The Online Photographer

So You Want to Make Money with your Photography

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 Introduction: a few days ago I mentioned that my next-door neighbor here in Wisconsin, Todd Sattersten, happens to be the co-author of a new "book about books," The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You. I asked Todd if he'd write a post for TOP recommending a select few business books that pertain to the kinds of business problems that photographers contend with. Here are his recommendations. —MJ

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By Todd Sattersten

Let me start with dispelling two falsehoods that persist about entrepreneurship:

Myth #1: Nine out of 10 businesses fail in the first five years. This myth has been dispelled by research from the Small Business Administration, but the message persists. StartupNation by Jeff Sloan and Rich Sloan reported that 40% of companies where thriving after three years, and only 18% had filed for bankruptcy. Startups That Work by Joel Kurtzman presents more definitive data from a study conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers that quantifies the failure rate at less than 6%.

Myth #2: You should start the company by yourself. Most entrepreneurs leave their jobs because they don’t want to work for or with anyone. This is dangerous. The data is clear that companies founded by more than one person are more successful and grow faster. David Gage, in his book The Partnership Charter, says that 94% of hyper-growth companies have two or more founders.* The Kurtzman research also chimes in on this idea, saying that "Founding teams with a diverse set of skills tend to be far more successful than a single founding entrepreneur, especially if the members of the team worked together previously and had complementary skills and personalities."

So, start now and find a friend.

But, of course, it's not that easy. Being in business is about more than shooting pictures or baking bread or fixing cars. Taken mostly from The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, here are five books to help turn your hobby and passion into a business:

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber—Gerber’s message is that most new business owners don’t have a problem with the technical parts of the business, but fall down with the managerial and entrepreneurial parts. He says business should be built like franchises are, with strong systems that allow repeatable results.

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition by Al Ries and Jack Trout—What is the first company you think of when I say "MP3 player"? Apple owns that space with its iPod product line. The authors say that this first-in-mind spot creates enormous market advantages.** And if you can’t replace the market leader, redefine the category. Become the best children’s photographer in your Zip Code, for example.

Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith—Selling services is very different from selling products. Beckwith says everything hinges on the quality of the service and making the value of the service concrete in the customer’s mind. This is a great book that is a quick read and will change your view of marketing your services.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin—Once you have the message for your business, you need one person to tell the next. Godin says that the companies, products, and ideas that win are the ones that spread the furthest. Same holds true for your reputation. Do something remarkable; people will talk.

The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham—Most entrepreneurship books just don't deliver. The wide variability in fledgling businesses makes it nearly impossible to write a universal prescription for success. Books about the entrepreneur who made it big are often filled with more celebrity and celebration than hard-won lessons and real life pain. The Knack is the exception. This new book just came out in December 2008 and was not included In The 100 Best, but the rich and relatable stories are the same ones that have made Brodsky and Burlingham's "Street Smarts" column in Inc. magazine so compelling over the last 14 years. The opening story alone is worth the price of admission.

Todd
Todd's website

*This is just anecdotal, but one thing I've noticed over the years is that many successful pro photographers are actually husband-and-wife teams. It's more often the case that the wife is some combination of bookkeeper, studio manager, secretary, marketer, scheduler, fixer of lunches, etc., but I've known more than one couple (including one very high-profile one) where a husband performed those tasks for his photographer wife. —MJ

**Strong positioning is essentially what I was recommending in this essay. —MJ

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Kodak Ektar 100 in 120

On Tuesday, in response to photographers' requests, Kodak announced that it will be making its premier color negative film, Ektar 100, available in 120 (medium format, as I don't have to tell you if you're at all interested in this post). Ektar 100, the descendant of the very high-performance but somewhat temperamental Ektar 25, is Kodak's sharpest and finest-grained film, and is excellent for both enlarging and scanning. Coming in April.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Smith)

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Photogs Flee Facebook

A press firestorm has been unleashed in the wake of consumerist.com's outing of a new policy by the social networking site Facebook. According to the site's new terms of use, anything you post on Facebook is owned by Facebook in perpetuity, even after you cancel your Facebook account.

Would such a claim hold up in court? "Yep!" says photoattorney.com, which emphasizes in no uncertain terms: photographers should not post their work on Facebook!

Spread the word.

Mike
(Thanks to Rachel and Amadou)

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ADDENDUM: Compare to Google's Picasa: "9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf." (Thanks to snowmoon on consumerist for this.)

Featured Comment by Matt: "As of today they've retracted their new TOS so that they can re-think them."

Mike replies: The old TOS still sucks. As far as I can tell—and I might be wrong—the old TOS said, basically, "We own your stuff as long as you're a member here." The new TOS said, "We own your stuff even if you take it down and even if you cancel your membership."

Featured Comment by Tom Passin: "On the other hand, this is the internet. As Tim Bray pointed out, You can't control where things will go. They get copied, potentially, many times by many people. They get reposted, all kinds of things. You can't stop it.

"Yes, Facebook shouldn't be asserting rights to your content. But you really can't control its spread once it gets on the internet, either."

Featured Comment by Mark Roberts: "Several people have pointed out that it's easy for anyone to appropriate your images once they're on the web. This misses the point. If a high school student in Nebraska uses your photo on his web page, you may be annoyed but you haven't lost any of your rights or any money. If Coca Cola used your image in an ad without paying you could sue and get money—and unlike the high school student, they have enough money to make it worth your while. What Facebook's TOS does if give them the rights as well as the image: They can use your image in an ad and, even though they have enough money to be worth suing, you can't do so. Depending on the terms in the TOS, Facebook might even be able to sell your image to Coca Cola for an ad.

"Finally, it's worth noting that the TOS applies to all media. Although photographers seem to be the ones getting most upset, it may be musicians who have the most to lose. Imagine some band that becomes the next U2 or Coldplay. They get a recording contract and have a big hit...with a song that has also been on the Facebook page they started when no one had heard of them. The amount of money at stake there would make all our photographs' value look like pocket change by comparison.

"Facebook actively promotes itself to bands, offering 'unlimited uploads' of music. Given the growth of social media, it's not impossible that one of these bands could someday make it big."

Featured Comment by Joe Decker: "Tom Passin said: 'But you really can't control its spread once it gets on the internet, either.'

"I dunno. I found a one of my images being used as a CD cover (and on the internet as the album cover) at one point, I found it very easy to control that. I sent them a bill, and then, when I didn't get an answer (after two weeks of attempting contact with both the band and the record company), I sent a DMCA takedown notice to one of the sites hosting that album cover—a certain Amazon.com.

"Within an hour, I had payment.

"(I've had to resort to DMCA [the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 —Ed.] a couple times before, and I don't like many things about that law, but there are moments where it's a small photographer's best friend.)"

The Bold Print

Just for the record, any original verbal or graphical content posted on this site by the principal site author, Michael C. Johnston, is copyrighted and belongs to him, but beyond that this site makes absolutely no claim to any rights belonging to any other author, person, contributor or entity. Bylined authors (i.e., Geoff, Ctein, Carl, Eamon, etc.) own all of their own content; commenters own their comments; anyone posting a picture that they own to this site still owns it; and any photograph we post on this site, with or without permission, continues to belong to its owner before, during, and after our use of it as far as we're concerned.

        Cheers,

Mike J., TOP's Director of Protocol and Principal Policy Wank Wonk

New Leica WA and Finder

Leica has introduced a new compact wide-angle lens, the Super-Elmar-M 18mm ƒ/ 3.8 ASPH. It has an accessory finder, the Bright Line Finder M 18mm. The 8-element, 7-group lens weighs 11 ounces and incorporates an aspheric element. It's a full-frame lens that can be used with film M-mount cameras, or it has a 35mm-equivalent field of view of a 24mm lens on the digital M8.2. Available in March.

Mike

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Canon Introduces Widest-Ever Tilt-Shift Lens

Canon Europe this morning announced the new TS-E 17mm ƒ/4L tilt-shift lens, the widest-angle TS lens ever offered by anybody. There's also a new "II" version of the TS-E 24mm.

The major new feature is that the new lenses allow users to rotate the direction of the tilt and shift functions independently of each other. (They were always operable separately, just not independently rotatable.)

No word on price yet, but let's just say if you don't routinely depreciate new lenses, you're not in the target demographic. Then again, seeing as how we now do in software most of the things we used to do with the shift function of T-S lenses, these offerings are unabashedly for certain types of pros, architectural and product shooters mainly. Canon deserves a lot of credit for offerings like this, however. It understands that the availability of a wide range of lens options makes its whole system more attractive. In the past, I've known pros who switched brands just for T-S lenses, and I've known Nikon-shooting pros who bought whole Canon outfits just to use the TS-E lenses.

And you gotta admit, this is one cool-looking hunk of exotica!

Mike
(Thanks to Mahesh Venkitachalam)

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Featured Comment by Speed: "Canon has posted USA pricing: The TS-E 24mm ƒ/3.5L II is expected to ship in May for an estimated retail price of $2,199.00. The TS-E 17mm ƒ/4L is expected to ship in May for an estimated retail price of $2,499.00."

More on Dynamic Range

It seems like there's a lot of confusion out there about exactly what "dynamic range" is. It's just a not-very-good term for how much subject luminance range that a given film or sensor can capture at one go.

It gets back to looking at the world. For any given framing of the world in a camera viewfinder—call it a "view"—the subject within the frame will have a certain range of luminances. Let's say your view contains both a tree trunk in shadow as its darkest object and a patch of sunlit grass as its brightest object. Photographers tend to measure what Phil Davis called this subject brightness range (SBR) in stops (as you know, the term refers to a halving or doubling of the amount of light or the exposure). If the subject—your chosen view of the world—has a measured seven stops of difference (two to the seventh, or 1:128) between these darkest and lightest subject areas, then the SBR for that view is 7 stops.

An imager (film or sensor) typically has an engineered-in maximum capacity to record a range of brightnesses. That's what's known as its "dynamic range." (I'm going to go ahead and abbreviate dynamic range as "DR" here, but note that in sensitometry, DR means density range.) The important part of D(ynamic)R is not its absolute specification—although more is generally better and less is generally worse—but how well it matches up to the subject you're trying to record.

Books for What Ails You

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

There are lots of really interesting photo books out these days; these two might not appeal to everyone, but maybe you will like one or the other.

TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre (Sept. 2008)
10.9 x 9.3 inches

$60 ($37.80 at Amazon U.S.)

-       (£37.32 at Amazon U.K.)

This relatively compact volume is the catalog for the traveling exhibition, a joint project of George Eastman House and the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG). You'd have a hard time finding a better brief summary of pictorialism as a movement within photography. The exhibition includes prints from numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private collectors.

The first chapter following a series of plates is a perceptive essay by Eastman House curator Alison Nordström and archivist David Wooters that nicely summarizes pictorialism and its place in both photography and the broader world of representational art. Subsequent chapters discuss pictorialism in Japan, Australia and the Czech lands. There is also a sampling of the writings of prominent pictorialists.

The reproduction quality of the included images is quite good, given the obvious difficulty of emulating numerous different types of print. The paper stock is a smooth coated off-white, and reproductions are very nicely toned to match the widely varying 'colors' of the various monochrome prints in the exhibition. My only gripe is that the actual print form is listed in an appendix, rather than in the caption beneath each plate; you have to go to the back of the book to find out that Alvin Langdon Coburn's "Fifth Avenue from the St. Regis" is a platinum print.

The exhibition is currently at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, through May 31st. By all means see it if you're in the area. After several visits I can attest to the fidelity of the book's plates, though they are no substitute for seeing the actual prints. The largest portion of the works are platinum prints, though there are also a goodly number of silver gelatin and gum/bichromate prints, with a smattering of less common forms like bromoil. Some are printed on heavily textured paper for graphic effect, which is impossible to reproduce in book form. 

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House Calls with William Carlos
Williams, M.D.
Hardcover: 106 pages
Publisher: powerHouse Books (Sept. 2008)
8.3 x 6.5 inches

$29.95 ($21.86 at Amazon U.S.)

£19.99 (£13.19 at Amazon U.K.)

This little book is a brief account of the experience of then-medical student Robert Coles (now a leading child psychiatrist and sociologist and prolific author) going on house calls with the great physician and poet William Carlos Williams in the early 1950s. It includes some of Williams' poems. The book is beautifully illustrated with black & white photographs taken in 2006–2007 by Thomas Roma. The photographs show the still-standing New Jersey homes and buildings visited by Coles and Williams more than a half century ago. It's a modest tome, but the photographs show much of the same subtle grace and shabby grandeur displayed by George Tice's images of the same area.

I'm a rural family doctor who still makes house calls, occasionally with medical students, and this book simply nails it. It gets the sense of community, the knowing nods from the neighbors when you visit a sick octagenarian, the terror and promise for the young student. Simply a lovely little tome. You may be able to discern from the scanned cover image that my copy has been well thumbed.

Geoff

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New WA Lens in Nikon and Pentax Mounts

Tokyo's Map Camera this morning is advertising an upcoming compact 20mm lens from Voigtländer. The Color Skopar 20mm ƒ/3.5 SL II Aspherical in Nikon AIS and Pentax KA mount is slated for release on February 28th. It's a little more than an inch long (29mm) and weighs 7 1/4 oz. (205 g). Price TBA.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren and Eolake)

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Teapot Tempests

Leica has a customer
There would ordinarily be nothing unusual about this—photographers are often proud and happy when they acquire a nice new piece of gear. But when a certain Ned Bunnell mentioned on his blog that he'd acquired a new Leica D-Lux 4 to keep his 42-year-old M4 company, it was indeed a little unusual...because Ned is the president of Pentax Imaging, the U.S. arm of Hoya Corporation's Pentax Imaging Systems Division.

Pentax Imaging's HQ in downtown Golden, CO. Photo by NB.

Personally, I completely get Ned's explanation—Pentax doesn't make a directly competing product, and who better to head a camera company than someone who's a photographer and photography enthusiast first and foremost? He mentioned that when the Honda Accord first graced these shores, GM forbade its employees to show up at their parking lots driving one (a story I haven't been able to confirm so far), but that, in retrospect, they probably ought to have done the opposite and issued one each to all their executives. Isn't it best to know what your competition's doing?

Nikonians for pay
I'm really not up on this one, so maybe readers in the know can fill me in on the current status of Nikonians, a leading Nikon enthusiast site. From what I hear, the site's PTB decided a short while ago to switch over to being a pay site by limiting the participation options for non-paying members. (That was the original plan for this site, but friends convinced me that it wasn't "Web 2.0." Being still Web 0.5 myself, I don't know what Web 2.0 means, but I'm getting off track.) Anyway, there have apparently been a lot of, er, feelings expressed about the switch at Nikonians and the reasons behind it, and I've been wondering how that's going....

fakechuckwestfall asked to cease and desist
And about this (if it's still there!), perhaps the less said the better. Real Chuck Westfall (right) is someone who's been friendly and generous to me over the years; few people so highly placed in any company I've ever had to deal with have been as unfailingly generous with their time and knowledge. Many times Real Chuck went out of his way to provide good, solid information for me when needed. He's deeply knowledgeable about the products—all the products—he represents, and I've known him to personally help photographers of every description, seemingly tirelessly. Chuck didn't personally make Canon the World's #1 camera maker, but he's done his part to help make that happen—and Canon's lucky; there aren't a whole lot of guys like him out there. Say what you want to about any camera—I certainly do—but don't make good folks (and their families) into straw dogs in the process, I say.

Mike
(Thanks to a variety of tipsters)

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What Is Dynamic Range?

Poking about the web yesterday for info on the Fuji F200 EXR, I came across the above illustration on Fuji's website, showing example pictures from the F200 without (left) and with (right) the camera's "D-Range Priority" feature switched on. (Click on the image to see it larger.)

It struck me that this is also a very nice illustration of what dynamic range is, for those who might not be quite clear on the subject. (I always tend to like visual illustrations of visual phenomena best. One thing I've always meant to do is to put together a compendium of image qualities and properties in visual form; yet another thing to do that will probably never get done.)

The new EXR sensor is said to differ from ordinary image recovery and DR-maximizing modes in that it (allegedly) captures an image simultaneously in both its different capture modes and combines them—something more similar to two-shot HDR schemes than what's usually available with in-camera features.

Mike

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Pentax Photographers Have Some More Fun

There are online resources for Pentax photographers created entirely by enthusiasts that are not quite duplicated by partisans of other marques (example: Bojidar Dimitrov's Pentax K-Mount Page). One of the best is the PDML, or Pentax-Discuss Mailing List, a mailing list moderated by Doug Brewer. The PDML serves a large group of Pentax photographers, many of whom have become friends. (Although I'm sure they have their lapses, the PDML is, among other things, perhaps the most civilized of any of the mailing lists, user groups, or forums that I've experienced since the heroic days of the 1980s and early-'90s CompuServe Photography Forum moderated by Mike Wilmer; in fact, the PDML and "Wilma's" CIS Photo Forum were the inspirations for the atmosphere of friendliness, respect, and collegiality I've tried to foster here at TOP.)

Recently, Pentax photographers in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Israel, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, the Philippines, Italy, Hungary, India, and several other countries decided to put together an Annual. Once quite common in photography, Annuals have fallen out of favor in recent years; I have a smattering of old ones in my library*, and find it fun and useful to page through them to see what enthusiasts and hobbyists were up to in years past. The PDML members' work, in the words of media specialist Mark Roberts, who facilitated the project, "encompasses every photographic style under the sun: urban documentary shots, expansive landscapes, portraits, sports, macro, abstract, fashion, travel, wildlife and combinations of many of the above. Some defy categorization. All speak volumes about the talent and imagination of their creators."

The PDML Annual is published through on-line book service Blurb.com. It also includes the famous PDML Quotation List. (Sample: "Calibrating a monitor with software is like measuring a car's speed by licking a finger and sticking it out the window." —Rick Womer.)

All of the group's profits from the sale of the book are to be donated to the National Childhood Cancer Foundation. Kudos to the PDML'ers for making their idea a reality.

Mike
(Thanks to Derby Chang)

*A comprehensive collection would require a bigger house, and considerably worse OCD.

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Featured Comment by Oren Grad: "I haven't been following the PDML closely so wasn't aware of the Annual. I wonder how much it was inspired by the original—Pentax itself has for many years run an owners' club in Japan, called Pentax Family, and has issued a photo annual each year. I've got a run of about ten of them on my shelf, though I eventually gave up chasing them because they look similar from year to year. But I just checked to see whether they still do it, and lo and behold."

Featured Comment by Dennis Mook: "As a member of the Leica User's Group (LUG), we have put together an annual for the past three years, also published by Blurb. The annual is a wonderful way for members of any photography or marque-related group to recognize and memorialize its members' enthusiasm and talents."

Featured Comment by Scott Loveless: "I'd like to chime in, in response to Dennis Mook. When I suggested the possibility of a PDML book, it was only after I had been lurking on the LUG for a couple months and saw how smoothly theirs came together. After seeing how the LUG handled theirs I suggested we do something similar, and a couple of folks, with Mark taking the lead, really made it happen. So the LUG's method for collecting the photos was really our working model and I'd like to thank you folks for it."

Notes and Rumors

Note that Ctein, in the post three down from this one, isn't saying that 400 MP cameras would be marketable. He's only talking about the general ballpark of where perfection lies, in technology extrapolated from today's.

One thing you might want to be on the lookout for in terms of the evolution of today's technology would be the first reviews of the new Fuji F200 EXR. Although this looks to be a bog-standard run-of-the-mill point-and-shoot, actually it's anything but. It's the first camera to feature Fuji's new EXR sensor technology [WARNING: link is a .PDF]. What's EXR? Basically, it's a sensor array optimized for pixel-binning, so it can alternate between fine detail capture in good light and pixel-binning for high sensitivity with less noise in low light. From the early samples, it looks pretty good up to ISO 800, which is a bit better than the typical. There's also happy talk of a combination mode, sort of an in-camera HDR mode implemented via software; we'll believe that when we see it, although one early sample is impressive enough. Word is that full production cameras are now abroad in the world, so we're in the crow's nest scanning the horizon with ye old spyglass, alert for the initial reviews. (Because it's been a while since I've run up to kick the pocket-digicam football only to have Lucy snatch it away at the very last second.)

The Canon 5D Mark II is continuing to meet a mixed, not to say rocky reception. Many buyers are "ecstatic" about the camera (why do I keep encountering that word from new 5D Mark II owners?), but Michael Reichmann reports a whopping 25% failure rate among the Canon 5D Mark II's on his just-completed Antarctica workshop trip (the loaner from CPS failed, even), and Canon-shooting fashion photographer Ron Purdy has thrown in the towel on his.

A little side-note to Ron's report of banding problems: I have a certain print that has a relatively small amount of shadow area, but pretty bad banding within those areas. When I show the print to people, most of them don't notice the banding until I point it out to them. And it's pretty flagrant. I'm just sayin'.

Rumors have been circulating that Panasonic is about to discontinue the popular LX3. 1001 Noisy Cameras is reporting that this is not true: the camera is in a "deep back order" situation (that's a quote of a paraphrase of an unnamed source, so git'cher caveats on), but is not discontinued. (Want my completely baseless guess? You'll see a refreshed LX4 at a significantly higher price by summer, as Panasonic strives to cash in on this camera's unexpectedly robust popularity.)

Meanwhile, back at the Waukeshavian Ranchhouse, the Canon G10 is now the all-time best-selling camera. More TOP readers have bought G10s through our links than any other camera. Note that we are not talkin' about huge numbers here.

Rumor has it that my #1 all-time favorite photo book is about to be reprinted again—I spoke to the distributor a few days ago. It's never been particularly rare or valuable, but it's been a while since you could buy it new. Word is that it'll be out in a couple of weeks. I'm on the case. Like the hawk.

What would a post about rumors be without fresh rumors of Leica's demise? This time, Andreas Kaufmann is said to be deep in talks to sell the company to Panasonic (why? Old joke, modified: want to know a surefire way to make a small fortune? Answer: start with a large one, then buy a struggling camera company). Seems to me I learned in Logic 101 that if you predict for long enough that something bad will happen, sooner or later you're bound to be right. Keep predicting rain, and sooner or later you'll be right. Repeatedly predict a future terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and sooner or later you'll look like Dick Nostradamus. Foretell a downturn in the market, and sooner or later...you get the point. I've been reading about the demise of Leica since the 'seventies. Nothing's forever, and at some point before the sun explodes Leica will probably cease trading. I suggest people talk about it then.

Okay, now back to the first topic. The point at which the march of DSLR resolution ceases will most likely be determined not by the technology reaching perfection, but by camera buyers by and large declining to spend actual money on further improvements. Consider just one perhaps chilling possible scenario. Say a huge conglomerate with a fledgling DSLR division came out with a really nice camera with ~25 megapixels, but it sold poorly. Then a seasoned mainstream camera company came out with a camera with the same number of megapixels, but priced it at, oh, some unrealistically stratospheric price, achieving predictably low sales as a result. Then say a nearly-as-high-resolution camera by the second company's main competitor, despite euphoric initial popularity, had some, er, nagging quality and operational irregularities, which perhaps causes the sales curve to tail off a bit too soon (this hasn't happened, I hasten to add. It just might). And say that while all this is happening, the world economy tanks alarmingly, casting a freezing pall on camera sales in general and high-end camera sales in particular. And say all these factors, in concert, effectively put the old kibosh on the development of further high-megapixel outliers; say nobody minds all that much, except a few fanatics; and say the standard settles down at, say, the 12–18MP range for the most part, which turns out to be plenty for most of the people actually willing to part with cash. When that happens, we'll reach the marketing analogue of the point Ctein describes at which further improvements are no longer detectable: the point at which further improvements no longer inspire additional sales.

I'm not saying it will happen this time, as in now, but I predict it will happen...sooner or later. I'm just sayin'.*

Mike

*Don't you wish I'd stop sayin' that?

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Featured Comment by Paul: "Isn't the possibility of failure part of the price of admission for early adopters? Especially as the complexity increases? We accept/expect glitches in our computers, so we have auto-updaters; can it be that far away for camera manufacturers to have something comparable for their onboard software?

"Anyway, I think that on the high-end of the scale, reputations hinge more on how well manufacturers look after their customers, and how quickly they can fix problems.

"I'm just sayin'."

UPDATE from John A. Stovall: "Leica and Panasonic have dismissed as speculation rumours that Leica may sell part of its camera business to Panasonic."

'The Portrait'

I almost forgot! I don't mean to overdo the archive thing, but the man is 200 today. Apropos.

Mike

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From the Archives: 'All Lens Tests are Wrong'

"All Lens Tests are Wrong" from 2001. Includes a brief case against single-index ratings (apropos the discussion of the other day). Note that this is an older essay, so please don't hold me (overly) accountable if not everything jibes perfectly with what I've been saying recently; after all, we do get to change our beliefs and opinions over time, at least if we're still growing and learning...and publishing this site over the past three years has been nothing if not a learning experience for me.

Mike

Why 80 Megapixels Just Won't Be Enough...

By Ctein

In previous columns and comments, I've tossed out the factoid that full-frame digital cameras should be able to make use of something like 80 million pixels. I've now done a more careful analysis to figure out at what point adding more pixels produces no perceptible improvement in the amount or quality of fine detail in a photograph. The number is mind-boggling in its immensity.

Now, understand that there's "good enough" and then there's "perfect." The former is achieved when most discerning viewers will look at a photograph and say, "That's real nice!" The latter is achieved when improving the photograph further makes no visible difference whatsoever.

The gulf is huge. Most viewers consider an 8 x 10-inch print to be reasonably sharp when it conveys 3–5 line pair per millimeter of fine detail. But, a print won't look perfectly sharp until it conveys around 30 lp/mm. That is, if you put a 15 lp/mm print next to a 30 lp/mm print, a high percentage of viewers will select the 30 lp/m print as being sharper, although most of them won't be able to tell you why they did. But, if you put a 30 lp/mm print next to a 60 lp/mm print, they won't be able to see any difference.

It's technically impossible to produce such perfectly sharp prints from 35mm film. In fact, it is very difficult to do until you get to 4x5 film and some would argue that you actually have to go to 8x10 film to easily produce a perfectly sharp print. Most photographers, even professional photographers, were entirely happy with 35mm quality. Only a few percent felt an overwhelming need to go to sheet film. Similarly, most of you won't need (nor be willing to pay for) digital perfection. Still, it's worth finding out just where perfection lies.

How many pixels is  30 lp/mm in an 8 x 10-inch print? About 180 million. Jeepers!

But, what can a printer actually deliver, and what could a camera capture?

Can any printer out there deliver 30 lp/mm? We may be getting close; I tested one several years ago that could render 15 lp/mm. That cuts the number of pixels down to a "comfortable" 45 million. Except...

...Bayer array cameras don't deliver one pixel of resolved detail for each sensor pixel. Typically they are substantially less than 50% efficient. So we'll have to at least double that number to get us as much resolution as the printer can handle. Call it 100 megapixels. If we ever get those 30 lp/mm printers, we'd be talking about 400 megapixels. Double-jeepers!

Can a camera lens possibly acquire that kind of detail? Well, the very best 35mm lenses, used at optimum aperture, can deliver something on the order of 3 µ blur circles. At one pixel per blur circle the answer is around 100 megapixels. So, that's the practical limit, right?

Well, um, maybe not. Trying to record a blur circle with a single pixel is hardly ideal. In a mosaiced sensor, it's not even possible. To be sure of correctly recording that blur circle, you need at least four pixels. There we are back at 400 megapixels again.

Do we actually need 400 megapixels? I honestly don't know; I haven't run the experiments. At the vastly lower resolutions around today, we know that trying to capture one pixel's worth of fine detail with a single pixel produces poor quality fine detail (see illustrations). Edges and points look ugly; artifacting occurs when you try to extract that kind of pixel-level information that is very difficult to avoid. Multiple pixels per blur circle unquestionably produce perceptibly better quality fine detail. The $64,000 question is whether that will be true when the resolution itself is at the limits of human perception. I don't yet have an answer to that.

These idealized figures illustrate how a blur circle gets converted to pixels. The top row shows a diffraction disc at two different locations in the field. The second row shows how that disc gets sampled by a sensor array. The two figures on the left have pixels the same size as the blur circle; the two columns on the right have pixels half the size of the blur circle. The third row shows a simple-minded reconstruction from those pixels. Observe how bad the reconstruction is when the pixels are no smaller than the blur circle. The situation is even worse for a Bayer array, as the bottom row shows! Fortunately, the algorithms in the raw conversion software  are very sophisticated, or good detail would be impossible, but artifacting is unavoidable.

A diffraction-limited line fares better than a single point, but pixels no smaller than the blur circle still do a lousy job of capturing it. A Bayer array would be even worse.

So maybe 400 megapixels is truly extravagant. Maybe going beyond 100 megapixels will never matter. But without real tests, all one can say is that it might. And, certainly, up to 100 megapixels there will be perceptible improvements in fine detail quality in modest-sized prints, even with current printer and lens technology.

Most of you won't need this, any more than you needed 8x10 view cameras. But for some of you, those won't be pointless pixels.

Ctein
Ctein's site

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Featured Comment by Bahi:

Three Cteinian asides from the last day, hidden from those who don't read the comments. I'm hoping that the first two will make apparent the sheer wrongness of the last one. :)

1. 'There are real-world situations in which a poorer signal/noise ratio produces MORE visual sensory information, not less.'

2. 'Noise may actually be a GOOD thing. And even if it's not, will a higher level of noise be at all perceptible if the pixel size is sub-resolution?'

3. 'Mebbe it'll gel into a column, mebbe not.'

Please let it. :)

Plain Old Plugs

This is mostly not on topic, but by coincidence, three old friends have recently published books—although the books are probably as different as they could be—and I thought I'd mention them in the spirit of getting the word out. Plain old plugs.

Jim Schley is a poet, teacher, and editor who lives "off the grid" in a solar house he and his wife Becky Bailey built on the back side of a ridge in Vermont, and he's recently published his first full-length book of poems, As When, In Season. The story of how Jim and I became friends is one I've told many times, but not many TOP readers have heard it so I'll tell it again. My family moved to Milwaukee when I was seven. My Dad had bought a house that wasn't finished yet, so we lived above the restaurant in a motel north of the city for a few months. The motel is now surrounded by other buildings, but in 1964 it was in the middle of nowhere; so, at the end of October, Jim told his mother that there was an unlucky boy in his class who was going to move into their neighborhood soon who had no place to trick-or-treat. That led to an invitation from Jim's mother Imy for me and my brothers to come trick-or-treat with them.

Later, my mother wanted to do something nice for the Schleys in return, so she invited their family to lunch at the local soda fountain, a classic old-time lunch counter in the local pharmacy. Come the big day, we were clearly supposed to be on our best behavior, with our mothers hovering over us being extremely nice to each other and closely monitoring our politeness. This created a certain tension—which provoked Jim's subversive streak. So, mid-meal, he took a mouth full of orange drink, pointed his straw at me, and fired. He and I both thought this was hilarious, our mothers were suitably mortified, and we've been fast friends ever since. The decades are adding up now.

Articles about Jim have appeared in The New York Times and NEWSWEEK, and Garrison Keillor has read Jim's poems on the Prairie Home Companion and included one in his popular compilation Good Poems. As When, In Season is a generous, complicated, lovely little book.

Cue theme music: the Beatles' "Paperback Writer." Dear old friend and Dartmouth roommate Ed Gaffney recently published his fourth legal thriller, a bonafide pulp fiction blockbuster called Enemy Combatant. He says that of his four books, this is by far his favorite. Now, I'm sure Ed has told me before that he was writing a book, but, heck, I'm writing a book—everybody "writes books." I didn't know he meant actual neat, nifty, published blocks of paper with shiny covers and blurbs and everything, for sale in stores! I'm impressed.

And here's the funny part—he's not even the writer in his family. I'm not quite sure of the official name of the genre Ed's wife Suze writes in—"romantic thriller" sounds about right—but she's written so many that Amazon maintains a dedicated Suzanne Brockmann store.

Oh, and speaking of blurbs, look who they're letting write blurbs these days:

Amadou Diallo's most recent book The 50 Greatest Photo Opportunities in New York City is an interesting idea—a guidebook specifically for photographers. There's so much to see in New York, why not organize your sightseeing with photo ops in mind? Makes perfect sense to me. But then, it would.

While I'm at this, I can't resist a shout-out to my youthful, glamorous and small friend Hil—she knows who she is—who makes a handsome living in L.A. ghostwriting "autobiographies" for Hollywood megastars. I'd mention her name, but she's enjoined by contract to never whisper a word about her involvement in her books, and I don't want to risk getting her in trouble. I've known actual CIA agents who weren't so secretive!

Finally, it turns out that my next door neighbor here in Waukesha, Todd Sattersten, is as nuts about books as I am—but he loves books of a very different stripe. Just the other day, February 5th to be exact, he and co-writer Jack Covert brought out their book The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You. Todd's wife Amy Buckley, an amateur photographer who recently asked my help in putting together a knock-down photo studio in their house (I keep meaning to write a post about that) tells me that this is no flash-in-the-pan interest of Todd's—he's been eating, sleeping, and breathing business books for ten years (Jack for 25), has a huge collection of them, and really knows his way around the genre.

I've asked Todd if he'd write a short piece for TOP about business books that would be specifically useful to photographers, and he said he would. It might be a week or three, but you can look forward to that.

Mike

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Fairey...and Garcia...vs. the AP?

There's a common phrase that goes "let the lawyers sort it all out," but even though that legal sorting phase normally makes my eyes glaze over, I have to admit that the latest twists and turns in the Shepard Fairey Obama "HOPE" poster case are particularly delightful. Here's the unofficial abstract:

• The poster itself achieved iconic status through an organic popularity, but the Obama campaign declined to use it officially because of copyright concerns—namely, that the photographer who took the original image wasn't identified and thus had never given his permission.

• After much sleuthing, people finally figured out who took the photo that had been used for the poster. The photographer himself hadn't known, and was pleased to find out. There had been several almost-identical pictures discovered first, which were then discarded as possibles because of subtle differences. The value of the orginal work is admittedly minor, so any claim that the derivative work devalued the original is moot.

• The Associated Press discovered that the photographer had been working as a stringer for them when he took the picture, so it staked its claim to the rights and declared its interest in some of the profits the poster had earned (whether fishing for a settlement or standing up for creators' rights being a matter of interpretation). The photographer didn't remember signing a work-for-hire agreement, so he disputed the AP's claims to his work.

• Meanwhile, the artist was arrested, in a sort of publicity stunt by the police, on the way to an opening of his work. This isn't unusual or significant in itself, as guerrilla tagging is part of the artist's usual M.O. and he's been arrested and jailed for the same thing many times before, but it makes the news all over the world. The interesting question, which I haven't seen answered yet, is whether he was arrested for new or past acts. That is, did the police belatedly figure out who'd been putting up all those damned "Obey" posters around town because of the publicity surrounding the Obama poster, its artist, and his opening? If that was it, does that make the timing of the arrest essentially a political act?

• To the AP's surprise, Fairey's now gone to court to have his work peremptorily declared Fair Use (see link), so the AP can't pursue any further legal options. Meanwhile, the photographer continues to dispute the AP's claim to his work, and continues to profess himself pleased that Fairey used his photograph as the take-off point for the poster.

Whew. They might not write case law about this one, but it would make a hell of a New Yorker article.

Mike

UPDATE from Marco: "An interesting perspective on the possible local politics behind the arrest can be found here."

Gordon Lewis Wants to Know...

If, because he's black and a photographer, is he still a black photographer?

Mike

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Featured Comment by Amadou Diallo: "In a perfect world, I would agree with Nikos' comment that the identity of the photographer is pointless unless you are marketing your work along a socio-political bent (a perfectly valid approach, in my opinion).

"But as an African-American photographer whose work doesn't chronicle, say, the lives of underserved and disenfranchised urban populations, I'm often met with questions as to why I shoot landscapes, botanical images, Japanese shrines, etc, instead of drug dens in (substitute whatever locale makes you think of '70s–'80s era Harlem stereotypes). The overwhelming expectation in the art world is that 'black' artists create work that is documentary in nature, ie addressing directly inequality and/or injustice.

"So even if you don't ascribe such defining labels to your work, there are plenty of others that will try to do it for you."

Featured Comment by Bahi: "Compare musicians and photographers to see just how lucky we are. A photographer can carry any number of labels that describe approach, intent, equipment or medium. It's possible to be at once a colour photographer, a large-format photographer and a fine-art photographer. None of the popular labels imply anything racial as far as I can remember.

"Compare with musical examples: rhythm'n'blues, hip hop, soul, gospel, country and, to the bemusement of musicians the world over, world music. There are definitely some links to race, even when we think they're just descriptions of musical style, probably because we can often tell so much about the singer when we listen to the music. That doesn't sound in any way a bad thing till you try to define the boundaries of these categories; see recent comments by Estelle, a young black British singer reacting to the promotion of white British acts like Adele and Duffy as soul singers, here, and a response here.

"I can understand and applaud what the Black Photographers Annual represented at the time but am so glad that we appear to be past the stage where it matters so much."

On Second Thought...

Here's the glass-half-full version.

I guess my initial reaction to the new Nikkor 35mm ƒ/1.8G AF-S DX lens was colored by the fact that I plain mis-percieved at first what it was. When I first got the news, I assumed it was a replacement for the old AF-Nikkor 35/2, which I'd been using as recently as early January with the D700; perhaps that's what I saw because it's what I expected to see. I was dismayed when I realized a few minutes later that it was a DX lens.*

But let me be fair, and more objective:

1. It's Nikon's first-ever DX prime with a normal angle of view.

2. It's a fast, light, small, quiet, and (quite likely) high-performance lens.

3. It's specifically designed-for-digital.

...And it's just what a lot of people wanted. Operationally, it's designed for full compatibility with the D40/D40x/D60, which are small, quiet cameras—and which (as long as I'm making self-incriminating admissions here) I've actually criticized in the past for not having just this kind of lens available for them! Also on the good side, the design is quite sophisticated for such an inexpensive lens, and the sample image looks great.

And, there's nothing at all wrong with a normal.

So, okay. Let's celebrate what it is, not what it isn't! As soon as it comes out, then, we'll review it. Properly, on a D40, D40x, or D60. Yeah, I can see the appeal.

Mike

*Primarily because my mind leaps to what seems to me like an obvious implication: Nikon's not going to replace the AF-Nikkor 35/2; the FX lens it's planning will be a competitor for Canon's EF 35/1.4. The further implication of that is that Nikon will, in the future, not be making an updated, current, modern version of the lens of the specification I personally use and prefer. Plenty of reason to break out the black bunting—but specifically for me, not for everybody.

UPDATE: dpreview.com has pegged Nikon's rationale for this product offering, in the form of an interview with Nikon's Robert Cristina, Manager of professional products, Europe and Ludovic Drean, Product Manager for lenses, Europe. As Robert Christina says, "The main target is D40/D60/D90 owners. They make up 80% of our DSLR sales [...] If even 5% of [them] buy this lens, that's a huge number." (Thanks to Tom and Mrten for this link.)