The Online Photographer

Encounters of a Small, Wet, Furry Kind

Some pictures of an encounter with a curious fur seal taken on a trip that TOP reader Alek O. Komarnitsky recently took to Antarctica, South Georgia, and the Falkland Islands.

Alek, who describes himself as a dedicated amateur who "takes way too many pictures and spends way too much time pixel-peeping" (although his wife just says he's "a crazy camera guy"—can anybody relate?), describes the trip as "truly a trip of a  lifetime," adding, "if you ever do this, don't just go to Antarctica, do the triangle with Falklands and South Georgia which are even more impressive."

The baby fur seal actually started nibbling on the lens hood of the remote 40D. You can enjoy the whole set and travel along vicariously at his website, where there's more information, too, starting with a map.

Have a great weekend!

Mike
(Thanks to Alek)

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Shots Mag Call for Work

The venerable Shots mag- azine, an alternative magazine for art, student and outsider photography (my description, not theirs) founded by Dan Price, is issuing a call for work, for its annual Portfolio Issue. There's a small submission fee. "Photographers selected for inclusion will be interviewed for publication and featured on at least 4 pages...."

I don't think I've seen it since Dan was in charge, but back then, at least, there was always interesting stuff in Shots. Might be just the thing if you're not finding regular outlets for your work, but I suggest you take a look through at least one issue before submitting.

Mike

OT: More Howlers

Howler, n., informal, a stupid or glaring mistake, esp. a humorous one.

As a professional editor, I was a semi-professional editor. I've never been trained in editing and I am not an expert in grammar. However, spending six years of your life correcting other peoples' prose has the effect of sensitizing you to verbal errors; it's unavoidable. As a naturally good speller, I'm also sensitive to spelling mistakes.

"Howlers," to a professional or semi-professional editor or a former one, as well as to many readers, are commonplace. Finding them is easy. But sometimes I'm amused by finding several in close proximity—a high "howler density," you might call it. I ran across this actual sentence the other day on a forum:

"Hey your right. Where is everbody? Look's like there loosing interest...!"

That one is pretty impressive. Three sentences, and at least one error in each; and, in a mere 11 words, five errors, four of which are flagrant howlers. And that's not counting the fact that there probably should be a comma after "hey." The third sentence is particularly impressive, with three howlers in eight words (the whole sentence had three more words), for a total howler density of 37.5%. A howler density over 50% is rare, even on the internet.

It should be, of course (with corrections in bold):

"Hey, you're right. Where is everybody? Looks like they're losing interest...!"

Of course, that was not on a photography forum. You can tell not necessarily because of the howler density, but because people don't loose interest in photography. Theirs alway's somthing new and interesting to learn. Photo buffs aren't loosers.

Mike

(Reminder: I'm off tomorrow. I'll try to find something just as productive as this to do.)

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Featured Comment by Matt: "To be honest, I find it a bit harsh how nitpicky some people here are. Of course, good grammar would be a pleasure to read, but keep in mind not everyone's native language is English. If one learns the language at an older age, it might even be quite challenging. There's people that don't even bother or try, but those are most likely the same people that don't write their sentences with capitals in the first place."

Mike replies: I probably should have made more of the fact that I consider my sensitivity to be a regrettable occupational hazard, in the way that a podiatrist might notice the way people pronate their feet when they walk, or the way a musician might be unable to ignore the Muzak in an elevator. It's not necessarily even desirable.

And of course it's possible to be perfectly correct and utterly boring. One of my favorite readers here on TOP writes comments that are peppered with errors, but he also expresses himself vividly, and with spirit, and he has a lot to say because he knows a lot. To be distracted by his errors—or, worse, to be bigoted against his opinion on their account—is akin to not enjoying a spectacular sunset because there's a contrail in the sky, or dismissing a great photograph in a museum because it has dust spots.

For instance, in your comment, you made a common error...."there's people...", where "there's" is a contraction for "there is," when of course it should be "there are." But what does it profit me to notice that? Nothing. It's like a nagging little pinch to my brain on the way by. And I wish I didn't feel it. You've expressed yourself perfectly clearly. I would prefer not to notice the small mistakes people make. I would prefer not to notice all the mistakes I make. Alas, 'tis not to be.

But I'm sorry if I offended anybody here. That wasn't my intent.

To be honest, I'm going to try very hard to take to heart the comment made by David, the former proofreader, in the comments section below.

Featured Comment by robert e: "That forum poster 'should of' proofread his remarks.

"I am as annoyed by these errors as anyone, and probably just as annoyed that I'm annoyed as you are annoyed that you are annoyed, Mike.

"And it is doubly annoying when I consider what an unkempt, mercurial pastiche the English language has been since its beginnings: the bastard offspring of several major linguistic collisions, a ravenous assimilator, even historically a big mess that, late in its adolescence, a bunch of cloistered monks attempted to stuff whole into an ill-fitting Latinate grammatical structure.

"Being picky about something so wild and alive feels like a futile and inappropriate thing to do."

Featured Comment by Rana: "What I tell my students, when it comes to grammar, typos, and writing, is that correcting errors is a way of showing that you respect your readers and your own work.

"I liken it to brushing your hair or checking your suit for lint before an interview; people will notice errors, and, for some of them, it's a deal-breaker. They'll stop reading, outright, or they'll view everything else you wrote with increased scepticism.

"In some cases, too, the errors are such that they get in the way of the message—it's not unlike trying to view the world through a lens covered with specks of dust. Clean them, and your point is easier to discern.

"That said, I make a distinction between formal writing and causal writing, just as I make a distinction between formal speech and the sort of speech you use when hanging out with your friends.

"(Of course, as I've been writing this, I've backspaced more than once to correct typos, errors in punctuation and spelling, etc.  It's pretty hard to turn off the internal editor once you've acquired one.)"

Snow Leopard Performance Gains: Diglloyd

This page may be of keen interest to Mac users.

Notably, Lightroom shows a very nice performance gain in 64-bit mode.

But Aperture is really stunningly better.

From Lloyd's conclusion: "Performance gains of up to 30% were observed, making Snow Leopard by far the best value for the money in a long, long time. At about $25, you won’t find a more compelling upgrade of any kind, anywhere."

The full review starts here.

Mike

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Editing by Magic

Carl's recent posts about editing and the comments they've evoked have brought up so many thoughts that I could probably write five long posts about it. If not ten. (If you just blurted out, "oh, no!" never fear, that wasn't actually a threat.)

One thing leapt to mind. I've been taking golf lessons recently for the first time in my life (it's never too late for golf; it is too late for platform diving), and one thing my pro keeps saying is "make it yours." That is, he wants me to work out things for myself. And of course, each of us needs to "make our own" a great many facets of our pursuit / passion / profession / hobby / diversion of photography, starting with how serious we're going to be about it and what our aims are. The comments to Carl's posts make it clear that a lot of people have developed their own methods of editing. Which of course doesn't mean that it still might not help to talk about it.

I wanted to post a sort of counterpoint to Carl's article, in order to point out that he's talking about working out a method and then following the method through. He's not saying, "use the software I use, follow my method slavishly."

Sorry about this overlong preamble, but I also need to make a disclaimer: I'm not a guru. My way is not the right way. So don't take what I'm about to tell you as gospel; don't even take it as a recommendation, unless you want to. I'm not trying to tell you the "right" way to do things, even if I believed there was such a thing, which I don't.

Get to the point, Mike!
Anyway, when I had my chops up, here's how I worked. I developed either one or two tanks of film (three rolls of 35 exposures* each per tank) once every few nights. (Less in winter, more in summer.) I'd hang the film in the closet to dry, clip it and put it into PrintFile pages the next morning (this was my most hated photographic chore, by the way), then, when dark fell, I'd make proof sheets. (My darkrooms, always crude affairs, were almost never light-tight enough to use when the sun was out.)

In looking at the proof sheets, I had a couple of rules for myself. First, I had to loupe every frame. Second, I had to mark between one and six pictures per roll. It didn't matter if it was the stupidest, ugliest roll of useless pictures I'd ever taken, I had to find at least one frame to workprint. And I strongly resisted making workprints of more than six frames per roll. Oh, of course if I really, really had to see that seventh or eighth frame, I'd do it; but the reason for the six-frames rule was that if I marked 20 frames or 25 frames on every roll, it would be too much work to workprint (and too expensive), and I'd procrastinate and never get to it. So I had a method: every frame that interested me under the loupe first got a single cross mark in the corner; if there were more than six, I had to winnow them down to six, then I would put a second cross-mark, making an "X", on the ones to be printed.

Do you see that those "rules" were just an effort to cope with my particular psychology, my personal weaknesses? I didn't want to be tempted to throw a roll aside just because there wasn't much good on it; I knew I'd miss some good frames that way. I had to force myself to deal with every roll when workprinting. And I didn't want to trigger my tendency to procrastinate. These are my own personal solutions to my own personal idiosyncrasies. They have no more significance than that.

I was an effing ninja at workprinting. I could make twenty prints in an hour just cruising; thirty to forty an hour if I was trying. After years in the darkroom, I had no trouble looking at the neg against the safelight and setting the time and contrast to "good enough" with nothing more than a glance. Most of my workprints look pretty good, too, if I do say so.

Workprints. I made a gazillion of these over the years. No exaggeration**.

So here's the thing I started out to say: I have to have prints in order to edit.

And here's why. If I took, say, fifteen of those 8x10 workprints and taped them all up on the wall, they would all look more or less the same to me at first. And I'd look at them. Then I'd look at them some more. And some more. Gradually, I would start to get interested in a few of them more than others, and some would begin to drop into the don't-care category. And this is the mystery: after about three or four days of looking at a batch of workprints, chances are I would love two or three of them and not care at all about the rest. 

How did this happen? I really have no idea. Still don't, to this day.

But I could depend on it.

I finally decided that it was just not entirely conscious. It's not like I was "deciding" which pictures were "good" and which weren't; it's just that some of them had that "it," whatever it is that I personally happen to find gratifying about photographs, and the others didn't. 

There have been all kinds of things I've learned about myself along the way. For one thing, "good" pictures—the solid, good-looking, pictures-that-look-like-everybody-else's-good-pictures pictures—seldom made it for me. And, the things I liked were often quiet, sometimes too quiet for others.

I sometimes liked failures, too...pictures that were intriguing for some reason but...well, bad. I had a separate category for these, called "significant failures."

Sometimes I'd put 20 prints up and, after three days, it had become obvious that none of them were any good. That was always dispiriting, but it wasn't all that unusual.

So what accounts for that magical "sorting" process that almost always occurred half a week or so after I slapped a bunch of seemingly identical-quality workprints up on the wall and just looked and looked and looked? I just don't know. I only know that it was the way my brain worked when it came to photographs. 

Paper is wealth
The end of the process was that when I could spare the time and the money (paper was wealth, for most of my adult life; I almost never had enough paper) I would go into the darkroom and make a fine (finished) print from the negative. I always had a reputation as a fine printer—it was how I made a good bit of my living for a good long stretch, and I'm happy to say that some prints made by me reside in some very prestigious museums and collections—but I never enjoyed this part quite as much. It was too final, and few fine prints were fine enough, if you get my drift. I probably only made "finished" fine prints out of, I don't know, maybe a third of my sorted "selects." In a sense, there was no reason to—I didn't have shows, and nobody bought them. I was just doing it because I liked it. (Same reason you play golf. Who cares except you?) But workprinting for me was the center around which everything else revolved. I loved seeing what the negatives looked like, and I loved anticipating the magic "editing" process that would follow. 

I can't do the same thing on the computer screen. I have no good method there. That's not a value judgment, not an anti-digital comment. It's just a fact. I need prints on the wall. I need to be able to do lots of looking. It's just the way I am.

I've never counted exactly, but I believe I have about 85,000 negatives***, and although I've lost or left behind most of the workprints I've made, I probably have a few thousand of those hanging around the house. I really should be responsible to that work, and attempt to edit a book of pictures out of it—maybe even two. It's another one of those things I've always put off to "someday." That's the kind of task that requires that you be systematic and organized, and I am neither. I'm not looking forward to trying. But...someday.

I hope it won't be hard to see how very different Carl's method of editing a large set of digital captures (something I've never even done, because I've never made a large set of digital captures) is from my method of working with rolls of 35mm film.

We're all different. You've got to make it yours.

Mike

*Only 35 frames fit on the kind of PrintFile sheet I used, so that's how many pictures I shot on a roll, never 36.

**Well, slight exaggeration.

***Sounds like a lot, but it only averages to about two and a half rolls a week over twenty years.

ADDENDUM: A great tip for those still doing 35mm black-and-white. If you happen to use an Omega or LPL 4x5 enlarger (the latter being the best enlargers ever made, and now imported into the U.S. by Omega, formerly by Saunders, they of the easels), get yourself an LPL 4x5 glass carrier (has to be the LPL one, the Omega won't work). If you cut your negatives in strips of six, and you carefully overlap the clear sprocket-holed edges of the film, you can just fit nine 35mm frames into the carrier. Then you can enlarge all nine frame together onto whatever size sheet of paper you can afford and want to handle—11x14 or 16x20. Four sheets and you've done a roll of 36. It replaces both contact sheet and work prints. I could never quite get it together to work this way, but I always wanted to. It's very luxurious and very nice.

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Featured Comment by Gary: "I agree about the importance of work prints, but I still find the digital work flow to be a big improvement to that of 35mm film.

"The thing is, I don't use on-screen viewing to replace the work print stage, but rather the contact sheet stage. The curse of 35mm is that you can't really see what you've got squinting at a contact sheet with a lupe and so, must make enlargements of many frames just to see what's there. Doing the initial viewing on screen seems a big improvement to me.

"With digital, the second stage (work prints) is still there and just as important, but getting there is easier. And not just with regards to selection, but physically, too. I can shoot JPEG or JPEG + raw, use the JPEG for intitial viewing and make a workprint from it at the push of a button. Keep the raw for the final print if needed.

"I'm amused when I sometimes hear people on forums ask how they can make a contact sheet from their digital files."

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer...

 

 

 

 

...I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Mike
(Thanks to Yuanchung Lee)

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Question from Don Bryant: "There has been a suggestion on an internet forum that Penn didn't actually do his platinum printing. Of course anything can be written on the net but the suggestion was made by someone very knowledgeable about the world of platinum printing. I don't know if that is true or not but the rumor is out there. But I have to ask, if the rumor is true, does it matter? I was fortunate to see a couple of large exhibits of his work and was a great admirer of the work I saw firsthand. His dye transfer color prints were great as well. I recall coming back to the exhibits three times to soak it all in."

Answered by Keith Trumbo: "Regarding Mr. Penn and some vague internet accusation questioning whether he made his own platinum prints: I worked for Mr. Penn for many years alongside him as he made his platinum prints. He made the developers, he coated each one personally. I was lucky enough to be an extra pair of hands to help get his work done. Yes I was one of many that helped him in one aspect or another in the production, but I want this to be heard loud and clear—Penn personally made his own platinum prints."

Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "At least with respect to Penn's career, the institutional guardians of fine art photography are well over marginalizing his commercial work as a fashion photographer. Indeed, things more generally have gone so far to the other extreme—witness the most commercial of Annie Leibovitz's photos with all their gooey appeal displayed in art museums—that I suspect that some readers don't fully appreciate the sardonic nature of Mike's post.

"Despite working at Vogue magazine since 1943, Penn did not have an exhibition at MoMA until the mid-Seventies show of the cigarette butt series that, to me at least, must be seen in their monumental original size to be fully appreciated. Much of the ambiguity of the pictures—both optically (their resemblance to ancient ruined marble columns) and intellectually (the questions of whether he was both literally and figuratively inflating something prosaic into something larger than it can become)—does not come through in reduced size. But there was another sort of ambiguity or tension regarding the exhibition as well. John Szarkowski in his wall essay acknowledged in passing Penn's commercial work in the world of 'haute couture or cuisine' and said, with what appeared to be almost an apologetic sense of embarrassed dismissal, that 'one might guess that he [Penn] has only rarely enjoyed more than a cursory interest in the nominal subject of his [fashion] pictures.' 

"At the same time, it is hard to escape the sense that Penn was not being sardonic himself about this issue of his primary home being located in the ghetto of commercial photography. He had to be smiling to himself and at himself that, after three decades at the top of the profession, cigarette butts became his key to the pantheon. It's not that Penn pulled a fast one, per se. The cigarette butt work reflects keen intellect and craft, but it is interesting to contemplate all the subtle elements of the wit and schmaltz that Penn also brought to that particular proceeding."

Digital Holgas Everywhere

Our friend Dirk Rösler of Japan Exposures has added the upcoming Exemode-Yashica EZ F521 to his export list. If you're not familiar with Japan Exposures (formerly Megaperls Webshop), they export Japan-only photographic products to most of the rest of the world, including North America, Europe, and Australia.

It costs a little more, of course—$112 or so.

Mike

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UPDATE: Dirk checked with Exemode,who tell him that the prototype camera has menus in English, Spanish, etc. as well as Japanese, but that they need to wait until release to be able to tell "officially." If you order one and the shipping camera turns out not to have menus in the language you need, you can cancel your order for a refund.

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer, Is Dead at 92

Irving Penn, New York, 1951. Photo by Horst

Staley-Wise Gallery

By Andy Grundberg, The New York Times

Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92....

READ ON at nytimes.com

Mike
(Thanks to Feli)

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Featured Comment by Yuanchung Lee: "Penn was a magician, conjuring Form and Beauty from the meanest of materials. Regardless of the subject matter, the Penn 'voice' was the same—elegant, concise, and seeming always to capture the essence of the thing. It's a shame to label him a 'fashion photographer' (as the Times headline writer did). Not only because he did all sorts of pictures, but because his work is really the opposite of fashion: It's timeless. Penn obviously did not make pictures to please ephemeral tastes. As for the inevitable comparison to Avedon, well, Penn wins hands-down for me."

Last Chance Romance

I'm happy to say that Gordon Lewis's print sale (the umbrella lady, a.k.a. Precipitation) has been popular—we expected it to do well, but it has sold beyond expectations. A big success.

Just a reminder—don't forget that orders close in a matter of hours, at 12 noon on Wednesday. So if you intend to order a print for yourself, please make sure you get around to it before the deadline.

Oh, and that's 12 noon U.S. Eastern (Gordon's) time, so you might have to adjust for wherever in the world you are. Noon Eastern time, for example, is 9:00 a.m. in Seattle, 2:00 p.m. in San Paulo, 5:00 p.m. in Brighton, 8:00 p.m. in Dubai, 5:00 Thursday morning in Kamchatka, and, here at TOP World Headquarters in Wisconsin, 6:43.*

Anyway, don't forget. And thanks to all.

Mike

*Old George Carlin joke. Then again, they're all old George Carlin jokes.

UPDATE, Wednesday 12:38 p.m.: The sale has now ended and the"Buy It Now" tab has been removed from the original post. I'm happy to report that the sale was a smashing success! Thanks to everyone who participated.  —Mike

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Zen Slap

By Carl Weese

Some of the comments to my recent post about editing made me realize that I was writing from an underlying assumption about the nature of editing that is not necessarily obvious to the reader. The comments recommending various ways to edit out mistakes remind me of something important in my photographic life from about twenty-five years ago.

I had the opportunity to show David Vestal in-progress work on a personal project. At that point I had been intensely involved with photography for two-thirds of my life; I had been a working professional for a dozen years. David spent time with the pictures, and then, instead of talking about them directly, asked about my editing. "Do you look for mistakes, and get rid of them? Or do you look for good stuff to hold on to?"

I was dumbfounded, like after the Zen master's slap upside the head. There was no middle ground, no gray area, no way around it: I had never in my life thought of the editing process as anything but taking a berserker's broad-axe to the shoot, eliminating anything that showed the slightest weakness, the least flaw or error. David recommended I start over from scratch with this material, and look for all the good things instead of editing by fault-finding. Once the pictures with good stuff in them were found, I could start to decide whether each one had, on balance, enough good stuff to outweigh any bad stuff I would previously have rejected it for. This was a radical change of thought. Instantly, I knew he was right.

What I've come to understand in the years since, is that editing by fault-finding traps you into what you already know, so is an impediment to discovery and advancement. From the beginning I'd been suspicious of "rules," but editing by negation sneaked a bunch of stupid rules right past me and into my practice. To edit by fault-finding is to encase yourself in foregone conclusions—you might as well be insisting on The Rule of Thirds, or Single Center of Interest—but to edit as an exploration of the take for what actually worked, for what you found that you didn't already know, is a voyage of discovery. It's a crucial difference.

Carl

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Retro Digicam...Digital Holga?

Exemode Yashica will release a low-spec, retro-styled digicam in Japan on October 24th. The EZ F521 will have a 5-megapixel 1/2.5" CMOS sensor, a fixed 42mm-e ƒ/3, and an optical viewfinder. There are only two manually-set positions for focus: Hyperfocal (1.5m–infinity) and Macro (0.2–0.4m [roughly 8–16 in.]). Size, 110 x 66 x 48mm (4.33 x 2.6 x 1.9 inches), weight 125g (4.4 oz.). Power comes from 3 AAA batteries. The price in Japan will be ¥8,000, about $90 or £57. CNET News is calling it a "digital Holga." Looks like fun!

Probably won't be available in the U.S. or Europe, but we'll keep an eye out.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Lang and Miserere)

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Featured Comment by Erlik: "Actually, it's quite similar to the Digital Harinezumi. The Harinezumi has only 1600 x 1200 resolution, though, and it has a frame instead of an OVF. They even market it as digital Holga."

2009 Nobel Goes to Digital Photography Pioneers

Reuters

Half of this year's Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to Willard S. Boyle (left) and George E. Smith (right), inventors of the charge-coupled device, or CCD, which forms the basis for most digital camera sensors. They shared the award with Charles K. Kao (center), whose work was crucial to fiber optics.

Further reading:

New York Times Science section

CNET News

physicstoday.org

Mike

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Featured Comment by Rick: "This was wonderful news to hear. I first met George Smith and some of his colleagues from Bell Labs in the 1970s when I was a young engineer. We were part of an informal sailing club George established called the 'Five B's Society' (don't ask). I vividly recall remarkable conversations with him about his work on the CCD and other related technologies, which back then were mostly thought of as digital memory devices. He's a very warm and self-effacing person, but even 30+ years ago was already well known as a world-class scientist. In more recent years, we would occasionally correspond with him and his wife as they cruised their sailboat around the world. Ironically, I don't remember ever seeing him with a camera."

'On City Streets'

By Ken Tanaka

I love a good little story, even if it’s true, but especially if it involves photography. Here’s a dilly from a few years ago that I think you’ll enjoy.

One day in 2004, Bob Thall, chair of Chicago’s Columbia College Photo Department, was met at his office by a rather unusual visitor. Amid the usual young students was a middle-aged man with a paper shopping bag. Thall’s secretary told him that the man said he had some photos to show someone. Thall invited the man into his office where he introduced himself as Gary Stochl. He told Thall that he had been doing photography for forty years but hadn’t really shown his work to anyone. He thought Columbia College’s photo department was a good place to start.

What a start! After browsing some of the approximately 300 loose prints from Stochl’s shopping bag Thall abandoned his afternoon schedule and instead, with some of his colleagues, spent the next two hours reviewing the rest. Those black and white prints captured on downtown Chicago’s streets since the 1960s were some of the best street photographs he had ever seen. According to Stochl he had become inspired by studying the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank during high school in the 1960s. He bought a Leica and took to the streets of downtown Chicago to find his own style. He had been photographing mostly in this same area continuously ever since.

Since that first jolting meeting Thall and others have helped Gary Stochl find his place as the significant photographic talent that he is. Stochl’s work has since been exhibited, collected by individuals and museums, and published. On City Streets is the first published collection of some of Gary Stochl’s work, but hopefully not his last.

In his introduction Bob Thall presents an excellent academically-oriented explanation of why Stochl’s work is so good. He expresses particular surprise that Stochl could have become so skilled outside the confines of formal art education and the support of the art community. (I find this a bit humorous since I believe formal photographic education has not been a particularly positive or productive influence on photography. But I’ll leave that subject for another day.)

I can offer a simpler explanation for why Gary Stochl’s images have become my favorite body of street photography and my own gold standard. Yes, nostalgia and familiarity are factors. As a native Chicagoan and downtown resident I know, or remember, many of the images’ locations very well. In fact I am photographing at many of those same places nearly each week. But this work is not at all place-cast; even someone who’s never visited Chicago will likely find these images exceptional and often haunting. No, what makes this work so darn good is that it so perfectly embodies the four ingredients required to create good candid street imagery; an imaginative eye, the ping-pong timing reflexes to react to that imagination, the technical skill to actually use a camera to get the shot, and, most importantly, the courage to actually do it. Browsing through "street" galleries at photo sites such as Flickr will confirm that these are very, very rare qualities to encounter behind a lens.

But Stochl actually goes far beyond those prerequisites. He captures the gestures, the juxtapositions, and the frame compositions to package the humor and enigmas that the greatest street photography consistently delivers. What makes his images so darn good is that, like all of the genuinely great street shots, they brand themselves deeply into your eye’s memory. Myself, I never tire of looking at them. I keep this little book on my desk and pick it up often. It’s become somewhat like a mentor; I feel recharged and re-inspired after spending a few minutes browsing Stochl’s images.

If you enjoy looking at street photography, but particularly if you enjoy practicing it, On City Streets is simply a body of work you must see. Gary Stochl may never enjoy the fame and fortune of the biggest names in this photo genre but he certainly deserves as much attention. And what a terrific story, eh?

Ken

On City Streets: Chicago, 1964-2004 by Gary Stochl, from Amazon U.S.
On City Streets: Chicago, 1964-2004 from Amazon U.K. (Note: No "British Penalty" on this one)

(Note: Softcover only)

ADDENDUM: And in an almost eerie case of parallelism, check out "'The Man Who Waited,'" about Robert Bergman, at The Wall Street Journal. Another terrific story. You've got to read this. Thanks to John Camp for passing this one along.  —Mike

Robert Bergman, Untitled, 1990

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Featured Comment by Dan Mouer: "It was exciting opening my morning dose of TOP and finding this story about Gary Stochl immediately after having seen the CNN story about Sevket Sahintas, Istanbul's Street-shooting taxi-driver. I guess street photography still thrives in the 21st century. Time to load some Tri-X into the Bessa and take a walk...."

FTC Guideline Changes Affects Blogs and Websites

The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it has approved final revisions to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act.

The notice incorporates several changes to the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers.

The Associated Press puts it a wee bit more succinctly, saying, "The FTC will require that writers on the Web clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products."

I've been racking my small brain, and I can't come up with anything I'm going to do differently here on TOP as a result of the new guidelines. Except maybe to make sure that I make the rules more explicit to outside contributors...most of whom know said rules just fine already. Basically, we disclose up the wazoo. I disclose stuff I'm not supposed to disclose. Because...well, I'm a blabbermouth.

As David Vestal says, we are in the disclosure business. And you, dear Reader, shall be kept apprised, FTC or no FTC. On that you may rest assured.

Mike, TOP's End-of-Line Destination for Proverbial Passed Buck

Citizen's Arrest

An unusual crime situation documented by Chicago photographer Mike Anzaldi. Anzaldi narrates a short slide show at chicagonow.com.

Note that the situation evokes a kneejerk "how could he just stand there" response from one of the commenters. As I've written elsewhere, a very common reaction to photojournalism.

Mike
(Thanks to Charlie Didrickson)

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Featured Comment by Stan B.: "As someone not physically impressive by any means, but who has had to perform more restraints on emotionally disturbed junior high students (many larger and heavier than himself) than he cares to remember, there are a few things which this does bring to mind. First off, as for pure energy expended, it's often easier to fight someone than to restrain them. Bearing that in mind, when a person continues to resist in a standing restraint, bring it down horizontal where one can exert greater control and keep all concerned considerably safer. A good leg sweep is best, even easier with someone assisting. Immobilize the person's hands and feet—with pressure, not punches. And by no means let a third party get close and antagonize the person you're trying to calm down by yelling at him!

"Interestingly, without the narrative, quite a number of widely differing scenarios could have been constructed from those photos...."

Editing a Large Set of Digital Captures

By Carl Weese

One of the really positive things about digital capture is that in a situation where you'd like to shoot freely, digital "free film" lets you shoot with downright reckless abandon. (Of course capture isn't completely free: memory cards cost money even though you get to reuse them, and you need to store multiple copies of your capture files, preferably on more than one kind of media, but that's still almost free compared to film and processing.) Not all situations call for high volume shooting, and it is possible to overshoot. Working too quickly, making too many captures without thinking clearly about them can result in getting everything except the right shot. But there are plenty of times when there are many things to photograph and more than one worthwhile viewpoint or moment for each, so the card starts to fill up with a lot of captures. This can become quite a headache once all those pictures are downloaded to the computer.

The trouble with a dense forest of captures is how to find the best trees. There's also the issue of "what was I really trying to do with this shoot?" That question may not apply to conceptual artists who start with an idea and set up a shot for the camera, but for any photographer who likes to work by going out into the world just looking for the unexpected, the unedited take can be completely confusing. The whole collection is overwhelming so the trick is to slice it into manageable chunks. The chunks I look for are "Situations" (the word "Subjects" might seem more descriptive for someone else's work but I'll coin the Situation usage here). A weekend excursion to an interesting city, or a road trip, or a wedding or a soccer game—just about any shoot that results in a large number of pictures can be divided into Situations.

To illustrate my approach to editing large sets of pictures I'll show screen grabs from the Bridge module of Photoshop CS3 because that's the browser I use. You can find equivalent tools in other browsers and adapt my suggestions accordingly. I'll show the folder holding my shoot from a day spent at a country fair a few weeks ago. In Bridge, I set up a Workspace that has some housekeeping panels on the left, a large pane with twenty good size thumbnails on the right, and a Preview pane in the middle. The selected thumbnail shows at a more legible size in the Preview pane.

First I want to get a general feel for the shoot, so I scan through the whole folder by selecting a thumbnail in the top row and then using the keyboard down arrow to advance, which means I see every fourth frame I've shot. That way I'll probably see at least one capture from each Situation I worked on. I'll move sideways if needed to catch situations that have only one or two shots, but the idea is a rapid overview of the whole folder at Preview size.

Next step is to start over again at the beginning. In the first screen grab there are five frames of "the giant pumpkin Situation," frames 6–10. Frames 11–15 are of "the poultry barn Situation." I use the right/left arrows to flip through each set quickly, first to last, then last to first, like a rapid back and forth slide show, all the while staring at the Preview window. Don't use the mouse to select the thumbnails or you'll have to keep looking away from the Preview pane. I'm not trying to do a detail-oriented analysis here but to get a gestalt impression of this slice of the shoot. Often one shot just stands out as best, so I "rate" it with a single star (Bridge allows five rating levels, 0-4). Sometimes two or three are in really close contention so I mark more than one. If I don't really like any of them I still find the least unsuccessful shot and give it a star, so the Situation itself remains in the tentative edit. I work all the way through the shoot, not necessarily in one session! When you find it hard to pick the best shots, or to see where the Situations should be divided, go do something else for a while.

(As an aside, if you can find the discipline, put off this whole process for a while after making the pictures. The great Josef Sudek said he didn't look at his pictures until at least six months after shooting them, because he wanted to encounter just the picture, not his memory of the situation he made it in. Deadlines are one of the negative things about professional photography, a bug, not a feature, so if you have the luxury of waiting, take advantage of it.)

Once I've gotten all the way through the folder, I filter for the single-star pictures, and Bridge hides all the rest. I'm not deleting anything, just hiding the potential out-takes.

The full take of 671 pictures has been reduced to a much more comprehensible 131. Almost every frame represents a different Situation. By looking at the work Situation after Situation I begin to get a much clearer idea of what I was up to during the shoot. I see my thought process, I can decide which ideas, which trails I was following, were the most productive. Where I still have more than one shot marked from a Situation, it can be helpful to switch from viewing the choices sequentially to a direct comparison, so I select both at once and Bridge displays two good size Previews.

The next step is to start from the beginning again and start putting two-star ratings on the best Situations, then filter again to show only these. Up to now I've just been looking for good pictures, good picture Situations, in a general sort of way. But now it's important to think carefully about intention and audience. My thought about these pictures was that I'd like to use them on one of my blogs, WPII: Pictures in Public. This has a big influence on the next step in the edit. For example, a picture that depends on lots of tiny details won't work in a little 800-pixel wide blog presentation. Another good picture might not fit with the theme of the blog, in which case I might mark it with three stars, indicating "good shot, but not for WPII."

Now it's time start over once again, to work through this much tighter edit of two-star files. At each one, I remove the filtering so I can see all the frames that I shot in each of these best Situations. My initial choice may have been wrong. More important, I now understand the shoot much better from the exercise of finding the best Situations, and that may influence my choice of what is really the most important shot in each. A picture that didn't seem the best before may resonate well with a picture from another Situation, which means it now becomes the better choice if the pictures are to be collected into a group or series like a succession of blog posts. Now is also the time to look for small technical flaws like focus or movement errors. If the picture that seemed best in step one is off focus, but step two told me the Situation was one of the best in the shoot, there may be another frame that gets what I really care about getting from the Situation.

Filtering for the double star files hides everything except the pictures selected to post at the blog. These can be copied to a new folder and run through a batch action to prepare small JPEGs for posting. Bridge also allows you to place color "labels" on individual files. If I had another potential purpose for these pictures, say a brochure promoting the fair, the final tight edit for that could be labeled red. Then filtering for double star would bring up the edit for my blog, filtering for red would bring up the edit for the brochure, even if some pictures appear in both edits. Note that "the pumpkin Situation" in the first screen gab above doesn't make it to this edit—I like the shot but it doesn't fit the theme of WPII.

That's my process, in detail, for editing large groups of captures. But it's the process, not the details, that matters. You can use any file management system and adapt its tools to the purpose. To review, the first step is to slice the take into bite size chunks by dividing the shoot into groups of pictures, then make a tentative pick of the best picture in each group. Then pick the very best of these, or the ones that fit a specific intention or audience you have in mind. Finally, go back and compare each of these survivor pictures with the rest of its shooting Situation and make sure it really is the best choice. Editing a large folder of files can seem like a daunting task, but this process not only cuts the task down to size, it gives us an opportunity to learn about our pictures. Long before the advent of digital capture, David Vestal wrote that one very good reason for photographers to print their own pictures (in the traditional darkroom) was to learn about them. Editing a large take on the computer can also be a valuable learning experience rather than mere drudgery.

Last note—the longer you let this process take, the more time you let pass between shooting and editing, or between the editing steps, the better your edit is likely to be.

Carl

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Featured Comment by Ken White: "I recently put together my first large scale (for me) portrait project using a similar multi-pass filtering technique. In my case I started with four years of images in 12 different folders. I went from over a thousand images down to 43 for the final selection. The process of filtering the images and looking at them in great detail helped me see problems and opportunities that will be reflected in my next project. It was a great learning experience."

Featured Comment by Mike in Montreal: "Here's what I do:

1. Pre-shoot checklist.

2. Go to event/interesting location.

3. Shoot at the speed the situation requires. 'Chimp' religiously.

3a. Allow myself to get sidetracked.

4. Sit somewhere. Use camera to edit out junk.

5. Go home. Edit out more sub-grades using camera.

6. Remove card. Load remaining images to a subfolder.

7. Bring into Lightroom using safe all-purpose pre-set.

8. Divide into categories using 'Collections.'

9. Using 'Print' module (with large single-shot template), flip through each collection, assigning the color Yellow to the keepers (based on whatever criteria suits the moment).

10. Filter to Yellow only, develop each image, assigning the color Green when I'm 95–99% satisfied with the result. Not all the Yellows make it this far.

11. Now I look at my Greens as a photo editor would (the print module makes a nice light table) and choose what will best make the story. Mark these as Blue.

12. Final tweaking of the Blues, send to Photoshop.

"I developed this method over time on my own, based on my own quirks and habits. When I read other photogs' workflows, I feel a vague anxiety, so I'm not recommending my approach to anyone here. Mr Weese's tips offer good clues, as do mine, but shooters must find their own way from concept to presentation. Preferably one that keeps the creative process flowing and doesn't throw up psychological obstacles."

Marty Forscher (A Keeper of the Flame)

Noah Schwartz and Marty Forscher. By Herb Zimmerman.

I just heard, late last night, that Marty Forscher died last Wednesday. That name won't mean anything to some, but right now photographers who have been around for a while will be going "Awwww...."

Similarly, some people won't see much in the shot at the head of this post. To others it will look deeply familiar—down to the scratches, so typical of a zillion 'Roid test shots that got louped and then tossed on the studio floor and stepped on and whatnot....

This is actually the first-ever test shot made with a two-shots-on-one sheet fiber-optic Pro Back. (Photographers had complained about "wasting" so much of the area of a Polaroid sheet with just one 35mm test shot. So Marty fixed it.)

Marty Forscher presided for years over a place in New York City just down the street from the offices of LIFE magazine called Professional Camera Repair—otherwise—widely—known as "Marty Forscher's." He was nominally a camera repairman, but he was also an inventor (most notably of the Polaroid back for 35mm cameras, first marketed as the Forscher Pro Back and later licensed to NPC); a sort of unofficial support staff for generations of independent photographers, from lordly Richard Avedon on down to the lowliest wet-behind-the-ears student; and, mainly, a wizard who could do anything—fix anything, create whatever you envisioned, attach any one thing to any other thing even if they weren't intended to go together, make things work differently from the way they were intended to work, and on and on.

He famously called the Nikon F "a hockey puck that could take pictures."

He was a gadfly who prodded the camera manufacturers to making better, stronger, more resilient, more reliable, and more easily repairable gear. They didn't listen to everything he said, but they listened.

He believed in the mission of photography and its best practices, its ability to witness, to draw attention to injustice and affect social change.

When I was coming up in photography, Marty Forscher stories were part of the background radiation. It seemed like everybody had one. People who never set foot inside Professional Camera Repair knew who he was and had heard some of the stories or a few of his bon mots.

Rod Sainty remembers an address Marty made to an annual gathering of pro news photographers some time around 1978–80. "Though acknowledging the increased features that cameras had which enabled amateurs to make photos more easily," Rod says, "he was dismayed at the increasing frailty of cameras with which pros had to work. I remember his opening statement that he had been appointed 'keeper of the flame' of cameras past, and a later one that 'camera manufacturers should decide whether they are in the tool business or in the toy business.'"

There's a brief obituary at PDN. He retired in 1987, and Professional Camera Repair closed its doors, a victim of rising rents and declining business, in 2001.

He was 87.

Mike
(Thanks to Rod Sainty and Noah Schwartz)

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UPDATE: Noah has posted a page of photographs, articles, and related ephemera on Photo.net. Thanks to Rod for mentioning this in the comments.

UPDATE #2 (October 10th): There is now an obituary in The New York Times, written by Margalit Fox, in which TOP is mentioned, and Marshall Arbitman (see below) is quoted (!).

Featured Comment by Jim: "Professional Camera Repair helped keep a lot of my 'hockey pucks' of various kinds working over the years. There didn't seem to be any destruction I could heap upon my cameras as a pro that Marty couldn't fix. I don't know if the 'good old days' were really as good as I remember, but Marty sure made working hard with cameras a lot easier."

Featured Comment by Carl Leonardi: "Marty will be missed—an icon of the photographic film era. The magic was, you believed he could repair anything and make it work again. He took the fear out of camera abuse. I probably met him in the '60s when I brought [LIFE magazine photographer Bill] Vandivert's Leicas and Nikons in for their annual cleaning. Yes it was like going to the local shoe cobbler to repair what was left of an old pair of shoes. No matter what shape your camera was in—'Take it to Marty, he'll fix it' was the word heard round the world."

Featured Comment by Chris V: "As a graduate student in the '60s, I had the privilege of taking my mentor's fell-off-the-tripod Hasselblad to Marty's. I knew I was in a special world. But when another customer, a kindly older lady, asked me if I was familiar with Cornell Capa, I was confused. My sister had been a 'Kappa' (kappa-kappa-gamma) at Cornell, but that didn't seem to fit the conversation at hand. The lady assured me that I would soon know what she was talking about. I think if that Hasselblad had managed to fall off the tripod a couple more times, the Professional Camera Repair environment might well have turned me into more than just an amateur photographer. And I'd love to know who that lady was."

Featured Comment by Marshall Arbitman: "I walked into his shop in, musta been about 1982. Around my neck was a Pentax MX. On my face was a pained expression. Without batting an eye, this impish, graying, stoop-shouldered guy looks at my face, looks at the camera and says: 'Lemme guess. The diodes flicker in the finder and jump all over the place when you meter, and Pentax says they've never hearda such a thing happening. Whyncha just come here first?' He was right. He later told me, lest I think him some sort of camera mystic, that his last MX through the door was just a few days earlier, my camera had no dents, scratches, missing pieces or saltwater residue, and my face looked just like the last guy's. So, QED. Made sense. Still makes sense. But after hearing Marty Forscher stories for 25 years, I don't buy it for a minute."

Featured Comment by Arthur Kramer: "I loved Marty. He was a skier and an athlete and I was sure he would outlive me by 20 years or so. Well so geht es. I remember all the guys who hung out with Marty. A great group. Of course back then there was only one camera, the Leica M3, but the Nikon was creeping up on it. Sleep well old friend. You have many friends who will miss you and remember you."

(Ed. Note: Art Kramer, of whom my son is an honorary nephew, was the optical columnist for Modern Photography magazine for many years. He was the pioneer of laboratory lens tests in consumer photography magazines.  —Mike)

Gordon Lewis Collector Print Offer: 'Precipitation'

Gordon Lewis, Precipitation (with virtual mat)

I'm very psyched about Precipitation, which is the actual title of the umbrella lady pic. The Fed-Ex man came up the walk yesterday afternoon bearing the proof prints from Gordon's printer in Philadelphia, and they look fantastic on the viewing board. (I've spent lots of time looking at 'em.) Gordon worked with the printer and settled on an 8x10 and an 11x14 size. The sizes are nominal; image area is slightly smaller. And, he's decided to offer just the one print this time.

There are of course many options when optimizing a print, but I think I like Gordon's and his printer's decisions; the print captures the light well. It's a striking picture. I like it an order of magnitude better in print form than I do as a JPEG, as you're seeing it here, mainly because of the better rendering of textures and surfaces. Although it still retains its lovely painterly quality. And I love the paper, Crane Museo, which I hadn't seen before—it's semi-gloss, but without much texture, and seems to get out of the way of the picture nicely while retaining a sense of richness and depth.

Would you help us spread the word about the offer? Post a link on other forums or groups you participate in, or on your own blog? And, thanks, if you do.

Here's the official stuff: it's officially the TOP Pentax K-7 Sample Print (although not subsidized by Pentax in any way). The offer is open for five days only, until Wednesday at noon, Philadelphia (Eastern U.S.) time. Payment has to be by PayPal unless you contact Gordon directly and arrange to send him a check (send me an email and I'll pass it along to him). After the offer closes the prints will be made in one run to fill the orders. (On an Epson Stylus Pro 9800 with UltraChrome K3 inks, by the way.)

Because Gordon's working with a professional lab, the prints are a little more expensive than if he were making them himself. Consider, though, that a "normal" gallery price for a photograph would be in the $500–$1,200 range, with $650 or so being a typical average; $250 was considered normal for a student print when I was in school in the '80s. Collecting orders in advance of production instead of filling orders one at a time allows us to offer the 8x10 size for $75 and the 11x14 size for $150. That's what you call a good deal. Even I would spend that much for this, and you know how I am.

Gordon will sign and date each print on the verso.

Shipping/packing/handling is $5 for U.S. orders and a total of $15 for international orders.

MUY IMPORTANTE: 
Please be sure the address you want your print sent to is on your payment page! Whether it's your official PayPal address or you write it in as a note by clicking on the link that says "Add special instructions to the seller." Don't count on emailing us separately with a shipping address...it's a real headache to track stuff like that.

Also, Gordon thinks I should mention that it would make a nice gift! It would, at that.

My sincere thanks to Gordon for working with us on this. Hope you like his print as much as I do.

Mike

UPDATE, Wednesday, October 7th: The sale has now ended. I'm happy to report that it was a smashing success. The only reason we had the sale in the first place was that the picture evoked so much spontaneous praise from readers after it appeared in the original review—which of course is no guarantee that people will actually like it enough to buy it! In this case, however, a lot of people did. I'll leave it to Gordon to write a wrap-up post about the whole experience, if he chooses to, once all the orders are filled. Thanks to everyone who participated.

And by the way, I'm having the test print framed. I've been looking at it for the better part of a week now, and I still like it.  —Mike

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OT: Brief Question for the IT Brain Trust

...Is there such a thing as a high-quality, reliable external hard drive that spins up quickly? I probably sit here forty times a day drumming my fingers waiting for the darn hard drive to spin up. Each time isn't so bad, but in the aggregate it sure wastes a lot of time. Any opinions? Thanks in advance,

Mike

British PM Responds to Photographers' e-petition

I'm finding remarkably little commentary on this in the U.K. press—perhaps because it's hard to search for—but, on Tuesday, the official site of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered an official response to an e-petition protesting the unreasonable oppression of photographers in the U.K.

As I read the document—the language of which has a pretty hard plating of official blandness—it's essentially saying, "Right, we hear you, but it's terrorism we're dealing with here, so bugger off." Adding, at the end, in a slightly more conciliatory vein, that if you're nabbed up you're welcome to make excuses for yourself if you like—which might do you some good. Or not.

I'm not sure whether this is a fair characterization.

If anybody has an opinion about the response, or has found an interesting one online, please let us know.

Mike
(Thanks to numerous tipsters, including Simon Conner and Michael Carrithers)

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Featured Comment by Chuck Albertson: "Sir Humphrey couldn't have drafted a more opaque response, viz: 'Well Minister, if you ask me for a straight answer, then I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn't very much in it one way or the other. As far as one can see, at this stage.'"

Featured Comment by David Talmage: "Your next civil disobedience T-shirt: innocent tourist or other sight-seer."

Featured Comment by David Miller: "Getting well into my grey panther years, I summoned up a bit of long-languishing young revolutionary spirit on a recent five week walking holiday around England—I thought it would be a bit of a lark to get myself arrested for photographing a policeman, and set out to snap everything in uniform from Southampton to Carlisle. Complete waste of time: none of the coppers so much as raised an eyebrow, and when I began to ask them about the law I couldn't find a single one who had heard of it. 'Sounds a bit daft to me,' was the usual response. And during our stay we saw several televised news items which displayed the constabulary in a far-from-flattering light. When it comes down to it, this may be a bit of a tempest in a teapot."

Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "I know folks talk funny over there, but this frankly seems like rather noxious guff for the Government to fart in the face of our dwile flonking photographer friends. 'An officer making an arrest under section 58A must reasonably suspect that the information is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.' Note that the photographer in this weasel-worded sentence need not necessarily refer to the 'person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.' Even if the photographer is taken to be nothing more than a doddering tourist with a disposable camera, the focus (so to speak) seems to be on the subject of the photograph—or, more broadly still, on a photograph of that general kind—and whether it, in turn, 'likely' could be 'useful' to a terrorist. 'Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly, an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse.' Likely?!? This plainly means that a journalist engaging in 'legitimate' activity or an 'innocent' tourist (under some unspecified circumstances) might not have a legitimate defense to an arrest."