The Online Photographer

Last One Out, Please Turn On the Light

Richard Nicholson's survey of London's last remaining professional darkrooms. If you've spent half as many hours in half as many darkrooms as I have, you'll know how pleasing and poignant I find some of these pics. Good for Richard for documenting some of them before they're gone.

Mike
(Thanks to els)

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Featured Comment by Dogman: "After years of working in various darkrooms, both in the workplace and in bathrooms at various residences, I finally settled into having a very nice one at my current home. After years of making do with what I could afford in a home darkroom, I finally bought really good equipment—an expensive enlarger, superb German lenses, an archival washer, a professional easel, etc. Stuff I envied in my youth. And now I haven't printed in over a year. I only use the darkroom for loading film—I still shoot a few rolls of black and white regularly.

"I miss the soft amber light, the smells, the digits clicking off on the timer and the still-magic-after-decades of an image coming up in the developer. And, most of all, I miss the solitude of working without all the distractions out there in the light. But somewhere along the line, I got old. My knees ache, my back hurts and my eyes don't see as well in low light. I also got impatient. I have little interest in the technology, but I can muddle through digital imaging well enough to satisfy my current requirements.

"Like Joni Mitchell said '...something lost but something gained in living every day.'"

SoFoBoMo '09

Portland: A Love Letter by Amy Sakurai, from SoFoBoMo '08

Edited from the press release:

SoFoBoMo is short for Solo Photo Book Month—a group event where a bunch of photographers all make solo photo books start to finish in 31 days, at more or less the same time. It's modeled loosely on NaNoWriMo, where participating writers all write novels in a month, and NaSoAlMo, where musicians write and record solo albums in a month.

So far 137 people have signed up for SoFoBoMo '09. View a list of all SoFoBoMo '09 participants.

For SoFoBoMo, the goal is to make the photos, write any needed text, lay out the book, and produce a .PDF of the book, all in 31 days. Rather than confining it to a single calendar month, we use a 'fuzzy month,' where you can pick any contiguous 31 day period inside a two month window—this makes it a bit more flexible and encourages broader participation.

Why should you participate in SoFoBoMo? There are a lot of reasons.

A lot of photographers have considered doing a book, but various concerns have stopped them. Heck, the same concerns stopped us. We worried that our photos weren't good enough. We worried that we didn't have enough photos. We worried that we couldn't write decent text, or couldn't do a decent job of layout, or that we didn't have the time to do a good job.

SoFoBoMo gives us (and you) an end run around those fears. There's no requirement that the photos be good. (But we suspect you'll be surprised by how good yours are if you participate.) There's no requirement to have any text at all. And there is no requirement on quality of layout. There are just three constraints: all the work must be done in one 31-day stretch that falls completely inside the two month window; the book must contain at least 35 photos; and you have to generate a .PDF of the book. That's it.

SoFoBoMo was started by Paul Butzi, but it exists because of the efforts of all the participants. There are no fees, so we don't collect money. Bottom line: SoFoBoMo is a bunch of photographers all around the world who want experience turning their photos into books, and all do it at the same time to help one another be successful. No one is excluded. Everyone is free to participate. The more, the merrier!

If you're uncertain, take a look at Gordon McGregor's essay on why you should participate. And then go and sign up.

Mike
(Thanks to Paul)

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Welcome News for Rangefinder Fans

The news out of Japan overnight is that Epson is going to be re-introducing, in April, the Cosina-made R-D1 digital rangefinder camera that it discontinued two years ago. The new camera, called the R-D1xG, is essentially the same as the old one. It is modified somewhat in that it will have a larger 2.5" viewing screen, "improved shutter feel," and support for SDHC cards, but the Adorama News Desk says it will have the same 6-MP CCD APS-C (1.5X crop) sensor as before.

Before you get too excited, it's currently for the Japanese market only, and there's already a price on the Epson Japan website—300,000 yen, which translates to US$3,000+. That doesn't mean it would sell for the same price here, but it's an indication of the ballpark.

Old wine in new bottles? Still, choice is good.

Mike
(Thanks to J.W. Newton and others)

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Featured [partial] Comment by Olivier Giroux: "It's depressing really. Is there a rule that says all digital rangefinders have to be thinly veiled attempts at grabbing cash from the specially price insensitive?"

Winship Website

I heard from Vanessa Winship the other day in response to our "Random Excellence" posting about her. Among other things, she tells me that her ISP has upped the bandwidth of her website (although it's still a bit slow to load for me) because we inundated the site with traffic. So if you had trouble visiting the other day, carve out a little time today and go to her website and look at some of her pictures. I really don't think you'll be disappointed.

Mike

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Random Excellence: Eric Etheridge

Freedom Rider Miller Green was a high school student in Jackson, Mississippi, when he was arrested on July 6th, 1961. Today he lives in Chicago. Contemporary portrait by Eric Etheridge. From the book Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. Miller recently joined Eric as he gave talks about the book at public libraries in Cleveland, Ohio, and Flint and Kalamazoo, Michigan.

"In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans—blacks and whites, men and women—converged on Jackson, Mississippi, to challenge state segregation laws. The Freedom Riders, as they came to be known, were determined to open up the South to civil rights.... Over 300 people were arrested and convicted of the charge 'breach of the peace.'

"The name, mug shot, and other personal details of each Freedom Rider arrested were duly recorded and saved by agents of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission...what is clear, forty-six years later, is that by carefully recording names and preserving the mug shots, the Commission inadvertently created a testament to these heroes of the civil rights movement."

Mike
(Thanks to Scott Kirkpatrick)

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Featured Comment by Steve Rosenbach: "Thanks for highlighting this book, Mike. I was an 11-year-old in 1961, and I remember the Civil Rights struggles through the early to mid-1960's very well. We've come a long way, but books like this make sure we remember what it was like and what it took to get here.

"I generally like 'where-are-they-now' books, but this one is much more weighty and serious. The layout seems very good—here's a sample two-page spread:

"Beautiful B&W photography, and of course, the subjects of these photos are great and brave Americans, whom it is right to honor with such a magnificent book."

Featured Comment by Eric Etheridge: "Mike, thanks for the shoutout.

"For folks who are interested, there are more pictures, and material I gathered that I didn't have room for in the book, here: breachofpeace.com."

The Olympus E-620: More About Art's Filters

Picture from the U.K. Photo Safari Focus on Imaging meet-up (see link below).

Well, okay, maybe I got a bit carried away yesterday in trashing Art's filters in the new E-620. (I had fun, though. As Craig Ferguson says, amused myself, and that's half the battle.) But while I'm not against having fun with cameras, there are lots of good arguments against in-camera "Art" filters (I'll never be able to write that without quotation marks). Most of them have to do with the same arguments I have against in-camera JPEG processing in general, which is that if you start off with the best, deepest, most flexible file the camera can give you, then you can do anything you want with it after the fact without limiting yourself: you can make a highly saturated version and a high-contrast black-and-white version and a fuzzy vignetted version and a high-res version for printing and a severely compressed version for the web and so forth. It's one of the advantages of digital—no penalty for generational copies. Why toss that away by letting the camera do the processing?

Second, arbitrary "filters" like that have no integrity. They're mimicking the look of something they're not. For me, the entire charm of particular processes lies in the fact that the process makes the picture look the way it does. Mimickry has no integrity. Of course, if you don't mind pine boards painted to look like marble, vinyl printed to look like wood grain, plastic chrome-plated so it looks like metal, and on and on, then probably you will blithely accept digital files massaged to look like pinhole photographs and so forth. Not for me.

Finally, it has to do with the way I practice (and understand) photography. Photography is like fishing—you're only going to catch but so many keepers, and it's never going to be anything but a minuscule percentage of all the keepers out there. Was it Boubat who said something like "If I knew how to take a good picture, I'd do it every time"? You never know when you're going to take a good picture. If you've developed a way of looking at the world, if you have visual concerns, a visual taste of your own, a body of work that you're adding to one picture at a time—a body of work that needs to have its own internal consistency—then you just don't want to have the wrong camera with you or the wrong film in the camera when you're out working...or the wrong "film" in the camera, i.e., the wrong "Art" filter switched on. If you were out shooting and something magical happened to you and you took the best picture of your life, would you rather be shooting on raw or with some dumb goofy filter automatically applied to the file that makes a hokey fake-looking little JPEG out of it?

Maybe I'm misreading the way the camera works...maybe you can shoot on a "Raw + Stupid JPEG" mode, and then these arguments would be moot. I don't know. I haven't dug that far into the specifications. I know I don't want to shoot with visions of "Art" filters blinkering the way I see, I can say that much. But suit yourself.

Obviously, though, this has relatively little to do with the Olympus E-620, because you don't have to use the "Art" filters at all. The E-30 is a tasty-looking camera, and if the E-620 lives up to its considerable promise (I liked the E-510 quite a lot), then it'll be a winner. (I'd be super-tempted to use the Olympus system myself if it only offered the lens I need. I love the look of the files. The lack of lens options is the only thing that keeps that door shut to me. But it's shut tight. That's really just me.)

Brian Mosley passed along a great set of initial reactions written by the U.K. Photo Safari group after they got to pass the new camera around amongst themselves. (Brian himself seems to be of the opinion that Olympus has poured everything that's good about a number of its recent cameras into one model in the E-620.) Worth reading if you're interested in the camera.

Mike

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ADDENDUM: It was Doisneau, not Boubat, and it does appear to be the case that "Art" filters can be shot as RAW+JPEG and not applied to the raw file. (Thanks to Miserere and marlof.) —MJ

Canon Notes

My friends at B&H Photo sends word that they just received another batch of Canon 5D Mark II bodies, for a nickel less than $2,700 and free shipping. Just passin' the news along.

Mike

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Shepard Fairey and Mannie Garcia on NPR

Shepard Fairey at the National Portrait Gallery. Photo by Jewel Samad.

National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" program will be interviewing artist Shepard Fairey, who created the Obama "HOPE" poster, and photographer Mannie Garcia on the issue of Fairey's alleged copyright infringement of Garcia's photograph of Barack Obama. It's on today—here's the schedule—and unless I misread the website, the audio will be available online as of 3 p.m. Eastern Time this afternoon.

Mike
(Thanks to Doug Fisher)

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Steve's Digicams Sold

Steve Sanders, founder and principal reviewer of Steves-Digicams.com, one of the original big digital camera review sites, announced on Tuesday that the website has been sold to Internet Brands, an internet media company. Internet Brands, which owns a portfolio of more than 100 web properties and e-commerce sites, had revenues of $104 million in 2008, up from $89 million the year before. Steve's Digicams publishes more than 100 digital camera reviews a year. The site was founded 12 years ago, and is known for excellent review summaries and for pioneering the first "Digital Photo of the Day" contest.

The sale price has not been disclosed, but Internet Brands did reveal that it purchased CVTips.com, GrooveJob.com, Steves-Digicams.com, and SellMyCar.com in Q4 2008 for an aggregate price of $2.8 million.

Mike

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The Miner and the Copper

The picture might not even be known to many people outside the U.K., but in Britain it's one of the best-known press photos of recent decades: a moment of good humor and seeming rapport between a policeman and a miner, in the midst of a bitter strike that was ugly and all too often violent.

For many years, the identities of the miner and the officer weren't known; they weren't to the late Don McPhee, the famous British newspaper photographer who took the picture. But now, writes Martin Wainright in The Guardian, thanks to the efforts of a BBC Executive's assistant named Lucy Smickersgill, the identities of the two men have been discovered.

The miner was George "Geordie" Brealey, who died young (age 53) in 1997 from choking on an egg sandwich after having suffered a series of strokes, but who is fondly remembered by his many friends for his ready smile and sense of humor—including the way he would pretend to "inspect" the police, dressed in the toy bobbie's helmet he acquired on a family outing.

The policeman was Paul Castle (shown above in a more recent photo from his website), who now lives in Tennessee and runs a "Tactical Training & Research" company called Sabre, Inc. Paul Castle now doesn't recall his feelings or the mood at the moment the photo was taken. Although he says he had sympathy during the miners' strike for "the decent human people [who] just got pulled into the middle of it all," he thinks that, at the time, he would have been more interested in crowd safety than anything else.

But the last word on the human aspect of the encounter, fittingly, is in the photographs—the negatives surrounding the shot on Don McPhee's contact sheet. The famous photo is the second of four, and the last two show Officer Castle laughing, as Geordie Brealey continues to clown.

Mike
(Thanks to Gavin McLelland)

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Featured Comment by Neil Castle: "The Police officer in this photo (Paul Castle) is my father. I was unaware of said photo's existence or importance until a few hours ago. I feel a little dizzy."

Olympus E-620: Small Gem (with a Flaw)

It might have PMA all to itself: First the good news. Olympus's new DSLR, the E-620, is a thoughtful evolution of its popular E-x10/20 series said to incorporate many of the ramped-up performance features of the fine mid-level E-30, for a mere entry-level price. It has an articulated viewing screen, two card slots, four different aspect ratios (including square!), and, as you can perhaps see better from this shot at fourthirdsuser.com, it's an unusually handsome little bugger, basically the size of the small E-420 with bolder, more finely judged features and, reportedly, a sturdier, more de luxe build. Furthermore, it is not crippled in the manner of all Canons and all Nikons, in that it has body-integral image stabilization, which we applaud. It's a very nice compact size, and only one pound. We're all for one-pound cameras. (The Japanese website betrays its target in the home market, showing the camera in a fru-fru white-and-red half-case and being caressed by female hands.)

Banner from the Olympus Japan website.

Who is this guy 'Art' and why does he have such awful taste? And now for the bad news. In a move sure to ratchet up the demand for cameras that don't shoot JPEGs at all, the new Olympus inherits from its recently-introduced bigger sibling six horrible "Art" Filters—the name a pox on the word—for those who want their cameras to add some strange quanta called Creativity to their photos automatically and effortlessly. And thoughtlessly, and arbitrarily, and idiotically, and.... Here at TOP we question the omission of the painting-on-black-velvet filter, the LeRoy-Neiman-acrylics-with-a-palette-knife filter, and the filter that makes the eyes of juvenile humans and pets ten times too big. Oh, Olympus—seat of the gods, home of the legendary Yoshihisa Maitani, lenscrafter par excellence—how you sully yourself, in a craven grovel to Mammon. We assume users can "just not use" the "Art" Filters, but the question is, does the camera emit any unpleasant odor just on account of they're in there? We'll have to await further reports. Oh, and the E-620 has face detection too, perfect for people who cannot tell in the tiny viewfinder which parts of the view are the humans. Bah and hum and bug to proliferating feature creep, which skips along on its merry meander from disease to pandemic.

There, now I feel better. Art Filters. Harrumph. Sounds like satire I wrote fifteen years ago.

Other than that, though, looks like it might turn out to be a nice little camera.

Mike
(Illustration: Hockey action shot with LeRoy Neiman Art Filter "On")

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Featured Comment by mcananeya: "I wants."

Year Upon Year

It's my birthday today. By rights, the candles on the cake should spell out "O-L-D." (Actually the cake was discreet and delicious, my birthday celebration as lovely as anyone could ask, at my brother and sister-in-law's, surrounded by loved ones—including dear Mom, in from Massachusetts, which was a treat.) Time is a cheat, though, for sure. Not only does it keep up its inexorable march, year upon year, when you just wish it would hold off and take a break from time to time, but it actually seems to accelerate, as each year becomes incrementally a smaller percentage of a life.

Maybe buy yourself a present today, to help support my little website? Okay, that's this month's mention.

Mike

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A Bit More About Ritz

By Eamon Hickey

The basic commodity that kept most U.S. camera stores alive in the 1980s and 1990s was the 3 1/2 x 5 (or 4 x 6)-inch print. At the camera store where I went to work in 1987, we could make one such print in our minilab for about three or four cents in materials cost. We sold them for 36 cents each. Everybody who shot a roll of color negative film bought 24 or 36 of them, or double that if they ordered double prints. (At least customers usually got a discount on the second set). And they bought those 24 or 36 or 48 or 72 prints even if only two pictures on the roll turned out to be any good at all.

Obviously, there was some labor cost to account for (the lab rats and guys like me who took the customer's order), and the cost of the minilab itself (nearly always leased). But a minilab was a potentially viable business at 25–30 rolls a day, a good profit maker if you could get your roll count above 50 a day, and a gold mine if you could get over 100 rolls a day.

Larger operations like Costco or Walmart that were more ruthless about cost reduction (i.e., bought cheaper paper in larger quantities) would have gagged at our 3–4 cent per print cost. They probably paid less than two cents. Even if they cut their selling price to twenty cents a print—roughly $4.99 to develop and print a roll of 24-exposure film—that's still an 80–90% profit margin before labor costs.

This was the fundamental economic fact of the photo industry in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere) in the 1980s and '90s following the invention of the minilab (by Noritsu in 1976, according to Noritsu) and its rapid widespread adoption. It roughly coincided with the widespread advent of heavy retail discounting on hard goods—cameras and lenses—which took root in the 1970s. By the time I was hawking Nikons, Canons, Minoltas, and Yashicas (remember them?) at retail in 1990, our store was selling cameras for about 5–10% more than we paid for them, and we were fairly typical for camera retailers in the U.S.

Used Noritsu minilabs for sale cheap at alibaba.com.

Many people, especially people in the jewelry and clothing businesses, didn't believe that. How, they asked, could you pay employees and keep the phone bill paid on that gross profit margin? Well, those cameras magically caused a subset of our customers to regularly walk in and buy batches of 24 or 36 3x5-inch prints of mostly bad pictures. That's how we sold cameras for essentially no profit and kept the lights on.

Although this basic dynamic was true in varying degrees for most camera stores in the U.S. (not the mail order giants, notably), it was absolutely the foundation of Ritz's business model. This was especially true during Ritz's aggressive expansionist phase in the mid-1990s when they bought out hundreds of local camera stores around the U.S. (One article I read on the Ritz bankruptcy mentions the Inkley's chain of stores, which was for a time my biggest account when I was a Nikon sales rep. Ritz bought them out, and I had to watch several hundred thousand dollars worth of business disappear from my commission statements. I'm not bitter. Really.)

Ritz wasn't buying stores to sell cameras; they were buying locations to operate minilabs.

So this is what Ritz means when it says that digital photography hurt its business so badly. Prints made from digital files on a digital minilab are almost certainly every bit as profitable as prints from negatives were, but they're nowhere near as numerous. Now, photographers might print the two or three shots out of 50 that are good. Or they might print them themselves, at home or the office. Or they might just put them on Flickr, and not print them at all.

Eamon

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A State of Alarums

It was 18 degrees F this morning and the ground is covered with snow, but when I was driving my son to school this morning I saw a kid walking to school dressed in shoes, a parka, gloves, and shorts.

In other local news, the dog very enthusiastically called my attention to a pheasant in my backyard last week. Right here in the middle of town! It was a big, beautiful bird, with a flowing tail, and it was trying without much success to leave. Consensus amongst the neighbors is that it was a confused pheasant, probably lost or otherwise estranged from the wildlife refuge on the edge of town, where they get fed cracked corn.

And not long ago there was a home invasion here in my part of Wisconsin—by a goat. It seems a woman heard a "commotion" at her door, which she took for knocking. When she opened her door, a "strange" goat pushed its way in. (A rude strange goat.) It then proceeded to make its way about her house, knocking things over and generally causing an uproar. In the recording of her 911 call, the homeowner was quite volubly upset. She had many complaints about the goat's behavior. I wish I could somehow replicate for you the very distinctive way one says "goat" with a heavy Wisconsin accent when one is in a state of alarums. But—and this is somehow very typically Wisconsin—after she got to know it, the woman decided it was a nice goat, and that she liked it, so at last report she has decided to keep it. If no one claims it.

And if it wants to stay, of course.

In statewide news, it turns out that our government has been taking Federal anti-terrorism money for quite some time now, but not actually spending any money on anti-terrorism measures. While not strictly ethical on the face of things, this has a certain hard-headed practicality. We have more pressing things to spend money on, and we really don't have all that much here worth blowing up. And besides, it's too darned cold for terrorists.

Mike

Featured Comment by John Camp: "You have dozens of vulnerable cheese factories."

Rights at the Pawnshop

I'm running the risk of categorizing myself as being too outspoken a critic of Annie Leibovitz, and I must say that personally I wish her well and admire her accomplishments. Mealy-mouth aside, people might find this interesting—to continue yesterday's theme of economic news. Read the first paragraph.

Although how the phrase "it's very discreet" (a few paragraphs further down) then applies, I'm not exactly sure. What's less discreet than having your personal business splashed across the pages of the Times?

If you're interested in this sort of thing, there's a book about this general subject that's been getting some great reviews and press lately. Can't tell you much more about it—I've got it on order. I have a feeling it's right up my alley, though. If it really does help answer the question "What makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored?" then I'll enjoy it, because that's something that often perplexes me.

Mike
(Thanks to Rich Read)

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Ritz Camera Seeks Bankruptcy Protection

By Randall Chase, Business Week

Dover, Delaware—Ritz Camera Centers, the nation's largest retail photography chain, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The Beltsville, Md.-based company submitted its filing Sunday in federal bankruptcy court in Wilmington, estimating assets and liabilities at between $100 million and $500 million. The list of its top 30 unsecured creditors is led by Nikon Inc. and Canon USA Inc., which are owed a combined $40 million in trade debt.

The company said revenue from its profitable photofinishing business has declined significantly with the shift from film to digital cameras, and that 2008 holiday sales were "materially lower" than prior year sales. It also said an increase in gasoline prices, along with other economic factors, led to a sharp drop in sales in its Boater's World recreational marine business last year.

Ritz has about 800 photo stores in 40 states, operating as Ritz Camera, Wolf Camera, Kits Cameras, Inkley's and The Camera Shops....

READ ON at businessweek.com

Mike
(Thanks to Les Hibbert and Jeffrey Greer)

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OT: The Great Race

Britain's Dee Caffari on the racing yacht Aviva gestures to supporters after her 99 days at sea. Photo by Olivier Blanchet

Congratulations to Dee Caffari of the United Kingdom, whose sixth-place finish in the Vendée Globe 'round-the-world sailing race made her the first woman ever to successfully sail solo and nonstop around the world in both directions. She accomplished the feat only 18 months after taking up sailing in Open 60s...which is like placing sixth at the 24 hours of Le Mans 18 months after getting your driver's license.

Her countrywoman Samantha Davies finished fourth, another splendid accomplishment. Arnaud Boissières placed seventh, Brian Thompson fifth, and Armel Le Cléac´h second.

Michel Desjoyeaux and Foncia triumphantly approach the finish line at Les Sables-d'Olonne, France, in the Bay of Biscay. Photo by Jacques Vapillon

The race was won this year by Michel Desjoyeaux of France in the yacht Foncia in an official time of 84 days, 3 hours, 9 minues, 8 seconds.

Skipper Marc Guillemot of the Safran, the third-place finisher. An Open 60 is a glorified surfboard, designed for sledding down 80-foot waves in the Southern Ocean. Photo by Jean Marie Liot

The Vendée Globe (which, like the Olympics, takes place once every four years) is one of the world's most arduous and hazardous sporting events. The rules are simple: you must sail around the would, alone, without aid or pause.

Of the thirty skippers who started the race, seven have finished, four are at sea (including Rich Wilson and Great American III, the only American entry), eighteen have retired, and one, defending champion Vincent Riou, is at Puerto Williams having been dismasted in a successful attempt to go to the aid of a fellow sailer in distress, Jean le Cam. (At the tip of Cape Horn, in Tierra del Fuego, Puerto Williams is the southernmost town in the world.) Under the rules of international sailing, Riou has been given redress, which means he will be able to continue the race when his boat is repaired. Redress is given when a racer has to change course to attempt a search or rescue.

Jean Le Cam's VM Matériaux capsized off Cape Horn, January 7th. Photo courtesy of the Chilean Navy

Rich Wilson on Riou's coming to the aid of Le Cam: "Huge relief at hearing the news of Jean Le Cam's rescue. The whole episode was 200 miles east of where we capsized in 1990, so that brought back many scary memories, of the dark, the cold, the water, inside the boat. I think that Jean Le Cam showed incredible courage, courage beyond description, to depart the bow compartment. Think of it, he must have had to go down into the cold water, the survival suit wanting to buoy him upward, against the deck, sails in the water, or ropes or stays, could trap him, or tangle him, or hook onto him, he would have had to go down deeper to get past the lifelines and outside the perimeter of the boat to then get back to the stern to hopefully climb on the bottom and hold onto a rudder. He really had no idea what he would find then. He had heard Vincent, but...stunning courage, no words to describe...and Vincent, to make 3 passes and on the fourth push it so close to save his friend that he damages his own boat, deck spreader against the keelfin, to do anything for a friend, what skill, what courage he showed himself. Speechless here...."

An Open 60 in ideal conditions can reach speeds of around 40 knots, about the speed of an average small speedboat of the type used for waterskiing (albeit a considerably hairier ride!).

More race photos here.

Mike

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Great Expectations

By Ctein

Grazing the technical papers on the DxO website, I've been struck by how radically standards of acceptability have changed in the past decade. The level of image quality serious amateurs and professionals feel a camera should deliver is incredibly higher now than it was at the turn of the century. Exposure range is one good example. People consider 10 stops inadequate (although that's 1–2 stops better than the very best transparency film ever gave you).

Readers who have never made darkroom prints should understand that attractively conveying more than seven stops of exposure range in a print was a serious endeavor, requiring substantial effort. Few bothered. Getting 10 stops was barely possible, especially if you wanted the photographs to actually look good (as opposed to merely being technical tours de force). The kind of tone control that digital printing from film offers makes it a lot easier to make good aesthetic use of a longer exposure range, but 10 stops is still around the upper limit without things starting to look very, very odd.

Yet, many consider 12-stop digital ranges (better than any film processed normally) barely adequate. Sure, the digital characteristic curve has that ugly brick wall it runs into in the highlights, but that's a matter of nailing down one's metering technique (something many photographers haven't internalized, it's true). People who do understand proper digital metering, though, are still demanding longer exposure range.

Similarly, the DxO baseline standard of quality for an acceptable low light image is, so far as I can tell (I haven't tested enough cameras have a really solid feel for this) not only well beyond what could be achieved with 35mm format film, I think it's better than anything that could be achieved with medium format film (with the possible exception of exposure range). It's an insanely high standard of quality. Yet, from what I read in comments, here, I don't think it's out of line with what sane people genuinely expect.

For what very little it's worth, my current camera, a Fuji S100fs, whose low light performance makes me happy because it's definitely better than 35mm film, would probably rate about ISO 300 on the DxO low-light scale of acceptability, EWAG*. Then I look at something like the Sony A900, which a lot of people downrate for its relatively poor low light performance, and it's two stops better than that! I know that would make me delirious, and I'm pretty picky about these things...but then my expectations have been colored by years and years of (serious) available-light film work.

 
Both these photographs were made at ISO 800. The top photograph was made with a Fuji S00sf  digital camera; the bottom with a 35mm camera on Fuji NPZ800  film.

Extreme blowups (covering only a bit more than 1% of the frame area) of both photographs shows how much better the noise/"grain" is in the Fuji digital photo than in the Fuji film photo.

Understand that this is not meant to disparage, in any way, other people's expectations. Expectations have always risen as photography's improved, and film photographers of the late 20th century (including me) would have thought it ludicrous if anyone suggested that they should be satisfied with the standards of the first half of the century. I am not belittling changes in expectations. I am only astonished at how huge they've been in the span of less than 10 years. I might even argue that this indicates a truly qualitative change in the craft. Yes, it's all photography, but in some important ways I'm pondering the notion that digital photography may have as little in common with silver-based photography as wet glass plate photography does with dry film.

Ctein

*extremely wild-ass guess

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Random Excellence: Paul De Zan

A brief but spectacular aerial tour of San Francisco, California. Regular TOP reader Paul De Zan shot these yesterday afternoon from his "faithful steed," using a Nikon D40 and 18–55mm VR lens. He says, "conditions were so good I didn't have to fly the airplane much."

Mike

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Random Excellence: Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship, Untitled, from Imagined States and Desires, A Balkan Journey

By far my favorite photographer of the past six months or so is the lavishly talented Vanessa Winship, a British photographer who has worked mostly in the Balkans, mainly Bulgaria and Turkey. I've bought both her books, Sweet Nothings and Schwarzes Meer (Black Sea). The latter especially, available only from Amazon Germany, is just wonderful. (Enter "Schwarzes Meer" or "Vanessa Winship" in the search field.) The reproduction quality is very good, and the book is a treasure, a much better way than the web to see the work. You can get a pretty good idea of her work and her concerns from her website, however. I find myself returning to it again and again, although I feel an almost visceral desire to see her original prints at exhibition sizes. The website never seems to work quite right for me, so some patience might be required.

Winship seems to be a spiritual descendant of Koudelka. She's one of those rare photographers whose work obliterates the bulwarks between documentary honesty and exquisite personal art ("between chronicle and fiction," as she says). A big hat tip to Stan Banos, who first clued me in to this photographer and her superb work.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Guy Batey: "An exhibition of prints from Sweet Nothings is on at Host Gallery in London at the moment. Even better than the book."

Featured Comment by Mike C.: "I know how annoying (and how beside the point) these "if you like X I'm sure you'll love Y" comments are, but I'm going to do it anyway...ff you like Vanessa Winship I think you'll love Marketa Luskacova, whose book published by Torst is still available, beautifully produced, and full of astounding work in that rich Koudelka vein. I've been on a mission to make her work more well known ever since I got a copy of Pilgrims, another astounding book (some of the images in there are better than Koudelka).

"But now I'll go and have another look at Vanessa's work, which I agree is very good."

Featured Comment by Judith Wallerius: "Her pictures are wonderful. I was lucky enough to hear and see her speak at the Lumix Festival in Hannover, Germany last year. For her presentation she showed her pictures while reading personal texts about how she grew up, and it was incredibly poetic. You can see the whole lecture at the festival's website (short introduction in German, 40 min. video).

"The festival went over a couple of days and many of the photographers who were invited to speak also stayed to listen, and watch. At some point I approached her to tell her how wonderful I thought her work and presentation was. This is not something I'd usually do, partly because I'd wonder what it could possibly mean to someone as accomplished as Vanessa Winship when some random audience-member comes to tell her how great her photos are. But as I was really touched by her work I seized a quiet minute to tell her so, and I was lucky. The quiet gentleness so tangible in the photographs is there just as much when you meet her in person. She very gracefully accepted my compliments and we talked for a while, and I was happy to see that she is not someone impressed by her own success but instead reflective about her work, sometimes even unsure, trying to reach people with her photographs and searching to inspire others with what she does. She certainly inspired me, and telling from the stunned silence at the end of her presentation, everyone else in the audience, too.

"I remembered that encounter when I read the post in January about how it's not always a good idea to meet your heroes because they might be jerks. Definitely not true here. Of course I can't claim to know Vanessa Winship from one short meeting (and don't know what she's like in everyday life) but from all I can say the work rings very true of the artist that created it."