The Online Photographer

Classic Shots: The Greatest Images from the United States Golf Association

Reviewed by Mike Butler

Marty Parkes and Thomas L. Friedman, Classic Shots: The Greatest Images from the United States Golf Association. National Geographic, $35 ($23.10 from Amazon), 2007.

Link to Amazon U.S.

Link to Amazon U.K.

I stopped playing golf about eight years ago, about the time I started taking photography seriously again. I simply made a decision that if I had four hours of free time, I’d rather spend it driving down gravel roads than driving a Titleist.

But the game still holds power over me, luring me to the TV every Father’s Day for the final round of the U.S. Open. Will Phil Mickelson spray tee shots into the woods on this Sunday afternoon or conquer his demons and win? Even when Tiger Woods has a three-shot lead stepping up to the first tee, and I know he’s going to win like I know tomorrow is going to be Monday, I can sit back and marvel at his artistry, as even he occasionally does when he strikes an impossibly fine shot, then breaks into a sheepish grin.

The similarities between golf and photography are eerie to me. Each shot is a new beginning. You visualize and make decisions about what to do. You might be with some buddies, but they can’t help you. Good or bad, this shot is ultimately going to be about you and the story you have to tell. It’s not about the ball or the camera.

Certainly, Classic Shots isn’t going to appeal to those who’d rather spend time in a dentist’s chair than play, or watch, golf. But neither do I think that you have to be a fanatic to appreciate the way this book’s 250 photographs capture the game’s tradition, splendor, and drama.

The 9th Hole at Rush Creek Golf Club in Maple Grove, Minnesota.

Since the USGA formed in 1894 to promote and govern the game in America, it has been collecting photographs. In his introduction, senior director of communications Marty Parkes claims it was easy to winnow more than 500,000 images down to 400—but very difficult to cull from there. National Geographic editors helped.

A project like this could have easily turned into a boring encyclopedia or a dusty historical tome. It succeeds, I think, because it is so wonderfully subjective and eccentric. Sure, you’ll relive Payne Stewart’s winning putt at the 1999 Open at Pinehurst, but you’ll also laugh at a colorful iguana caught in the act of scampering across a green during an amateur event in Puerto Rico.

By organizing into regions, the editors allow you to open the book at any place and become immersed in a beautiful color landscape shot of Whistling Straits in Kohler, Wisconsin, or an elegant portrait of Tommy Armour taken outside Oakmont Country Club (suburban Pittsburgh) after winning the 1927 Open. Women are well represented, too, from Depression-era phenom Virginia Van Wie to present-day phenom Michelle Wie. The pictures transcend those who took them, many of whom are unknown or aren’t credited until a page in the back of the book.

Photographers loved Payne Stewart for the flamboyant way he played and suited up. He was at the top of his game when he died in a plane crash in 1999.

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In an afterword by Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and Golf Digest contributing editor writes humorously and poignantly about how golf helped shape his character and forge a bond with his father while growing up in Minnesota. In 1970, as a 16-year-old, Friedman’s name was pulled out of a hat to caddie for one of the game’s greatest characters, Chi Chi Rodriguez, at Hazeltine in Chaska. (In those days, USGA officials didn’t allow professional caddies at the Open because it was thought they might give the pros an advantage over the amateurs.) Chi Chi finished 27th that week. Young Friedman pocketed $175 and so much more.

Twenty years later, some friends of the by-then best-selling author and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner bumped into Chi Chi at a Florida golf resort. They asked if he remembered who caddied for him at the 1970 Open. "Tommy," Chi Chi said, right away. Surprised, Friedman's friends then teased the old pro a little bit. "Do you know that Tommy’s more famous than you are today?" Chi Chi pondered that for a moment and said: "Not in Puerto Rico."

Nope, it’s not about the ball or the camera.

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Mike Butler is a hobbyist photographer living in Des Moines, Iowa.

Buy You A Present For My Birthday

Okay, now this is probably going to sound craven, greedy, and selfish, but that's only because...it is. Yesterday was my birthday, and I kinda need to ask you a favor—I need you to buy you a present for my birthday.

That's not a typo. I don't want you to buy me a present; I want you to buy you a present.

See, when people buy things from Amazon through our links, we get a small percentage. The more items we sell, the bigger our percentage gets. This month has been particularly slow, and I really need people to buy 87 more items before the end of the month. This will kick us up into the next higher percentage bracket and increase our take for everything that people have already bought. And—well, it helps keep the lights on.

So please, support TOP, and go to Amazon through this link—or through any of the links at the bottom of the right-hand column (respectively, for the U.S., U.K., Germany, Canada, and Japan)—and buy yourself a present. Any present. Camera, lens, memory card, book, CD—more expensive is better, but actually anything at all would help, no matter how small or inexpensive. (I'm not sure music downloads count.) Be sure not to send it to me. Just buying it for yourself is birthday present enough for me.

I hate to make you do this, but, as you can see, it's your duty as a loyal TOP reader to go buy yourself something you want. If your spouse complains, just tell her, or him, that you're not doing it for yourself—you're being completely noble and altruistic, just helping out a friend in need.

Hey, it makes sense to me!

___________________

Mike

P.S. I'll let you know if we make the magic number by the 29th.

UPDATE: Well, that was a very nice birthday present! People ordered 106 items on the 27th and another 72 items yesterday, so we cruised past the goal. I really hope everybody enjoys our birthday presents—and many thanks to all.

It's Bigger, But Is It Better?

Photoshop Bicubic vs. Genuine Fractals vs. BlowUp

By Ctein

Now that I have a giant printer (Epson 9800) I've been getting interested in what it takes to get really good, really large prints. Obviously huge scans (or original camera files) are best, but sometimes one has to upsize an existing file.

For years I'd been hearing about how superior Genuine Fractals was. When Alien Skin came out with BlowUp, my curiosity got piqued. Two competing and expensive (over $200) plug-ins? I was sure they would blow Photoshop Bicubic interpolation away. But which one was the truly superior program? The fine folks at Alien Skin and OnOne Software provided me with evaluation copies to satisfy my itch.

Well, I got surprised. Nothing is all-around superior. Bicubic, BlowUp, and Genuine Fractals produce very different looking results, but each produced superior enlargements in different cases. If I were keeping score, I would say BlowUp was the best more often and Genuine Fractals best less often that either BlowUp or Bicubic. It depended upon the particular file I was upsizing and how much I was upsizing it.

(Click on images for larger size)

This was hardly what I expected, and it killed my notion that this would be a quick report. Many hours, 20+ gigabytes of images, and a hundred square feet of prints later, I'm writing this as a three-parter for Mike. Normally my columns are spaced 10 days apart, but we're running these on three-four day intervals so you'll have the whole story in one week instead of three.

I upsized an assortment of different files by 1.67X, 4X, and 10X. I did find one consistent difference between the three approaches. Bicubic is by far the fastest and least memory-intensive choice. It ran 5–10 times faster than BlowUp. Genuine Fractals was by far the slowest. It ran 2–12 times slower than BlowUp and 20–60 times slower than Bicubic. It also consumed prodigious amounts of memory. It's a good thing my Macbook Pro has 4 GB of RAM!

But that's an incidental. What really counts is quality. I tried to be fair in how I looked at the results. All files were printed at 300 ppi on my Epson 9800 on glossy paper. I didn't pixel-peep (well, not too much), but I did scrutinize the prints fairly carefully. While larger prints are often viewed from some distance, if your prints aren't being given a critical examination there's really no need to consider either of these pricey plug-ins.  Stick with fast and free Bicubic.

I began with a fairly low-noise test photograph made with my Fuji Finepix S6000fd, and upsized it 10X. The illustrations in this column show a very, very small section of that enlargement at 25% scale. Subjectively, this proves a pretty good match for what you would see looking at the prints. Still, I must remind readers that the point of illustrations is to illustrate my points, not to prove them. If you don't agree with my description, based on what you're seeing on-screen, trust the description.

The two plug-ins did a great job on the strong continuous edges of the ornaments and the pine needles. But they lost subtle fine detail, like that in the textured golden bands and cap of the seahorse ornament. The result looked plastic, like a digital photo that has had too much noise reduction applied: edges are hard but texture's missing.

I should mention that both plug-ins have controls for fine-tuning their outputs. The changes weren't enough to alter my rankings, but I did adjust the settings to produce the most pleasing results each plug-in was capable of.

Genuine Fractals fared the worst, because it took the small bright highlights and turned them into distractingly hard-edged polygons. The golden string looked downright weird. Overall, the print looked sharper, but also looked just plain wrong. The image no longer looked like a photograph; it looked like it was created with a paintbrush.

While BlowUp produced less distracting artifacts, there was still no question in my mind—Bicubic was by far the best choice if I wanted a print that still looked like a photograph.

But you know that's not the whole story, or this would be a one-part review.

When I made 4X enlargements of the same file and compared prints, it wasn't so clear-cut. Genuine Fractals still produced an unpleasantly artificial rendering, so it stayed in third place. But now it was a tossup between BlowUp and Bicubic. The suppression of fine detail and the artifacts in the highlights were less bothersome, and edges were definitely clearer in BlowUp's version. I would pick BlowUp over Bicubic by a nose.

Down to 1.67X, and I got a new surprise. There were subtle but clearly-visible differences between the three renderings; equally clearly the superior one was Genuine Fractals', no question about it! The loss of fine detail and the highlight artifacts were invisible at this scale. The edges were uniformly cleaner and sharper, and the image was just a bit less noisy with smoother tonality. BlowUp came in second and Bicubic came in third.

Curiouser and curiouser. Would other test files produce the same rankings? Well, what do you think? Tune in next time for further adventures.

____________________

Ctein

What Lens Was It?

By the bye, this picture was taken with a 50mm lens, a Leica Dual-Range Summicron on an M4. I was originally planning on asking whether it was taken with a 40mm or 50mm, but I thought that the answers might divide 50-50 just based on random chance. Despite this, if you look at the survey numbers as of tonight, you'll see that although the consensus wisdom was correct overall, "50mm" and "not 50mm" did indeed divide up almost exactly 50-50—49.5% voted for something other than a 50mm and 50.5% thought it was a 50mm. And this is despite the fact that all the choices were more than a 15% divergence from the actual focal length.

This is just one example, of course, but in my experience it's much more difficult for people to make many kinds of distinctions when they only evidence they have to go on is the visual evidence in pictures.

______________________

Mike

I Am Abducted by Aliens

The strangest thing happened to me last night. I've had the EI flu ("everything involved," a.k.a. the FFH—you can figure that one out), my second bout of flu in two weeks. I was sitting here innocently at my computer moderating comments when I had a coughing fit so severe that I passed out! But when I came to, slumped down on my knees with a roaring in my ears and a most bizarre lightheaded feeling, I didn't remember the coughing fit that had instigated the event. So, to my mind, I was working at the computer feeling not too bad one moment, and the next I was waking up feeling woolly and detached, with no clue what had happened in the interim.

I walked around the house saying (out loud, to the dog), "what the hell was that?" My best guess at first was that I had had some sort of mini-seizure. Or maybe I'd been whisked away for a few moments by aliens*. After five or ten minutes of walking around the house, the memory of the coughing fit came flooding back to me—not being able to relax, not being able to draw breath, the tunnel vision closing in—and I realized what had happened. It's no wonder some people believe in "memory erasure." It was just that strange.

Moral: moderating comments for T.O.P. is not always as easy as you might think!

Just kidding. But while we're on the subject, I must say that I'm enormously impressed by, and grateful for, all your thoughtful comments to yesterday's post. They add so much to the site and to my own education, and they keep things interesting for me. I feel like I have a lot of friends around the world—I just wish I knew more of you in person!

___________________

Mike

*Who quickly returned me lest they catch the flu.

Featured Comment by David Emerick: "See a doctor Mike! If you go missing, I'll know where to look!  Seriously, rest, fluids, doctor. Hope you feel better soon.

Mike replies: Thanks to everyone for the good wishes. I'm feeling better today (Monday). At least the act of coughing is no longer a stark test of manhood. My ribs are so sore that one cough feels like being kicked by a mule. Note to self: flu shot next year, for better or worse. 

Sensor Sizes Part II

As I wrote in Part I of this post, below, it seems to have become a "forum truism" that the 4/3rds sensor size (13 x 17.3 mm) is woefully inadequate and can't compete with the allegedly more desirable APS-C sensor size (14.8 x 22.2 in Canon cameras). I made the argument that assertions for the superiority of the larger size were dependent on direct, controlled comparisons, and that any differences are actually probably too small in magnitude to reliably detect if people were simply looking at pictures.

Readers commented that not all visible differences can be attributed to sensor size alone—implementation and sensor design have a lot to do with it too.

That's certainly true, and to demonstrate it you only have to look at sensor design and implementation with a time dimension. In the year 2000, Canon introduced the landmark D30 (n.b.: not the 30D, a more recent descendant), a camera that was remarkable for any number of reasons. It was the first all-Canon DSLR, and the first to use a CMOS sensor. At 1.6 pounds it was considered almost amazingly compact and light for a DSLR, and, by the time it was reviewed there, Steve's Digicams said, brightly, "With an estimated street price now less than $2600, D30 sales have been and continue to be brisk!" Michael Reichmann made his bones by famously proclaiming that the D30's image quality matched that of film.

The D30 caused tremendous, almost unprecedented excitement at the time. Photographers had been accustomed to a sleepy, saturated market in which progress came mostly as refinements, and most refinements had to do with convenience for the user (rather than image quality) and more efficient manufacturability for the cameramakers. Slow-evolving companies with little R&D could usefully compete alongside companies that made haste somewhat less lazily. In that context, the pell-mell development of DSLRs for several years surrounding the turn of the Millennium seemed like a continuing succession of revolutionary shocks. (It was, among other things, a lot of fun to watch.)

The D30 had 3.25 megapixels. (The "camera to beat" at the time was the 1999 Nikon D1 at 2.74 megapixels, which Digital Photography Review called "Nikons [sic] answer to Kodak's domination of the professional SLR's [sic] market.") You could buy an IBM microdrive card with as much as 1GB of storage, although they were not cheap. Diagonal edges showed visible jaggies at 100%. Regarding noise, dpreview concluded that "Shooting for the web, smallish prints or a family album and [sic] you could certainly get away with ISO 800." It was considered "very fast" because you could take a shot every 1.5 seconds.

Eight years later, we take for granted factorials of two to four, all in our favor, in terms of megapixels, ISOs, shooting speeds, write times, and prices. 1GB flash cards are so cheap they're sometimes given away. The improvements and capabilities of 4/3rds sensors shadow those of APS-C sensors. Digicam sensors routinely exceed the D30's specs—or most of them—and a 4/3rds camera with the D30's specifications would be laughed off the planet.

You don't know
So, anyway, here are a few common assumptions about sensor sizes, closely paraphrased from actual statements I've encountered: "The days of 4/3rds are numbered. It won't be around in a few years." "All else being equal, bigger is always better." "The whole market is now moving to full-frame." "Every advance in quality and capability that is available in 4/3rds is also available to larger sized sensors, so the larger sensors will always be better."

This amounts to "the conventional wisdom" (CW), and it might be correct. (The CW sometimes is.)  But ever since I took a debating class in 8th grade it's been part of the repertoire of my thinking processes, so let me just bring up a few "debating points" that perhaps oppose the CW as set out above. Together these don't constitute a coherent argument; you might rather think of them as "nodules" of evidence, little wet balls of fact and assertion zapped at your pretty blackboard diagrams when you're not looking like spitballs through a straw.

Nodule: You don't know. The future isn't always a linear continuation of the assumptions of the past and the present. Progress is not always overtly logical, even if it follows someone's idea of logic. Ten years from now, 4/3rds might be dead. Also, ten years from now, all cameras might have 4/3rds sensors, from pro DSLRs to pocket digicams—at which point such an evolution will be back-constructed to seem logical and inevitable 'twixt here and then. Not saying I know. But you don't either.

Nodule: Despite the public pining of pontificating pundits such as moi demanding small cameras with large sensors, only one is even on the horizon. Is this because tiny sensors the size of fingernails are simply getting so good that Joe Sixpack and Jill Boxed White Wine don't want or need anything more? Is the manufacturers' strategy simply going to be to keep improving the fingernail-sized sensors until people like me have to shut up?

Richard Man (Imagecraft.com), My Wife, Karisu. Olympus E-3 and 35–100mm ƒ/2 lens, shot wide open.

Nodule: Bigger was better when it came to film, too, but that didn't mean that bigger always won out. In fact, film sizes got smaller and smaller until they fetched up against 35mm (24 x 36 mm), at which point there were several concerted attempts, most led by Kodak, to make the sizes smaller still (110, the disc camera, APS), none of which remained viable more than temporarily. So-called medium- and large-format survived, supported mainly by professionals and a loose confederation of aficionados and artists who together comprised an active but numerically minuscule segment of the overall market.

Nodule: "Post-Bayer," as Thom Hogan likes to call it, is going to change the game completely. Don't think for a second that there aren't engineering teams at Canon, Nikon, and elsewhere working feverishly to figure out how post-Bayer is going to play when it hits the mainstream.

Nodule: The market is moving to full-frame, check...based on three extant cameras (Canon 1Ds, Canon 5D, and Nikon D3) and three more (Canon 5D replacement, Sony "flagship," Nikon's competitor to the 5D) supposedly in the pipeline. These will doubtless exploit a market demand that currently does indeed exist. The Sony Mavicas, which wrote directly to CDs, and the digital "bridge" camera, like the Olympus E-10 and Sony F-717, also exploited markets that existed in their time. Where are they now? There's nothing that says any trend has to continue.

Nodule: Film speed. Lens speed. Film grain. Motor drive speed. Shutter speed. What  do these and many other technical specifications of photographic devices have in common? I'll tell you: they were once hotly contested fields of competition between manufacturers that were followed avidly by the market...until they reached "points of sufficiency" when further development just seemed to no longer make sense. (Okay, so maybe film speed never really quite got there). Lenses got to ƒ/1.4 and the market pretty much decided that was plenty; faster lenses exist, but they're mainly curiosities that never sold in anything but very low numbers. The Nikon 8008 had a huge market advantage when it came out, with its spectacular 1/8000th top shutter speed and 1/250th flash sync speed; but when faster shutters than that came along, the market pretty much yawned—when you can already freeze moving helicopter blades, you pretty much don't need shutter speeds faster still.

Okay. Fast forward to now, when high ISOs, capture rates and write speeds, shutter lag, resolution, and dynamic range are  hotly contested fields of competition between manufacturers that are followed avidly by the market. Will they be forever? Not likely. Much more likely: all parameters will reach "points of sufficiency" where people just won't need or want more. Where those points will be, I can't say. But there's one thing about it that's probably true....

It's not up to you
Idle speculative follow-up question: Let's say (for the sake of argument) that sensors reach this mythical "sufficiency" in every conceivable parameter the market demands by, oh, say, 2015. Then the manufacturers figure out they can develop sensors with the same performance, but smaller, cheaper, and with higher profit margins. Care to guess what your chances of buying a sensor of any particular size are going to be, if there is no demand for such a sensor in the market as a whole and if the manufacturers don't want to make them?

Upshot: Don't write off 4/3rds, and don't assume anybody knows what cameras or digital capture is going to look like fifteen years from now. If the lessons of the last fifteen years would seem to indicate any one thing, it's that this ain't over yet.

_______________________

Mike

Leica Replaces Chairman Lee

Leica Camera AG today released a press release indicating a management change: 

"The Supervisory Board of Leica Camera AG today removed Steven K. Lee as member and Chairman of the Board of Management of Leica Camera AG with immediate effect.

"At the same time the Supervisory Board appointed Dr. Andreas Kaufmann additional member of the Board of Management and Chairman of the Board of Management for the period until February 28, 2009. For the time being Dr. Andreas Kaufmann will be in charge of the Company jointly with Andreas Lobejäger. Dr. Kaufmann holds sole power of representation of the Company."

Read Amateur Photographer (U.K.) Editor Damien Demolder's comments

____________________

Mike

Sensor Sizes

Just thinking aloud here (sometimes I have to remember that this still is my blog, after all, and I can weigh in with my little two cents' worth of thoughts when I want to), I'd like to put forth a radical claim: there's actually no effective, detectable difference between the APS-C sensor size and the 4/3rds sensor size. They're simply too close together. Forum measurbators like to crow and cluck about how there are huge differences, that the larger sensor is oh-so-much better, and that the sky is falling. Hogwash. If they just looked at pictures, they couldn't tell.

As with film, a certain degree of departure is necessary before the differences begin to show up reliably in the real world. Otherwise what you have to resort to is direct comparison in controlled situations.

There are a great many parameters in photography that can be detected in direct comparison that can't be detected simply by looking at non-equivalent pictures taken under real-world conditions. This might surprise you, but if I show you some 35mm prints taken with different lenses, you won't be able to distinguish those taken with a 40mm lens from those taken with a 35mm lens, or the 100mm focal length vs. 90mm, unless it's the same subject or unless you have enough examples that you know are one or the other (that is, when viewers are asked to distinguish between pre-sorted groups of samples, their accuracy goes up somewhat). If I were to show you moderate enlargements from 645 film and 6x7 film, you couldn't tell the difference unless, again, the pictures were of the same or similar subjects, and probably not even then. If I were showing you B&W prints made on one of two papers, and you knew one of the papers was capable of a higher D-max (maximum black), you couldn't guess which paper you were looking at if I showed you only one print. Furthermore, most people can't look at two B&W prints that have different maximum blacks and tell me which one has darker blacks! That never stopped an enthusiast from declaring one paper superior to another based on a measurable difference in D-max, however. Same thing with lenses—I proved to my own satisfaction (though not to the Leicaphiles' satisfaction) that even Leicaphiles can't tell the difference between pictures taken with Leica lenses and pictures taken with other lenses...unless, again, they have before them the evidence of direct, controlled comparisons or the advantage of large, pre-sorted groups of samples. And sometimes not even then.

Anybody wanna guess how I know all these things? Actual experiments. Some better-controlled than others from a scientific-method perspective, I admit. But still.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

(Please go along with the game—don't change your answer after seeing the results! I promise, you won't be graded on your answer. I'll add the answer to this post on Sunday evening.)

Now, care to guess the average forum maven's chances of looking at a digital picture, either online or in print form, and being able to guess accurately and reliably whether it was made with a 4/3rds sensor or a 1.5X sensor? I haven't done that experiment, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess: they haven't got a chance in hell. Maybe full-time fine printers or reviewers could be able to approach statistically significant accuracy. Maybe. But even with them I'd have to see it to believe it.   

With many such factors—lens contrast, maximum black in B&W papers, lens focal length, color accuracy, degree of negative enlargement, etc., etc., etc.—there has to be a certain amount of separation before differences begin to be reliably detectable without direct comparisons. There's usually a "zone" of difference where most viewers can't distinguish between two variables at all, a "zone" of confusion where some viewers can tell and others can't, or people can tell some of the time but not all of the time, and a "zone" where the differences becomes sufficiently large that almost everybody can tell almost all of the time. (A friend of mine compared 6x7 to 35mm, for instance, and found that under almost all conditions, 6x7 was clearly better—even where the 35mm result was optimized in several ways and the 6x7 samples weren't. The exception was in prints sizes that represented less than 5X or 6X enlargement from the 35mm negative.) Where focal length is concerned, research suggest that 15% is the approximate threshold of this third zone. I don't know where it is with sensor sizes, but I suspect it requires a doubling of the area of the sensor, which is two or three sizes except when taking into account the huge leap between 1/1.7" and 4/3rds—that is, between the largest digicam size and the smallest DSLR size (a 5.2X difference in area).

Sensible experimental results would never stop forum pontificators from "absolutizing" differences that they can detect, or think they can detect, in direct comparisons under controlled conditions—or from thinking that slightly better measured results will translate to real-world pictures. It's human nature to want to be on the side of "scientific proof," after all, just as it's human nature to want there to be a "winner" and a "loser" in every comparison or contest. But I suspect those same people would be dismayed by their own inability to distinguish all those differences they think are so obvious, if they were just looking at pictures.

___________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Charlie H.: "One of the fundamental tenets of psychophysics is Weber's Law, which states that the detectable difference between two magnitudes is proportional to the magnitudes themselves; e.g., humans can tell the difference between 1 oz. and 2 oz. but not between 100 lbs. and 100 lbs., 1 oz. Mike, you're a psychophysician!"

Mike replies: I knew a was a psycho-something. Thanks, Charlie.

Test Your Photo Knowledge

Test your photo knowledge—at the end of last year (December, 2007), Canon, Inc. issued a press release in Tokyo that announced it had passed:

A. Its own 70th birthday
B. The 20th anniversary of the EOS system
C. The 30 millionth Canon EOS camera
D. The 10 millionth Canon EOS DSLR
E. All of the above

____________________

Mike

P.S. The answer is "E." Happy birthday and happy anniversaries to Canon!

P.P.S. Regarding "C," it was only 4 years earlier that Canon produced its 20 millionth EOS camera.

Olympus E-510 Part 3—Hands-on Experience

By Gordon Lewis

In the previous two installments I explained why I decided to get an Olympus E-510 and how I figured out how get reliable and consistent results from its meter. And once again, just so there’s no misunderstanding, the E-510’s meter is no less reliable or consistent than any other. You just need to take the time to understand how it works, the same as you (hopefully) would with any other camera.

My primary reasons for buying the E-510 were its portability, flexibility, in-body image stabilization (IS), and the availability of high-quality, compact, reasonably fast, yet reasonably priced lenses in the range I wanted. My only lens so far is the 14–54mm ƒ/2.8–3.5 Zuiko, which will soon be followed by the 40–150mm ƒ/3.5–4.5 Zuiko. I’ve been shooting for over 30 years, so I know exactly what I need to get the types of photos I like to shoot, which include travel, architecture, street scenes, candids, portraits, and abstracts. Needless to say, your needs may differ.

My normal photo routine while vacationing in London consisted of day trips with my camera in a small (10” x 6” x 4.5”) Domke F-5XB shoulder bag. The only accessories I carried were a second Compact Flash card and battery. I had no hesitation about slinging the bag over my shoulder and carrying it with me everywhere I went. Aside from brief subway or bus rides, I walked from place to place. The E-510 never became a burden or an impediment; in fact, the E-510 is one of the best handling, most comfortable cameras I’ve ever owned.

This gentleman was seated next to a large window. Even so, the exposure was 1/30 second at f/4.0 at ISO 400. I was zoomed to 45mm (90mm equivalent for 35mm format), which is close to the maximum focal length, and I was at maximum aperture. The E-510's image stabilization helped steady the shot. As you can see from the 100% enlargement below, the E-510 can deliver excellent results handheld at ISO 400. Another bonus is that I was only about six feet away in a quiet coffee shop and he never noticed the sound of my camera.


This is a crop of the above photo enlarged to 100%. The camera's noise reduction feature was turned off. I find this improves image detail with minimal sacrifice of noise. Above ISO 800, noise becomes more obvious; however, it's mostly luminance noise and therefore more "film-like."

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Once I  got used to the single display on the back, I liked the fact that I could tell at a glance what ISO the camera was set to, whether IS was on or off, what shutter speed, aperture, and exposure compensation I had set, and so on. Changing settings was no slower than with other DSLRs I’ve used, and in some cases faster. The display was bright enough to be usable in daylight, even when using the Live View feature. Glare and reflections can be a problem at times, but all essential information is visible through the viewfinder.

The situation where I most often noticed the E-510 reaching the limits of its abilities was in low light (EV 5 or below). Autofocus speed slowed noticeably and its accuracy became less consistent. Because the E-510’s viewfinder magnification is low (0.92X), accurate manual focusing was next to impossible. In theory, it would have been possible to switch to Live View mode and to magnify the image up to 10X. In reality, this was practical only when the camera was mounted on a tripod.

As for the IS feature, I didn’t expect any miracles nor did I witness any, but it definitely reduced hand-shake with borderline shutter speeds such as 1/60 or 1/30. Lower than that, subject motion and low-light focusing errors conspired to make the results hit-or-miss.

With proper exposure and with the recording mode set to RAW, the E-510 can handle highlights quite well. There's even enough dynamic range (and low enough lens flare) to see inside the door in the foreground.

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If you judge image quality based on how well a camera does at ISO 3200 and print sizes of 30 x 40" (the E-510 is a Four-Thirds camera, remember) then you will find the Olympus E-510 a disappointment. Keep saving up for that Canon 5D, Canon 1DS Mark III, or Nikon D3. If, on the other hand, you can live with smaller print sizes and with ISO 800 as your practical limit, the E-510 will often surprise and delight. I was shooting with the 14–54mm Zuiko, and found its resolution, micro-contrast, tonality, and flare resistance outstanding. Linear distortion was remarkably low at all focal lengths. Bokeh was buttery smooth. The images required minimal sharpening. Frankly, I think this camera is worth considering for the quality of the lens alone.

This photo was a test of the E-510's Live View feature. I exposed it at 1/60 second at ƒ/4 at ISO 400, with IS on and with the camera resting on my knee. Using Live View results in a one-second shutter lag, but in this case the subject wasn't moving and neither was I, so it wasn't a problem. I converted the image to black and white in Photoshop and sharpened it a bit, but the resolution, tonality and bokeh are all typical of what the E-510 and 14–54mm ƒ/2.8–3.5 Zuiko can do.

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There are a few negatives, of course: The viewfinder is small, low-light focus is dodgy, and the default image settings are sub-optimal; but if you’re looking for a small but full-featured DSLR that can produced professional quality results, the Olympus E-510 should be on your short list.

_____________________

Gordon

Just Right

I have one small personal comment to add to Gordon's E-510 review, which concludes above. And that is that, in my considered judgment, the Olympus E-510 embodies the ideal size, form, and weight for a 35mm-style eye-level camera body design.

In Henry Petroski's marvelous book The Pencil, about the "mute history of engineering," he notes that the task of engineering can be distilled to three essences: concepts, magnitude, and materials. With developed technologies, evolution usually comes down to refinements of one of the three. Here, it's magnitude I'm talking about. 

In terms of size, shape, and weight, extremes are not what are called for: that is, you don't want the camera to be infinitely light or infinitely small; too small is just as much of a problem as too large—just a different problem. What the designer should be seeking is the optimum balance—neither too light nor too heavy, neither too big nor too small, and just the right shape and form. (I'm not necessarily extending this claim to all the control dials and their placements, although I think the size and shape of the grip and the placement of the eyepiece and shutter release are among the things the Olympus designers got right.) I've personally wondered for years just where exactly the optimum midpoint is for these qualities; every camera of the hundreds I've used is, in my mind, a candidate for overall winner in this respect, and every camera has fallen short, until now.

I won't claim that the E-510 marks any point of progress where concept or materials are concerned; but it is the last word in magnitude, I think...in size, shape, and weight, just what a camera should be, ideally. It could usefully be used by all manufacturers as a model of perfection.

It's possible this might be an idiosyncratic opinion, as, for instance, Thomas Edison's preference in pencils departed from the norm. Petroski tells us that Edison ordered his pencils 3,000 at a time, and that they were fatter than the usual design and only 3 inches long; he liked them to fit in the bottom of his waistcoat pockets. At least I'll claim to be less influenced by "what I'm used to" than other photographers, since I've used so many cameras over the years. So, an opinion, yes, but, as I say, a considered and informed one.

(Incidentally, The Pencil is one of the best books about technology even written in human history, and one of the unabashed masterpieces of the literature of human beings as builders and creative animals—a tour de force of history and culture, not to mention a highly enjoyable non-fiction read, one of the very few books I know of that is worth re-reading. In fact I'm not sure I can recommend it highly enough.)

___________________

Mike

Out of Our Tree

It's true that I'm given to bragging on our weather, but this winter's been verging on the ridiculous. Two weeks ago we had a nice 18-inch snowfall where I live, but there have been eight discrete snowfalls (the jargon of the moment is "snow events") since then. Granted, none of them amounted to more than an inch or three, but still, it has snowed nine separate times in two weeks. Local municipalities are running out of salt for the roads (one local county uses a concoction made of beet juice on the roads, which is said to be "incredibly effective." It's more expensive, but they use less of it). And we only need three more inches to make it into the Top Ten for total snow for a winter. That's just since records have been kept, and records haven't been kept for very long in this corner of the world, but still. And bear in mind that it's only February, and measurable snow in May is not unknown. Madison has already set a record. My step-sister Gwen, who lives there, says life consists of "eat, sleep, shovel; eat, sleep, shovel...."

The snow events are interspersed with cold snaps, in which we go into the deep freeze for days on end. I've seen the mercury as low as –12°F this year. Mostly it's been in single digits below zero. Now, that's not particularly cold for this part of the country, on an absolute scale, much less in more wintry climes, unless the wind gets to blowing. But when the wind gets to blowing hard, well, I hope to tell you, brothers and sisters, you can freeze your katuschka clean off in the time it takes to sing "On, Wisconsin." The other day it was –4°F—not particularly cold on the face of it—but the wind was gusting up to 50 miles per hour. Just in the 50 yards between the parking lot and the grocery store I practically froze my nose off. That's the kind of weather that makes you appreciate a good hat. You know how some people talk about temperature estimates being "just" wind chill? Well, there's no "just" about it. After whole winters without a single snow day at the local schools, my son's been home several times this year, and one time was just because of the cold and wind—a virtual "cold storm." And Wisconsinites are not squeamish about that sort of thing—if they call off school here because of cold, it's cold.

The last storm to hit us, last Sunday, was an anomaly. The clockwise air currents from the south took over and we got mainly rain. The storm itself missed us—for once. Chicago caught the brunt of that one. For us, what happened was that it drizzled all day...and then night fell, and everything froze. Wisconsinites aren't scared of winter driving, but there were precious few cars on the road Sunday evening and into the night. Ice everywhere.

This used to be the darkroom-intensive time of the year for me. Now that I've been liberated from my darkroom (which in my case is like a sun-worshipper being liberated from the beach—I always liked the darkroom), I spend my spare time poking around the internet and reading photography books. One bright spot in this otherwise dull month is that I've whiled away a number of hours perusing Lloyd Chambers' voluminous and detailed reviews of the Zeiss manual-focus single-focal-length lenses manufactured in Japan and available for both Nikon and Pentax mounts. Years ago I wrote a camera review that elicited the following comment from my then-editor, Ana Jones: "You've certainly said everything that can possibly be said about this camera." Lloyd's lens reviews may not say everything that could possibly be said, but they invite that conclusion, and he hits a nice balance between technical tests and descriptions and practical visual information. I can certainly appreciate the immense amount of work and preparation that go into his reviews. If I have any criticism, it's that it's often simply not clear which is which in the mouse-over comparisons. However, you can really get a pretty thorough handle on what you could expect from these extremely fine lenses. And, I admit, geek that I am, I find poring over comprehensive reviews such as these to be one of the many subspecies of photographic fun.

Meanwhile, a just-completed study has revealed—finally!—why there are so many injuries in Wisconsin during deer-hunting season, which took place back in the aptly-named Fall. Turns out only about a third of deer-season hospitalizations are the result of drunk hunters shooting each other or driving into things. The other two-thirds involve...trees. Hunters settle into nice cozy tree blinds, presumably equipped with a fifth of their favorite poison for warmth, overimbibe, and then, well, fall out of the tree. That's right: the study has showed that two-thirds of our deer-season injuries requiring hospitalization are caused by hunters falling out of trees.

Ah, the great outdoors.

__________________

Mike

Revisiting the Canon Powershot G9

By Ken Tanaka

Regular TOP readers may recall that I posted a brief review of the new Canon Powershot G9 here last year when the camera was first introduced. A reader recently wondered if my impressions of the camera had changed since then. Personally, I always find it interesting and informative to read relatively rare second-impression pieces. So here, after approximately 1,000 shots, is my brief follow-up on the Canon Powershot G9.

The G9’s Best Features

• A manual ISO selection dial. This is an essential feature for a camera designed for experienced or aspiring owners. (Too bad that Leica didn’t understand this when they designed my $5,500 M8.)

• RAW image file format. This is the feature we G7 owners whined loudly for and what Canon returned to us with the G9. Thank you, Canon. While the G9’s RAW files are not quite as robust as, say, those from the 1DsII or 5D they’re more than adequate for nearly all of the adjustments I’ve needed.

• Image Stabilization. No, it’s not new to the G9 but it’s a key feature that greatly buttresses the camera’s performance.

• Easy handling in Manual mode. Having taken time to become adept with the G7’s Manual control I found the G9 to be identical.

• That wonderful LCD. The live-view LCD display is superb in nearly all lighting conditions. 

• Full E-TTL flash exposure control with Canon Speedlites and the Canon ST-E2 transmitter. The G9 works just like its bigger brothers in this regard.

• Overall build quality. Like its predecessor, this is a hefty, solidly-built little camera.

What I Wish
There are really only three things on my wish list for the G9.

• I wish Canon had restrained themselves from cramming an extra 2 MP onto that little G7 sensor. The G7’s 10 MP was just fine, thank you. But the G9’s 12 MP makes the image ever-so-slightly noisier particularly at ISO 200 and above without providing any tangible benefit.

• I wish the G9’s shot-to- shot time was much shorter in single-shot mode. Yes, I’m spoiled by my other cameras. But this seems like such a do-able improvement.

• I wish Canon would get a grip. Actually, I wish they would add a usable right-hand grip to the G9. I purchased a 3rd-party product that certainly does the job. But why not just design the camera for the reality of the the human hand? (I suppose Canon might say, "Leica has ignored such ergonomics for 50 years. Why should we start now?")

In case it's not obvious I've become extremely fond of the G9.

If you’re interested in reading more about the Canon G9 from a practical perspective I strongly urge you to read Nick Devlin’s wonderful recent Luminous-Landscape article titled, "The Canon Powershot G9 in Japan."

But beyond that, why waste more time reading about the G9? If you want one and don't already have one just go get one!

_____________________

Ken

Emerson on Tone

"We strongly advise those desirous of doing artistic work to begin by studying tone, expose (always giving two exposures to each subject) on selected subjects, especially fit for the study of tone; for example, a figure in a white dress against a white background, another in a black dress against a black background, and then a white dress against a black background, and a black dress against a white background; some white flowers against a sheet of white paper; yacht-sails against the sky; faces against the sky; black velvet in bright sun-

shine, and on a grey day; yellow flowers (with orthochromatic plates) on a white background. In short, the student should think of all the possible harmonies and discords that can be found indoors and out of doors, and he should, before taking a plate, make a mental translation of the subject into black and white, and put on paper roughly, with a piece of charcoal, what he expects to get, by drawing rough masses in tone of the subject. He should at first think nothing whatever of composition, or the more poetical qualities of a picture; but simply study tone, and by this he will learn thoroughly exposures and development. Let him eschew all requests to take portraits, dogs, horses, parks, and what-nots; but let him always study tone. When he has mastered tone, and with it exposure and development, he knows the most difficult part of his technique and practice, let him then proceed to picture-making. In this early stage let him take anything and everything that is a study of tone, and let him take it anyhow, no posing, no arrangement, and when he knows his metier thoroughly let him destroy all these early plates ruthlessly. We strongly advise him to give away no prints of early work, or he will most surely rue the day when he did so. In our opinion a year is not too much in which to work in this way, both in doors and out of doors, in studios and out, with shutter and without, before there is any attempt to take a portrait or picture of any kind."

—Peter Henry Emerson
—from Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, 1889

(Available in its entirety from the Internet Archive)

_____________________

Mike (Thanks to R. Stafford)

Random Excellence: Štreit and Livingston

A small but fine selection of the work of the superb Czech photographer Jindřich Štreit can now be seen online. I found the interface a bit funky and I had to leave the page alone for a while as the images loaded, but the small portfolio (Štreit has been working for decades) is well worth seeing.

Featured Comment by John A. Stovall: "Even more of Streit's work can be seen here along with a short biography and with a more user friendly interface."

Featured Comment by Geoff McCann: "I stumbled upon Jindrich Streit's exhibition in the House of the Stone Bell, Old Town Square, Prague, purely by accident last week. We had spent the previous day at the Czech National Gallery and decided to have a day off from galleries and museums. Fat chance! Wandering through the square I spotted a poster for Jindrich's exhibition, which was into its last day so we just had to go. Amazing, humbling work. The website doesn't do it justice. To see these works expertly printed (some very large) was just beautiful.

"On the way out we popped into the bookshop just in case they had any of his books for sale. Lo and behold they had one which contained most the work in the exhibition, so my wife kindly offered to buy it for me. The woman behind the counter asked if we would like Jindrich to sign it. As we were leaving Prague the next day we said no. To which she replied that it was not a problem as Jindrich was in the building! She dashed off uttering over her shoulder that she was going to find him. Returning a few minutes later she suggested we follow her. So, we met Jindrich Streit and his wife Agnes in the coffee shop of the House of the Stone Bell and he inscribed my book!

"Chance is a wonderful thing. Needless to say this encounter made the holiday."

And, in case you missed this in our comment sections the other day, the late cinematographer Jamie Livingston, who died at age 41 in 1997, left an archive of almost 6,000 Polaroid SX-70 shots, taken one per day (with only minor lapses) for 18 years. "Photos of  friends, girlfriends, objects, landscapes, ball games, and New York City scenes, are interspersed with shots of famous people like Philip Johnson, Keith Richards, Lionel Richie and many others Livingston met in his career as a music video and commercial director and cinematographer." Hugh Crawford is now putting them online. There is no way to describe or even indicate the breadth and richness of this vast archive with one picture, so please don't nitpick my almost random single selection; go spend some time with the archive. Brief background information can be found here.

______________________

Mike  (Thanks to Geoff McCann and Hugh Crawford)

ADDENDUM from Mike: By a strange coincidence, out of the thousands of Jamie Livingston's Polaroids the one I chose to illustrate this posting is actually of Hugh Crawford, who is doing so much to preserve and publicize this unique body of work. That's Hugh and his wife-to-be at their wedding rehearsal dinner, with Hugh's niece, who was their flower girl. Jamie Livingston was their best man. I had no idea it was Hugh and his wife when I chose and posted the picture. 

UPDATE from Hugh: "In answer to all the questions about Jamie's working methods, Jamie had a hard and fast rule that he would only take pictures once a day. If he took a photo of the light passing through a bag of potato chips earlier in the day, a hundred long-unseen friends staging an impromptu parade later that evening would not make it as a P.O.D. because the picture for that day had already been taken. Once I was running across 34th street at around 11:30 at night with Jamie and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey elephants, and asked if the P.O.D. was coming up, and the answer was, 'Nope, took it this morning.'

"I'm always stunned how people who never knew him or anyone in the pictures and all the individual arcs of lives and deaths and relationships connect so vividly with the work. We had an exhibition of reproductions of all six and a half thousand or so photos on the tenth anniversary of his death and his 51st birthday at Bard College where he started making them just before he graduated. At the reception party for the show, over and over students would come up and say how much they identified with the photographs and how much they wanted to have a life like Jamie's."

Quote o' the Day

"I regard...my own photography as a form of collecting."
-                                                                    —Martin Parr

______________________

Mike (Thanks to Rod Purcell)

'The Photobook: A History,' vols. 1 and 2

Reviewed by Rod Purcell

Martin Parr, Garry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol. 1
Phaidon Press, 320 pages. $75 ($47.25 on Amazon)

Link to Amazon U.S.

Link to Amazon U.K.

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Martin Parr, Garry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol. 2
Phaidon Press, 336 pages. $75 ($47.25 on Amazon)

Link to Amazon U.S.

Link to Amazon U.K.

The authors suggest that the history and diversity of photography can best be understood through a review of photobooks, and, across the two volumes, some 400 selected books are reviewed. The basic premise here is that individual prints are limited in their distribution, exhibitions are local and transient, commercial works are particular to a market, so what is left as the preferred medium for the presentation and analysis of photography is the photobook.

One of the authors' central concepts is that the format of photobooks sits between that of the novel and film. In one sense this is obvious as novels generally do not contain images, whereas films have moving images, so still photography lies in between the two. However, this idea also implies that like novels and films, photobooks contain a narrative. In some cases this is true. On the other hand, to find a narrative, for example, in Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations requires considerable mental agility and imagination.

More generally the two volumes provide an interesting and welcome analysis, which succeeds in moving us away from the tyranny of the individual "photographer as genius" approach, to locating and exploring bodies of work in wider contexts. The authors have created 18 categories that relate in various ways to the chronology and geography of photography, but also to a selection of themes. These categorizations provide a useful frame of analysis. For example categories include:

From Volume 1
Topography and Travel—The First Photoboks
Photo Eye—The Modernist Photobook
Medium and Message—Photobook as Propaganda
The Indecisive Moment—The "Stream–of-Consciousness" Photobook

From Volume 2
Mirrors and Windows—The American Photobook since the 1970’s
Point of Sale—The Company Photobook
Looking at Photographs—The Picture Editor as Author
The Düsseldorf Tendency—The New Objective Photobook

These volumes include works that have been hard to access in the both in the UK where I live and many other countries. So one of the effects of reading these volumes is to realize what it is you have been missing. I now know about a range of excellent Dutch photographers about whom I had been previously unaware. Most importantly the chapters on Japanese photography (Moriyama, Araki, etc.) present essential material that is almost invisible here.

Each section has an overview written by Gary Badger. Some of the writing provides an informative background to the photobooks in question, but in places this can slip into to being rather generalized and superficial commentary. However the final chapters on the "Dusseldorf Tendency" (the Bechers, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky), and "Home and Away" (Bruce Gilden and Richard Billingham, but, surprisingly, not Nan Goldin, who is less appropriately placed in the "American Photos since 1970s" section) are for me the best, being very clearly written and informative.

But all is not perfect. The authors' definition of a photobook excludes monographs. I’m not convinced that this was due to any other reason than making the project manageable, or perhaps further monograph based volumes are to come. By default any photographer that did not produce a photobook is excluded. Other photographers are also excluded because a copy of their photobook was not available for review or that Parr and Badger didn’t rate it. This means that major photographers are missing form this collection. For example both Edward Weston and Sebastiao Salgado, who would surely be central in any review of 20th century photography, are absent. Perhaps out of modesty Martin Parr is also excluded. As an attempt therefore to provide an alternative history and overview of photography this project must be seriously flawed.

The project also falls down through the method of presentation, and this is the most frustrating thing about these volumes. Most of the selected photobooks have only a few (sometimes just one) illustrations and often they are reproduced very small. This is particularly true for early photobooks. For example John Thompson’s Illustration of China and its People has a single photograph less than one inch square. Man Ray’s La Photographie n’est par l’art also has one photograph, reproduced even smaller. Things improve with more recent works. Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces has two double page spreads illustrating eight prints at 2.75” x 2”. But this is about the best it gets. As the original of American Surfaces has 313 photographs, the abstract of eight prints cannot really convey what Shore was trying to do and how well he succeeded.

So we are told how important the books are, but we cannot see sufficient content to work this through for ourselves. As the two volumes run to over 600 pages it is unreasonable to expect fuller reproductions. But maybe this suggests that the future of photography is not, as the authors claim, with the photobook and print based publishing at all, but on the internet. What we need is the selected photobooks digitized and put on line in something like Mark Harden's Masters of Photography site. That really would be a resource to be valued.

Nevertheless, these are stimulating books—you can’t help but think that some of the categories are misconceived and photographers within them misplaced, but this pushes you to reconceptualize your understanding of photography, and that has to be a good thing. Recommended.

_________________

Rod Purcell was born in London, England. Over the past twenty years he has traveled and photographed widely in Europe, Asia and North Africa. Rod currently lives in  Scotland where he works at the University of Glasgow, writing, teaching and photographing on social action and cultural change.

Polaroid Made Me The Photographer I Am Today

By Ctein

S'truth! My habits and practices came from cutting my photographic teeth on Polaroid film. For the first several years of my "serious" photographic life, Polaroid was all I used (save for a few rolls of 35mm film developed in a summer photography class). I even used it for the first two years I was a photographer on my college newspaper.

Eugene McCarthy running (almost literally!) for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968.

There's a good chance, in fact, that I wouldn't even be a photographer today were it not for Polaroid. Until I got a Polaroid camera, my photographs were extremely ordinary. I've gone back and checked. I was usually the one wielding the family camera, but any other family member could have done exactly as good (namely, bad) a job as I. That all changed early in my teens. My grandpa gave me his Polaroid Highlander 80A rollfilm camera, with Wink-light flash and a modest number of filters.

Having the instant feedback made all the difference in the world (that's why I've always been enthusiastic about digital cameras for beginners). I could immediately see what was wrong with a photo I'd made. Being of an inquisitive and scientific mind I promptly started experimenting. The second illustration here shows a very early photo I made while experimenting with filters to improve skies.

A very early experiment with my new Highlander. Penciled notes on the back say "3000/orange filter/EV 15." Polaroid experimentation not only made me a good photographer, it made me a good record keeper.

In a few years I acquired a full-size Polaroid Model 150 rollfilm camera. Not only did I want those luxuriously large (3 in. by 4 in.) photographs, but Polaroid made a wondrous assortment of films that were not available in Highlander size. I started photographing color, which was now technically as easy as B&W. ASA 3000 B&W film became my mainstay for low light fun and home photomicrography. The 10,000 speed oscilloscope film let me experiment with night and high-contrast photography. Polaroid's infrared film was great.

I'm not sure how I got the money to buy that camera. Polaroid was expensive, and I could only afford to make a handful of photographs each week, even devoting most of my allowance to buying film. I learned how not to waste photographs. I got really good at that, to the point where I expected every photograph to be a keeper. I learned how to take a pass on lesser compositions, to make the one photograph I really wanted to make and walk away. I learned how to meter well with an averaging meter. Polaroid film was no more forgiving than slide film, and your exposures had to be pretty much on the mark. I became skilled at looking at a scene and instantly intuiting how much it deviated from the 12% effective reflectance that the meter expected to see. For my high school graduation, I got a Polaroid Colorpack 250 with all the accessories. Until just a few years ago when I got access to a digital camera, I still used that for some of the product shots for reviews in Photo Techniques magazine. I bought a first-model SX-70 camera and made many, many hundreds of photographs with it into the early 1980s, when the poor stability of the prints soured me on it.

That's what Polaroid did for me. It taught me to develop my eye and discrimination and never make a photograph unless I knew it was the right photograph to make. It taught me to meter accurately; today I still use an averaging meter for all my film work. And it let me start developing my interest in color four or five years earlier than I would have otherwise, without being hampered by inconvenient and lengthy processes.

I'm not going to mourn the loss of Polaroid film; it's no longer important to me in any way. But I do owe it considerable gratitude.

____________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by David: "I'm mourning the Pola loss. It sucks that so many photographers can carry that 'let's move on' attitude so easily for the film processes that proved the medium. To each his own.

"Type 55 is a special thing, nothing like it. I use the medium format stuff to proof lighting. There really is, for me, no better way to do it.

"...Maybe I'll start using digital to check my lights...nowhere near as cool because then I'll have nothing to drop into my box of old Polaroids. That box is like a treasure...I go in there looking for ideas and reminders of ideas all the time. Like Ctein...notes all over those things, lighting diagrams, schemes and ratios. Nice to not have to sit at a computer to do this...stare at a screen for yet another series of tasks.

"I can't think of another invention (computer) that has been so liberating and so insulating/alienating at the same time. Biggest paradox ever."

Film and Video: Where We Are Today

Why HDTV production is making film shoots a thing of the past

By Bob Burnett and Dan Bailes

Bob Burnett: I used to always shoot public service announcements and TV spots on film. Sometimes, marketing and advocacy programs too.

After spending 90+% of my time working in video it was great to have projects where shooting film was possible. By its very nature film offered a different perspective to approaching a shoot and a "look" that made the captured images seem very special and different.

Of course film shoots offered moments where the magic would be momentarily interrupted, like the time the assistant camera person was changing mags, dropped the just-shot one which popped open (he also forgot to tape the mag closed) exposing the previous four hours of set-ups and shots.

Never mind those moments—in fact, forget them—because they aren’t going to happen again. Given how the landscape of work has changed I doubt I’ll have the opportunity to justify using film again. The new generation of video cameras (High Definition as well as DV) has put a serious crimp in my ability to rationalize using film on shoots. And I’m not alone. I see so many things on TV that were once shot on film now being shot on video.

Screenshot from GVI's production "Great Schools By Design" for the American Architectural Foundation

But what about those wonderfully unique qualities only possible when shooting film that in the past made video look a far distant second place?

Let’s review a few basic points of where we are today:

Aspect ratio? Not a problem, video now shoots flawlessly be it 16:9 or 4:3. All it takes is a quick, menu driven adjustment to make a change.

Shutter? Got it. Video has an adjustable shutter making 24p frame rates somewhat replicable.

Video’s electronic image replication versus the deep, lovely irreplaceable nuance of film’s image exposure? Well…yeah…we all know about that but depth-of-field adjustments, inclusion of "grain," color correction and pulldown "filmlook" manipulation are all basic "drag and drop" tools in editing now. Just think what Photoshop is capable of doing in still photography (be it film or digital) and the same broad range of possibility is happening in video editing and color correction.

Screenshot from GVI's production "Stop the Aerial Hunting of Wolves in Alaska" for Defenders of Wildlife

Dan Bailes: I grew up with film—first as an assistant cameraman (circa 1970) and later as an editor. I learned all about 16mm ECO reversal film (ASA 16)—if you didn’t know how to light back then you’d end up with a shiny figure surrounded by darkness. Then came the faster reversals—but with all that grain. Man, when Kodak rolled out 16mm negative it created a revolution. Finally "Big Yellow" had created something to rival the ever-growing incursion of video. Or so we thought at the time.

I loved editing film—namely hour-long documentaries or political spots. For me it was the perfect medium. I learned how to develop a deep memory to keep all those shots in my head. I devised little tricks to make sure my tracks stayed in synch to the picture and developed a complex filing system using film bins, vault boxes and hundreds of two- and three-inch cores for all those trims and outs.

I learned how to pre-visualize effects like fades and dissolves and mark the film with grease pencil so the negative matcher would set up the a and b rolls correctly. (Those days, after you were done with the creative editing, you had to match the negative to the original and send it to the lab for timing to get the contrast and color balance just so. Then you’d review the first answer print, call up the lab with changes and hope the second or third answer print would get it right.)

I devised workflow systems for my assistants (I almost always had at least one assistant) so I could spend my time on the creative side while they managed the mechanics and filing. And it was a great way for them to learn editing. But the best part was it was all very physical, as I’d get into a rhythm: view, judge, stop, pull down the roll, mark, cut, splice, and push on to the next. I got so I could work as fast as I could think. Pure heaven.

Of course, as we all know, nothing lasts forever. Video soon took over and made editing a nightmare. Wonderful non-linear film editing became locked into linear and ugly video. And God help you if you wanted to lose a shot half way through the edit. You had to go down a generation until pretty soon you could barely read the window-burned timecode on the smeary VHS dubs. Staying calm and developing the patience of Job became just as important as lining up great shots to tell a story.

Thankfully, all the visual sense I developed as a film editor helped. And I often worked with footage shot on film and "dumped" (great word, that) to tape. Then along came the next innovation, non-linear computer-based editing, and with it the death of film editing.

My first experiences working with (computer-based) Avid’s Media Composer were mixed. With computers, if you don’t carefully label and file your work, you’re lost. And you have to spend all that time logging and importing the picture and sound elements. I’ve worked on projects where more time was spent on capturing/digitizing the media than on the creative process. Back in the days of film editing, three to four months was standard for editing an hour-long television documentary. Now, for a lot of cable TV projects, three weeks or less is more the rule. So instead of presenting polished, thoughtful work, the first draft effort is typically what goes on the air.

In the old days, the path to becoming a film editor required years of working as someone’s assistant. You had to know so much about the entire process to do your job right—often the editor would direct the lab finishing process as well as the audio mix. Now editors often do their own Avid-based digital color correction and audio mix.

I must admit, editing today is truly amazing. The programs developed by Avid and Apple allow you to do just about anything you can imagine.

But the biggest downside to all this innovation is that we’ve lost the training ground that went with film editing. As a newbie, you’d typically work with ten or twenty editors over the course of several years before you developed the expertise to call yourself an editor. What a great way to learn. There’s nothing like that today.

It seems like every technological advance is constructive and destructive at the same time. Yes, some things are easier and the barriers to entry are constantly lowered. And the tension between innovation vs. the expertise that comes from experience will probably always be with us.

But for me, what is most important is the content. Understanding what you are trying to say and deciding how you want to say it. Then, it’s just a matter of using the available tools to get the job done. Whether its art or artifice, all this technology is just a means to an end. Making the pictures tell a story is still the most important thing. So for me, I’ve learned to keep my eyes and ears open and to look for inspiration where ever I can find it.

Bob Burnett: Our aim here isn’t to be depressing or to wallow in some great, lost era of film—it’s just to present our small slice of how we’ve seen things change. Instead of bemoaning the changes, Dan and I are excited to be producing videos for use on DVD as well as on the web—where image quality is vastly improving and in many cases our stories are reaching a wider audience and having greater impact than in the past.

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Bob Burnett (Creative Director) and Dan Bailes (Senior Editor) work together at GVI in Washington, D.C.

Olympus E-510 Part 2—Dealing with Overexposure

By Gordon Lewis

The most consistent criticism leveled against the Olympus E-510 is that its dynamic range (the number exposure steps between maximum black and maximum white) is narrower than many of its competitors. Although this is true, the difference is relatively minor; only about 0.7 EV. The more significant problem, at least for me, is that when faced with high-contrast lighting situations, the E-510 has a consistent tendency to overexpose the highlights to the point of clipping—i.e., the point at which one or more of the color channels are maxed out.

I don’t mean small, specular highlights. I mean major highlights, like skies, clouds, walls, and sandy beaches. To make matters worse, if you have the camera set to record images as JPEGs, the resulting overexposure is “baked in.” If there’s no highlight detail, there’s nothing you can do to recover it. There are a variety of theories and explanations for why the E-510 does this, and I’m sure several readers will expand on them, but I prefer to concentrate on what to do about it. Here’s what works for me:

1. Shoot RAW. When you shoot RAW, you have more control over the image post-exposure. You will often be able to use a RAW converter to recover clipped highlights—but only if they were overexposed by no more than a stop. Since it’s often difficult to know while you’re shooting exactly how close you are to the true clipping limit, it’s still best to avoid overexposure whenever possible.

2. Set the “information” display so that overexposed highlights blink on and off. The exposure histogram indicates only whether the highlights are clipped, not how much. The blinking highlight option allows you to judge how much of the image is overexposed and where. If you see flashing in areas where you want to retain detail, you’d be wise to reduce the exposure.

3. Set exposure compensation to –0.7. Since that the meter tends to overexpose high-contrast scenes by about 0.7 EV, reducing the exposure by 0.7 EV effectively “zeroes it out.” Keep in mind, however, that this applies only to high-contrast situations. If you shoot low-contrast scenes with the camera set this way they will be underexposed. You may therefore prefer to:

4. Expose for the highlights. I have my camera set for center-weighted or spot metering. That way I know exactly what the meter is “seeing.” Instead of aiming it at mid-tones, I aim toward the brightest areas (exclusive of the sun or other light sources, of course). As long as I include a few mid-tones in the measurement area and lock-in the exposure, the highlights are still bright, but seldom to the point of clipping.

There are other things you can do, such as reducing the camera’s contrast and saturation settings, but I find the above four suggestions to have the most significant benefits. Other E-510 users should feel free to contribute their insights too. In the meantime, if you’d like to see some examples of how well these suggestions work, check out my gallery of London photos.

This "before" picture represents what you get straight out of the camera if you don't meter for the sky. If you were shooting JPEGs, this is what you'd be stuck with. There would be no way to rescue the lost detail in the sky.

The "after" version shows what the same file looks like after adjusting the exposure and recovery sliders in Adobe Camera Raw, tweaking the contrast a bit, and cropping. The whole process took less than 30 seconds. Some of the sky is still blown out, but it looks much better. It would have been even better if I had exposed for the sky to begin with.

Such adjustments would be a drag if you had to do it for every shot, but in practice you'd either save them for the keepers or you'd use a batch processor such as Lightroom. Also keep in mind that the sky was only about a stop overexposed. Any more than that and the brightest highlights would be difficult or impossible to recover without making the darker tones look bad

In the next installment I’ll conclude with reflections about what a like about shooting with the E-510—and what I don’t.

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Gordon Lewis has over 20 years experience as a journalist, photographer, scriptwriter and instructional designer. His articles and photographs have been published in Camera 35, Petersen’s Photographic, Camera & Darkroom, and Popular Photography. His television credits include comedy hits such as Amen, A Different World, Family Matters, and In Living Color. Having exhausted all reservoirs of humor, he now designs online training for corporate clients. Gordon resides with his wife and three children just north of Philadelphia, the birthplace of freedom and current murder capital of the USA.