The Online Photographer

TechRestore Matte Screens for Macs

By Steve Rosenblum

I've used Macs since 1985 or so and have long valued their intelligent design, thoughtful software integration, advanced OS, instant color management, and ease of use for photo editing. I even raised an Apple computer engineer! I am very knowledgeable about Windows-based computers, which I use extensively at work, but once I get home and turn on my Mac I heave a heartfelt sigh of relief.

In my humble opinion, Apple's one major misfire from a hardware standpoint in recent years has been their near-universal adoption of shiny, reflective monitor screens on both their laptop and iMac computer lines. These displays are absolute glare kings, so high in contrast and brightness that they are difficult to use for even semi-serious photo editing. I think Apple went to these screens because they make video and photos "pop," which probably helps them move computers in their brightly lit Apple Stores. However, they've been a disaster for us photographers.

I solved this problem for my desktop computer by buying a Mac Mini and the last-generation matte Apple Cinema Display. The Mini has plenty of horsepower for my style of photo editing, and the display is accurate and beautiful. Last year when I finally handed my trusty 13-inch G4 Powerbook over to my wife, I purchased one of the the 13-inch plastic-bodied Intel-based MacBooks. This computer does everything that I want it to do with speed and aplomb. But it has that cursed shiny screen! I put up with it for a year—not working on any photo files until I got home from vacation and could transfer files to my Mini—trying to find the one seat in a cafe without tremendous screen glare—scrunching down in my chair to find the one angle without reflections, etc. But last month I finally reached the end of my rope. I was going to sell the MacBook at a loss and buy a new 15-inch MacBook Pro, the one Apple laptop that you can order with an anti-glare screen from the online Apple Store.

Then, I came across an online story about a company called TechRestore that offers a service whereby you send them your shiny-screen laptop and they replace it with a matte screen display of equal specification and ship it back to you.

Otherwise identical MacBooks with and without the TechRestore matte screen

Intrigued, I Googled this and found that it won "Best in Show" at the 2009 Macworld Expo. Satisfied by what I found, I backed up my hard drive and shipped the MacBook off the TechRestore.

The cost for doing this swap for my Macbook was $169 with free ground shipping. They have a number of shipping options, all with a fair pricing structure.

I got the computer back a few weeks ago and it is exactly what I had hoped for: the MacBook that I wanted in the first place. The screen displays an accurate, beautiful image. I had no trouble calibrating it with my ColorEyes Display Pro. It displays a very usable range of grays for photo editing. Two thumbs up from me!

Before people start chiming in on this one, several observations:

1. Yes, Apple should just make this option available on all of its laptops.

2. If you are shopping for a new computer and want a Mac, you should just order the 15-inch MacBook Pro with a Matte screen—the TechRestore swap is mostly worth considering if you already have a shiny-screen MacBook or MacBook Pro.

3. TechRestore claims that this modification will not nullify your AppleCare warranty except on the new screen, which they warranty themselves. They say they are a certified Apple repair shop and will handle it for you with Apple. I have not tried that out myself and cannot testify to its legitimacy.

4. Last, but not least, I have no connection, financial or otherwise, with these guys. Just a satisfied customer!

Steve

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Solar Photography with a Coronado PST

By Ctein

Last column, I told you how much fun Paula and I were having with our new Coronado PST solar telescope and some of the tricks I've come up with to squeeze even more enjoyment out of it. Well, within a few days, I figured out that it was really easy to make solar photographs through the PST! I really do mean easy, not just "easy for Ctein."

You need a digital camera that has raw mode and manual focus and exposure settings; your camera is not likely to be able to focus on the monochromatic red light and relatively featureless disc of the sun, nor is it likely to accurately meter. Use an eyepiece with a rubberized eyecup, common on shorter focal length eyepieces, so that you can press the lens up against the eyecup and keep out stray light (Fig 1).

Figure 1

Set the camera on manual and focus the lens at infinity. ISO 800 and 1/125th sec seem to work well with my 5mm (shown in figure 1) and 3.2 mm eyepieces. Your mileage may differ. Leave the aperture wide open. If your camera has a burst mode, turn it on. Focus the telescope so the image looks sharp to you. Center the features you want to photograph in the eyepiece. Press the camera lens against the eyepiece and hold down the shutter release to fire off a burst of photographs; the Olympus Pen will do 10–12 raw photos before it starts to slow down.

Make a whole lot of photographs! You'll see why.

Figure 2

Okay, that was the easy part. Now it's a little more work. Don't try to evaluate the photographs in the screen on the back of the camera; the deep red light falls well outside the gamut of the display, and they're going to look featureless, a lot like figure 2, top. This is also how they'll look with the default settings in ACR (figure 3, left). Settings more like on figure 3, right, will give you an image like the one at the bottom of figure 2. Eliminating most of the color cast and increasing contrast lets you see a lot more of the detail in the prominences and what's on the surface of the sun.

Figure 3

Experiment! This column is not a tutorial and I'm not explaining exactly what the settings mean nor which ones will work best for you. Play around for yourself! I use different settings for bringing out detail in the prominences and in the surface of the sun. I usually kick the contrast way up to see solar detail, and that pushes prominences into black (figure 4). Not shown in this screenshot is that I also made the curves a lot steeper to increase contrast. Nice thing about raw; you can process photos any way you want.

Figure 4

Figure 4 shows one of the November 17 photographs I referred to in my comments to the previous column. After massaging the photo like this, I could see much, much more detail in the sun than I could through the telescope. This is a much better "view" that I could get with the naked eye. Notice all the "floaters! Almost all those dark spots and clouds are bits of dust and dirt and smudges in the eyepiece. You need to clean your eyepiece scrupulously or your photographs will be filled with these. Even Thierry's photographs aren't spotless. But, the narrow U-shaped cloud near the limb of the sun, lower right, is real. I could tell because from frame to frame it moved with the sun; floaters stay in the same place in the field.

So, why make a lot of photographs? Atmospheric turbulence! From frame to frame, the heat ripples in the air will make big changes in the sharpness of your photographs. 1/125th sec is enough to freeze those ripples, but it won't make them go away. Some frames will be extremely blurry; only a few will be maximally sharp. You will need to look through dozens of frames to find the best one.

Figure 5

Figure 5 shows one of the best frames on November 18. This was a very nice small prominence, but the seeing was really awful. I could barely make out the thin "rind" of darker spicules along the edge of the sun. Normally that rind would be very clear, even though this scope is too small to resolve individual spicules. I picked that frame out of about 200 photographs I made, and it's still not very sharp. Yes, searching is very tedious. Professional solar astronomers have the same problem—that's what students are for.

While you can expect photographs to show you a lot more detail than you can see in plages, granulation, and sunspot groups, you'll see less in prominence photographs. Our brains are really good at picking out fleeting fine detail in a wavering image; much better than the camera.

Can we do anything about that? Yes, but now it's no longer easy. You'll need a good image sharpening program, such as FocusFixer and a user-controllable noise reduction program such as Noise Ninja. (Again, I'm not going to tell you how to use these—not enough time, not enough space. I repeat, experiment!)

I took figure 5 and applied FocusFixer to it with a 16 pixel radius. This gave me the best sharpness with the fewest artifacts, but the photo was covered with "orange peel" texture; an artifact of the extreme enhancement. I used Noise Ninja with a manual selection of areas in the sky and the surface of the sun to eliminate most of the orange peel. Figure 6 shows me as much detail as I could ever hope to get under the really awful seeing conditions. Notice how ragged the limb of the sun is and the "rind" is almost invisible. But it's almost (not quite) as much detail as I could see with the naked eye.

Figure 6

I'm waiting for a day with good seeing and a great prominence. It'll happen; every day is different. That's also part and parcel of real solar astronomy.

Ctein

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ARSENAL Closes its Doors

Дорогие друзья и киеваголики.

Очень жаль информировать, что после 245 лет существования, завод Арсенал окончательно закрылся и канул в историю. После многочисленных судебных процессов, вместо "Государственного Предприятия Завод Арсенал" появилась новая структура "СКТБ" (Специальное Кострукторско-Техническое Бюро), руководство завода упразднено, рабочие места кардинально сокращены, цеха закрыты, оборудование распродается, производство остановлено, склады опустошены.

Хорошая новость заключается в том, что мы выкупили камеры среднего формата, запчасти к ним и обеспечены материалом как минимум еще на 4-5 лет работы.   Поэтому, Вы как и прежде будете иметь возможность приобрести камеры АРАКС с включенной годичной полной гарантией. В любом случае, Вы никогда не останетесь наедине с техническими проблемами еще много много много лет.

С уважением,

Геворг Вартанян
http://araxfoto.com/

Arax translation:

Dear friends and kievaholiks.

It is pity to inform that after 245 year the ARSENAL factory (Zavod ARSENAL in Russian) is lost. After many judicial proceedings now we have the Special Construction Department (SKTB in Russian) instead of ARSENAL factory. The factory management, including the director of factory, are totally changed. The workers are discharges, all manufacturing is stopped, the factory storehouse is empty.

The good news is that we have bought the medium format cameras and parts for several years of works and we'll keep our business running at least 4–5 years more. So, you'll have ability to buy ARAX cameras as usually with our one year worldwide warranty. In any case, you will never be left alone with a problem from your ARAX cameras many many many years.

Sincerely,
Gevorg Vartanyan,
http://araxfoto.com/

Mike
(Thanks to Paulo Rodrigues)

ADDENDUM: Could this finally be the end of the line for the ancient breechmount Pentacon Six / Practisix design? I used Heinrich Mandermann's Exakta 66 variant for a couple of years in the '90s. I wish I had the expertise to write a brief history of that camera design—surely one of the longest-lived in photographic history.  —MJ

Last of a long line: The Arax-60. (Arax Photo)

Great Photographers on the Internet, Part II

(Robert Capa)

Dear Bob, As I always tell people the single Most Important purchase I ever made for my photographic endeavors was my tripod. You certainly needed one here didn't you?  ;-)  You might object that you were standing in the surf to take this, but you could have merely stood on the beach and used a longer lens.

-

(Frederick Sommer)

Sorry but there is a reason why they call it "portrait" orientation. Are you too lazy to turn your camera vertical? Thumbs down

Although your daughter is cute

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(Philippe Halsman)

Nice capture!

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(Henri Cartier-Bresson)

In response to your request for a critique (which I assume you wanted because I have found your photo uploaded on the internet) I have been thinking about your picture for a long time and have concluded that your problem is you don't really know which your subject is. Are you trying to take a picture of the kids? In that case you have failed miserably because the kids are around the edge, almost an afterthought. Are you trying to take a picture of the walking man? Then perhaps you should of considered formal portraiture, at least gotten him to stop, if you ask for permission to take his picture you will be surprised how many people will stop and help you out. 

And here is what I would of done, I would of made an abstract study of the windows, which is the strongest element of what you encountered here. It is the most unusual aspect of your scene and yet you have not drawn sufficient attention to it, a more abstract treatment can be achieved by cropping out and cloning out some of the distractions. Oh well that is my 2 cents I could be wrong, hope it helps you, I have done my best for you, Sincerely Dennis G.

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(Gertrude Kasebier)

SHOW ME HER BOOBS!!!!!!! WOOT-WOOT!!  —seahawksdood90

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(Pete Turner)

Comment from Phil: Excuse me, can someone please tell me why the color balance is so blue on this? Am I missing something? Because if this guy is trying to come off like some kind of expert, I think he should at least know how to SET COLOR BALANCE. I may not be some kind of famous big shot, but at least I know how to use the color sliders and set neutral balance in the raw converter, which is something this guy obviously doesn't know.

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(Sally Mann)

Please don't get me wrong, I totally love this as it is an awesome picture, and I have total respect for your photographic vision. I only wish my photographic vision were half as good. However there is one thing, which is that I see in color. Do you not? I hear dogs see in black and white are you a dog? When I look at this I see a totally unrealistic representation of reality as I see it. Why don't people understand that human beings see in color and black and white far from being artistic is just a depature from reality as bad as anything you could do in PhotoShop? That's my only comment otherwise I love this. I just really wish it had been in color as it would have been double awesome. dmofong999 please see my photostream

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(Andrei Tarkovsky)

I am one who loves this effect, which I have seen before. Do you have an action for this and could you share it with me please? Thanks and love, Gloria from Topeka

-

Mike
(Happy Birthday TOP)

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Featured Comment by Chris: "I really love that HCB, at least in the top five of his. It almost surprises me that not everyone gets what I do out of it. But of course, why would they? When different people look at the world, they see very different places. Which is scary. Or sometimes wonderful. But keeps surprising me. Photography sometimes seems like a way to sort out how we do see the world, and share it with people...but then it turns out that a photo is also another part of that mercurial world."

Featured Comment by William Sawalich:

Dear Ansel:

You're making such progress! I really like the simplicity of this composition, but there's so much "detail" missing from the finished image. Have you considered HDR? I've taken the liberty of fixing your photo to show you what I mean.

Keep snapping,
Bill

-

Featured Comment by Damon Schreiber: "Another fine parody. What we are witnessing, though, is something that I think is great. It's the democratizing of photo-exhibition and criticism. In the days when HCB et al were 'big,' it really was something to show one's work publicly, to mount an exhibition or publish a book, and to receive written criticism of one's work from strangers.

"Today, both the exhibition of one's work and the criticism of others' work can be made without removing one's ass from the comfy confines of the computer chair. And this is both terrible and wonderful.

"The terrible is that with so many million photos on display, the online critic will spend no more than three seconds deciding that something is saveme or deleteme, thumbs up or down, one star or four. And that the less insightful among us rely on pat prescriptions and descriptions like 'use a tripod' 'crop' 'rule of thirds' 'nice capture' 'great DOF,' etc.

"The wonderful is that those of us who would never dream of getting as far off our asses as a gallery or publishing house are still able to find ways to display our work and receive something like valid criticism. Also, one finds every once in a while a truly great unsung photographer. And in the absence of curators and editors telling us how 'important' one person's work is, we are able to respond more authentically to what moves us as opposed to what is supposed to move us.

"Actually I have to say that contrary to most of your examples, much of the online commentary I see at places like Aminus3.com (and I'm equally guilty) is generic praise and logrolling (praising those who have praised us) rather than truly close reading and trenchant criticism.

"On balance, things haven't probably changed all that much in that there have always been less-than-insightful critics as well as those who baffled with bullshit and used tortured rhetoric to camouflage that fact that they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. The pointedly ignorant drive-by put-downs were mostly unpublished until recently, though. Ultimately, I do always have to come down on the side of giving more voice to more people, even if some of those voices remind me of people I thought I'd never have to hear from again after high school."

ADDENDUM: A poor digisnap of Mark Klett's "Man Behind Creosote Bush," which I mentioned in the comments. From MK's lovely little book Traces of Eden, which is an old fave, one of those books I treasure. (Long out of print. Looks like there are some used copies available for reasonable prices, however.) —MJ

Blog Notes: TOP Turns Four

Rather incredibly (and by incredible, I mean difficult to believe), TOP turns four years old on Saturday. I think I've mentioned before that when I started doing this in 2005, my ambition was to keep it going for a year, and, frankly, at the start, I wouldn't have given a farthing for the chances of that. And yet here we are, still chasing the great white squirrel.

To date, there have been a few dozen shy of 3,000 posts, well over 21 million visits to the main page, and very close to 50,000 comments.

Now, I hate to do this to you, I really do, but you know what's coming: as I always say, it's time to buy yourself our birthday present. If there's something you want from either Amazon or B&H Photo, you must* buy it for yourself. Look, you have to do something to support TOP and help pay for all the good free stuff you enjoy, right? So if there's a book you want, or a lens, or a CD, anything, I'm sorry, but it's your duty; you really have no choice—your hands are tied—your obligation as clear as...optical glass. And if your spouse or partner, child or parent complains about you spending money, well, you can tell him or her in good conscience that you didn't want to buy yourself a present, but you had to, Mike forced you to.

Mike with hottie and tool of trade in front of TOP World Headquarters

Meanwhile, I'm going to take a couple of days off. I won't be slacking, however: I plan to use the time to finish up this year's "TOP Ten Cameras" list. This time, though, I'm trying something different. I know we all just love the cute way that the "top" in "top ten" matches the site's acronym, but let's face it, the concept of the "best" cameras is incredible (and by incredible, I mean lacking in credibility. Kinda silly, in other words). I'm planning to try a new format for it, too. Hope you'll be entertained, and possibly even enlightened.

Okay, mostly entertained.

And Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate it—what the heck, even if you don't.

Cheers,

Mike, TOP's Chief Artificial Coffee Creamer Officer**

*(I kid, of course. As I also always say, you're always welcome here whether you buy anything through our links or not. Especially if you are un- or under-employed, my thoughts are with you this Thanksgiving, and please keep your money for more important things. You can catch us when prosperity smiles on you again, as surely it will.

I'm very grateful for all the support we get from so many people. TOP has felt the economic downturn but is still surviving. More than 270 people "subscribe," i.e., give a recurring donation of at least 25 cents a month; a number of people have sent cash "tips"; somewhere between 1% and 4% of our readers have bought things though our links at least once; and various "Friends of the Site" have made donations in kind of everything from professional advice to equipment loans. Plus, we have some great advertisers. And let's not forget the many individuals who have written the guest posts or the great comments that add so much to the conversation. I have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.)

**

ADDENDA:

 

Out-of-camera JPEG version

 

Mike K2 filter version

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(P.S. There are sometimes some hidden jokes on the site that I put in just to amuse myself. People hardly ever notice. Hit the permalink for this post and check out the URL....)

OT: On the Origin of Species

Darn, missed it—I meant to mention that yesterday (Tuesday) was the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, surely the most important book of the 19th century. Although this is one of those important classics, like Smith's The Wealth of Nations, that is seldom read even by its admirers, I have a pretty strongly-held opinion that the version to read, if you want to read it, is the first. Later editions contained considerable new matter by Darwin, but in essence he was, in those later editions, addressing points raised by the debate that followed the book's publication—joining the argument as it were, like a blog post that gets continually revised in response to the comments it raises...and in my opinion those revisions dilute the impact and impede the flow of thought and language that defines the character of the original book as a reading experience. 

There's a Kindle version of the first edition available for 99¢.

Mike

Featured Comment by Ronny A. Nilsen: "The first edition is available free from the Gutenberg project. The copyright on this book has expired so it's in the public domain."

Featured Comment by BrianW: "Like a lot of people right now, I expect, I'm part-way though actually reading it for the first time. I'm finding it less tough going than I had anticipated. Darwin's writing is very lucid. I'm reading the Everyman hardback edition, which is the first edition along with The Voyage of the Beagle, plus an introduction by Dawkins. Maybe Mike can provide the Amazon links for that? It is really nicely printed and bound—the kind of book I didn't think you could buy new any more (I have no affiliation, etc....)."

U.S. link to the Everyman's Library edition

U.K. link to the Everyman's Library edition (temporarily out of stock)

Charis Wilson, a Link to Another Era

Charis Wilson died last Friday. She was first the model, then the lover, and finally the wife of photographer Edward Weston, who was 28 years her senior.

When I came of age in photography, it was just past the time when reading Weston's Daybooks (in the then-ubiquitous two-volume Aperture set, now long out of print) was almost a rite of passage among photographers of a certain ambition. I remember reasoning during my penurious student years that I didn't need to own my own copy because the two volumes would always be available in libraries; and now all I remember about them are his accounts of his love affairs. Chiefly, Charis. Edward was a man much swayed by his passions for his lovers.

Wilson is often referred to as Weston's "muse," and the description for once isn't inapt. She was the subject of half of his nudes, many of them among his most famous pictures. And, according to some, she was the better writer and wrote the application for the Guggenheim—the first ever awarded to a photographer—that cemented Weston's national fame. She helped support them, helped him in the darkroom, even helped generate ideas for his pictures.

Weston died more than fifty years ago, and even his most famous photographer son, Brett, has been gone for more than decade and a half. I hadn't actually realized Charis Wilson was still alive. Weston distinctly belongs to an earlier time, a different era. Charis was long-lived. She was ninety-five.

Photographs by Edward Weston

I remember, from the Daybooks, Weston's palpable grief when they divorced—he wrote to a friend something like "Edward and Charis are no more!" —But don't take that as an accurate quote. Yet, although she left him and remarried immediately after their divorce, they remained friends, and she spent much of the latter part of her life talking and writing about her association with him—including in her autobiographical book Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston, and in a film, made five years ago, called Eloquent Nude: The Love and Legacy of Edward Weston and Charis Wilson. (Anyone seen that?)

I'd love to own The Daybooks now, but can't afford a set. Hard to believe they're rare now. I wonder if Weston's work and the arc of his life are as familiar to photographers now as they once were. Amy Conger's book is still in print (although Amazon doesn't seem to have it in stock), as is the earlier Aperture monograph.

I have a feeling the definitive story of Edward and Charis is still to be written.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Chris Y.: "Thank you for this blog, I can't tell you what it means to me sometimes. I took all of Newhall's classes at the University of New Mexico in the late '70s. He made these people real to us, and we felt as if we'd known them personally, because he had. The news about Charis reached me via The Online Photographer as I was leaving my office for the weekend, like a faint radio signal from a distant, distant star. I thought about it all day yesterday, but who could I tell, that it wasn't just a dream after all...."

Quote o' the Day

"I'm an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I'll bring you something out of it."

—John Lennon

Featured Comment by DZ:

Edward Burtynsky's Oil

Edward Burtynsky et al., Burtynsky: Oil
Hardcover; 140 pages
Steidl Photography International
Published October 31, 2009
14.4 x 11.5 x 1.1 inches
(U.K. link )

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

Many of the 20th century's greatest landscape photographers consciously embraced an environmentalist ethic in their work. Ansel Adams's long association with the Sierra Club and his tireless devotion to conservation is of course well known. Eliot Porter, Ray Atkinson, Robert Glenn Ketchum and many others pictured the dwindling remnants of pristine landscape as a redemptive Eden, worth preserving before it was all paved over.

While many folks have continued pursuing this idiom, in a world with six billion people and relentlessly increasing pressure on the environment it's harder to find unique corners of wilderness that haven't been photographed already. Confrontational images illustrating environmental degradation have been a feature of work by photographers such as Richard Misrach, Ed Kashi and Robert Glenn Ketchum. (Ketchum seems to slyly insert a few shocking images between more traditional pretty landscapes.) There can be a kind of formalist beauty to such photographs, but it's obviously a much tougher challenge than rendering a snow-capped mountain or forest waterfall attractively.

Edward Burtynsky has built a career in fine art photography meeting this challenge. He began photographing conventionally beautiful landscapes in large format. As he relates in the video Manufactured Landscapes, he had an epiphany while attempting to photograph in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania. He realized that every bit of landscape within sight had been completely reshaped by coal mining. Nothing was "natural." The landscape as reshaped by man instead became his subject.

Oil is Burtynsky's latest book. The extraction, distribution, consumption, and declining availability of petroleum are all explored through his large-format photographs.

The opening section examines extraction and refinement. The immense size, geometric order and rectilinear shapes of production fields and refineries make for images of striking formal beauty despite the subject matter, all rendered in fine-grained detail. The cover image, reproduced inside, is a vast diptych of a California production field with endless ranks of derricks, shot in warm late-day light. Another image shot from the air reveals the colossal scale of tar sands extraction.

Next is "Motor Culture," images of the world oil has made. Aerial shots of geometric highway interchanges, the immensity of exurban sprawl, endless rows of new cars awaiting shipment—even Bike Week in Sturgis, South Dakota, gets the same monumental treatment.

Last, and darkest, is "The End of Oil." In this section Burtynsky shows us the final result of the process: rusted out, oozing abandoned oil fields, endless ranks of junked cars and airplanes. Some of the most affecting images show unbelievably vast piles of discarded tires, or the grim oil-soaked reality of recycling in the developing world.

Following the images are essays by curator Paul Roth, writer/photographer Michael Mitchell, and economist/ecologist William E. Rees. Their essays provide a sobering perspective on what the extraction of petroleum, the consequences of its exploitation, and the predicted decline in production mean to civilization and the planet. The essays bracket a short, ironic postscript group of photographs of Detroit's decaying abandoned auto factories.

Oil is a remarkable book for those concerned about where, as an industrial civilization, we are headed in the future. The beautiful photographs of nominally unappealing subjects may cause a bit of cognitive dissonance compared to photographs of a pristine mountain lake; but they're beautiful just the same.

For those interested in Edward Burtynsky's work, there is an embarrassment of riches currently available in book form. Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, catalog to the 2003 exhibition, is still available, though its reproductions are marred by poor shadow detail (U.K. link). China (Steidl, 2006) has very good reproductions, which beautifully depict the country's vast factories and frenzied urban construction, together with older coal and steel facilities (U.K. link). Finally, Quarries (Steidl, 2009) (U.K. link) applies the same immaculate large format photography to the mining of marble, granite and limestone. Reproductions are again excellent; large vehicles look like Matchbox toys inside gleaming marble pits in the earth. Great stuff if you like this kind of photography.

Geoff

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Featured Comment by Gavin: "I work in the oil industry, mostly installing offshore platforms and laying pipes, not something Mr Burtynsky has photographed, but it is nice to see some really good, truthful pictures of any kind of industry. The manufactured landscape is all around us; most of the 'wild' landscapes here in the U.K. are anything but. I used to live down in the SW of England and Dartmoor, a popular haunt of landscape photographers, was once one of the most industrialized areas of the World (probably) as tin and lead etc. were mined. It doesn't take much effort to find the remains of the mines and smelters if you know where to look."

Featured Comment by Moose [responding to Gavin]: "From a broader perspective: 'Southern England, for example, is one of the largest structures ever made by man. We think of it as nature: the beautiful expanse of towns, villages, forests and moors that extends from Cornwall to Kent and from the south coast to the Midlands. We think of it as natural, but of course it is man-made, almost all of it. It wasn't there three thousand years ago. It is a consciously created structure, perhaps 300 miles by 100 miles, and it has been created slowly, patiently, over a period of about a thousand years.' Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book One, 'The Phenomenon of Life,' pp. 28-29."

It Wasn't a Referendum on the Work

A number of issues have come up in the last few days as a result of recent posts that I haven't done a very good job of following up on. However, I'd like to address a couple of issues that arose from Mitch Alland's post yesterday.

First, a technical one: curiously, none of TOP's brain trust, including me, knew what should happen in theory to the maximum aperture of a fixed lens when a wide-angle converter is screwed on to the end of it. It's always fascinating to discover the extent of one's own ignorance! However, experimentally we've determined that the maximum aperture of the GRD III's fixed 6mm (28mm equivalent) ƒ/1.9 lens doesn't change when the GW-2 wide-angle converter is used. It does indeed become a 21mm-equivalent ƒ/1.9. With a constantly-lit subject and the lens set at ƒ/1.9 in Aperture-priority mode, the shutter speeds are the same with and without the converter. Whether the same would hold true for all add-on wide-angle converters—don't know.

Secondly, I was surprised (and disappointed) that several commenters seemed to have trouble with the premise of Mitch's post, which is clearly stated in its first sentence: "...for my work, the new Ricoh GR Digital III produces ISO 1600 files that are greatly improved over those of the GR Digital II." What could possibly be controversial about that? What he's saying, for those of you who didn't get it, is that, for his work, the new GR Digital III produces ISO 1600 files that are greatly improved over those of the GR Digital II. I hope that explanation makes everything more clear.

The key phrase is "for my work." And why would anyone approach someone else's work with the implicit expectation that they have to like it? Does anyone approach all photographic work that way? All plastic art*?

I find that idea both alien and absurd. You can respond to work however you want to, but what anyone's work looks like, or ought to look like, is up to the artist. With a mature practicing artist or photographer (i.e., not a newcomer or student), we respect the fact that their work looks the way it does because that's the way they want it to look. You have to take it at face value and accept it or reject it for yourself based on what you see.

Mitch is going for a very particular look with his pictures; I've been looking at his work for at least a dozen years, and, although he's changed and evolved over that time, he's never strayed from his basic aesthetic goals and preferences. The fact that you don't share those goals, or that you might use different equipment or materials if you were to do that kind of work yourself, is meaningless. All Mitch is telling you in his post is how his new camera works for the uses he needs it for. It's an admittedly limited data point, of relative interest to various readers based on how it relates to what they like and what they might want to do, or what kinds of pictures they want to look at. (It wasn't a referendum on the work. Also, it was only a small portion of his overall review of the camera, the other parts of which were published on the Rangefinder Forum.)

It's futile to approach art by saying, in effect, "if only." If only Mark Rothko had done sunsets, if only Picasso had liked pink instead of blue, if only Norman Rockwell had been an anarchist nihilist. Like this? If only Mitch Alland took the kind of pictures you take, then maybe he would prefer the camera you use? That makes no sense.

If only Winogrand's horizons were straight. If only Witkin wasn't such a necrophiliac. If only Juan Buehler would shoot Tri-X. (This could get fun.)

How you respond is up to you. What they present is up to them.

Mike

*Glossary Dept.: "Plastic art" means painting, drawing, sculpture, etc., not artworks made out of plastics.

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Using the Ricoh GR Digital III at ISO 1600 for B&W

By Mitch Alland

The Ricoh GR Digital III

Let's start with the bottom line: for my work, the new Ricoh GR Digital III produces ISO 1600 files that are greatly improved over those of the GR Digital II. The GRD III files have much better image quality in terms of noise and dynamic range, improvements that are revealed dramatically when processing to achieve the high contrast look that I like. GRD III raw files (DNG) can be substantially "roughed up" while maintaing a longer and more attractive mid-tone range. With the GRD II I could only rarely achieve the look that I wanted without the files falling apart: my experience was that only a small proportion of ISO 1600 files shot with the GRD II were usable. Similarly, the image quality of the original GRD, which could produce only JPEG files at ISO 1600, was also much inferior to the image quality of the GRD III's raw files.

GRD III, 21mm converter, ISO 1600, ƒ/1.9

GRD III, ISO 1600, ƒ/1.9

Ricoh has made a huge step forward in the GRD III. The improvement in ISO 1600 files parallels the improvement in lower-lower ISO files that if wrote about in my review of the camera on the Rangefinder Forum.

However, with the GRD III's fast ƒ/1.9 lens there is also less need to shoot at ISO 1600 than there was with the earlier versions of this camera (the GRD II had an ƒ/2.4 lens). The following picture, taken in dark lighting, I would previously have shot at ISO 1600, but the faster ƒ/1.9 lens of the GRD III encouraged me to try ISO 400: the slight motion blur (1/55 sec. shutter speed), for me, does not detract from the mood of the photograph.

GRD III, ISO 400, ƒ/1.9

Exposure for night shots is another issue, as one usually faces a high contrast situation. With street lighting the tendency is often to overexpose, particularly using high-ISO on a digital camera whose files usually don't take well to lightening (dodging). When I started shooting with the GRD III I discovered that using manual spot exposure, rather than aperture priority multi exposure, I generally got better exposures.

Manual exposure on the GRD III uses the same method as the GRD II: by pressing the "rocker button" the camera immediately centers the needle on the suggested exposure, and one can then use the ADJ lever to increase or decrease the shutter speed. Viewing the LCD allows you to select the best exposure for the subject that can been seen easily and accurately when using the LCD for framing, which is what I do in any case.

Using manual spot exposure I find that my shots are more correctly exposed and the exposure is generally less than I was getting by using aperture priority multi exposure together with an EV adjustment. The fact  that the manual exposure method leads to less overexposure for night scenes is important because these are shot at high ISO, which has less dynamic range than lower ISO shots. My feeling is that people generally tend to overexpose night shots by letting the exposure meter do its 18% gray thing, without adjusting sufficiently for the reality that the night is not 18% gray. The following picture is, in my view, a reasonable representation of the the general darkness of the actual street scene.

GRD III, ISO 1600, ƒ/1.9

Fast and wide
You will note that the first photograph in this post was shot with the 21mm wide converter. In my RFF post on the 21mm converter, I wrote that this was an excellent lens and a cheap way of getting an effective field of view of 21mm with ƒ/1.9. Fast 21mm lenses are not common and are expensive: for example, it's only recently that Leica has gone beyond ƒ/2.8 for its 21mm lenses, and its current 21mm ƒ/1.4 lens costs US$6,000.

Here is another picture that benefits from the 21mm FOV, complete with some motion blur that I feel adds to its expressiveness:

GRD III, 21mm converter, ISO 1600, ƒ/1.9

You will note a good amount of grain in most of the pictures above. When contrast is enhanced, just as with film, digital photographs increase "grain." From the following photograph you can can an idea of how ISO 1600 from the GRD III can look if contrast is not increased strongly.

GRD III, ISO 1600, ƒ/1.9

Finally, unlike most digital cameras, the Ricoh GR Digital III might under-rate ISO somewhat, which means that the performance of this camera set at ISO 1600 is actually higher than 1600, which would make it even more impressive. Indeed the overall performance of the GRD III helps validate the idea of the small-sensor camera as a new, serious format, in the way that 35mm was a new format when the first Leica was introduced.

Mitch

U.K. links:
Ricoh GR Digital III Digital Camera
Ricoh GW-2 wide converter

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Where Was the Photographer Standing?

I had a brief conversation with Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai the other day about how bad many people (even photographers) seem to be at reading facial expressions in pictures. We both agreed it's something a lot of viewers seem remarkably blind to. Another thing people seem especially bad at reading in photographs is the participation of the photographer in the scene and the implications of where exactly he or she had to have been when the picture was taken.

The exception seems to be photographs taken from tall buildings or from flying machines, looking down. "Now where were you when you took that?" is the usual response to the only aerial shot in the portfolio I show most often. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to be something most people concern themselves with*—the common assumption seems to be that the camera is an omniscient eye and it's perfectly explicable, if not natural, for it to have been where it was.

I thought about this again yesterday when reading about Elliott Erwitt and encountering again his once-famous picture of the laughing lovers in the rear-view side-mirror. (I say "once famous" because I don't think it's particularly well known any more, except perhaps among older photographers—even though it's on the cover of his Personal Exposures.) I've never liked that one, particularly. The first time I saw it, many years ago now, I blurted out something like "who is he, the hook?"

My friend who showed me the picture said, "what?"

Photo by Elliott Erwitt

I was referring to an old campfire story that circulated widely when I was a boy (and may still, I don't know) about a pair of lovers in a car in the woods where an axe-murderer with a hook for a hand is known to be roaming. In one variant of the story, they end up falling asleep in the car and, in the morning, awake to find the hook hanging from the door-handle. (I guess you know this is an older story, because only old-fashioned car door handles would have a place for the hook to hang.)

Anyway, that's why this picture has always struck me as unsatisfying—because I instinctively place the photographer in it. He'd have to have been virtually a stalker in order to take such a picture naturally. The picture was a setup, not a candid. That seems obvious to me at a glance.

If it's not a setup, then it's disturbing, rather than all happy, sunsetty and romantic.

Eyes, balls, and a camera
One of the funniest—and most cogent—answers to my question the other day about the three things you most need to practice your photography was provided by a reader named Nick, who said "eyes, balls, and a camera." Amen, brother Nick. A little crude, but that nails it.

My teacher and mentor Steve Szabo, who had been a top photojournalist for The Washington Post before retiring to become an art photographer with a view camera, once showed us a photograph of a Central or South American peasant wedding that amazed me. Nobody else in our class responded the way I did, but all I could think of when I saw it was "where were you when you took that?" The picture was taken during the ceremony from directly over the priest's shoulder, with the bride and groom and all the guests in attendance. When I put Steve in the scene it just stunned me. Steve answered my question by saying he'd just walked right to the altar as if he had every right in the world to be there, and started photographing. He said it almost with a shrug: "It's just what you have to do." I've mentioned before that I could never have been a photojournalist because I would never have the stones to do things like that. Or, more accurately, the confidence to pull it off without creating an unpleasant spectacle. Some people can; not I.

A lot of the work of photographing is getting yourself to where the picture was taken—whether that's Simon Roberts setting up his tripod on top of his strategically-parked motor home, or Jim Nachtwey wandering the scene of 9/11, or the indefatigable Robert Cameron, who died last November 10th at the age of 98, up in a helicopter above a big city in good light. But most viewers, most of the time, are perfectly happy to collude in the illusion of the omniscient camera, and simply ignore the implications of the photographer as a presence in the scene.

Candid photography as misdemeanor
Another story I think about in this context is one I had occasion to tell the other day when I had a lunch with a local reader, Jack McD. (Jack also let me "unbox" his new gray Leica M9—way cool—but that's another story.) It was a picture taken with a wide-angle lens, looking directly down on two sunbathing young women dressed in bikinis. The women were both asleep on the grass, and they each had the back strap of their bikini tops open so as not to ruin their tans. The picture was taken by a woman I taught with briefly many years ago. She was small, quiet, and unprepossessing in her manner, even though she was actually quite assertive in terms of how she actually acted. Here's more or less how that conversation went:

Me: Do you know these girls?"

She: No. They were just sunbathing in the park.

Me: Were they really alseep?

She: Yes.

Me: So how did you take this?

She: I just walked over and put one foot in between the two of them, and leaned in.

(In other words, she was straddling one of the sleeping young girls in order to get herself in position to take the picture.)

Me (laughing): Do you realize how fast I'd be arrested if I tried to do that?

I'm 6'2", and I weighed 200 lbs. at the time, and if it's been a while since I've had a haircut I somewhat resemble Ted Kaczynski's post-capture mugshots. If I tried to take a picture like that of two sleeping teenage girls who were strangers to me, it would practically constitute assault. All I could picture was one of them waking up to find me hulking over her, and the scream she would have let out as a result!

No credit
As photographers, we're preoccupied with where we were and how we felt when we took our pictures. In fact, I think a lot of photographers often allow their memories of how hard the picture was to get to affect their editorial judgment about how good a picture it is. (A clue: it has nothing to do with it. A great picture can be a toss-off, and one you work and work to get can still suck. You've got to detach yourself from all that when you edit.) But it's not something you get much credit for from viewers. They take it for granted—if they even think about it at all.

Mike

*There's one other exception—the moralistic and unreasonable one that we discussed recently about the common kneejerk reaction to a photograph of a crime or atrocity in progress—"how could he (or she, or you) just stand there?" In a sense, though, that also assumes a sort of omniscience—it assumes the photographer as omniscient actor, as if anyone who could intervene in a scene enough to photograph it should also have the power to alter the event, whatever it was—even though that's seldom the case.

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ADDENDUM: Doug Boller sent me this, an outtake from a late '70s project of his, calling it "a confluence of reflections"...the man in the mirror is Steve Szabo! Quite a coincidence considering the contents of this post....

Featured Comment by Ben Rosengart: "Movies and television have trained us not to ask about the camera-wielder. IMHO."

Featured Comment by Ed Nixon: "I always thought that Erwitt picture was a self-portrait (with friend). Still do, even after reading this post. My interpretation does a better job of explaining where he was than a 'stalker' theory. Why would he have to be looking through a camera, particularly given the obvious attributes of the lady in question?"

Featured Comment by David Lykes Keenan: "Elliott told me that this particular picture was not immediately seen as he reviewed his contact sheets. He 'found' it some time (years?) later. He also told me that he knew the couple in the car."

Featured Comment by David Brookes: "I like your Steve Szabo story, Mike. Before I retired I was an Anglican priest, and I was taking a wedding service one day in a small church in the North of England where I was Vicar. It was a small church with no side aisles, so it was impossible for a photographer to move to the east end unseen: for that reason no photographs were ever taken from behind where I was officiating.

"One day, however, a vestry door had been inadvertently left unlocked, and the wedding photographer sneaked his way in. Unfortunately this particular fellow had a bad limp and walked with a stick: he also used a Mamiya RB67. You can imagine my surprise when I heard this three-legged creature clumping across the church behind me, followed by the crash of the Mamiya's shutter (which, for your younger readers, sounded like someone dropping a tray of cutlery).

"Needless to say this particular photographer was banned from my church after that!"

Featured Comment by Andreas Manessinger: "The image is also on the cover of one of the best albums ever made, Fairground Attraction's glorious 1988 debut 'The First of a Million Kisses.' I knew the image long before I knew the photographer."

Featured Comment by Robert: "This is a quote from a recent Erwitt lecture I attended, regarding said photo: 'The story about this picture is that I discovered it 25 years after I took it. I happened to be looking through my contact sheets and thought that it might make a nice print. I advise everyone to look through their contact sheets.' Later he related how the couple were friends of his, and someone tried to sue him claiming to be one of the subjects. He produced the contact sheet with the rest of the photos and never heard from the person again."

Home is Where You Are At the Moment

"I consider myself a reasonable craftsperson."

—E.E.

There's a nice article about the World's Greatest Living Photographer at the Financial Times. Just thought I'd pass it along.

Regarding his hatred of digital manipulation mentioned near the end of the FT.com article, remember Stephen Gillette's great comment about Elliott's anti-digital T-shirt? Still makes me chuckle.

I'm supposed to be taking today off, so I'll hush up now.

Mike
(Thanks to Chris Bertram)

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An Interview with Simon Roberts

Simon Roberts, South Downs Way, West Sussex, 8th October 2007, from We English

By Ailsa McWhinnie

Simon Roberts is a British photographer who for a number of years worked on assignments for magazines and weekend supplements. His eventual disillusionment with being asked to produce what he describes as "the definitive story" on a topic, and then being given three days in which to do it, led to him embarking on a year-long trip across Russia. The resulting images were published to great acclaim by Chris Boot, under the title Motherland.

The success of Motherland put him in the position where he was able to raise funding for his next project from Arts Council England, the National Media Museum and the John Kobal Foundation. His latest book is We English.

Simon lives on the south coast of England with his wife Sarah and their children Jemima and Florence. Of his daughters, he says, "Jemima was conceived in Russia and Florence as we traveled through England, so I can’t go traveling any more as we can’t afford any more children!"

Ailsa McWhinnie: We English is photographed in a quite different style from Motherland. What prompted the change?

Simon Roberts: It’s not quite the departure it might look. There are a couple of pictures in Motherland that inspired the direction I took with We English. One in particular shows a Victory Day picnic at Yekaterinburg [a major Russian city on the eastern side of the Urals]. Victory Day is a very important public holiday when the Russians celebrate victory over Nazi Germany. When I blew the picture up for an exhibition I became really interested in the relationship between these constellations of people and the geographical space. There are all sorts of little signifiers in the photograph, such as the silver birch trees—which are a motif in Russian landscape painting—but also when you look more closely you’ll see balloons in the trees, so it becomes a natural landscape adapted by human presence. It was something I decided I’d quite like to explore in the England work.

Sunday picnic, Yekaterinburg, from Motherland

AMc: What inspired the project that became We English?

SR: I was quite struck by the relationship between the Russians and their geography, and it started me thinking about my relationship to England. I started to want to explore that sense of identity. There’s a very rich tradition of British photographers photographing the British landscape, from Benjamin Stone in the 1890s to Bill Brandt and Tony Ray-Jones, but there had been a bit of a lull more recently, so it felt quite timely to go on this journey. My generation has travelled abroad a lot, there’s this sense of the "exotic other"—and I’ve done it myself with Russia, albeit trying to take an anthropological approach. However, it was really important I wasn’t derivative of what had gone before in terms of photographing Britain—I had to find my own voice. So in summer 2007 I started exploring different ways of photographing.

Motherland was shot using a Mamiya 7, because I needed a light camera when travelling—but this time I started playing with a 5x4-inch camera and began to see something quite interesting when the people in the picture appeared small in the frame. I wanted the landscape to be as important as the people within it, but to make sure the people weren’t so small you wouldn’t be able to make out the detail of what they were wearing and how they related to one another.

AMc: So did you try to avoid the places that have formed parts of other photographers’ work?

SR: No. I deliberately went to New Brighton [the seaside town photographed by Martin Parr in his book, The Last Resort]. The pictures didn’t end up in the book, but I certainly went to some of these places because they’d been done before. I was intrigued, because historically we’re doing many of the same things we did a hundred years ago, it’s just we’re wearing different clothes. A lot of old traditions and festivals are being revived by local councils who are looking for new ways of getting tourists. Actually, there are very few photographs of that sort of event in the book, because I wanted to steer clear of events that were being quite deliberately marketed and promoted. The images that ended up in the book often depict quite mundane activities.

AMc: Were there any surprises as the project got underway?

SR: It was interesting to see that people are quite parochial. They end up doing things very close to where they live: the guy fishing on the banks of the river, or the Sunday-league football, these are very ordinary things, but to the person doing them they’re very important, so I wanted to make them more grand—and that was one of the challenges. When you’re doing a project in your own back yard you have to learn to tune into the ordinary things you see every day that you don’t consider to be a photograph—so in many ways I was looking for the "non" photograph.

AMc: You invited members of the public to submit ideas for places or events to photograph. How successful was that?

SR: What I liked was not just the suggestions themselves but also the way that people talked about them. What’s interesting is the way they think about England. A lot of it is about memory—how they remember a place and how that might be different from how they experience it now. If the person was writing from abroad, it would often be to suggest something they missed about England. I probably photographed only five or ten percent of the ideas, but it was a great way of generating interest. Other ideas would come from local newspapers, or I’d stop by the local village hall and see what was posted on their noticeboard. There were probably 12 main anchorpoints—places I wanted to be at particular times in the year, such as Ladies Day at Aintree—and then I’d build in other places around them.

Ladies’ Day, Aintree Racecourse, Merseyside, 4th April 2008

AMc: Even though you worked with a 5x4 camera, which by its very nature slows things down, the pictures are still very much about the "decisive moment"—I get the sense of you waiting for the choreography to come together.

SR: It was very challenging because often there were a lot of people in the frame, and how do you find the decisive moment when there are a hundred people moving around? Sometimes I would just take the picture and not really be too bothered if one person was standing in front of another, or if a lamppost was coming out of somebody’s head. But another reason for using 5x4 was because everyone’s a photographer now—whether with a mobile phone or a high-end DSLR—and I had to ask myself what differentiates me from them? So by using a 5x4 I was actually making a very public statement that I was there to take a photograph of this landscape.

People were quite interested in what I was doing but, more importantly, they didn’t feel threatened. If I’d been on a beach walking around with a 35mm camera I suspect people would have felt a lot more threatened. Funnily enough, I was getting quite spontaneous pictures with a very cumbersome piece of equipment. It would take five or ten minutes to set the camera up, so people would get bored with watching me and end up carrying on with what they were doing. There are only a couple of frames where you can see in the distance that someone’s looking at me, but generally it’s almost as if I wasn’t there.

AMc: What other considerations were there?

SR: I shot using only a 150mm lens, which is pretty much how the human eye sees, and I always wanted, where possible, to have an elevated position as this gives a greater sense of the people and their relationship to the landscape. So often I would photograph from the roof of my motorhome.

I wanted to explore the notion of leisure because often this is something we do quite subconsciously, and what people do with their leisure time not only says something about them as individuals, but us as a collective, too. I also knew I only wanted to work outside, to give a sense of the pastoral. And even though I worked in cities, too, there is still a sense of people gravitating towards the green spaces.

Mad Maldon Mud Race, River Blackwater, Maldon, Essex, 30th December 2007

AMc: Why England and not Britain?

SR: Because of devolution, and with Scotland and Wales having a lot more local power politically and to some extent economically, there is a sense of Welshness and Scottishness, but people often see being passionate about being English as rather dirty. I deliberately put the flag of St. George on the cover because I wanted to be quite provocative and suggest there don’t have to be right-wing connotations to it. I’m not suggesting I’m a nationalist, but I do find it interesting how people align themselves with a geographical border.

Saunton Sands, Devon, 23rd May 2008

AMc: Would you say the photographs are romantic?

SR: I was certainly inspired by romantic paintings of England, but even so there are probably only one or two images you would describe as picturesque. I did deliberately photograph in quite evocative light sometimes to try to generate a particular feeling, but yes, I did want to create quite beautiful pictures—and unashamedly so.

AMc: Thank you very much Simon.

SR: Thank you.

Ailsa

We English, by Simon Roberts
Hardback, 112 pages
Published by Chris Boot Ltd. 
Price £26.20

(U.S. link)

For more information visit www.we-english.co.uk

A major exhibition of the work will be on show at the National Media Museum, Bradford, from March 12th to September 8th, 2010

Motherland, by Simon Roberts
Hardback, 192 pages
Published by Chris Boot Ltd
Price £15.75

(U.S. link)

--

-

My friend Ailsa McWhinnie, now a freelance writer and book editor, was founding editor of Black & White Photography magazine. My thanks to both Ailsa and Simon. —MJ

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Featured Comment by Len Salem: "I would also recommend Simon Roberts' blog. You can go back through its archives and see how the project matured, how he interacted with contributors to the blog to research ideas for his work, how the project grew, the final sequencing and editing and so on—as well as lots of interesting asides of a photographic nature on the way. I find it really interesting to follow such a motivated photographer as he develops his work."

Polaroid Warholia

There's a small show of Andy Warhol Polaroids of 1970s and '80s sports stars at Danziger Projects, partly viewable online. You can also read Kathy Ryan's admiring comments at the World's Greatest Photography Magazine. (Note that this appears in a fashion section, not an arts one.)

I'm not sure I agree with her about the intrinsic merit of the photographs; seems more like celebrity culture cutting both ways, with the photos themselves left over as talismans, artifacts. Is it really so deathlessly fresh to picture Jack Nicklaus nuzzling a golf club, Ali with his shirt off, Dorothy Hamill with her skates slung around her neck? Not convinced. Of course I haven't seen the actual...artifacts. The show is up until December 12th at Danziger Gallery, 534 West 24th Street, New York City.

The vagaries of taste
I was never grabbed very hard by Polaroids per se. Taste is a strange and mysterious thing—I love snapshots, have a protean appetite for looking at them, adore books of snapshot collections (in fact I have a veritable pile of snapshot books here that I've been meaning for some time to write up in a massive group review). Show me a large enough pile of snapshots and I will find you an inadvertent masterpiece, with all the charm and magic that only serendipity can create. 

Above are two samples from a new group that Rodger Kingston recently uploaded to his SmugMug page of his Kingston collection. Of course we're not looking at "mere" snapshots there, but expertly chosen ones. Rodger is a rare connoisseur; his selections are, in effect, edited. Curated. I'm not saying "found" ephemera and snapshots are all I'd want to look at. Still, I have great natural affection for that stuff.

You'd think I'd love Polaroids. And I'm not saying I don't appreciate the high points—I think of Jamie Livingston's great archive, preserved by Hugh Crawford. You can't help but be moved by that. And yet, I've been meaning to write—trying to write—trying to find the right things to say—about The Impossible Project for some time now, and the words have a hard time coming. The only thing that come easily to mind are flip jokes about the appropriateness of the name. The project seems quixotic even to me, and I'm a very impractical guy.

Roped in
And the other day, when I bought PHOTO:BOX at Stan Banos's recommendation, Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" come-on roped me in, and I bought The Polaroid Book along with it. It should be the kind of book I'd just love. Another copious, well-made, almost ridiculously high-value book (I mean, for less than eleven bucks, they're giving this away—it is a very generous and well-made book for that price—or twice or three times that price). It's part of Benedikt Taschen's 25th Anniversary Special Editions series (his is a story in itself). It has an incisive Introduction by the last Director of The Polaroid Collections, Barbara Hitchcock, and the selection of pictures is an embarrassment of riches. To circle around to where this started, there is even a Polaroid of Andy Warhol wielding his Big Shot. And yet, I've paged through The Polaroid Book three times now, and can't sort out how to feel about it. I like it. I just don't love it.

There's something so self-conscious about Polaroids....

It doesn't seem enough to say that anyone who loves Polaroids should own it. I know there are people who really love Polaroids, who are genuinely excited about, and fervently hopeful for, The Impossible Project. Here's where I need a guest reviewer, someone with deep, real enthusiasm for that particular medium. Maybe I should ask Hugh....

Mike

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Featured Comment by charlie: "I have owned The Polaroid Book in its last release for I think four years. Since then, it has become my go-to book when I need a good dose of pure photography. Were I forced to choose just three photo books to have for eternity , this one would be in that list. I also prefer the cover as it mimics the old Polaroid logo and packaging."

Mike replies: Now you're making me feel bad...what's wrong with me, anyway?

Featured Comment by Sean Murphy: "I'm trying to decide, was it instant photography or Polaroids that I loved. I love slides and instant photographs, because they are the actual picture. Made right in your camera that you can view directly without intervening tools and tech. But the slide still had to be developed somewhere else in space and time. With instant, the alchemy of the darkroom tray happened in broad daylight as you watched, right in your hand! Its getting hard to appreciate in our digital-camera-wifi-upload-to-the-web times, the satisfaction of making a picture on the spot that you could give to a friend or family member on the spot.

"Shooting with folding Polaroids using 'wink lights' and 3000 speed B&W that you had to rub that acrid fixer on, the sleek metal and leather of the SX-70 and pack film that always came with fresh batteries, sometimes morphing the image with a stylus for goofy effects, waving the print by the white tab at the bottom, as if that would make it develop faster, all the variations that came after down to the cameras for kids that shot little Polaroid stickers.... I guess I do love Polaroids, they were just plain fun!"

Featured Comment by Hugh Crawford: "Well Mike since you handed me that can of worms and that fine looking can-opener...

"As a fan and for many years a user of Polaroid, a big fan of Andy Warhol and his work, and sort of an obsessive about on-axis and penumbral lighting, I thought I'd like the Warhol show at the Danziger Gallery more, but it didn't do that much for me. The best thing about it was that it was that it is right across the street from the Bruce Davidson show at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 505 West 24th Street. that show is quite wonderful. It's an interesting show to view with the Robert Frank show up at the Met.

"Odd coincidence number one: today's photo on my wife's blog otbkb.com was taken walking out of that gallery last Friday.

"Maybe it's the white seamless backgrounds or something, but those Big Shot photos look a little to much like they were made with a photocopier or a stat camera. Writing that down makes me think 'of course Andy wanted to become a photocopier, well duh...', but the qualities of the Big Shot pictures shot against white seamless that are so good when they are made into silkscreen paintings just don't do a whole lot for me in their original form.

"It's funny, I took a lot of photos of Warhol, and I took a lot of Polaroids of artists , but no Polaroids of Warhol.

"Odd coincidence number 2: a video of Andy Warhol and Truman Capote taken while I was photographing them showed up on youtube recently; I think it was maybe my first job after college. 

Hugh photographing Warhol not with a Polaroid. Note Alfred Stieglitz moustache.

"As for Polaroids in general, for me a lot of what makes them interesting it that they straddle the boundary of being an image and an object. Unlike most modern photographic prints, a Polaroid is fixed in its final form in the context of its making. A Polaroid portrait has most often been held by its subject at the time of its creation. These are qualities that Polaroids share with Daguerreotypes and wetplate collodion processes like tintypes and ambrotypes, but I think that the quality of the Polaroid being an artifact possibly held by its subject is much stronger with the Polaroids.

"The other interesting thing about Polaroids is not so much that they are imperfect and idiosyncratic visual interpretations of the world (because all photographic processes are imperfect and idiosyncratic visual interpretations of the world) but that the success of the Polaroid practitioner depends on anticipating and committing to that translation before the moment of exposure.

"Conventional late 20th century photo processes all allow or even demand a considerable amount of post exposure manipulation and visualization, and digital photography demands even more, whereas Polaroid demands that all decisions about the image be made prior to exposure.

"I just happen to be in the midst of cataloging another Polaroid based project (it's Mnemonic, it's Mimetic, and it's Memetic!) that encompasses all of this.

"Odd coincidence number 3: Andrew Lampert, Czar of the Cosmic Baseball Association, figures mnemonically in the the Robert Frank show, the Jamie Livingston Project, and this other thing I'm working on."

Featured Comment by Bill Poole: "I love The Polaroid Book, and I have always loved Polaroids for many of the reasons already mentioned. They hold a fascination as one-of-a-kind objects, like Daguerreotypes and tintypes. And they do have a view-camera-like quality, since the image is recorded full-sized. And then there is that soft color, which Cosindas exploited so expertly—Portra-like before Portra came along. Ya gotta love it—I did, and my Polaroids from the '70s are among my favorite images (and not just because my friends all look so young in them)."

Around the Web on a Wednesday

• 7D at SNL: Director Philip Bloom reports on his blog that he heard from Saturday Night Live Director of Photography Alex Buono that SNL is now using Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 7D cameras to shoot the intros and "loads of bits and pieces" for the show.

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• Friends don't let friends pixel peep: An amusing video found by Ned Bunnell on his blog.

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• Woodward on Greenough: There's a good review by Richard B. Woodward, among the most reliable of photo critics, of Sarah Greenough's meta-book Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans, at The Wall Street Journal. (The first link is to the article, the second to the book; here's the U.K. book link.)

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• Sam Haskins falls in love every day: Photography as mood enhancer.

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• Award-itis: Jonathan Chait on "The Case Against Awards": "...Nearly every prize seems to regularly go to a clearly undeserving winner. Woody Allen’s character complained in Annie Hall, 'They’re always giving out awards. Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.' If an award like that really did exist, though, they’d probably end up giving it to Mussolini." Entertaining.

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• Especially for photography: So look what I found: After going on a bit the other day about framing Gordon's picture, we got a few comments from do-it-yourselfers. I've never used this, so I can't recommend it, but I was fascinated to find a mat cutter aimed explicitly at photographers (although if it's for photographers, why's it so reasonably priced? Everybody knows "the photography tax" means you have to pay 3X for ordinary items if they're labeled as being for photographers.) Anybody used one of these? If you have, I'd be curious to know how you like it. It's called the Logan 700-S Simplex Studio, and it's for mat board up to 16x20" in size.

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• Carly Simon riff: I know I already mentioned it the other day in my pan of the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner book, but it's worth reiterating: Jörg Colberg has translated a worthwhile interview with Steidl's Gerhard Steidl from the German Photography Now. What's more, Jörg has promised more translated interviews to come. I know that's not news if you already read German, but it's got some of us monolingual Murkins singin' an-ti-ci-pay-ay-shun.

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• Be good, be sweet, be honest always: A few weeks ago Zeiss finally introduced its long-awaited Distagon 35mm T* ƒ/2 ZE Lens for Canon EF Mount, and the lens should begin shipping soon. This is my favorite lens of all of Zeiss's Z[x] series, or of all the ones I've used at any rate, which isn't all of them; and it's one of my favorite 35mm lenses, period. Thirty-five millimeter or its equivalent is my "home" focal length, and I've probably tried more 35s than any other type of lens—at least twenty over the years, maybe as many as half again more than that. This is right at the top of the list. It has all the properties I like in a lens.

Still, you'd have to wonder why this lens would be preferable to Canon's own offerings, the cheaper and lighter Canon EF 35mm ƒ/2, or the slightly heavier, much more expensive, and one stop faster Canon EF 35mm ƒ/1.4—both of which I've used and like, and both of which autofocus. The Zeiss ZE lens might just split the differences nicely, or offer the kind of handling individual photographers prefer. Although if I had a 5D Mark II I don't know how I could resist. At any rate, you know what they say—"choice is good."

Meanwhile, for Nikon fans, Zeiss has just announced a new ZF.2 series of manual-focus lenses for Nikon F mount, which will be chipped for full automation with Nikon cameras. (Well, still no autofocus of course.)

The Zeiss ZF.2 lens line. A sight like this could give a guy religion.

There's more information on the new ZF.2 series at the Zeiss website.

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• Bullet the irony: To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Irish rock group U2 played a free mini-concert in Berlin a few weeks ago. To keep people from seeing the concert unless they had tickets, however—presumably so they would have to watch it on MTV, which sponsored the event—the concert was blocked from public view by...a two-meter high metal wall.

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• And you work behind a desk! National Geographic's Paul Nicklen describes his most amazing experience as a nature photographer in a 1:48 video called "Face-Off with a Deadly Predator." It's in support of Paul's new book Polar Obsession. (Here's the U.K. link.) Don't miss the video; it's short, and sweet in more ways than one.

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• Leica M9 watch: From Chromasoft, "Vignetting Correction Issues on the Leica M9," Part I and Part II; and, joining Seal, the latest M9-wielding celebrity photographer (see the last paragraph). (And here's Lou's latest book. It looks kinda dreadful, but I shouldn't say without seeing.)

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• Only on the web: Apropos of nothing, the analog digital clock.

Mike
(Thanks to Jonathan Guilbault, David Deckert, Max Piantoni, Gijs, Eolake, Tom Kaszuba, Peter Hughes, Oren Grad, and John Camp)

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Featured Comment by Thiago Silva: "Paul Nicklen is by far my favorite wildlife photographer, and one of my favorite photographers overall. Thanks for the link, I had never had the chance of seem him speak before. Cheers!"

Here Comes the Sun

By Ctein

A couple of weeks ago, Paula and I bought a small solar telescope. It just kinda happened.

Paula became very interested in getting a solar telescope several years ago when she had a chance to look through one and got to see solar prominences live and up close for the first time. I was less enthusiastic; many years ago I did solar astronomy professionally, so my standards for what constitutes a decent image are, well, a tad unrealistic. I doubted I'd be satisfied with low-cost gear. $10,000 or $20,000 will buy you research-grade equipment, but that's not exactly in my price range!

The Orion Telescope store in Cupertino announced an open house where they'd be showing off the Coronado line of solar telescopes. The technical specifications for low-cost scopes were not encouraging—small aperture and wide bandwidth are not conducive to serious viewing. Still, I was curious to see what the view was like through these low-end instruments. Then I could better figure out what level of unaffordable scope might make me happy.

To my surprise, I found I enjoyed the view through even the smallest and cheapest Coronado PST ("Personal Solar Telescope") (figure 1). On top of that, the price had dropped from $599 to $499. Paula and I looked at each other, shrugged, and decided we could always call it an early Xmas present (a blatantly transparent rationalization).

Figure 1

The PST has a 40mm aperture, a 400mm focal length, a 1 Ångstrom filter bandpass, and weighs 3 pounds. It's got a standard tripod socket on the base, so I just mounted it on my Bogen tilt-pan head trpod. For a scope this small, you don't need anything that fancy; pretty much any 'pod you've got lying around will do.

The PST comes with a 20mm eyepiece. That's entirely insufficient for solar viewing, except for the very largest (and rare) prominences and sunspot groups. A 10mm eyepiece is a much better choice as a standard. Normally I use a 7mm; if the seeing isn't good enough to support the 7mm eyepiece, it's pretty poor seeing. Which means that unless something really interesting is happening, I don't care. With good seeing I go down to 5mm, easy. With great seeing, 3mm. You don't need to buy expensive eyepieces: four-element Plössls are fine. With careful shopping, you should be able to pick up three for around $100.

Figure 2

There are some tricks to using a scope like this. The first is getting it pointed towards the sun. Swing the scope around until the shadow of the front hood or the adjustment ring is centered on the body of the scope (figure 2). Then tilt the scope up and down to align the sun's image in the bore sight (figure 3). The bore sight may not be perfectly aligned, and the proper position for the Sun image may not be dead center. When you find the proper position for the image, mark that spot on the ground glass of the sight with a sharp marking pen. Makes keeping the scope pointed a lot easier!

Figure 3

If you're using a tilt-pan head, tilt the scope so that the eyepiece is horizontal instead of vertical. The highly collimated, monochromatic light projected by the eypiece makes every damned floater in your eye clear as crystal. Keeping your head vertical keeps the floaters drifting a bit more and makes it easier to see the solar image. You'll still have to take breaks and move your head and eyes around to stir things up inside your eyeball.

What will you see? A deep crimson red sun, dappled with just-barely-visible granularity. The image will be dim. The telescope throws away more than 99.99% of the light! On almost any day, even in this period of low solar activity, you'll see small prominences around the rim. They change in a matter of hours or less. Solar astronomy like watching the weather. From minute to minute, the view will slowly change. We leave the scope set up in the living room and take it outdoors a couple of times a day, just to see if anything interesting is happening. Usually there is.

If you're lucky, there will be a sunspot group, which means there will be bright flares and dark filaments against the surface of the sun.

For reasons of space, I'm not going to explain how the H-Alpha hydrogen emission line filter in the PST works. See this URL instead. Normally, you'll want the tunable Fabry-Pérot etalon filter centered on the H-alpha line at 6562.8 Ångstroms. That produces the maximum contrast in solar surface detail. The PST has an adjustment ring (figure 4) for tuning the wavelength the etalon transmits. Adjusting this ring back and forth will bring out maximum detail in sunspot groups and maximum contrast in prominences along the edge of the sun.

Figure 4

This leads to a neat trick. With a scope like this, you are looking at such a narrow slice of the spectrum that modest velocities (by solar standards) will Doppler-shift the H-alpha line out of the bandpass of the filter! If you're looking at a sunspot group on the surface and you detune the filter to the long-wavelength side of H-alpha, you may start to see darker filaments and streamers appear against the surface of the sun. The reason they look dark is because their emissions are being Doppler shifted towards shorter wavelengths. That means this is stuff that's coming towards you! Similarly, you may see different parts of large prominences on the rim get brighter or darker relative to each other as you tune the etalon. That tells you the different parts of the prominences have different velocities towards or away from you. With a bit of practice and deduction, you can get some sense of what shape these "clouds" really are and how they're moving.

This, by the way, is one of the important tools that the big kids use for solar astronomy, which is why professionals want filters with bandpasses as narrow as 0.1 Å. Strange as it may seem, solar astronomers are always complaining about not having enough light.

So, am I getting $500 worth of fun out of this scope? Oh, you betcha!

More next time....

Ctein

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ADDENDUM: Dear folks, You want photographs? Okay, how about this one?

(The link is here.) I wasn't aware that this had even been an "APOD" photo* until tonight. I was Googling for some information on solar phenomena for my replies and stumbled across this. My first (and so far, only) APOD! This is a rather so-so scan of a rather brilliant print (if I do say so myself) of a rather spectacular prominence. For its time, circa 1971, it was considered a noteworthy achievement, being able to produce that much local contrast and detail enhancement without blowing out the highlights or the shadows (easy in Photoshop; not so easy in the darkroom). It ended up being on the cover of Science magazine in the early '70s. Not only my first APOD photo but my first magazine cover! (Well, nobody said how recent the photograph had to be...) If I can find my print of this photo, I'll try to make a better scan and post it.  —Ctein

*Astronomy Picture of the Day

Featured Comment by David Anderson: "Perhaps just an idea to issue a warning that no-one should attempt to view the Sun through any optical instrument unless they are using suitable solar filters. Please don't try this with an ordinary telescope or binoculars, your eyesight will be permanently damaged."

Featured Comment by Animesh Ray: "Dear Ctein, Thanks for the article, but more for the photo. I actually saw the cover in early '70s and, amazingly, remember it! I was an undergraduate student then, back in Calcutta, and I chanced upon this image of solar eruption on the cover. It was just an amazing sensation to ponder the real magnitude of these eruptions. I still remember having 'pored over' this photo for hours and dreaming about it, in the USIS library on a dingy lane near College Street in Calcutta.

"Just to revisit the old times, I looked for and found the issue of Science with Ctein's photo on the cover. It is amusing to re-read Linus Pauling's acerbic letter to the editor in that same issue!"

Wayne Levin in Papahanaumokuakea

Wayne Levin, Decompressing Divers and Galapagos Sharks, Laysan

Wayne Levin has added some work from the remote Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (North West Hawaiian Islands) to his website. While a fair amount of this new work is black and white underwater (the genre that he is most known for) he has also included black and white above-water pictures and even a selection of color above-water pictures. The work is from this past summer, when he was invited to accompany a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) scientific expedition aboard the Hi'Ialakai.

I published a portfolio of Wayne's work in Photo Techniques a few circuits around the sun ago.

He also has two new books scheduled to come out next year. Akule, a book of his images of the amazing schooling fish, published by Editions Limited, with essays by Frank Stewart and Tom Farber, is set to come out in May of 2010. A new book of the Hansen's Disease Settlement of Kalaupapa, published by the Arizona Memorial Museum Association, with text by Anwei Skinsnes Law and Valerie Monson, is scheduled for later in 2010. I was pleased to discover that his previous book is still in print.

Mother and Baby Spinner Dolphins and Sea Cucumbers

Mike
(Adapted from Wayne's press release)

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Two Lovely Books

Manuel Alvarez Bravo has a heavy burden on him: he is widely considered the greatest Mexican photographer.

While I suppose every country needs its go-to name, I've never been quite convinced. It's not that the pictures I saw lacked coherence, or conviction. Just that they didn't all seem very compelling.

But then, how do we know photographers? I first encountered just one picture—the one in Szarkowski's Looking At Photographs. (Accompanied by one of the weakest essays in that fine book, I regret to say. Uh, Rapunzel?) Then I saw a magazine article or two. Then, a motley of small or indifferently published books, some with only a chapter or a section on Alvarez Bravo. I don't recall ever having seen any original prints, although I might be forgetting one or two encountered in group shows.

The very best monographs are more than just pretty picture books. They actively make a case for the photographer, by showing the photographer in his or her best light.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photopoetry, published by Thames & Hudson in Britain and Chronicle Books in the USA last year, is by far the best monograph I've encountered on this photographer. The selection is comprehensive and first rate, the layout unobtrusive and the sequencing expert, the reproduction quality consistently excellent—the ink on paper has an almost sensual yumminess, good enough to give you that familiar but often elusive visceral sense of gratification. I've known many of these pictures before, but I sense from this book that I have only known "of" them; I never really saw many of them until now. (There are twenty never-previously-published pictures, too.) This is really an example of the highest function of the best monographs: they make you feel like you really understand a photographer's work. Sometimes for the first time.

Bill Jay, Manuel Alvarez Bravo in London, 1980

It's curious how the best retrospective monographs go out of print and become scarce, so one generation has a chance to "know" a certain photographer and the next generation doesn't; I realized recently that all of my favorite monographs by André Kertész—there are a handful—are out of print and hard to get now. So how do people know Kertész now? Probably more flittingly and furtively than I know his work.

We never see all of a photographer. Only a subset. Whether that subset is enough to let us grasp a sense of the whole life work is the key.

Well, here we have a chance to really get to know Manuel Alvarez Bravo. I venture to guess that this will remain the standard monograph on Alvarez Bravo for some time to come—most probably even after it goes out of print and becomes hard to get. It's difficult to envision a better one. It really helped me "get" Alvarez Bravo. The first book on him I've truly enjoyed.

Nicely made book, too.

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A recent book I got that I really didn't like is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Photographic Work, published by Stiedl & Partners. I understand the book was in part underwritten by a Kirchner museum, and I don't know the rest of Kirchner's work; he's primarily known as a painter. Perhaps this record of his photographic activities is of interest to specialists. Whatever its hidden merits, as a photographic book I found it resoundingly unconvincing. Described as "a skilled photographer" in the publisher's writeup, what I see is a manifestly unskilled photographer (have a look for yourself—there are some sample spreads at Steidlville) whose only virtue is that his pictures are now antique, and whose lack of skill is not ameliorated by his having had anything in particular to say. (As a photographer, I mean. I have nothing to contribute about his painting.) I think I understand the difference between "good" bad and "bad" bad, and this is just bad—I see a photographer who hasn't any idea what he's after and doesn't know how to get it, one not so much exploring as bumbling. 

It's my own fault. I took a flier on this, without really knowing anything about it. It looked enticing, and it's from Steidl—how bad could it be? Steidl is the leading photographic book publisher in the world right now (Jorg Colberg has done us all a favor in presenting a translation of an excellent interview with Gerhard Stiedl, on Conscientious). But I confess I'm a bit down on them right now. It sometimes seems that in their creative white heat to rush book after book to press, they're not being as thoughtful about content as you'd like them to be. I also admit that I've been a bit too overenthusiastic about buying their product—a touch of white heat about that, too—and I feel like I've gotten singed a time or two. Skip this one, and be careful about getting too caught up about the rushing cascade of titles from Steidl—there's absolutely some wonderful stuff coming from them, but it's not all wonderful.

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Finally, a very different kind of book—one never destined to become a collector's item and that would get the boot from any self-respecting high-end gallerist's art library, but that is a delight pro populo nonetheless. I wrote not long ago about a couple of books of this type—"samplers," I called 'em. I should have waited! Stan Banos recommended Photo:Box the other day, and because I trust Stan's eye I promptly ordered it.

It's fantastic. It was originally published in Italy, but the translations are so well managed you won't notice. A smallish (7x9", 18x23 cm) but hefty brick of a book, it takes standard sampler form: one picture from a photographer accompanied by a mini-essay. But there are two ways it departs from the norm: the quality of the reproductions is really amazingly good, especially considering the bargain price (though they'd be good enough at any price), and the write-ups are lively and engaging. I should disclose that I haven't read all of it yet. In what I have read, there is some repetitiveness, and the insight is a tad uneven; but the writing is far better than just the ordinary rote "content" of pasteurized, processed book-product.

There's a lot to look at in Photo:Box (so called, by the way, because the cover wraps all the way around and closes with a magnetic flap). It's divided into sections: Reportage, Portraits, Nudes, Women, Travel, Cities, Art, Fashion, Still Life, Sport, and Nature. A great many of the classic pictures are just the ones you'd want to see from each photographer (actually there are 250 pictures by 200 photographers, so a number of photographers are represented by more than one picture, in different sections), and there are some lovely surprises, too. Inevitably in this sort of production—or, indeed, in any history of photography text- or coffee-table book—the earlier photographers are more canonical than the contemporary ones; but you won't mind, because the contemporary selections are so nicely chosen and so entertaining. And just as the German PhotoWisdom has German photographers well represented, so Photo:Box has Italian photographers aplenty, especially in the "Fashion" section. It's not a drawback. The only thing you might need to be aware of is that there are a lot of nudes in the book—and not only in the "Nudes" section—so it's not appropriate for things like middle school or high school art department libraries.

There are also a surprising number of pictures included that I've reproduced or discussed on TOP in the past—I didn't count, but at least eight or ten, maybe more.

Published just last month by Abrams in the U.S. and Thames & Hudson in the U.K., Photo:Box attempts to be a history of photography in pictures, and it does pretty well at that. Regardless of how well you feel it succeeds at that grand ambition, though, I think virtually any photographer of any skill level and any level of knowledge would thoroughly enjoy it. You'll like it the first time you leaf through it (if you have the stamina to make it all the way though at one sitting, which you might not, there's so much), and you'll find it an ample cornucopia to return to again and again, to dip in to the write-ups and savor the nice reproductions anew. A lively and vigorous compendium. 

Here are the United States and United Kingdom links.

Again, as a book, not a collector's piece, never likely to appreciate in value, not "essential"—but very highly recommended. You'll love this. And at less than sixteen bucks for 512 very high-quality pages, how can you go wrong? Don't miss. Fun and filling.

A round of applause for Stan for finding this one.

Mike

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Featured Comment by John Camp: "Regarding Ernst Kirchner, there have been a number of books in the last few years about famous painters using photography. Some are obvious cobbled-together catalogs of personal snapshots paired with more famous paintings, and have little to say about anything, but others are extremely interesting. Degas, for one, was seriously influenced by the way cameras crop scenes to produce surprising point-of-view effects, and he often used those odd (for the time) points-of-view.

"More recently, I encountered a very nice book called Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. Rockwell was a fine illustrator, not a great painter—but his virtually daily use of the camera in constructing his complicated, multi-layered illustrations is really eye-opening. He didn't do the photography himself, but served as a director, and the results of the complicated scenes he created are almost like photographic forerunners of the stuff you see from Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson...but done in the 1930s and '40s.

"It's also interesting to see how he took a real individual in a photograph, and reshaped his features into a kind of stereotype (the brash kid, the comical guy with a squashed hat, the prissy old lady, etc.). He actually shot a nude once, but the photographer was so embarrassed that he wouldn't come out from under the dark cloth.

"The book is straight-forward and free of art-world cant. Although I'm not really a Rockwell fan, I am a fan of this book."

Mike replies: That's fascinating. I was into Rockwell as a child (I drew all the time back then), and I never knew he worked from photographs, much less from photographs he directed and had made for him.

My favorite photographs by a painter are in the book Pierre Bonnard: Photographs and Paintings from the Collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, published by Aperture in 1988, long out of print. (It was originally published in Paris as Bonnard Photographe by Editions Philippe Sers in 1987.) The pictures are charming snapshots of domestic life, clearly made as visual notes, and I suppose I must record that they are "bad" photographs—but to my mind a very good sort of bad. A few of the pictures in that book have never left my mind.

Featured Comment by Stan B.: "I just happened to pick up Photo:Box waiting for it to stop raining; as you pointed out, it's not the kind of book you'd expect much from. And bam—the quantity and quality really threw me! This is one unbeatable compilation at that price. Will be ordering it and Eugene Richards' A Procession of Them as soon as I get home from work today (through your link, natch). Haven't bought a photo book in a good half year and am looking forward to these two...."

Featured Comment by Javier: "In my humble opinion the best Mexican photographer is possibly Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel's wife. I discovered her by chance: a Mexican friend had the habit of offering me a book about Frida Kahlo, the national icon, each time she came to visit. I do not like Kahlo, she even disgusts me, but found some of her best pictures were taken by this confusingly named photographer. Initially I even thought it was a mistake, and they should be credited to Manuel. Later on I discovered she married him, assisted him for years and after he dropped her (a nasty story) the only thing she could do to earn a living was photography, and she decided to keep the family name. She was a fabulous portraitist and an excellent photographer on her own, always obscured by Manuel's fame.

"By the way, Manuel also had Graciela Iturbide, probably the second best-known Mexican photographer, as an assistant. I heard her recently reminisce about those days. It seems he taught her to develop a personal vision, which she did, but when she asked about technique, the great Manuel told her all she needed to know was on Kodak's instruction sheets..."

Mike replies: The first monograph in English of Lola Alvarez Bravo came out two years ago, and I haven't even seen it yet. Have to figure out a way to find that to take a look....

An Appeal from The Digital Journalist

From Dirck Halstead, dated yesterday:

Subject: An Important Letter to the Viewers of the Digital Journalist

I am afraid that the December issue of The Digital Journalist may be our final issue, at least for a while.

As many of you on our mailing list know, The Digital Journalist has been online producing our monthly magazine, about visual journalism, for 12 years. During that time we have presented the memorable work of some of the greatest photojournalists in the world, while offering opportunities for publication to many new photographers. Our columns and reviews have taken a 360-degree look at the industry, and predicted much of the upheaval that has taken place as the media around us have been buffeted by the shifting winds of technology, and now, a crippling economic downturn.

We have also sponsored over 37 Platypus Workshops around the world, which have taught photojournalists how to cope with and adapt to these industry changes.

Unfortunately, our principal sponsor, Canon, whose market has also been impacted by these turbulent times, has decided they can no longer afford to provide their financial backing to The Digital Journalist. We are very grateful for the generous support they have given us over the years.

Even before Canon's decision we were planning to reorganize. We are aware of how seriously a lot of our readers, who make their living from photojournalism, have been hit by the recession through the failures and cutbacks of countless publications, magazines and newspapers, as well as TV and cable. Our reorganization goal is not only to continue publishing The Digital Journalist, but to provide funding in order to send photographers out into the world to do their work, documenting the important stories that shape our lives and history.

Such an ambitious undertaking requires serious fundraising efforts on our part.

So we are asking you, our loyal readers, numbering more than 10,000, to help us raise these funds. Effective immediately, we have set up a PayPal link on The Digital Journalist and urgently ask for your pledges so that we can continue the work which will help us all. We have never solicited paid subscriptions, but these dire times call for dire measures.

If you value The Digital Journalist, this is the time to step up and make a pledge. If enough people do, we may be able to keep The Digital Journalist—and video journalism—alive. Consider it as an investment in yourself, and the future.

Thank you all for your loyalty over the past years. We appreciate your continued support, and look forward to seeing you on the Web.

Sincerely,

Dirck Halstead
Editor and Publisher

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