself driving down tranquil suburban streets, with detached houses set back from the road, and, on a warm morning in late August, not a soul in sight. Nobody does bourgeois solidity like the Germans: you can imagine coming here for coffee and cakes with your aunt, but that would be the limit of excitement. By the time you reach Oskar-Barnack-Strasse, the town has almost petered out; just before the railway line, however, there is a clutch of industrial buildings, with a red dot on the sign outside. As far as fanfare is concerned, that’s about it. But here is the place to go, if you want to find the most beautiful mechanical objects in the world....

READ ON

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David Emerick

Canon G9 Review

"It Might Be...It Could Be..."

By Ken Tanaka

Harry Caray, the late Chicago Cubs (baseball) broadcaster, became famous for his tension-building technique of announcing long-hit balls in flight: "It might be...it could be...it IS! A HOME RUN! Holy cow!" At the risk of being corny I think it's appropriate to apply Harry's expression to this topic: "The Canon Powershot G9 might be...it could be...it IS the best point-and-shoot digital camera ever!" It's certainly the best I've seen. 

Not being a professional camera reviewer I'll leave the detailed G9 review to the many Internet sites and pundits who make such examinations their stock in fame. But you might enjoy reading some off-the-cuff observations of an early G9 owner...

READ ON

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Ken

Featured Comment by Scott Jones: "Took my new G9 out for a spin today for the first time. I usually shoot a 5D. I would like to comment on two items that rarely get mentioned. First the weight and form of the camera hangs just great on the strap and Canon has supplied a 'sticky' surfaced strap that will not slide off your shoulder so what I found was that this thing is a joy to carry. It tucks right under the arm at your flank and is very well hidden there and feels very weightless. The strap while wearing dark clothes hardly is noticeable because it is so narrow and thin. The body has enough heft that it hangs very nicely and does not wobble around. On the down side is the user manual which appears to be written almost entirely in symbols. Very hieroglyphic and almost 300 pages. One must be able to decipher diagrams and symbol translation. Several of the controls/menus are not intuitive and vary somewhat depending on what shooting mode you are in, but I suspect I will learn to play this instrument. Just thought I would post two comments one rarely sees about what I think is going to be a terrific camera for me to have 'on me' all the time, but still give me RAW control and enough image quality to make nice 13x19" or smaller prints that I usually make with my 5D. I think the two are going to cover almost any situation for me."

Random Excellence: 'Buba Subacuática' (Albano Garcia)

The picture is titled Buba Subacuática (Buba Underwater) and it was taken by Albano Garcia. Click on the image to see a somewhat larger version. It seems to me like a cross between classic underwater swimmer pictures by Cartier-Bresson or Kertész and a Picasso...

André Kertész, Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, 1917

Pablo Picasso, The Dream

...But if I may be so bold, I like it better. You can see more of Albano's work at his website, called Flaneur.

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Mike

Nikon Sendai Plant Tour

Final assembly of a D3 at the Sendai plant takes one worker 80 minutes.

Matjaz Intihar of e-Photographia has published a virtual tour of Nikon's Sendai plant in Miyagi Prefecture. The pictures of the workers and assembly areas were provided by Nikon, but there are a lot of them. Veeery interesting....

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Mike  (Thanks to Albano)

'A Classic Lesson in Corroboration'

Clark Hoyt, in his "Public Editor" column in the New York Times, has written an insider account of the Joe O'Donnell fiasco at the Times. It's titled "Pictures Worth a Thousand Questions."

After a chain of communications, a former Times staffer, Gary Haynes, was the first to contact the paper with the news that its obituary might be erroneous. Haynes thought "...the newspaper might have taken the wrong picture from its files to illustrate O’Donnell’s obit.

"The truth" continues Hoyt, "was worse and much more painful. The Times—like the Associated Press, Time magazine, CBS News, The Tennessean in O’Donnell’s hometown of Nashville and other news organizations—had been taken in by a man who for years had inflated his life story.

"It was, said Bill McDonald, the editor of obituaries, 'our worst nightmare.'"

Hoyt notes ruefully that the story made him think of an old newsroom maxim: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out."

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Mike (Thanks to Chuck Albertson)

Sunday Sermon: The Reader's Regret

This week's off-topic post is a little essay on books and reading called The Reader's Regret. Excuse me—I'm off to read now.

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Mike

Featured Comment by Damon Schreiber: "So true, and yet you've compounded the problem. I read this site far more than I should, while great books lie patiently waiting for me to get off the Internet (and my camera sits waiting to go for a walk). And because of the very subject of today's sermon, by the halfway mark, I was starting to hope that it would end soon (just like a real sermon!) as there was food to be prepared and books to be read. Yet here I am wasting even more of the precious seconds of my life by writing a comment."