The Online Photographer

Don't You Just Hate That?

Here's another shot I took on the brewery tour last weekend. I came around the corner and looked up and there was a great photograph right there in front of me. I mean a great shot.

This isn't it. The great picture was there, oh, I don't know, maybe half a second before I took this one. It hung there for just a moment and then poof, gone.

I missed it. Too slow. This is its remnant.

I don't know about you, but for me when I have a camera in my hands the world is a shifting kaleidoscope of possibilities in constant flux, possibilities that often don't come together. And then, occasionally, there are brief little moments when everything comes together to perfection in front of my eyes...and then shifts asunder again, disintegrates, disappears.

Maddening.

Here's another one like that. Another "almost." Just a half a tick earlier, the father was looking at the baby (he's just started to look away in this shot), and the baby was looking at Santa's face (she's just looked down at his hand here). (And probably the woman in red—hi Liz!—had her eyes open.) It only lasted half a second. Maybe a quarter of a second. I had it, and missed it. Just barely. Of course, you know what they say—a miss is as good as a mile.

It's almost a great picture, isn't it? Emphasis on "almost."

Unprepared
I saw another great picture this afternoon—one that stayed put, nothing moving, nothing changing, and I knew just what camera I should have had with me to get it. Which I did not have with me, of course. All I could do was stand there in the right place and look at the picture I was missing. I can see it still.

I don't know about you, but I miss a lot more than I get. Don't you hate that?

Mike

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "I do. The ones that got away sometimes haunt me, like investment opportunities I've missed. My mind's eye burnishes them to absurd perfection, like a long-lost girlfriends from my youth. Ahh...if only.

"But even worse, at least to me, are the images I've captured that ultimately fall into what I call the "On the Waterfront" category, referring to Marlon Brando's famous "I coulda been somebody..." speech. Perhaps my timing was slightly off, I was too slow to react, too unimaginative to anticipate what could happen, the wrong light, bad camera position,...For whatever reason (excuse) these images are just nothing special. They don't really work. They're dull, apparently uninspired. But I let them linger in my library sometimes for years, perhaps as self-punishment. I sometimes visit them like a ham-handed surgeon visiting patients he's mangled. These sadden me much more deeply than those I missed entirely.

"I do, however, feel well compensated for these losses by the amount of pure luck I encounter in my photography. Jay Maisel is fond of saying, "The more you shoot, the luckier you get." But in my case this has to be expressed more like, "Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while." It's part of the magic of photography to find something wonderful, but entirely unplanned, in an image. In compensation for my bad luck I sometimes congratulate myself, and take unwarranted credit, for plain old good luck.

"So the world remains balanced and I can get out of bed in the morning!"

Featured Comment by David Bennett: "It's a lot of years since I saw a man rocking back on his heels laughing while on the telephone.

"He was using the wall telephone that stores in La Paz, Bolivia rent out by the minute to passers-by.

"The store was a funeral parlour and there were coffins parked upright either side of the door, flanking the man on the telephone laughing with great abandon.

"I didn't have a camera with me in South America, so I am not sure that this comes within the category of unprepared, but I can still hear the shutter clicking on my non-existant camera."

Featured Comment by Peter Rees: "About 15 years ago, I was on a slow boat journey through central Myanmar. We were moving at a stately pace through the pre-dawn gloom along the broad Irrawaddy River. On the left bank, a magnificent white temple loomed up—domes, gold spires, the works. I snapped off a humdrum pic of the temple against some pale orange clouds. The boat drifted around a bend in the river, and at the same moment, the sun burst into view behind the temple—multi-hued rays arcing across the sky, gold spires ablaze, sky alight in rich reds and purples.

"At that moment I could hear two things above the hum of the boat's engines: one, the awed gasp of the passengers; and two, the mosquito whirr of my camera's auto rewind: a sound that haunts my dreams to this day."

ADDENDUM: Maybe I could be forgiven for quoting myself here. From an article called "The Magic Bullet," under the header "You Suck! (Me, Too)":

To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody's pictures suck, that's how. I've seen Cartier-Bresson's contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand's exposures sucked. It's the way it is. —MJ

Featured Comment by Rod S: "Yes, this post reminds me of some very spectacular alignments of crepuscular rays ("godbeams") with structures that I was not quick enough to photograph. And each day I see many street shots pass me during my speed walk from the bus stop to my workplace: an alignment; a surprised face, a look of love between two young lovers. However, I have learned to be kinder to myself than I once was, and simply enjoy those moments of joy right there and then. Indeed, the act of seeing these moments is a real gift of my practice in photography, which I might not otherwise enjoy. Who can tell?

"Rather than beat myself up on the many images that flow unrecorded past me, I'd rather enjoy then anyway and celebrate those few that I do manage to catch. Life is better when it is lived and enjoyed."

Mike replies: Very true. The fact that we try to photograph fleeting moments at some times makes us more aware of visual experiences all the time—and it makes the special experiences more memorable. That's nothing to complain about.

Mike's on Break (Or, Beer in Cans)

Well, apparently I'm on a little break. I wasn't planning on it, but actual (as opposed to virtual) life has been very busy lately. Every now and again I seem to have to rediscover that there is a world out there beyond the four walls of my home office. Ah, the world—a magical place where the air does not smell like the inside of a used bookstore, lighting effects come from the actual sky, and giant plants grow apparently without requiring attention from anyone. Remarkable, considering I cannot get small plants to grow even with obsessive attention from me. (I used to joke that I should grow potted dandelions, which might be funny except that I could probably kill those too.)

Plus, with two dehumidifiers going full time, I have nearly gotten the basement dried out after the recent rains and am getting back to jousting at windm...er, building die Dunkelkammer.

And my high school reunion was this weekend. I didn't participate in every event, but I got to go on a brewery tour with some former classmates at the Milwaukee Brewing Company, craft brewers of Pull Chain Pail Ale, Flaming Damsel Real Blonde, and of course the locally famous Louie's Demise, sold at the Milwaukee Ale House on Water Street in Milwaukee's old Third Ward.

Most of the people on the tour were there for the company—some of us had not seen each other in 35 years—but I learned a lot on the tour as well. For instance, I'd never heard the term "green veneer" before—said of a company that seizes on some environmentally conscious aspect of its  enterprise and makes a big deal of it for PR purposes. The Milwaukee Brewing Company, by contrast, is green through-and-through, going so far as convert cooking oil from a smattering of nearby restaurants into bio-diesel to power their operation. I learned that barley is the beer's magic ingredient and that other grains—including the recently touted "wheat"—are mere fillers. Plus, I learned that, contrary to popular belief, cans are actually a more premium form of container for beer than bottles.

My friend and classmate Kate next to a bottling machine, a modern iteration of the one her great-grandfather invented. He also invented the automated label-applicator and bottle capper, which left his descendants prosperous.

Our tourguide, Jim McCabe, said that while bottles are perfect for short runs of experimental brews—just print up a few labels and there you go—cans have to be manufactured specially in large numbers (evidenced by a giant mountain of cans stacked against one wall of the brewery awaiting their contents—see below). Cans are far more ecological, for two reasons. Although both glass and aluminum are technically recyclable, in practice far more cans get recycled than bottles; and bottles are far more expensive and wasteful to ship.

Jim also says the can gets a bad rap for imparting a "metallic taste" to its contents. That's actually (surprise) user error: people who drink directly out of cans are tasting and smelling the aluminum along with their beverage (not to mention ingesting whatever unsanitary crud might be deposited on the top of the can: Milwaukee Brewing actually ships its cans with protective covers over the whole top). He says if you want the best taste, always pour a canned beer into a glass before you drink it. That eliminates intimate contact with the metal and "gets the nose involved." Once that's done, people in blind taste tests can't tell the difference between beer from cans and beer from bottles.

So why "Louie's Demise"? Part fact, part legend. In 1886, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Louie Eisold, an immigrant born in 1847 in Saxe-Meiningen, Germany, and a local ladies man, got in to a brawl in a bar with another man. At issue was the man's stunning young wife, with whom Louie had been overly friendly, and Louie got smashed over the head with a deadly weapon in the form of a full glass of beer. The blow proved fatal. Legend has it that as Louie went down, still clutching his own beer, an onlooker pried the drink from Louie's hand and lifted it to toast Louie's lustful ways—even as Louie himself was expiring on the floor. Louie's demise has been honored locally ever since: his framed death certificate hangs in a place of honor at the Ale House.

The modern-day brewer (that's his wife in the top picture, at the brewery—she's the sister of one of my classmates, hence the connection) says, with admirably genteel phrasing, that Louie's Demise is "for those who appreciate the search for true love."

The Milwaukee Brewing Company is a tiny operation—in its infancy, according to Jim—and the tour is short and sweet. They've only been giving tours for four weeks now. But anybody can come. If you're in the area, and interested, you can find out more at the Milwaukee Brewing Company website.

And now, back to my break. The next noise you hear will be Ctein on Thursday morning, for some very approximate value of "morning." 

Mike

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Tripod Technology Part II

Part I is here.

I've now gathered together some tripods for "testing." (As you might remember, I dislike the word "test" on photographic sites on the internet—a better, more accurate word is "trial." Most people don't run real tests, and many of those who do don't know how to design their "tests" well enough to avoid error—or even randomness. As for me, I'm just messin' around—one might more kindly call it "investigating"—and telling you what I think.) Of course the other possibility is that somebody's trying pretty hard to copy somebody else.

So anyway, sometimes comparisons on the internet are faulted for cutting distinctions too fine. If you find people arguing about which sensor shows more noise at 100%, and there are proponents on both sides, chances are the difference isn't worth chasing. But wouldn't you say that if and when something is twice as good as something else, it's unabashedly, unambiguously better?

First of all, I went to a local camera store—Mike Crivello's in Brookfield, Wisconsin—and took a quick look at what they had. Since I'm mainly curious about carbon fiber, I bought this: a ProMaster SystemPro T325P Carbon Fiber ($260). It's a cute little thing—wee, which is not to say twee, and almost impossibly light: I was able to weigh it on my Pelouze digital postage scale, upon which the legs and center column registered a featherlight 2 lbs., 5.2 oz. (1055g). It almost comes up to my knee with the legs unextended. You can get a five-section version for $40 more that collapses even smaller but, naturally, takes a little longer to set up and knock down (more locking collars to loosen and tighten). If you don't know the name, ProMaster is sort of a shared house brand for camera stores—it makes a whole range of products (flashes, bags, filters, cards, and on and on) for rebranding or retail sale mainly at dedicated camera retailers.

I'm actually quite enamored of the $260 ProMaster. It's very slight, which used to be indelibly associated with cheapie amateur occasional-use tripods, and, indeed, the ProMaster doesn't seem like it would hold up to frequent hard use very well—although it might, who can tell?—meaning the ProMaster probably isn't a tripod for actual pro masters. But the attention to detail is very high. It has both a level and compass built into the tops of the leg brackets (for those times when you find yourself lost in the trackless wilderness having remembered to bring your tripod but somehow forgotten to plan for finding your way around); the leg-locks are wonderfully easy to use, and lock and unlock quite positively with minimal pressure; the middle leg section, thoughtfully, doesn't rotate, so you can lock and unlock the bottom (innermost) section when the middle section isn't locked down; and there's even a spring-loaded hook at the bottom of the center post for hanging a bit of extra mass, should you wish to.

I then asked my friends at B&H Photo to send me a Gitzo GT1531 Mountaineer ($560 with current rebate). Gitzo, originally a French brand now owned by Italy's Manfrotto, is one of the oldest and most prestigious names in tripods. It was both a pioneer of carbon fiber as a material for tripods and also says it pursues continuous development of its materials and designs, so that today's carbon fiber tripod is considerably better than its original carbon fiber tripods.

Gitzo 1531, left, and ProMaster T325P, right

Much to my surprise, however, the Gitzo is also wee—about the same size as as the ProMaster. The Gitzo is somewhat longer when folded up. It has a locking collar above the circular plate to which the legs are attached (the ProMaster's is underneath), which accounts for most of the height difference. It has a shorter center column and its legs are skinnier, just. (The thicker section you see at the top of the right leg of the ProMaster is a foam carrying handle which could easily be cut off if you don't like it.)

The Gitzo (above) has its center column locking collar above the top plate, the ProMaster (below) has its less effective locking collar underneath the top plate.

The Gitzo tilts the postal scale at 4.8 oz. heavier—2 lbs 10 oz. on the nose (1190g).

The two tripods look so much alike that I inspected them carefully for signs that they were sourced from the same factory. The fit'n'finish of the Gitzo is higher overall, but the ProMaster is nicely finished too. Despite many close similarities I didn't find any actual shared parts, so I can't say they're cousins; however, I wouldn't bet much that they didn't emanate from the same mainland Chinese factory*. (Zhongshan Ltd. in South Guangdong province, possibly. Just a guess; I know nothing.) The other possible explanation is that somebody is trying really hard to copy somebody else. No accusations, just sayin'.

That said, the Gitzo's higher level of finish shows virtually everywhere—the locks are more positive and stronger, the hammertone finish is nicer, the leg tips unscrew. And no little compass. And although I thought the ProMaster was very attractive when it was all I had in the house, the Gitzo is handsomer still.

I really am impressed with the ease and positiveness (for lack of a better word) of the leg-locks on both tripods, but especially the Gitzo. Both are easy and dare I say pleasant to use. The Gitzo locks loosen with a little "tock" sound, as if they're coming unstuck; both are very easy to loosen, which certainly cannot be said of my old Studex. Both lock quite strongly with relatively little pressure, but here again the Gitzo does better: even firmly tightened, I can put weight (far more than the weight of any camera and lens) on the ProMaster legs and get the locks slip; the locks on the Gitzo just stay put. More weight still might get them to slip, but it's not my tripod and I'm not going to test the limits. For all conceivable values of "the weight you might put on a tripod" the legs just stay put.

The only real practical difference between the two tripods is that the center column locking collar on the ProMaster doesn't clamp the center column terribly firmly—which its designers acknowledge by providing a secondary column lock. Best to reserve this tripod for smaller cameras and lenses, in any event.

Secondary locking knob for center post on the ProMaster T325P is remedial. This is not an ideal tripod for big, heavy cameras anyway, probably. Note wee bubble level and twee compass.

Just based on their features and a close inspection of their operation and fit'n'finish, I'd pick the Gitzo if money were no object or if I used a tripod a lot. But the Gitzo costs more than twice as much as the ProMaster, and, according to today's designated leitmotif, a factor of half or double is undeniably significant. If it were my money, especially given my only occasional use of tripods, I'd have no trouble picking the ProMaster; it doesn't really have anything to apologize for...given its cost.

Carbon fiber, carbon fiber
I'll get around to comparing the stability and user-friendliness of these two tripods relative to an older aluminum Bogen and my formidable old Gitzo Studex in the next installment of this series, which will come along some time in the next three weeks. But here's the real point of this post: even the heavier of these two tripods weighs in at 2 lbs. 10 oz. (Did I mention I was able to weigh them on my postage scale? I did? Okay.) The Bogen I'll be comparing it to weighs more than 5 lbs., and the Studex, about 7 lbs. Now, it's possible that this is like comparing apples to melons, since I've clearly picked two smaller, shorter carbon fiber tripods to compare to my larger, taller metal ones. Still, it seems abundantly clear to me from playing with these that materials science has wrought a quiet revolution in the tripod category since I bought my trusty Studex.

In portable tripods, lightness is good. And when something is twice as good as the competition, that's a significant difference. And carbon fiber tripods are better than half the weight, roughly speaking, of equivalent metal or wooden tripods. That's very, very good indeed. Revolutionary, some have called it. Half as heavy = twice as good in my book, at least where tripods are concerned.

This isn't remotely news to veteran tripod users, and it's not really even news to me, but still, having acquainted up-close and personal this week with both a cheap and an expensive carbon fiber tripod, one thing that seems unarguable to me is that carbon fiber material is a no-brainer for portable tripods unless you simply cannot possibly stretch to afford one by hook, crook, or patiently saving up.

Mike

*This is wrong. See here for an update.

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Question from Ctein: "For those of us constrained by the dimensions of airline luggage (both checked and unchecked) it would be most useful to know the dimensions of the tripods, with and without the center columns removed (assuming they're removable)."

Mike replies: They're both removable. Using my old-fangled 1922 tape measure (really—it was my grandfather's), the ProMaster measures 22 3/4 inches long when compacted, and you would save 3/4" by removing the top plate (no need to remove the whole center post, which, by the way, breaks into two parts like a fine pool cue. I am really unsure as to why, because you can remove the center column by just removing the bottom cap. I guess it's so the same base unit can be used to create different length center posts?).

The Gitzo measures 24 1/2" collapsed and 23 3/8" with the center post removed (the locking collar is affixed to the top plate and doesn't come off, so removing the center column doesn't save you a lot of length).

If anyone would like any more measurements please let me know. —Mike

Question from Richard: "Do the legs turn when trying to lock them extended? I know some Gitzos have a nice feature that stops their legs from rotating, making locking less complicated."

Mike replies: Sorry for not making that more clear: the center leg sections of both tripods don't rotate, making it easy to lock or unlock the third (bottom, innermost) leg section without the center section being secured.

Featured Comment by latent_image: "Working on various survey crews in the 1970s, I was constantly setting up tripods for transits, levels, and theodolites. Surveyors have a technique for very quickly getting the tripod head level and over target on sloping ground that involves setting down a leg that may be slightly shortened on the uphill side and then grabbing the two downhill legs and moving them into position while observing the level on the head. What makes this easy is that surveyor's tripods have legs that can be tightened at any angle.

"I mention this because a lot of photo tripods have no method for locking down the legs at more than a couple of predetermined angles. To my mind this is next to useless. I can't tell you how many times I've watched photographers tediously shorten and lengthen legs to get their tripods level. Legs that can be locked down through a full range of angles are faster to set up and make it easier to locate the head in the most stable and safe position with relation to the feet, which goes a long way towards preventing a mishap with the camera."

Featured Comment by Joe Reifer: "The Gitzo GT1541 [$600 with current rebate —Ed.] is the 4-section version of this tripod, and folds to 21.3", which will fit in many carry-on bags. A 1-series Gitzo tripod is really only appropriate as a lightweight travel tripod - it's too light for windy days or long lenses. My everday tripod is a GT3541LS [$710 with current rebate, 21.7" folded —Ed.] and I couldn't be happier."

Mike adds: Joe, who has contributed to TOP several times, is a dedicated nighttime photographer and knows his tripods.

OT: Digital Excess

I just realized something very disconcerting this morning. Dilbert has too many fingers!

Everybody knows that cartoon characters from Mickey Mouse to Homer Simpson have three fingers and a thumb.

On the good side, Dilbert has no mouth and his hair is apparently made of flesh. So maybe he's okay, despite the freaky extra digit.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Doug Klassen: "'Dilbert' is not a cartoon strip, it is a documentary."

Tabletop Tripods

Manfrotto 209 tabletop tripod legs ($25)

By Adam McAnaney

In the comments to Mike's post "Tripod Technology," I made my aversion to tripods pretty clear. But like others I decided to try and find the smallest, sturdiest option available that would hold, at a minimum, a small SLR, yet which would be fairly cheap given the limited use it was likely to see. After trying several options, I have come up with what may just be the ideal solution.

Legs: The trick is to get legs that won't flex, have some mass to them and which sit very low. If the mini/tabletop tripod is going to fit into your camera bag, the legs simply won't be very long. Buying a mini tripod with telescoping legs is just a bad idea all-around, piling instability on instability. So you want something with solid legs. If the head of the legs is more than 3 or 4 inches off the ground, then the legs won't be spread out more than 4 or 5 inches, which means that by the time you mount a camera and lens, the setup will be very unstable. Solid legs that spread very wide will maximize your stability. My recommendation? The Giottos QU 500B Mini Tabletop Tripod* ($25) or the Manfrotto 209 Tabletop Tripod ($25) which supposedly support up to 11 lbs. That seems ridiculous for a mini tripod, until you realize just how basic and stable its design is. The legs are made of metal and very stable, and they sit very low to the ground. Only drawback: the legs really work best when they are fully spread out on a flat surface. In practice, I haven't found this to be a problem, but your mileage may vary.

Head: Again, I was looking for something cheap, yet stable, that wouldn't start to drop with an SLR attached. My solution: the Manfrotto 234 Swivel Tilt Monopod Head ($24). It, too, is made of metal and is very, very stable. It is designed for use on monopods with much heavier lenses than what I use it for. The locking mechanism simply does not loosen. Given that the unit is made of metal and is very robust, the large tightening screw just won't budge once you set it. Only drawback: it is a swivel, so you can only adjust your camera/lens along one axis. Again, I haven't found this to be a problem for my work, but then again I'm obviously not all people.*

Quick release (optional): This setup really doesn't need a quick release. I say this for two reasons: 1) The attachment screw on the Manfrotto 234 is very easy to access and operate, so attaching and removing it manually is much less annoying than with most tripods. 2) Since the Giottos/Manfrotto legs and the Manfrotto tilt head are so small, I tend to just leave this combination attached to my camera in situations where I'm using it. With the legs folded up, they provide a sort of grip for my SLR and do not interfere with my hand-held shooting. When I want to use the mini tripod, I just spread the legs and set the camera down. That said, there are people who are die-hard quick-release fans and who already have QR plates on all of their cameras/lenses. For those people I recommend the Markins QR-48 ($70), which includes a built-in bubble-level. My chief objection to this is that the quick release costs more than the legs and the head combined, yet doesn't add much in terms of functionality.

For anyone looking for a slightly more flexible setup (with more adjustable legs and a ballhead) and for whom money is no object, I would recommend the following:

The Leica Tabletop Tripod with Folding Legs ($109) with one of the small ballheads from one of the better ballhead manufacturers, such as a BH-25 LR ($175) from Really Right Stuff or a Q-Ball Q3 Emille ($300) from Markins. Both of these heads have built-in quick releases.*

But frankly, I wouldn't dismiss the Giottos/Manfrotto Mini Tripod / Manfrotto 234 combo. It is a much more flexible and stable combo than you think. On the other hand, for someone who will use such a setup a lot, even the more expensive Leica / mini-ballhead combo can seem like a bargain. To be honest with you, I would get far more use out of such a setup than I do out of my carbon fiber tripod and massive ballhead which, as I have already made clear, sits unused at home.

Adam

Adam McAnaney comments on TOP as amcananey.

*Legs identical to the Giottos/Manfrotto legs are available in a combo with a mini-ballhead in the form of the Manfrotto 709 Digi Tabletop Tripod with Ballhead ($40). The ballhead looks okay and has gotten good reviews, even from people using it with cameras as large as a Nikon D700, but I am skeptical that a mini-ballhead at this price point won't start to droop with use. For those using EVIL cameras or compacts, this might be a good option, however.

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113reykjavik

Tyler Monson, Not Pleased

Tyler Monson has just set up an anti-blog called 113reykjavik covering a recent 113-hour trip to Iceland.

As Tyler says, "The blog will be completed when you first see it; there will not be ongoing posts, so it is more like a book than a journal...also, like a book, it begins at the top/front and ends at the bottom/back—as Mother Nature intended."

Most of the pictures are of the urban-detail-and-doorway genre, but many repay a closer look. If your visual idea of Iceland consists mainly of scenic glaciers and black basalt* you might find his approach refreshing.

Tyler Monson, Economic Blessing

Mike

*Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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The Ever-Shrinking Tripod

By Ctein

Y'know, it seems to me much the discussion around Mike's tripod column can be summed up by a rhetorical question that's similar to the one we ask of cameras:

Which will help you make better pictures—the $50, 2 kg tripod you take with you or the $500, 10 kg tripod you leave at home?

Before going to Baja in 1991 to photograph the solar eclipse, I bought a truly massive 'pod to support my Pentax 67 and the long telephoto lens I would be using. The Bogen (now Manfrotto) 3051 with a 3047 head was reasonably priced for what it offered (in other words, not all that cheap) and it was by far the most rugged and stable tripod I've ever used in my life.

Your intrepid author, accompanied by the monster Bogen tripod, photographing the 1991 solar eclipse. That little black box hanging off the end of the lens? That's a Pentax 67 body. Gives you an idea of the size of the tripod. The mentioned-in-passing Velbon tripod is the one attached directly to the camera body. (Photo by Paula Butler.)

It also weighed at least 7 or 8 kg; it had to be 10 with the Pentax mounted on it. I only ended up using it in the field a couple of times after that; it was simply too heavy for me to lug more than a short distance. Definitely no cross-country hikes with that one. I always ended up taking a relatively flimsy Velbon that I'd had since I can't remember when.

The Bogen was a great tool for the specific task I bought it for, but as a life purchase it sucked. Its primary function was to take up space in the back of the closet and get hauled out for camera, lens, or film tests. I sold it a couple of years back.

In 2002, while planning my trip to Hawaii to photograph the "Jewels of Kilauea" project, I needed a sturdy and flexible tripod that I could take out onto the lava fields. It sure wasn't going to be that Bogen! I needed stability without weight. My ultimate happy compromise was a Gitzo G2227 carbon fiber tripod with a Manfrotto 329RC4 head. That set me back more dinero than I can recall. $600? $800? Whatever, lots, but it was definitely the right tool for the job. I had no trouble carrying it for kilometers across uneven terrain. I still have it and use it. There's a good chance it's the tripod I'll have for the rest of my life.

But still, I don't carry it around routinely. It's a little bulky for that. So I've continued to move down the scale and found two tripods that work fabulously well for my current photographic "lifestyle" and cost me nearly nothing.

The first one I just plain stumbled across. I was going off on a road trip with a friend a few years back, and she needed to stop off at Ritz Cameras on the way to drop off some film for developing. Looking around the place, I realized that an inexpensive, lightweight tripod could be a real boon on the trip. I ended up buying a Quantaray QSX-6601TM on sale for $29.99. It's remarkably capable for what it is, having center leg braces, a quick release plate, and a removable and reversible monopod column. It's small enough with the column removed that it will fit in carry-on luggage, and it only weighs 1.5 kg.

Won't work worth a damn with a Pentax 67 (surprise!) or probably even a full-sized digital SLR. For cameras like my recent Fujifilm S100 and 6500 it proved entirely adequate. It's definitely a nice match for the positively petite Olympus Pen EP-1, even when I mount the 45–200mm zoom.

Is it going to be good in a strong wind? No. Is it going to last me the rest of my life? Given the almost-entirely plastic construction, I very much doubt it. But, when it finally dies, I'm out only $30. I've gotten a huge amount of use from it over the past 2 1/2 years; it's probably the smartest impulse purchase I ever made. It's almost all I've been using for field photography since I started making digital photographs.

Bottom of the bag
Almost. Some years earlier, I'd picked up (again at Ritz Camera) a Vanguard Mini Tabletop Tripod (similar to this one ) for the whopping sum of $12.94. It also weighs a whopping 350g and folds up into a 20 x 8 x 5 cm package. Consequently, it has permanent residence in the bottom of my shoulder bag next to the Olympus. I don't even notice the tripod is there...except when I need it.

A self portrait by my Olympus Pen camera, showing the Vanguard Mini tripod.
It's compact, it's cute, it's cheap, it's practical.

That isn't often, but it's sure nice to have it when it is. When I went up to the top of the Empire State building at night on my recent trip to New York City that's the tripod that went with me, because The Powers That Be don't much care for tripods on the observation deck. Nobody complains about a little gadget that's barely bigger than the small camera that's mounted on it. Setting it on floors, putting it on ledges, propping it against walls, I managed to get all the photographs I wanted with all my focal length lenses. Okay, it was a little dicey out at the 200mm end of things; this is not exactly the most stable camera platform. But it worked well enough that about half of my maximum telephoto photographs came out. Without that little 'pod, the percentage would have been precisely zero.

From the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State building, looking up.
Photographed with the Olympus Pen and the Vanguard Mini tripod.

Yup, that's the tripod I have with me...it's helped me make me more good pictures than the Bogen ever did.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears every Thursday morning, for some value of "morning."

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Digital Restoration

The Second Edition of Digital Restoration from Start to Finish: How to repair old and damaged photographs by Ctein has recently been published. (As we sometimes remember to mention, the name is pronounced "kuh-TINE" and it's his whole legal name.) Changes since the first edition are that the chapter on software has been completely rewritten; the examples are all new; a new chapter called "Beautification," about how to make pictures look better, has been added; there's a new section to help aid in diagnosing problems; and there's now better separation between the main text and the more than 80 How-To's. Changes throughout the text reflect refinements in presentation and methods and account for the use of more powerful computers and non-destructive editing.

The book is published by Focal Press, meaning that the editing and presentation are first rate.

The chapters are:

1. The Big Picture
2. Hardware for Restoration Work
3. Software for Restoration
4. Getting the Photo Into the Computer
5. Restoring Tone
6. Restoring Color
7. Making Masks
8. Damage Control
9. Tips, Tricks, and Enhancements
10. Beautification
11. Examples
12. Printing Tips
13. Archiving and Permanence

You can order a signed copy of Digital Restoration from Start to Finish through Ctein's website, or, if it's more convenient for you, you can order it through Amazon U.S. or Amazon U.K. There's also a PDF of the introduction and sections of several chapters available for download at the first link.

Finally, if you want to save some money, Ctein will be having a sale on the book at a later date, which we'll alert you to when the time comes.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Scott Dommin: "I have the first edition of the book, which Ctein was kind enough to sign for me. It's the best book on the subject, bar none. The second edition should be even better. Even if you're not currently restoring a photo, you can flip through the book and be amazed at what is possible these days."

Featured Comment by Bahi: "I haven't yet read the book (shameful admission…I'm going to put that right shortly) but do have an idea of how good it might be, assuming that the author doesn't hold his cards too close to his chest.

"I recently asked Ctein to restore some very old photographs for a client and just had a chance to look at some of the incomplete work in progress. It may be unfinished but it's already beginning to look eye-poppingly good—there's genuine highlight detail in some of these pictures that we simply couldn't see in the originals. I'm not able to rule out the possibility that time travel was involved in obtaining the highlight detail (consider: long beard, interest in spacecraft, physics degree, clever fella, endless supply of dye transfer paper which Kodak stopped making sixteen years ago, etc.) but either way, we're talking about a book written by something of a wizard."

Joe Deal 1947-2010

I'm sorry to report that Joe Deal, of Providence, Rhode Island, who we last talked about here, died of his illness last friday. Joe's pictures are elegant, analytical, accurate, and austere, with elements of abstraction, usually showing the raw encroachment of new development on landscape that still shows its natural contours and textures. There is an obituary at the St. Louis website stltoday.com (he was the Dean of the Art School at Washington University there during the '90s), and you can read a little about his post-New-Topographics work The Fault Zone at Robert Mann.

Sincere condolences to his wife, daughter, and father, as well as to his many students and friends.

Mike
(Thanks to Kent Phelan)

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Platinum Print Offer Update #2

I'm pleased to announce that after eight weeks of very hard work, Carl Weese has now shipped all of the platinum/palladium print orders—roughly 240 Pt/Pd prints and 90 digital prints in 183 packages. Many of you who ordered will have received your prints by now, and the few who haven't yet will soon. There were inevitably just a few glitches in the orders or payments—and still a slight possibility of lost shipments, although there haven't been any yet—so if you're expecting prints and are still without them at the end of the next week or ten days, please contact Carl. You can also send an email to me and I'll forward it to him.

Carl will be incommunicado for a few days while he takes a well-deserved break. Again, my sincerely thanks to Carl, his wife Tina, and to all of you who purchased prints—I hope you like them!

A job well done, all around.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Markus Spring: "I received my print last week and got excited to a degree I really had not expected—the combination of finest details, warm inviting tonality and a wonderful structure of the paper was overwhelming. My thanks go not only to Carl, but also to T.O.P. for preparing the venue for that print offer."

The Night of the Lightning

I live at the northernmost reaches of tornado alley, the vast expanse of the American Midwest that is plagued with tornadoes every Spring and summer. The most famous of them is probably the Kansas twister that carried Dorothy to Oz, but there are hundreds of them every year and they're not all so imaginative. For the past two nights we've had tremendous thunderstorms here, a few of which spawned tornadoes.

Tornado frequency. There are no accepted boundaries for "Tornado Alley," roughly the large orange and red area at the left. If you map tornado deaths, the epicenter moves considerably eastward, since those areas have more population. My location is roughly at the green dot. Map courtesy Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

When the big storm cells came through on Monday, the kids were planning on going bowling. I kept them at the house, which turned out to be a good idea—three tornadoes touched down locally. The largest, in the Village of Eagle just west of where we are (my son went to YMCA day camp in Eagle when he was younger), damaged more than 100 homes and completely destroyed at least six. Where we are, the warning sirens were wailing above the roar of the wind and the sky was flickering with lightning. The crackling nearby lightning hits were tremendous, like sonic booms. The rain came down in a fury—an inch and a half in an hour or so. The county is still under a State of Emergency.

The Chief of the Eagle Fire Department, Justin Heim, age 27, was at the Fire Station trying to start the town's warning siren manually (it's been on the fritz for some time) when the tornado struck his own home—with his wife and two young daughters inside. The house was completely obliterated down to ground level. The Chief himself, as you might imagine, was among the responders to that call. "It's gone," he said. "There's nothing there. It's like someone took the house and it's gone." Fortunately, he'd left his loved ones in a protected area of the basement (another reason we have basements here!) before he left the house, so they were safe. A local resident allowed as how Chief Heim might have been allowed a little time to recover after he got his family settled into a nearby hotel, but he stayed on the job—and probably hasn't had a lot of sleep since. Makes sense—he's Eagle's only full-time fireman.

Everybody's playing innocent so far when asked about the non-functioning sirens, but local news quickly uncovered evidence of multiple failed inspections going back months. Fortunately, despite their absence, folks made it to their basements and no one out in Eagle was killed or seriously injured.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch house, my basement's full of puddles, so no more work on the darkroom for a while.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Glad to read that you're fine, Mike. This sure has been a week of turbulent early summer weather up here in the upper Midwestern U.S. Here in Chicago last Friday this monster rolled over Chicago near rush hour. (I was doing some unrelated photo work at the time and had a camera handy to grab this ominous scene.)

It blew-out quite a few windows in the Sears (a.k.a. Willis) Tower and several other buildings. Fun fun."

Featured Comment by Alexandre Buisse: "For a second, I had a vision of your basement full of poodles. That would definitely have been an issue for a darkroom...."

Mike replies: To say nothing of the issue it would be for my terrier. The level of excitement doesn't even bear thinking about.

A Dangerous Post

This post is dangerous, because I'm jumping the gun a bit and I don't want people to take away the wrong message from this. Remember Johnston's Forum Constraint: "You cannot say anything clearly enough on a camera forum that it cannot be misconstrued." Here's my attempt at clarity:

N.b. (as you probably know, "n.b." means nota bene, Latin for "note well"): I am not recommending this. I might do so in the future, but not yet. So please do not take this post as a recommendation! Yet.

Safelights are a big headache in darkroom work. There really isn't any such thing as a perfect safelight solution, at least not with traditional technology. Many safelights (and texts analyzing and explaining them) were good for older graded papers but don't hold for "newer" VC papers; glass filters are pretty safe in most applications, but they can be dim (most darkrooms that use them have several, located strategically), and they do deteriorate over time; sodium vapor safelights still have their proponents but have tested very poorly for me (and Paul Butzi and, I believe, John Sexton too); and several types of LED-based safelights, which were too expensive to sell in large numbers even when there was a much larger market for darkroom products, have gone out of production.

Anyway, a tastiferous* box arrived via the brown truck today. Inside were two cool Chinese-made LED bulbs from a company called OptiLED: a 2.5-watt Festival Festoon Decolamp, in amber (top), and a .5-watt Festival S11 Decolamp, also in amber (right). They're not actually safelights: they're made for things like Las Vegas signage and to encrust Merry-Go-Rounds. The little one appears to be too dim to be of much use for our nonstandard purposes, but the larger one is promising. The graph of its output, which I saw during my far-flung 'net research but can't seem to find again, is a sharp-cutting spike at 590 nm. (Wish I could find that graph again...). 

So is it really sharp-cutting? Here's the thing about safelights: you have to test. Really, the "safe" in safelight is a misnomer: all safelights are unsafe for certain levels of illumination combined with certain durations of exposure. The trick is accurately finding out where those limits are...for your materials in your space given your working methods. In due course (i.e., once I'm set up to test this one), I'll write a post on testing safelights. The takeaway here should be that it's got to be done. A must. Baseline B&W darkroom craftsmanship. Ctein, for example, guesses this Festoon should be safe. Paul guesses it won't be. (If it isn't, I ain't dead in the water: there's also a red one, with output centered at 627 nm.) The point is, I can't take their guesses for gospel, and you can't take mine. We all gotta test our own.

Ponce de Leon
Even though I don't know whether it works yet, the OptiLED has a lot of allure. It's so wetproof it can be used outdoors; it will operate at any temperature from —30 to 70 degrees C (that's –22 to 158 degrees F), which pretty much encompasses all the temperatures I expect to encounter in my basement; it's made of fire-resistant polymers; it draws only 2.5 watts from the wall; and it's rated to last for 35,000 hours of use, which is more time than even I have spent in darkrooms in my entire life so far. And it's so nice in the darkroom space in the basement that I could really get by quite comfortably with only one.

Of course, allure can mislead. Ponce de Leon considered the Fountain of Youth so alluring that he wasted a large stretch of his limited lifespan looking for it, and we all know how that turned out. Just because something is appealing doesn't mean it isn't also too good to be true. So we test. More anon.

Mike

* Perfectly cromulent word if you ask me.

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Featured Comment by Mark Roberts: "I don't care if it works or not—anything called 'Festoon' is a must-have for my darkroom!"

Mike replies: I agree, the name is a big plus. <g>

Featured Comment by Kerstin: "I'm so far out of it that the last safelight I had I made myself. It was a small light bulb (about the size of the LED, I think), and I painted it red with nail polish."

Featured Comment by bongo: "Looks great. Thanks for the recommendation."

Progress!

Okay, I realize it still doesn't look like much. But if you'll compare it to the "before" picture (right—click to embiggen), you'll see I've gotten a lot done—removed all the junk, swept the cobwebs off the ceiling, removed or reattached the stuff hanging from the ceiling, and, mostly, cleaned the floor and gave it a couple of coats of floor enamel. That was harder than it sounds, because, before I fixed the house drainage (new gutters and Roto-Rooting the drain to the sewer), the floor repeatedly flooded over the years and stuff that was left out got wet, dried, and stuck to the floor. I spent a lot of time on my knees with a scraper and a wire brush and various buckets full of cleaning potions. 

The painted area is a little bigger than 10x13', by the way.

Oops! Once you get to working it's hard to stop. Thought I'd black out the windows at 2:00 a.m. and forgot, briefly, that blue masking tape isn't opaque. It's best to black out windows when it's light outside. I'll talk more about lightproofing when  get around to doing it.

I also installed splitters on all the light sockets in the basement. This one shows a compact fluorescent bulb, which won't be what I'll use for white lighting, and an older Adorama LED safelight (no longer available), which I won't be using either—we'll talk about lighting in the future, too. The splitter arrangement, made out of cheap parts from the hardware store, is what I wanted to show here. The extensions are just to get the pull chains, which, obviously, allow you to select the safelight or the white light. I've seen 1-to-2 bulb-socket fixtures that already have pull chains built in, but I couldn't find any this time. (Should have looked online—I didn't think of that.)

Another nifty trick I've used in the past is to get a long chain extension and run it through eyelets attached to the joist. That allows you to reach up and turn on the white lights from wherever you're standing. I don't think I'll do that in this darkroom, but I thought I'd mention it.

Finally, I can't resist—my friend Jack McDonough sent me the picture below of his basement "darkroom." Classic. 

Mike

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Sunday Open Mike

Anybody read any great books lately? I'm looking for what to read next....

Mike

And a P.S.: Historically I get my best book recommendations from my brother Scott, and he and I have a friendly guideline we call the Pinker Rule. The name comes from a Stephen Pinker book that starts out very promisingly but, after the first third, descends into unreadability. He recommended it warmly to me and I read the first third of it with interest but then hit the heavy slogging and bogged down. Some time later, feeling somewhat rueful, I reported my failure back to him (is "bailure" a word? A failure which involves bailing out? If it isn't, it ought to be—my life, at least, is littered with bailures), and he admitted that he too had read the first third of the book and then stopped as well—he apologized, saying he simply hadn't gotten far enough along in it when he recommended it. Ever since then we've observed the Pinker Rule, meaning that either one of us must have read all the way through a book before we're allowed to recommend it to the other. You are under no compulsion to accept any rules from me, so this is a humble request, not a requirement, but if you could please perhaps consider the Pinker Rule in your suggestions I'd be grateful. Just in case. As you know, life is short, books long.

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Featured Comment by Mark Cotter: "The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer (U.K. link). It explores the recurrent themes of American photography during the twentieth century. An excellent read, interesting without being overly academic. Just bought Gerry Badger's new book: The Pleasures of Good Photographs (U.K. link)—looks good but I've not started it yet."

Featured Comment by yunfat: "Sebastian Junger: WAR. Just check out the photo on the back from Tim Heatherington, you will know it's for you."

Mike replies: I wonder if that's the same Tim Heatherington who used to be Richard Avedon's assistant.

Featured Comment by Stephen Best: "I read Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge from Project Gutenberg recently with the Eucalyptus app on my iPhone. I was sceptical that the small screen would be readable with my less than stellar vision but it worked surprisingly well. I've been working my way through Hardy over the past few years and still probably like The Woodlanders the best. Maybe one day I'll make a pilgrimage to Wessex. Current reading is David Malouf's latest and a weighty tome on CSS."

(Ed. Note: Since I have no real way to discriminate between recommendations, and there were well over a hundred awaiting me when I woke up this morning, I will (mostly) dispense with the usual "Featured Comment" format and just list a few of the recommendations that seem interesting or unusual in some way. These will be chosen more or less at random, so please don't feel slighted (in the slightest) if your own recommendation isn't listed. It will be in the comments. I do read everyone's comments, and I extend my thanks to all, as well.

And in a necessary nod to Mammon, our Amazon links (I fear this post is going to be extremely expensive for me):

Amazon U.S.
http://www.amazon.com/?tag=theonlinephot-20

Amazon U.K.:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/?tag=cdrebyc6-21

Amazon Germany:
http://www.amazon.de/?tag=cdrebyc603-21

Amazon Canada:
http://amazon.ca/?tag=theonliphot-20

These links can be bookmarked.

I don't have an affiliation with Amazon France. I've applied, but was turned down. I really don't know why, although I suspect the problem is at my end and not theirs. —Mike)

Kafka on the Shore (Dan K)

Man's Fate (Erik)

The Broken Shore("Very Australian.") (Ann P)

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Ross Chambers, Dave, and Carl)

Featured Comment by Iain Dawson: "Have you read Fred Ritchin's After Photography (published by W.W. Norton)? I found it a very thought provoking account of where the 'digital revolution' in photography could be taking us (U.K. link)."

Snow Crash (John H. Maw)

The "Reacher Novels" by Lee Child ("Light but engaging action thrillers.") (Jim, and Gary Fitzgerald)

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy Bundle: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Recommended by Leigh Youdale, Dave Pawson, Simon, Dave Hodgkinson, Bill Anderson, stuartf287, Greg Anderson, Hugh, Mike Chisholm, and Al Patterson) ("If you liked The Da Vinci Code you'll like these." —Leigh. "Not put-downable." —Dave P.)

Dalva (Jean-Louis Cuvellier)

Featured Comment by Barnard Scharp: "Ctein's Post Exposure. Fits in with your current project (though I can imagine you've already read it)."

Mike replies: Oh yes.

The Invention of Solitude (XebastYan)

Blindness (Mr C, nacho)

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives ("Best thing I've read in ages.") (Scott)

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine ("Inside stories that answer the question, 'What happened?' to cause the recent and ongoing financial meltdown." —Speed.) (Recommended by Speed, MikeB, Harry, and Stephen Gilbert)

Kristin Lavransdatter ("Borrowed it from the library and had to buy my own copy.") (Ruby)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Rob)

Cloud Atlas (Neil)

Featured Comment by David Miller: "Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Parts of its long, rambling, cosmic, earthy journey seemed to make the very ground shake beneath my feet! How have I managed to avoid it all these years? Finally reading it in my sixties I was suddenly reminded of so many things that I knew when I was twenty-one, which I have somehow lost touch with over the intervening years. (Echoes of Bob Dylan singing 'Ah but I was so much older then; I am younger than that now....') Life-changing—it opened my photographer's eyes wider than they've been in a long while. Have fun with the darkroom. (When will you find time to read?)"

Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was ("I doubt [this is] the kind of thing you had in mind.") (Will Frostmill)

The Meaning of Life ("Everything you need to know in a 'slim, profound, accessible volume.'") (richard)

The Value of Nothing (James Bullard)

Featured Comment by Thomas Osborne: "I set out to read a book a week this year. I was doing well until I started Roberto Bolaño’s 900-page 2666 in May. Of the 23 books I’ve read, I'd recommend three recent titles: Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (with a Lange photo on the jacket); and American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell. And one from 30 years ago: Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein."

Sh*t My Dad Says ("Got it for Fathers Day and couldn't stop laughing.") (Roger Engle)

Featured Comment by Michael W: "I'm enjoying The Odyssey by Homer. Fitzgerald translation. Wonder where I got the idea to read that."

Mike replies:  :-)

Any book by Michael Pollan. (Tom)

Mike replies: I agree, Tom. Except the little Rules book.

The Art of Racing in the Rain (Don Olson)

Featured Comment by Frank Gorga: "May I recommend: Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day by Patricia J. Fanning. See here for details. In addition to being an interesting character in his own right, Day invited Clarence White to his summer home in Maine early in White's career and thus was in some ways responsible for the 'Maine School.' (Disclaimer: Patty is a colleague and friend of mine.)"

Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa (Ken Tanaka)

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (Kevin Schoenmakers)

Featured Comment by Matthew Robertson: "Keeping it in the family, John Camp is an occasional commenter here, and his pen-name of John Sandford is always one I look for. Good crime fiction, and he knows his photography."

Darkroom: Paint

Well, I was afraid of this: I'm afraid I'm just going to bore the pants off people for a while as I maunder on about darkroom stuff. What can I say? It's where I am.

Walls
Anyway, paint: there is a deathless myth which holds that darkrooms need to be painted black. Not so. Darkrooms should be white. At least, black-and-white darkrooms should be. Why? First, for the same reason that white is the most common color for any interior room: it makes a room seem brighter and larger and makes it a more pleasant place to be. Black walls cut down on the reflection of stray light—for instance, light leaks from the enlarger. But here's what you should do if your enlarger has light leaks: fix it.

The darkrooms that really need to be painted black are group darkrooms, such as school darkrooms...which is where most people get their ideas about what darkroom are supposed to look like (which explains the myth). And why should group darkrooms be painted black? Because more than one person works in them at a time, and, when more than one person is working, light contamination is unavoidable. In gang darkrooms there are always those unsociable individuals who open their enlargers to insert the carrier with the enlarger turned on, or (worse) use the light from the opened enlarger to see to do some other task, but even if everybody's being responsible there can still be someone focusing or exposing when someone else is walking past with exposed paper. With all sorts of unruly white light bouncing around the room, that's when you need black paint slathered over everything, even though it makes the place look like a medieval dungeon or the inside of a House of Horrors. But just because gang darkrooms are black doesn't mean all darkrooms should be.

The other reason white is the right color is that it greatly increases the efficiency of your safelights. Safelight is brighter and easier to see by when it can reflect off white walls and ceilings. Plus, greater safelight efficiency means you might need fewer of them.

My walls are sort of a dingy yellowish off-white. Based on all the stuff attached to the walls over the paint, I'm going to guess they were last painted in 1957 when the house was built. In the interest of KISS and speedy construction I'm not going to repaint. But if I did, they'd be white.

Floor
If your floor is concrete, as mine is, paint it.

Why? Again, simple. Concrete is porous. Darkrooms with unpainted concrete floors tend to get doused over time with lots of little spills and splashes and maybe (if you're unlucky) a very occasional large one. A little bit of every spill soaks into the floor, and after a while the darkroom starts to smell. Painting the floor, wiping up spills, and mopping every now and then just makes the space a little more pleasant over the long haul.

Mike

UPDATE: Paul Butzi points out that reflected light from the paper, during exposure can reflect off nearby white surfaces and degrade highlights, which I accept. So any areas directly adjacent to the enlarger should be...all right, painted black. Paul suggests using light-absorbing black fabric for your tests. He also suggests printing in a black shirt! That's one I've never heard before, but okay. Maybe that's why some of the best custom printers are New Yorkers.

UPDATE No. 2: Bought myself three black shirts at the K-Mart, on sale for $5.98 each. Plan to keep them in the basement.

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Blog Notes: Slight Clarification

It came to my attention last night that out there on the wild web, a few people are saying things like "Mike Johnston of TOP is going back to film!" or words to that effect.

No—no, he's not. All I'm doing is building a rudimentary darkroom work area in my basement so I can make era-appropriate silver-gelatin prints from a collection of film negatives made between 1980 and 2000, that's all. The project is mainly to take advantage of the fact that Adox is renewing the availability of my last standard silver printing paper, Agfa Multicontrast Classic (MCC), in its Adox MCC. I'm taking advantage of the opportunity in order to finish up some old business, because I don't know how long the opportunity will last.

As far as new shooting on film is concerned, I'm hoping to do a little. I'm hoping that it might amount to as much of 10% of my shooting. It could well amount to 0%. We'll just have to see.

In any event, I'm afraid I don't deserve to be numbered among those who are dedicated to film for their current work, darkroom project (and posts) notwithstanding...and now it's off to give the floor a second coat of paint.

Carry on,

Mike

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Never Build a Perfect Darkroom

In the times when photographers who wanted to work and weren't rich had to have what my friend Nick Hartmann once called "The room-sized accessory"—a darkroom—extemporizing was the order of the day. People worked in every conceivable kind of space: under stairs, in extra bedrooms, closets, basements, utility rooms in office building basements—the list is as long as your arm. Many such spaces and setups were just preposterously awful, some almost to the point of parody, or hilarity.

I've gotten interested in this notion of "reverse snobbery" that came up the other day, and I do think I've always considered it a point of pride that I could work anywhere. I've worked in some nice darkrooms over the years, but I've definitely worked in some horrible ones, too—dank, smelly, ancient, cluttered, cobwebbed spaces where it would be considered cruel to confine a cat. The only darkroom I ever put together that really didn't work was in the dressing area and bathroom of a one-room studio apartment I lived in in Washington, D.C. It was cramped, awkwardly laid-out, hot, and airless—too hair-shirt even for me.

Of course, the opposite impulse sometimes prevails: people get to jonesing to build the "perfect" darkroom, custom fit to them and with everything designed exquisitely just so.

As regular readers know, I edited a photo magazine for a number of years. It was called Photo Techniques, but its previous title was Darkroom and Creative Camera Techniques (D&CCT), and before that (before the publisher acquired Creative Camera) it was called Darkroom Techniques. It was one of two darkroom magazines founded within a couple of years of 1979, the year that the home darkroom hobby in the U.S. peaked. The other title was Darkroom Photography. (Ironically, I had a hand in changing the names of both of those darkroom magazines to remove the word "darkroom" from their titles.) Anyway, the magazine I edited was still essentially a darkroom magazine when I was there, so I saw a steady stream of "perfect darkroom" articles. Some of these creations were state-of-the-art in having the latest and best of everything; some deployed cutting-edge technologies (remember Minolta's 45A pulsed-xenon enlarger head?); some were lovingly crafted with furniture-grade custom cabinetry and multiple coats of glossy paint. One was so over the top that we ran a series of articles on it in the magazine. I wish I could recall the name of the author or the articles off the top of my head, but that information is not bobbing to the surface.*

Then, in about my fourth year on the job, I began to notice a trend: people who built "perfect" darkrooms tended not to use them very much. This was a purely empirical observation. I'd contact people I know had been passionately engaged in months-long building projects and ask them how they were liking their pride-and-joy. And again and again the same answer came back: don't really get down there as often as I'd like; it's great, but I just haven't had time; work situation changed; family obligations; so forth. Finally, several years after we ran the article about the over-the-top darkroom—really, the most elaborate home darkroom I'd ever heard of—I contacted the author.

He'd moved.

He had tried to dismantle as much of the darkroom as he could, if I recall the conversation correctly, but the effort hadn't really proved satisfactory. I do remember him telling me that he had realized at some point that the building project itself was what had really interested him, not actually having the finished facility in which to do photographic work. 

Reverse snobbery maybe, but that cemented my preference for plain, unadorned, utilitarian, workmanlike spaces. Don't build too much in; let the joists and studs show; never be afraid to hammer a nail into a wall. Make do with what you have. You never want it to be so set that you can't rig it some other way if you feel like it. If something's less than ideal, shrug and get on with it. It's just a utility room, not a work of art in itself.

Extemporizing, often merely necessary, can also be a virtue. 

Mike

* Maybe it's in the famous Grad Photographica Bibliotheca, either the one of paper and shelves or the one of gray matter and synapses.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Chris Nicholls: "Lots of nostalgia going on here, but some of us are living the dream! And at least in part thanks to the inspiration found in your stories Mike. I completed my first darkroom last Christmas, and have been locked away in there on a pretty regular basis ever since. No time for perfection in the build, and plenty of unfinished timber on show! Take a look!"

Chris Nicholls' darkroom

Featured Comment by Paul: "Our flat has three bedrooms, the kids' room, my wife and I share the other room, and my studio. The studio is a darkroom with all the equipment set up all day long, it also holds the digital side where I'm slowly printing less and less on my Epson printer. I write my little blog in this room on a old IBM laptop and my kids enjoy doing their homework in this room also. Under the kitchen worktop which goes round half the room I've got a few cupboards and draws, some without doors on and others with. I couldn't give a crap if it isn't beautiful; I come in here to create with the least effort possible. My wife has a love-hate relationship with this room because it's sometimes quite untidy but it's always when I'm at my most creative. Anyway she's got the rest of the house to carry out whatever she feels like.

"The room also contains seven electric guitars, a 150 watt head and 50 watt combo amplifier.

"This room isn't open to all visitors who appear round our house, it's a sacred place where a lot of feelings come out. I'm not at all religious in the standard sense but it's sort of our little 'church.' For my little kids and I it's an escape from the real world.

"My pitbull and the chihuahua sleep under the table which holds the enlarger and they've got the lounge, kitchen, dinning room and terraces to choose from but there seems to be a lot of peace in here. A friend of mine says it's very spiritual in here, I just think it's cool.

"The only advice, I can give to anyone is that room you create whether it's a lightroom or a darkroom, it must welcome you every time you step foot inside to create. If not you will soon notice you're not printing very much or perhaps there is something more interesting on the television. I've always had a studio in every house or flat I've lived in, since I discovered at the age of eight I had a compulsion to create, so I sort of know what I'm talking about."

Featured Comment by Rob Atkins: "These discussions remind me of something the poet Allen Ginsberg talked about. He had some expensive, fine notebooks to write his poetry in, but preferred 'cheapo' notebooks, as he called them. He was less inhibited by a .49 cent book than a hand-tooled Italian leather book. Freed his mind and creativity to just scribble. Some masterpieces arose from that."

Random Excellence: John Cyr

John Cyr, Barbara Mensch's Developer Tray

This is a 3:1 mixture of cool and funny.

I'll concede the subject matter won't resonate for everybody, but you've got to admit it's apropos, given my recent project.

Be sure to turn the captions on, using the [+] / [-] toggle at the bottom of the screen. Here's the link to the portfolio. From aCurator.com.

Mike
(Thanks to Stan Banos)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Brian Auer: "I'm not quite as weathered as some of those guys, but my tray is slowly getting there:

Featured Comment by Animesh Ray: "Wow! Her portfolio is striking!"

Featured Comment by Michel Hardy-Vallée: "The reference on the portfolio-about-darkroom-implements-tired-and-covered-in-crud remains Québec's very own Michel Campeau.

"Who was championed by Martin Parr in a 2008 issue of Aperture, I think."

Featured Comment by Dave: "My trays have been in storage for years. You'll have to settle for this:

Can You Get Good ISO 6400 from an Olympus E-P1?

By Ctein

I've just hit upon something rather cool and somewhat unexpected. Some of you will recall a column of mine from a year or so back called "JPEG...Seriously?" Well, I've found a reason for photographing JPEGs with my Olympus Pen E-P1. I can use them to get much, much better results at ISO 6400 than I could pull out of a RAW file using every trick I know.

(As usual, you can click on any of these illustrations to see them larger.)

Fig. 1. Olympus Pen RAW photographs at ISO 6400 are not lovely things. The full frame is on top, with a 100% magnification crop below. Observe the serious chroma noise, especially the horizontal and vertical stripes. © 2010 by Ctein.

As I wrote at the beginning of the year in "What Tests Don't Tell You," the E-P1 has some serious plaid chroma noise problems above ISO 800. It's great up to there, and then quality just falls off a cliff. ISO 1600 is marginal by my standards, everything above that is crap due to the chroma noise. Figure 1 shows a particularly egregious example of ISO 6400 quality in RAW mode; there's no way that I've found to make this RAW into a palatable photograph.

Now, take a look at the same photograph saved as JPEG in the camera (figure 2) . It's not perfect; there's some large low-frequency blotchiness, but that's the kind of stuff I could dodge or burn away. The chroma quality is not utterly sucking. It's usually not even this bad in most of the ISO 6400 photographs; this is just about the worst example I could come up with.

Fig. 2. The same photograph as in figure 1, but saved as a JPEG in camera. Excellent reduction of the chroma noise, but overall the picture is soft and veiled, and the highlights and shadows are blocked up. © 2010 by Ctein.

I'm truly amazed what the internal data massaging in the camera can do. If I had to, I could live with this as an okay snapshot. I don't much like that overall veiled quality, plus it's rather a shame losing several stops of highlight and shadow detail, most evident in the illuminated and dark stained glass windows and the trees).

So I said to myself, wait a minute...the Olympus can record in RAW+JPEG mode; what if I do that and then mix the two photographs in Photoshop? Start with the JPEG as the base layer, convert the RAW to a grayscale image (which almost completely eliminates the plaid problem), paste it in as a second layer over the JPEG, and set the blend mode to Luminosity (figure 3). I wind up with a photograph that has the clean chroma of the JPEG but retains most of the fine detail structure and tonal range of the RAW file. It's also a lot grainier.

Fig. 3. This layer stack combines a monochrome, noise-filtered copy of figure 1 with the JPEG from figure 2. The result is figure 4.

So, I further said to myself, what if I use my most flexible noise reduction plug-in (Imagenomic NoiseWare) to get rid of majority of the grain in the RAW layer, but not so much that I'm seriously compromising fine detail? Which leads me to Figure 4. Hey, it works! It's grainy, but the grain is even and tight. It's a nice compromise mix of the best characteristics of both source photographs.

Fig. 4. This is not half bad! Chroma noise is much better controlled than in the RAW photograph, but it preserves most of the RAW's detail and tonal range. It also has an acceptable compromise between grain and fine detail. © 2010 by Ctein.

It prints out as a fairly decent 8x10 (Mike's seen prints and Oren and Carl have seen full-size JPEGs, so they can confirm this). Nothing I would call professional quality by my standards, but more than pretty enough. It would be even better if I did a little bit of dodging and burning in on the remaining blotches; I didn't because I'm trying to show what the file really looks like. But, it wouldn't take me long to clean it up a lot more.

Best of all is that I can turn at least 90% of this merging process into a Photoshop automation. Possibly all of it; I haven't experimented with enough photographs yet. Even by hand it's very fast, but an automation would save me a whole bunch of repetitive mouse clicks.

Here are some of the better ISO 6400 results I've gotten out of this new trick (figures 5–7). Is it perfection? Of course not. But seeing as I'd previously decided this camera wasn't any good above ISO 800 I'm a mighty happy camper.

Fig. 5. RAW at the top, merged JPEG+RAW on the bottom. It's a big improvement, and the print looks even better; it's genuinely pleasing. © 2010 by Ctein.

Fig. 6. The merged RAW+JPEG photo combines most of the exposure range of the RAW file and most of the noise reduction of the JPEG. Compare the 100% sections at the bottom, RAW on left, RAW+JPEG on right. © 2010 by Ctein.

Fig. 7. My best result so far, and a genuinely good-looking 8x10 print. © 2010 by Ctein.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears every Thursday on TOP.

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Featured Comment by Semilog: "I suspect that there are at least a couple of things going on here.

"First, Olympus has access to much more proprietary information about the sensor and its specific hardware implementation than even, say, DxO does.

"Second, as Andrew Molitor says, the in-camera software (firmware) can be tuned to deal not only with a specific chip design/implementation, but a specific sample of a chip. This is really important because consumer devices, unlike scientific devices, have rather heterogeneous pixels.

"(Scientific devices are usually "grade 0," i.e., zero defects beyond a rather stringent specification. Moreover, scientific devices are generally CCDs, which are usually both more linear in response, and more homogeneous pixel-to-pixel than CMOS sensors. Because grade 0 devices are generally the cream of the crop, selected from much larger runs of devices, they also command very a very steep price premium. Your garden-variety D90 or E-PL1 is not going to contain a grade 0 sensor!)

"The sample-specific dark current calibration done at the factory accounts for variation not only between pixels, but between rows of pixels. On many cameras, this calibration is re-doable through the menus, useful since cosmic ray hits generate new hot and cold pixels over time.

"This sample-specific calibration information is potentially really important when making a zeroed image to start with, prior to application of conventional NR algorithms. This information is not stored in a RAW file, and thus is not available to any of the third-party RAW developers, fundamentally compromising their performance no matter how good they are (unless the dark subtraction is done upstream of the RAW file, which many forum idiots elsewhere deride as not kosher, but which is in fact a great idea, for reasons that now should be obvious)."

The Craft of Photography

I should just warn you—TOP is likely to be quiescent for a stretch, as I work on setting up the darkroom. (I thought I should say, because the "are you okay?" emails have started up already. Whenever I get quiet, people who know me start to worry, which I guess indicates that when I am in fact okay I tend to be jabbering away.)

This is a bit embarrassing (couldn't I have at least cleaned up a little bit before I made this shot?), but this is the "before" picture of the area of the basement where the darkroom's going to be. The thing on the left is the old enlarger stand from my darkroom in my loft in Chicago. That darkroom was a small "powder room" or half bath. I removed all the bathroom fixtures. It was L-shaped, and the best place to put the enlarger stand was in the entryway. I had to squeeze past it to get in, but once I was in I had more room that way. 

Highly professional TOP graphic of Chicago darkroom

The area next to the enlarger stand was just slightly narrower than self. Having thought about it a little more, I think what I have marked as 6' in this diagram was actually 7', and what I have drawn as 4' was actually 5'. It seems to me the sink I had was nominally a 2' x 4' sink and was slightly longer than 4'. Whatever. You get the gist. I wouldn't have wanted to do 16x20s in that darkroom, but it was fine for 11x14s, although the developer tray had to go up on the shelf.

I had a Focomat IIc in there for a while. That made it crowded. The Focomat IIc took up most of the empty middle part. Very little room left for Yr. Hmbl. Phtgrphr. If you ever get a chance to see a Focomat IIc, you ought to. Not the greatest enlarger from a practical point of view, but just so awesomely overbuilt you can't help but admire it.

I have not done any actual work in the PFD* yet, but I have done a lot of thinking. Thinking is hard, so I have to go lie down every so often. Think a while, rest. Think, rest. As you perceive, it doesn't leave a lot of time for writing.

I've worked in some very primitive darkrooms in my time, and I think I could be up and printing by this afternoon if I really wanted to be. All you need for trays is a table. But I've decided to get a little fancy-pants this time around, so I am plotting some refinements for the PFD. So far these refinements are just in my mind, but they are taking up a lot of room in there. (It's crowded in there, too, mainly with things I am going to do and might not ever get around to actually doing.)

I've been thinking about the comments people made the other day about reverse snobbery. I think I might have a little of that. I actually kind of like crude darkrooms, because I like to be able to do really good work even in very un-fancy surroundings. I've heard that Edward Weston was like that—a few of his darkrooms were quite primitive, but his craftsmanship was superb.

In the "before" picture at the top, that's a Durst M601 on the old enlarger stand on the right, and a Durst Modular 70 BW and a Saunders/LPL 670 VCCE behind the punching bag. This enlarger is unquestionably the Rolls-Royce, but (well, like a Rolls-Royce) it's ridiculously expensive. I wish I'd kept the one I had—I got rid of it because it didn't fit in that darkroom in Chicago. If I were going to buy a new enlarger today I'm pretty sure it would be this one. Of course, people are not clamoring for new Enlargers these days. Records show that the last time any Earth-dwelling human actually bought a new enlarger was 3 months and 18 days ago, When one George Dunkelkammer of Bisbee, Arizona, bought an Omega because he'd always wanted one. But I thought I'd put in the links anyway.

More soon—just, as I say, slowly.

Mike

*Postulated Future Darkroom

Correction: The original version of this post said "Focotar II" instead of "Focomat IIc." Man, am I ever getting ditzy. If my memory were an employee, I'd fire it. Thanks to V. I. Voltz for the sharp elbow.

Leitz Focomat IIc. Photo by Magnus Manske.

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Featured Comment by amcananey: "That Focomat is absolutely comical. Straight out of Dr. Frankenstein's lab...."

Featured Comment by Jammy: "The punching bag will come in extremely handy when they stop making your favorite paper and film. :-) "