The Online Photographer

The Unboxing!

So, before we start, care to guess what this is? Take a sec. Bet you can't....

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Nikon Replaces the Fast 85mm

Taken with the new fast Nikon 85mm. Photo: Nikon

"Sample image time, boys—break out the pink wigs!!"

When you can see where the false eyelashes attach, is it sharp enough yet?

(Camera companies hate it when I make fun like this...I'm just never...reverent enough.)

Nikon has rolled out three new zooms and a new entry-level combination camera/camcorder, and—our topic here—it has replaced a justly famous and always-coveted lens, the legendary* 85mmƒ/1.4, with an update. Not just an update—it's a completely new-from-the-drawing-board redesign, and it's a super premium lens—ten elements. (You can make a good short tele with five elements; the granddaddy of the fast category, the legendary** Zeiss 85mm ƒ/1.4 Planar, had six.)

This is a focal length at which Nikon has traditionally excelled.

The new lens reportedly has gorgeous, soft bokeh
(this is a detail of a much larger picture).

The marketing brief was probably to update the ancillary functions—make it a "G" lens with no aperture ring, add full-time manual focus, silent focusing, a hard outer coating to prevent damage to the outermost element, and bring it into line with the styling of the rest of the new lenses in the line. The old version was plenty good optically. But Nikon didn't stop there. It went all out. An inspiringly aspirational lens.

Quit drooling on your keyboard!

The new lens weighs 595g, covers full frame, isn't shipping yet, and will list for $1,700. Specs are at the topmost link. The official moniker is "Nikon AF-S Nikkor 85mm ƒ/1.4G."

Mike

*"Legend" and "legendary" are Nikonspeak for "very good" when talking lenses, ever since Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook.

**Really.

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Featured Comment by JK: "Interesting how Nikon are finally using the word 'bokeh' in their English-language releases. Years ago they usually called it 'defocus,' which of course is the correct technical term but always sounded a bit strange in this kind of context. Then they started saying 'background blur,' which is good straightforward English but begged the question, what about foreground blur? And now apparently they feel the world is ready for the Japanese term. Stay tuned to see if Canon follow suit...."

Featured Comment by Matt Needham: "False eyelashes? I can see the edge of contact lenses in the subject's eye with all of my lenses, even the cheap ones from uncool brands. For all the ever-growing gear hype I still believe Ansel Adams nailed it when he said, '...Practically all lenses made within the last decade or two are excellent—often more precise than even the most exacting practical photographer requires.'"

How I Learned Not to Trust Camera Bodies

By Ctein

I should have learned fairly early in my photographic life that camera bodies were not the reliable, infallible devices I imagined them to be (and that far too many photographers still imagine them to be). Back when I was in college, I remember the early reviews of the Pentax 6x7 commenting that the relatively straight film path in that camera did a much better job of holding the film flat than the serpentine path in cameras that used film magazines, like Hasselblads and Rolleis.

In truth, that's the only time I can recall a mass circulation magazine suggesting that this might even be an issue. Clearly insiders were aware that some things might be rotten in Denmark, but the news rarely made it to us consumers. When I talked about "pernicious secrets" in my last column, I was thinking of incidents like that. The big lie by omission; reviews rarely talked about how badly camera bodies performed, so one simply didn't think about the fact that they performed badly. So, I read it, noted it, and then managed to forget it.

In the late 1970s I bought a Canonet GIII QL 17. That was a relatively inexpensive and compact rangefinder that came equipped with a remarkably good ƒ/1.7 lens. It was a little soft wide open (would have rated a "very good" by the lens tests of the time), but once you got it down to ƒ/4.5 or ƒ/5.6, it was brilliant. I mean that both figuratively and visually. I was very happy with it.

Several years later I read an article that talked about the desirability of having one's rangefinder cameras periodically checked for focus accuracy. It was a notion that hadn't occurred to me before. I ran some tests on my toy and, big surprise, the focus wasn't anywhere close to being accurate. Being a brave soul I took off the top of the camera, dug into the rangefinder mechanism, and found the two set screws that adjusted the focus. Through a process of considerable trial and error, I managed to get the camera into some semblance of decent focus. I even got reassembled correctly. Usually that doesn't happen; I'm better at deconstruction.

(Please do not post comments nor send me e-mails requesting any sort of assistance on disassembling or adjusting your camera. If you can't figure out how to do it yourself, I'm not going to help you break it.)

Miraculously, that ƒ/1.7 lens became achingly sharp even wide open.

When I bought a Pentax ME Super with 50 mm ƒ/1.7 lens in 1983, the first thing I did was run some lens tests. Because, of course, the lens is what really counts. Right? I still hadn't entirely internalized the lessons from the Canonet. Stopped down, that lens would put in excess of 100 line pairs per millimeter on film without breaking a sweat (I learned later that I had lucked into buying one of the better 50mm lenses that's ever been made). Wide open, though, I was seeing a so-so-by-my-standards 60 line pairs per millimeter (the magazine test standards of the time would have given this lens a near-excellent rating).

Pentax ME Super with 50mm ƒ/1.7 lens. Photo from here.

Now I remembered that important lesson. I ran a focus test on my Pentax, and sure enough it was decent, within manufacturing tolerances, but it was not spot on. I tweaked it until it was, and I reran my lens tests. Wide open, that lens would put over 100 line pair per millimeter on film. At ƒ/4.8 I could hit 150 line pairs per millimeter.

After that, I never bought a camera nor tested one for review where I didn't give the body a very thorough going over. Rarely, if ever, did I find one that was in the best possible adjustment. That held true for a quarter-century. I'd be most surprised if it's changed today.

Of course, some things aren't fixable. Aerial tests on medium format lenses show that the best of them can peak at over 200 line pair per millimeter. I rarely, if ever saw more than 70 line pair per millimeter in 6x6 or 6x7 format; the cameras simply didn't control the film plane well enough. My Fujica GA 645 could hit 100 line pair per millimeter...were it not for the fact that the autofocus mechanism wasn't anywhere near that accurate.

Which takes me to my last point: I've just been talking about one aspect of camera performance: accuracy of manual focus. I haven't told you about the myriad ways that autofocus does go wrong, or the rather substantial problems with getting accurate and repeatable exposure out of a camera body, or the ways in which the camera body and the lens don't interface quite like they're supposed to (a shared problem). Oh, I could write so many more columns. I will spare you, if you promise to take the underlying revelation to heart sans elaborate exposition.

Ctein

P.S. I'm off to Montréal for 10 days, so if responses to comments are few and far between, that'll be the reason why.

Ctein's weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

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

The Henri Cartier-Bresson Show

I unshackled my leg from the desk yesterday and escaped to Chicago, where I saw the Henri Cartier-Bresson show with Ken Tanaka.

Ken, who started out as a fan and a booster of TOP, has become a friend. We first met at the first show we saw together, the great Eggleston retrospective earlier this year. Ken lives a hop skip and a jump from the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), and he's involved with the institution in some sort of way I'm unable to accurately report, so he knows the curators and gets to attend a lot of the insider events and so forth—and I kid him that the AIC is actually his private collection, as by his own admission he spends so much time in the building. He was seeing the Cartier-Bresson exhibit for the ninth time when he saw it with me. Seeing photographs is always good, and seeing lots of photographs is even better, and a visit to the Art Institute is always a pleasure. But to see a show in the erudite, engaging, and yet completely unpretentious company of Ken Tanaka greatly amplifies the experience. A fun day, well worth the drive and the Chicago traffic.

Brass tacks
I'm afraid I have to give the show itself a decidedly mixed review. Although the public response has been extraordinary, it's really an exhibit "by scholars for scholars," rather than a show for popular delectation. From an aesthetic standpoint, the selection is deep but in some ways puzzling: despite being overlong by twice, a lot of the great pictures are missing, and a large number of second-rate ones are present. There are plentiful "extra value" components, most notably a completely magnificent map of the world showing Cartier-Bresson's lifetime travels in glorious detail, and a single Magnum print presented next to a good reproduction of its own backside, showing all of the publication marks, stamps, and notes that it accumulated over its lifetime as a press photo. Fascinating.

The biggest disappointment by far is that many of the prints are just horrible. It is "vintagism" taken to an absurd extreme when truly great—I mean great—masterpieces are presented only in early repro prints that were originally fully intended to be ephemeral, two paper grades too soft and fogged and dimmed by time. It's one thing when the photographer is an independent artist and you're showing his or her original thoughts about a new work; it's quite another to pretend that the initial work-product of a working photographer has any of the same import or presence, or adequately reflects his intent. Really, the fastidiousness of scholarship has overwhelmed the viewer's interests—and good sense—in many cases here. I wouldn't say that bad prints predominate—there are a lot of adequate ones and some good ones too*—but if you get the catalog, I think you'll find that the catalog reproductions are far preferable to many of the original prints on view! A strange reversal of the ordinary case.

From memory, this is my impression of what the print
of this picture looked like in the show.

So: recommended, but with real reservations. To reiterate: it's good to see photographs, and great to see H.C.-B. photographs. Lots of good and interesting things here; rewards on every wall. I'm certainly not sorry I went, and I doubt anyone else would be. But it's a deeply flawed show. It makes a weak case for H.C.-B. as a dominant artist in our field, although it's probably more interesting for those who already know he is. And it isn't what today's public deserves as a celebration of his greatness. Show me half as many pictures in their best printed form, even if it's not their earliest printed form. I'd take that any day.

Although I'd still want to see that marvelous map!

Mike

*I don't know this for sure, but, although there is a wide range of prints in the show that probably originated from many different sources, I'd bet there are very few Voja Mitrovic prints in this particular show: that is, they're not the prints M. Cartier-Bresson would have had made when a collector would wish to buy one from him or from one of his galleries.

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Indeed, as Mike and I discussed at the exhibit, many of the prints are unimpressive, particularly prints from the earliest pre-war periods. I suspect that few, if any, of these were originally intended for exhibition. Most of the later prints (1954+) are more exhibition-quality.

"But I think it’s easy for (us) photo enthusiasts to inadvertently mis-read the curatorial objectives of this show. We see Henri Cartier-Bresson as a icon of photographic artistic talent. But that’s not what Peter Galassi, the show’s curator, is principally attempting to illustrate. Rather, the principal conceptual theme of the show is to present a wide-angled view of the enormous body of work by an extraordinarily talented and energetic man with a camera. The gigantic travel history maps on the walls at the exhibit’s entrance serve to drive the point that visitors will see photographs of history at key points during 'The Modern Century' as captured by Cartier-Bresson’s camera. Art, in this case, is a delightful but secondary feature. Indeed, Cartier-Bresson himself repeatedly denied that his camera work was art. He considered himself to be, first and foremost, a journalist with a camera. That’s why he co-founded Magnum as a news photo cooperative agency.

"So undoubtedly many photography enthusiasts will be disappointed with the flatness of many of this exhibition’s prints. It’s also true that several well-known images have been omitted from the show. (Although with 300 pieces they’re hard to miss.) And you may be correct that scholarship has sent art to the back-seat. But that was the intention. 'Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century' is designed principally to illustrate the remarkable events and inflection periods of 'The Modern Century' that this astonishing photographer witnessed and captured during his long career.

"I will say, though, that having seen the show so many times (with a few more viewings still to come) I believe that the pictures on the walls are, in this case, mainly evidential by-products. The wonderful catalog is the real gem of Peter Galassi’s curatorial work. I always encourage folks to see the show. But this is one example where, failing such an opportunity, the catalog text will more than fairly compensate you for your absence."

Featured Comment by timd: "I had a similar experience a while back at the Robert Capa exhibition at the Barbican in London—small dingy prints.

"I came away feeling that the show was neither here nor there; it was neither a show of images, because the prints were small and dull, nor an one of archival/historical materials, because there wasn't enough of that material on display and the materials that were shown weren't contextualized.

"It was very interesting to see the heroic photojournalist myth-making: old magazines featuring the work of the 'world's greatest photo journalist'; and to see how much the images were changed/manipulated when they appeared in print—e.g., elements from two photos merged into one image.

"It would have been interesting, given all of the discussion over the veracity of one of his photos, to have seen some of the exchanges between Capa and the publishers over the alterations they made to his photos—if there was any—but the magazines were just displayed without comment. (The images looked better in these old magazines from the '30s than on the wall.)"

Mike replies: I actually expend a lot of effort trying to figure out the best way to experience any given photographer—often it would be an "ideal" show, although those are rare and I get to attend very few shows in any event. Often it's an effort to find those books that have the best selection of images and the most appropriate and pleasing reproduction. Those are hard to come by too, but not as hard. Increasingly we are seeing better and better web presentations, and I'm awaiting the day when we start seeing full exhibits on the web presented purposefully. I'm always happy when I come across any "good enough" way to see a good representation of a photographer I'm interested in.

Featured Comment by John Camp: "I've known a lot of photojournalists, and I don't think any of them would want an exhibit of their photos, shown in a museum, to be selected from their first publication prints. For one thing, printers working for a newspaper or magazine or wire service tried to optimize the print for whatever printing technology was involved—and that often meant over-contrasty prints because of the poor materials (newsprint) on which the photo would ultimately be printed. And because the print itself would only be used for a few hours before winding up on a printing plate (and often ruined in that process), they frequently were barely fixed at all—just a quick shot of fixer and if it all went gray the next day, so what? You just make another. Those same photographers, when making prints for photojournalism contests (the state AP contests, etc.) would frequently spend hours making 'show' prints. Those prints, not their publication prints, represented the best they could do, and their best vision of the work....

"I think the emphasis on vintage prints is weird, and is basically just a way to monetize the product of a medium in which the potential identical copies of the product are virtually infinite. Critics and authorities argue that vintage prints best reflect the artist's original intent; but that's like arguing that Mahler would attempt to always conduct his symphonies with exactly the same inflection because otherwise, they would be inauthentic. That's absurd—any composer would try to make his compositions 'better' as the years pass, as Ansel Adams tried to make his prints better as technology improved.

"In other words, showing less than the best quality prints of HCB's work I'm sure wouldn't reflect his intent or his wishes—it simply reflects the quality of mechanical reproduction available at his time, and the need to make (deliberately defective) prints that would best utilize that machinery."

A Brief Comment on Printing

Some of the comments to Peter's Voja Mitrovic posts have indicated that there is some confusion out there about what makes a good print or a good printer. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I'd love to write much more about it, but what I'd like to point out here is that, while there might figuratively be said to be something "magic" about a really good print, there's nothing necessarily magic about getting there.

A home darkroom worker with decent skills and adequate equipment can make a really good print, one that is every bit as good—although maybe not exactly in the same way—as one made by a master printer.

How can I say such a thing? Because there are several variables that you can't see in the print itself. Mainly: time.

Let me 'splain.

For the most part, artists and devoted hobbyists can be better printers than garden-variety professional custom printers for three reasons. First, they have the client with them—themselves. They know what they want, and they can keep going until they get it. Second, they're only printing their own work. Long practice tends—partially subconsciously—to "groove" our own methods with our intentions and tastes, such that we become very good printers of our own work. We tend to be consistent to ourselves.

Sally Mann, 1988 © 2010 Michael C. Johnston. One of my most difficult
negatives to print—I hope you can't tell.

But—third—the biggest luxury that an amateur has over a professional is time. As in, the amount of it he or she is free to lavish on the project.

A pro printer in a lab—there were thousands and thousands of them in the old days, not so many left now—is "on the clock." The lab is getting a certain fee for the print and paying the printer a certain hourly wage, plus overhead. The pro just had to crank the prints out. The faster he could work, the more money everyone made. The idea of a pro taking a whole hour to make a single print from a single negative would have been laughable to most custom labs in the wet-print days. And if that worker didn't improve, it would probably be a job-ender. A pro might take several hours on one print, but only when he absolutely needed to. When he could work fast, he did. And he had to be able to.

But what's an hour to an amateur? Nothing. An amateur, working nights or weekends, printing his own negs, is completely off the clock. How much time it takes hardly enters into the equation. He or she could take two hours on a print—or two days. What does it matter? You're just having fun. It's a hobby, a recreation, an avocation.

Undeniably, a big part of being a great printer, pro or amateur, is judgment and sensitivity—I don't argue that. A few pros have those virtues in spades, and quite a few amateurs don't. But other aspects of the pro's skill set are not visible in the final prints: A pro has to be able to get results from all kinds of negatives. A pro has to know not only how to follow the client's instructions, but to get inside her head and get a sense of her tastes. But most of all, a pro has to be fast.

I remember reading an account of how Charlie Pratt printed. I'm going from memory, but I think he did it in three stages. First, a good guide print, to see if he liked the picture. If he did, he'd get into the darkroom and spend half a day making a really good print. Then he'd let it dry, pin it to the wall, and live with it for a few days or a week—study it, contemplate it, weigh his options. Then he'd go back into the darkroom and really get to work. 

No custom printer working for money ever had that kind of luxury.

And this is why many fine-art prints are better than most "custom-made" lab prints.

The marvel of Voja Mitrovic—and men and women like him—is that he can make prints "in the style" of many different photographers, from negatives that often vary widely. He can make a good guide print in one exposure from merely holding the neg up to the safelight and eyeballing it. (I could do that too, when I had my chops up. But only from my own negatives.) You can make a guide print that will look just as good as his guide print. It just might take you half an hour and three sheets of paper to get there, is all.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Stephen Best: "The Charles Pratt story comes from Ralph Steiner's preface to Charles Pratt: Photographs, one of my favourite photography monographs. Since the book is (justifiably) hard to obtain, and I have a real soft spot for Pratt's work, and it's a great quote, here's the relevant passage in full:

He [Pratt] came one evening fifteen years ago to a photographic discussion group which I sort of ran. We were looking at a couple of dozen rather ratty photographs, which had been broght [sic] in by a pleasant week-end photographer, who boasted: 'I knocked off these prints in just one evening.'

I was horrified by the prints, by the idea of two dozen in an evening, but mostly by the sacrilegious 'knocked off.' I was afraid of what might slip off my sometimes acid tongue, so I said: 'Charlie, why don't you tell us how you go about making a print.'

Rather shyly he told the group that he would take half to a full day to make from four to six rather good proof enlargements from one or at the most two negatives. He told the group that he would mount them all, and stand them up on a railing in his workroom, and would look at them for a month or so. Then he exploded into his normal, earth-shaking laugh, and said: 'I don't mean that I stand in front of them for a month, I leave them up for a month, stop to look at them some time each day to see how I feel. One day an idea will hit me how I want to print them, and I'll really go to work. Then I'll spend time on them.' That was Charlie.

—Ralph Steiner

Mike replies: I guess I got the story "sorta kinda" right. It is a wonderful passage. Thanks Stephen.

I saw the show of the prints from that book—it was in a wonderful little corner gallery of the Corcoran, two rooms that had wonderful light. Like all the exhibits at the Corcoran that I liked (the school, which I attended, was in the basement), I went to look at it numerous times and ended up spending many hours with the work. Later the administration appropriated those two beautiful rooms for offices, which I thought was a shame. I still remember where many of the pictures were hung in those galleries.

Featured Comment by David Simonton: "The Pratt book, Charles Pratt: Photographs was published in 1982 and was edited by John Gossage. Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Jane Livingston, and Ralph Steiner all contributed Introductions.

"About printing, Charles Pratt (1926–1976) wrote:

I spend a good deal of time printing, because to me a photograph is only a photograph when it's a photograph—not when it's an unrealized potential in a badly printed negative, nor when it's a reproduction. Printing is an essential part of the process of transforming the experience into a photographic image. This involves fiddling with tonality, not for the sake of richness as it applies to pieces of silver on paper, but as it applies to the memory of the surface that was in front of me, and as it applies to the unity of the image within the rectangle. The whole chain of effort starts with the experience of actuality at the moment of exposure, and this experience must be held all along the way if it is to be held at the end—as for me it must be.

"Pratt's 'Statement About Photography,' which appears at the end of the book (and from which the above quotation is drawn), is an eloquent, probing, and clear-as-crystal description of the photographic process as it is practiced, and experienced, by a master photographer."

'Pass It Along'

Can you help?

I write very few press releases for the goings-on at TOP; my original goal was to do three a year, and I have never hit that mark. Many companies (or ventures of any kind—TOP is not incorporated) either send too few press releases (none) or too many (when I was at the magazine, there was one company of which I used to say, "If someone at xxx farts, they'll send out a press release about it"). The time for press releases is not just for routine PR, but when something extraordinary happens that really warrants it.

But occasionally we do something that really is unique and original, that hasn't really been covered in the literature or elsewhere. 

I think Peter's article about Voja are one of those times, so I've prepared a press release about it. I'll be working for most of the rest of today to send it out to whoever I can think of. 

Download Voya-Mitrovic-Press-Release

Could you help? Could you please pass the PDF along to at least one other person or organization? There's no condition on who it might be: an individual, an organization, your local newspaper, other photo websites, or other forums or discussion sites you visit. Anybody you can think of who might be interested or in a position to spread the word.

Thanks very much!

—Mike, TOP's semi-competent  pro tem advertising & publicity corps

Voja Mitrovic, Printer to the Greats (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

Voja Mitrovic, Montparnasse, Paris, 1982

By Peter Turnley

I recently sat down and interviewed Voja Mitrovic for several hours about his experiences as a printer. Several important concepts emerged from this interview. He indicated to me that the three most important things involved in being a great printer are patience, developing a good dialogue and communication with the photographer he is printing for, and knowing how to read a negative. It is most important to know the photographer, to know what he or she wants, and to be able to read the image—like photographers, some people see things, and others don't! Great printing involves knowing how to choose the right paper, having technical skills, and a strong artistic and aesthetic sense. He feels that it has helped him very much to have been himself a photographer, in order to understand the goal of a photograph.

Voja gives credit to Josef Koudelka for having helped him become as great a printer as he is. This is because of how demanding and exigent Koudelka has been in what he wants from a print. Koudelka’s prints are very different than Henri Cartier-Bresson's. Cartier-Bresson’s prints are very low contrast with many details in the highlights and shadows—H.C.-B. liked the tonal values of his prints to be like the "color of the Loire River." Gray, but a very detailed gray. Also, Cartier-Bresson’s negatives were, overall, extremely well developed by Picto over the years and in general very consistent. Voya says an exception to this consistency was his early work in Mexico and India, which are among the most difficult of his negatives to print. Koudelka, on the other hand, has demanded prints with relatively high contrast, and yet with detail in both the extreme highlights and in the shadows. On top of this, the development of his negatives in the early years was often very irregular, and the film he used while he was living in Czechoslovakia, before going into exile in 1968, was often cinema stock and very high in contrast. The highlights often become very blocked up. In many of Koudelka’s negatives the tonal range between highlights and shadows are extreme, requiring tremendous "maquillage," or burning and dodging, to achieve contrast and detail to his liking.

Voya says that Koudelka’s prints have been 10 to 100 times more difficult to make than H.C.-B.'s. He recalls that at one point, after Koudelka first began to bring his work to Picto, Pierre Gassmann (that’s me with Pierre in 1995, at right) specifically designated Voja to print his photographs, knowing that he would have the physical and mental courage to meet the rigorous and precise standards of Koudelka’s printing demands. He feels that he and Koudelka understand each other well because of their common origins from Central Europe. He is very proud of their friendship. He indicates though that they have an understanding between them that their friendship and his printing are two very separate moments in time—the first always warm, but, while printing, the atmosphere is always one of clear minded, very demanding rigor. Voja recalls how Koudelka’s respect and confidence in his work was once solidified when he showed Josef a print and Koudelka was very satisfied, but Voja said that he was going to start over, because he knew he could take the process further and pull more out of the negative. This is a domain where Voja prints are exceptional—few people know how to pull as much out of a negative as Voja, and few would have also the physical, mental, and emotional courage and determination to do it.

Voja Mitrovic and Josef Koudelka at Magnum, Paris, when John Morris was awarded the French Legion of Honor, 2009. Photo by Peter Turnley.

Voja is very proud of the relationships and friendships that he has developed with the photographers he has worked with. These relationships have also offered one of life’s most important gifts—the opportunity to travel. He had been invited by photographers, as thanks for his work, to New York, Mexico, Rome, Barcelona, Crete, China, Cuba, and Barcelona.

He is very proud to be among the first printers to be credited by name for his role in printing the photographs in books of photography and exhibitions. This had almost never happened before the early 1990s when photographers began to credit Voja in their books and exhibitions for his printing. The list of books and books for which he has been credited is astonishing. It includes almost all of the books and exhibitions of H.C.-B. since 1966, including Vive La France, Henri Cartier-Bresson in India, America in Passing, Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer, Mexican Notebooks, and Paris a Vue D’Oeil. He has printed the exhibitions and books of Josef Koudelka for Exiles, Triangle Noir, Koudelka, and Chaos. He has printed both the books and exhibitions of many others’ work, including all of my books and the exhibition and signed collector prints of my photographs.

The book I did with my brother David of our early work, one of many for which Voja made the master prints. Voja has said that my cover picture here is his favorite picture of mine.

Anyone who has taken my Paris Street Photography workshop has been treated to an amazing presentation by Voja. My guess is those lucky few to have witnessed one of his talks will never forget seeing the demonstration Voja makes of showing a sheet of photographic paper of a H.C.-B., Koudelka, Burri, or Turnley "straight" print, exposed only once with no burning and dodging, held up next to a final print showing all of Voja's artisanry. It is a phenomenal sight to see—and a powerful indication of the degree to which a great printer like Voja has contributed immensely to the expression of the vision of the photographer. I have witnessed Voja many times spend at least one hour of physical burning and dodging of a print. I've also seen him be able to repeat perfectly, like a machine, the exact same gestures and make a series of ten identical prints from the same difficult negative.

Peter Turnley, Josef Koudelka, and Voja Mitrovic at Picto, Paris, 1996

While Voja has indicated that Koudelka’s prints have been the most difficult for him to make, there are several famous images of H.C.-B. which require tremendous burning and dodging—such as the image of the nuns praying in India. Koudelka’s image of the man and the horse and one of a street scene of a man setting off a fireworks rocket are among those of Koudelka's that Voja has commented are among the most difficult to print.

It is hard to imagine the physical and mental stamina and courage required to be a great printer. You are in the dark with very low light for at least eight hours a day, exposed to the odors and effects of rather strong chemicals. I recall the feeling of walking out of Picto after a long days work, and being suddenly exposed to the late rays of an afternoon summer day, literally feeling off-balance from the physical impact of such a sudden change in environment. I have rarely met anyone who appreciates his annual summer vacation like Voja. He loves to lie on the beach and soak up the sun—which seems to rejuvenate his body after spending so much of the year inside without much light.

Voja is a tall and athletic man always in great shape. I'm sure this has been extremely helpful in his work, which is not only mentally but also physically extremely demanding. You should try to stand under an enlarger with your hands lifted in the air burning and dodging with methodic consistency for one hour for only one print—and then repeat that some times ten times in a day. Each weekend, since coming to Paris in 1964, Voja played on a soccer team on Sunday mornings. He tells me that this enabled him to unwind from a week of stress and revitalize himself for another week of work ahead. He has also always been a wonderful family man, with a wife and two children, and he has a strong appreciation for good food. While I was at Picto, it was always impressive to see the regularity in which Voja would arrive each morning exactly on time, impeccably dressed, and then change in to his work clothes and begin printing. Each day at exactly noon he changed back into his street clothes, and, looking like a handsome movie star, struck out into the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris for his daily ritual of a very good lunch. At the end of the day, at 5 p.m. sharp, he stopped work, and would go to meet his friends at the Café Cosmos for a bit of conversation before heading home for dinner.

Finally, anyone who has ever met Voja, has been certainly struck by several rare characteristics. He is one of the most elegant, truly dignified people one will ever meet. He exudes a rare unpretentious dignity of someone that has led a hard working, decent life, and has cared for his family and friends, and put his heart completely into doing his work as well as he can. His spirit is infinitely fair and generous—when asked who is his favorite photographer, he will always refuse to answer, preferring to indicate the favorite image of each photographer for whom he has printed. He cites "La Rue Mouffetard" and "Matisse with pigeons" as his favorite H.C.-B. images. The man with horse is his favorite image of Koudelka, the image of Che Guevara and the cigar, his favorite of Rene Burri's, and my cover image from McClellan Street seen above is his favorite image of mine. While he has printed for so many great photographers, there are a few he wishes he could have printed for—Robert Frank, Alvarez-Bravo, and Irving Penn. He chuckled as he told me he had recently visited a Robert Frank exhibition in Paris and thought it could have been printed better.

It is likely that with the change of technology towards an all-digital world, that the world will never again know many traditional black-and-white printers like Voja. He worries that all of the technological know-how in the world will not replace what it first means to know how to make a photograph, and then to know how to read a negative and interpret it. There have been already few traditional printers that could do it as well as he could. He recounts how Josef Koudelka has spent in recent years more than six hours with a digital printing technician trying to achieve a match with the subtle artistic expression of tones and detail in one of his prints. He also worries about how long good traditional silver printing paper will continue to be made and laments how expensive it has become.

Voja Mitrovic, Paris, 1993. Photo by Peter Turnley.

I have met with Voja for coffee almost every Sunday morning I’ve been in Paris for the past twenty years. Each time I leave our encounters, my heart is uplifted—I am reminded of what seems important to me—and I feel proud that I have chosen a way of life and a medium of storytelling that has enabled me to know and work with a person with his elegance, dignity, strength, and decency. And, I am sure that I would be only one among a list of photographers who would say that he has been one of the best and kindest friends one could ever ask for.

The world of photography has been lucky to have Voja, and all of the other great printers that have meant so much to the powerful expression of moments photographers have chosen to share with themselves and others for now, and for posterity. He has spent his life in the dark, but he has helped illuminate the life and expression of so many. Thank you Voja.

Peter Turnley
Paris, August 2010

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Featured Comment by Stan B.: "'...but few would have also the physical, mental, and emotional courage and determination to do it.' Yeah, I definitely came up short on that end, despite all the blood, sweat and tears I still managed to shed in the dark. But to be blessed as a so called 'natural,' I guess that's where the 'joy' of the darkroom really came in. For many of us it remained a war...."

Mike responds: Stan, I always used to say, "sometimes you win, sometimes the darkroom wins." Voya's comments about patience and equilibrium and just treating it as a job to be done—stoicism, he's describing—really resonated with me.

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson:"Having done a little bit of printing for a couple of decades, the phrase that really rang out, Peter, was citing how Voja could repeat the same 'gesture' consistently.

"Those who have never printed under an enlarger may not know what this means. But once you see someone dodging and burning a print, once you see the ballet-like gestures of the hands in the light of the enlarger, precisely casting shafts of light onto the paper through hands formed into narrow apertures, deftly changing the shape of those openings through the course of the burning, gently moving the light to the edge of the paper to add edge burn (and thus create a glowing center), burning with one hand while dodging with the other, all the while keeping a running count of each adjustment so that it can be repeated (and adjusted), then you understand why one printer can be so much better than another, just as one pole vaulter can make it over the bar, and another can't. It's that physically demanding.

"And that doesn't begin to address the way an excellent printer looks at the negative and begins to form a plan of attack, of correctly identifying the biggest problems in the negative and addressing that first, and then inventing solutions to the subsequent problems thus incurred. Koudelka's negatives would be a particular problem because he wants (needs) contrast in the shadows which demands higher contrast paper, just what you don't want to use when you have a negative with blocked up highlights. But that problem can be solved with sufficient variable burning of the highlights. After all, any high contrast paper can theoretically be made perfectly 'flat' with sufficient burning and dodging, a fact that Voja seems to know very well. (And if I'm not mistaken that's exactly what he has to do on that picture of the nuns praying in India.)

"All of this requires 'gesture,' as you point out Peter, and not everyone has that level of subtle grace in their movements. Thanks for bringing this story to light and thanks for reminding me of beauty of craft seen only in the light of an enlarger, where hands shape light as gracefully as a nuanced ballet."

[Jim's most recent National Geographic photo essay, on the Hebrides islands (website—>Cultures—>Hebrides), was published in the magazine last January. —Ed.]

Featured Comment by V.I. Voltz: "Someone asked whether Voja printed the originals for Salgado's book Africa [now out of print and rising in price—don't say I didn't warn you! —Ed.]. At least some of those were printed by Nathalie Loparelli. the negatives were in her darkroom when she did some work for me years ago.

"Which is also the amazing thing about Voja. The first time I was in Paris in 1995 I was 20 and thought I was good. So I walked to Picto, explained that I didn't speak French, but that I wanted some printing done and that I would like to speak to the printer, who, it turns out, was Voja. I had no idea who he was. He took me completely seriously, even though I am sure he could tell I was a total hack, and later commented that he liked one of my photos. Voja, of course, did an _i_n_c_r_e_d_i_b_l_e_ job of printing them. They sparkle and practically jump out of the paper at you. With those prints I managed to talk my way into a job that I had on and off through the next four years.

"In 1995 if you'd told me the next print that Voja would make after mine would be a Cartier-Bresson or a Koudelka, I'd have thought I was good. Knowing what I do now, I'm just astounded at Voja's understanding, accommodating approach and sheer professionalism."

Featured Comment by Jay Colton: "Thanks Peter. I have seen the craftsmanship in Voja's work. Being a fair printer myself, I greatly appreciate his craftsmanship and share in his lamentations. Silver printing is now made more difficult as the papers are disappearing. I print on Oriental Seagull but I miss the graded paper; the G is O.K. but I for one am not a fan of multigrades. In addition the chemistry is harder and more expensive. Thank God for Photographers Formulary.

"On many occasions, I have explained in detail how I print only to see someone follow the letter and not the spirit of instruction. I understand it takes a kindred spirit to really craft a print. A printer must look into the negative and see your soul. As a photographer your negatives capture the moment but a great print recreates the moment in its own special poetry. If I don't print the image myself I have found it takes years (or a kindred spirit who sees through my negatives into my soul) to develop a relationship with a printer who knows what you want out of the negative and into your print. Silver prints  are like little jewels that contain their own special reality. When we shoot in B&W it is not a 'true' depiction of the world; it is an allegorical fantasy in shades of gray where form elocutes a special magic.

"The mastery of printing like any craft requires dedication. It s only after a great deal of time (Malcolm Gladwell quantifies it as 10,000 hours) that a true mastery is possible; where the intuition is innate and the gesture (as you put it so eloquently) poetic. Alas I have not put in the necessary time but I do so admire those whose craft has become natural like breathing. Like any artist they make it seem effortless (and it is, for them) and free.

"I most enjoyed your relating his ethic that it is just work, no more or less. That honesty is the mark of a master craftsman the humble beauty of work unencumbered by artifice. Thank you for relating the little-known story of the invisible hands that great photographers trusted their precious images to. It is truly sad to see the last craftsman (both shooters of film and the master printers) slowly fade into the dustbins of history  The world is poorer and a little darker without them. I only regret that I did not have the honor of having him print my own images."

A Bad Day

The Herman Leonard exhibit last fall at Lincoln Center. Photo by Brian Smith.

Saturday was a bad day for jazz fans, and photographers. We lost Abbey Lincoln—and Herman Leonard.

Here's Mr. Leonard's obituary, from the L.A. Times. Here's Ms. Lincoln's, from New York, where she lived on the Upper West Side. He was 87, she was 80.

At the Brian Smith link, above, take a look at the examples of the Herman Leonard prints destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Brian comments, "out of tragedy, sometimes comes beauty." 

At Herman's website, they quote what Tony Bennett said when he was told Frank Sinatra had died: "I don't have to believe that."

Cover photograph from Abbey Sings Abbey, from 2007 (Photo by Jean-Marc Lubrano).

As for Abbey Lincoln, do me a favor. Go to iTunes or eMusic and look up a 1957 album of hers called "That's Him." (Forgive me, I prefer the Riverside titles from the '50s, jazz from the second half of the '50s being where I live, musically speaking.) Download the song "Tender as a Rose." Don't play it right away. Late tonight, when everything's quiet and dark and no one's bothering you, cue it up and have a listen.

A fond farewell.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Ed hawco: "There's a nice gallery of some of Leonard's work at the Edelman Gallery's website. (With big thumbnails—easy to navigate.)"

Featured Comment by Ron W: "On the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise in 2005 I discovered that Mr. Leonard was one of the passengers, and we had some wonderful conversations about music and photography. Thinking about what he said and what others have said, he was very encouraging of other photographers.  Several of his photos are in a slideshow on the Washington Post website [behind a free password —Ed.] and he was also recently honored by the Montreal Jazz Festival.  I was pleased to purchase one of his books from him, and of course there will finally be an American published book of his photographs coming out this fall.

"There are obituaries for both Ms. Lincoln and him on the allaboutjazz.com website.

"Let us celebrate two well-lived lives that have passed on."

Voja Mitrovic, Printer to the Greats (Part I)

The Untold Story of One of the Greatest Printers in Photography

Voja Mitrovic at the Coupole, Montparnasse, Paris, 1993. Photo by Peter Turnley.

By Peter Turnley

This is the untold story of one of the greatest printers of black-and-white photographs in the history of photography—Voja Mitrovic. It is time that this man, who has literally been in the dark since arriving in Paris from Yugoslavia in 1964, be acknowledged for his important part in the history of photography and his collaborations with many of the great photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Voja's story is also the story of the world-renowned photographic laboratory Picto, in Paris, created by Pierre Gassmann in 1950.

You've seen Voja's work without knowing it. He was a longtime printer for Henri Cartier-Bresson, from 1967–1997, and  has made prints for the past thirty years for the great Czech photographer Josef Koudelka. While others also printed H.C.-B.’s photographs, what is so important about the period Voja printed much of his work is that it corresponds to the time when collecting signed photographs first began to take off and change the public’s view of photography collecting and its connection to the art world. Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the key photographers whose work was bought and collected during that period. It was during the time when Helen Wright was representing H.C.-B.’s prints in the United States where most of his prints were collected. A large number of the signed prints of H.C.-B. on any wall in the world printed from 1967–1997 were made by Voja—this fact is little known. He also printed at various times for many of the world’s other master photographers: Sebastio Salgado, Werner Bischof, René Burri, Marc Riboud, Robert Doisneau, Edouard Boubat, Man Ray, Atget, Helmut Newton, Raymond Depardon, Bruno Barbey, Jean Gaumy, Frederic Brenner, Max Vadukul, and Peter Lindbergh to name a few. I have had the great fortune that Voja has been my printer for the past twenty years. He printed the exhibition and reproduction prints for my books Parisians, McClellan Street, and In Times of War and Peace, and he has made all of my signed prints for collection.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, left, and Josef Koudelka, right, begging Voja Mitrovic not to retire at his retirement party, Picto, Paris, Dec. 22, 1996. Photo by Paolo Nozolino.

I first met Voja (by the way, the "j" in Voja is pronounced like a "y") in June of 1979. It was during my first sojourn of eight months in Paris in 1975 that I heard of the great photographic lab where Cartier-Bresson’s prints were made—Picto. John Morris, then the photo editor of the New York Times and an early and long-time mentor of mine, and the great Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka, who I had met one fall day in the Luxembourg Gardens after he photographed me kissing my then-girlfriend on a park bench, had spoken to me of this great laboratory, a center world-famous for amazing black-and-white printing.

My first visit to Picto was in late winter of 1976, and I will never forget the sight of men and women in their white coats looking over and discussing the tonal values of some Cartier-Bresson prints lying on a table. I had never studied photography—I had always thought from the outset that one’s vision was more a function of knowledge or experience with almost any other aspect or domain of life than photography and cameras, thus I was more interested in studying subjects like languages, history, political science, economics, and art. But from that first sight of H.C.-B.’s prints at Picto, while knowing that my life purpose was to be a photographer, I had a singular determination to come and work at this laboratory and to gain the practical experience of learning to be a great printer.

Picto was the creation of Pierre Gassmann (see my photo at right, taken in Montparnasse, Paris, in 1996), who had left Nazi Germany in 1933 to come to Paris. While working as a young immigrant photographer in Paris before the war and spending time around Montparnasse, Pierre Gassmann had met and become friends with the eventual founders of Magnum, Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and also with photographers such as Brassai and Gisele Freund. After the war, in 1947, Gassmann put his own photography aside and began to make prints for the Magnum photographers, and then created Picto as a commercial enterprise in 1950. There is likely no one who had more knowledge of and contact with the important members of the world photographic community of the twentieth century than Pierre Gassmann. He was a very important mentor to countless photographers, including me. The famous photography laboratory that he created would intersect with the destiny of multitudes of photographers—and have a profound impact on the destiny of the young Yougoslav, Voja Mitrovic, who arrived in Paris in 1964.

Both Voja and Picto would have a tremendous impact on my own destiny. In June of 1979, after arriving back in Paris, I went to see Pierre Gassmann at Picto and asked for a job as a printer. Pierre, with his tough-love gruff voice, asked me what I knew how to do—and I exaggerated and told him that I was a great printer and knew how to do everything with black-and-white prints. He said to me, "We will see. You will have a three day tryout, and if you aren't as good as you say, you won't get the job." On my first day of my try out, I was given 100 negatives and told to make 8x10-inch prints of each by the end of the day. At 4 p.m., a tall, handsome man with a foreign accent, one of the printers in the lab—Voja—came to my enlarger and asked how it was going. I told him that I had only printed 20 negatives. He said to me, "You will never get this job—give me the negatives." I watched him take the hundred negatives to his enlarger, and in one hour, he printed the remaining 80 negatives, putting each sheet of printing paper in a closed drawer after exposing each negative. At 4:50 pm, he took out 80 sheets of exposed photographic paper and went to the open developing tank. I watched him chain develop all the prints, and one by one put all 80 prints, perfectly printed, into the fixer. At 5:10 p.m. that day, Pierre Gassmann walked into the lab and said, "let’s see how you have done." He put his foot on the foot pedal to light up the fixer tank with bright red light, and went through my 100 prints laying in the fixer-and a few seconds later, looked up and said to me, "you are as good as you said; you are hired!" After Gassmann walked out of the dark room, I took Voja aside, and said, "thank you. I will find a way one day to thank you for this!" He looked at me and said, "I was an immigrant also. I know what it means to need work—we need to help each other!"

While I worked as a printer at Picto in 1979 and 1980, I saw first-hand the amazing work of Voja Mitrovic. After I left Picto, and had finished my graduate degree in international relations at Sciences Po in Paris (where I was a classmate of the current French president Nicolas Sarkozy), I began to assist Robert Doisneau in 1981, and then embarked upon my own career, traveling the world as a photographer. While at Picto, I eventually became a pretty good printer, but knew that I wanted more than anything else to continue being a photographer myself. I was clear about that before ever starting at Picto—but I am sure that my experience as a printer has helped me understand better what I want from prints of my own photographs, and it certainly has helped me appreciate even more the mastership of Voja's prints. I also knew that I didn’t want to spend a life in the dark, and realized early on that I could never be nearly as good a printer as Voja, who has now printed my work for most of the past three decades.

Voja was born in Foca, in Bosnia, Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia, in 1937. His father was killed during the war when he was four years old, and from this early age, he became aware that he would have to work to help his mother and family. He came to photography by accident—his family had a cow, and daily he would deliver a liter of milk to the house of a local photographer named Radmilo Mazic. One day this photographer asked Voja's mother if her son would like to be his photographic apprentice. In Sept., 1953, Voja began to work as Mazic’ apprentice. Mazic had studied photography at a school in Zagreb with teachers from the Ecole de Graphisme of Vienna. It was during this apprenticeship from the age of 14 to 18 that Voja gained extensive knowledge and skills in photography and printing. At the age of 19, he was obliged to do his military service and entered a unit of aviation photography of the Yugoslav Air force. After his military service, Voja worked for five years in a photographic studio in Belgrade where he was involved in all aspects of photography, making photographs, and developing film and making prints.

In September of 1964, Voja and another friend decided to embark upon a trip around the world before getting married and settling down. He arrived at the Paris train station on September 4th, 1964, with one hundred French Francs in his pocket and a backpack full of clothes and sausages—the money being the equivalent then of not more than US$100 now. Voja quickly discovered that with his Yugoslav nationality, it would be difficult to obtain the necessary visas to travel to other countries, and within two days of arriving in Paris, he had already found a job retouching prints at a lab near the Gare du Nord. This first job enabled him to obtain a "carte de sejour" and a work permit, which enabled him to begin to learn the French language.

Two years later, on April 2, 1966, he answered an announcement in a newspaper for a job as a printer at a lab called Picto. When he arrived at Picto, he met Pierre Gassmann and was given a tryout with three other candidates. Gassmann told him that he had been happy with one of his previous printers who was from Yugoslavia, and that he felt that people like him, who came from Central Europe, were good printers and good workers. Voja was hired that day. He worked at Picto for the next thirty years, until his retirement on January 1, 1997.

While there have been several people who have printed for Henri Cartier-Bresson—people such as Georges Fevre, Pierre Gassmann, Philippe Jourdain, Toros, Daniel Risset, and since Voya’s retirement, Daniel Mordac—few people , even in H.C.-B's close entourage, are aware of the role Voja played in printing his photographs over thirty years, most importantly during the time of the “photo boom”, that period of explosive growth in the modern acceptance of photography, of print collecting and photographic exhibitions. Collecting signed prints of photographers began in earnest by a large public in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this time, Voja Mitrovic printed a significant  number of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s collector prints, book prints, and exhibition prints. While I was at Picto in 1979 and 1980, Cartier-Bresson came to Picto almost every week to sign prints that would be sent to collectors in the United States—and many of these prints were made by Voja. I will never forget H.C.-B.’s frequent visits to the lab—witnessing him sign a print was a powerful sight, like a final conclusive act in a process of great creation—and it instilled in me the sense that a signed collector print is the summit of the photographic art. There was always an amazing spirit of conviviality at the lab between the printers and visiting photographers, and always a tremendous level of pride and respect within the walls of the lab. Everyone was aware that we were all involved with people and a process of artistic creation that was unique and special.

Voja Mitrovic and Peter Turnley, at Picto, Paris, 1994.

This was also a time when an important change took place in the world of printing—the introduction of multi-grade paper and filters, which allowed for a subtler rendition of details in both the shadows and the highlights of prints. It was also a time when the highest quantity of silver was in printing papers. Voja has indicated that there are certain qualities of richness in gray tonal values that he could never achieve with today’s papers, that he was able to obtain in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties. Also, since Voja’s retirement, many people, including myself, have noticed that the later prints of H.C.-B., sometimes became too pale, lacking detail in the highlights. Voja has indicated that this is not the fault of later printers' skills, but mostly because H.C.-B. himself changed in his printing taste a bit, asking for lighter prints in his latest years. He would often say that he didn't want his prints to be "dramatic" in the manner that was popular with many American photographers.

Most anyone who has ever spent any time printing in a darkroom knows the emotional difficulty and joy of making a great print. Josef Koudelka said that Voja has the mind of a computer. While I often saw other great printers at one point or another arrive at a moment of emotional and mental block when they couldn’t achieve a result they wanted with a print, Voja was always the picture of perfect methodical discipline, patience, and consistency. He has explained to me that from early age he knew he would have to work, and he learned quickly that whether he was doing something, or re-doing something, it was still simply work, and he respected that, and he would never become frustrated and emotional about doing something until it was done as well as it could be done.

Peter Turnley

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Featured Comment by Pak-Ming Wan: "Peter, That's a wonderful story about both Voja and you. As an ex-pat in Paris, I know first hand how hard it is to restart a life—but restart with just $100 in your pocket and not knowing the language or anyone? And to play that hand and turn it into something as great as he has is something I respect. Inspirational."

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "As an addendum to this wonderful story...

"Those who would like to see quite a large stock of Mr. Mitrovic's work first-hand should make an attempt to see the "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century" exhibit now at the Art Institute of Chicago.  The show, which originated at MoMA and was curated by Peter Galassi, features the largest and broadest volume of Cartier-Bresson's work (298 prints plus original magazine publications) you'll likely ever see assembled again in your lifetime.

"The show is organized approximately chronologically. So although printers are not noted (but printing is cited and discussed in an early part of the exhibit) the period of Mitrovic's work will be easy to scope, as it covers most of the show.

"If you cannot see the show in Chicago or its future venues, Peter Galassi's accompanying catalog is the next best thing. No, scratch that; it's actually equally valuable, as it presents a wonderfully rich narrative as well as all of the images from the show, beautifully reproduced."

Featured Comment by Bahi: "B&W wet printing is an irresistible combination of science, art, myth and magic. I just loved this story."

The Best Photography How-To Books

It was surprisingly easy to decide what to put on this list. I thought it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the simple reason that we all want to know "how to" do different things. Photography's house is large, and contains many mansions.

I think the reason it was easy is that the list is so short. Make it more than a dozen and the sub-categories begin to get complicated. Beginner or veteran? Color or monochrome? Film or digital? But there are those books that are either so popular, good, admired, or lasting that including them on a short list comes by acclaim. You can of course quibble with individual choices (please).

Obviously there are many specialties and numerous areas in which a technical library could go into much greater depth, but all of these books contain much that any photographer could learn from—even the ones that don't address the kind of photography you happen to be interested in, or practice, right now.

Set-aside
...But first, a title apart: Ctein's Digital Restoration from Start to Finish. This book makes my personal top 12 list, but Ctein (the name is pronounced "kuh-TINE," and it's his whole legal name) is a friend and a long-time collaborator and contributor to The Online Photographer, and including him in the basic list could easily be seen as, if not a conflict of interest, then at least a conflict of objectivity. But in the main, the judgement about the book from TOP readers who've bought it is that its usefulness and interest go well beyond what the title promises.

Humbly submitted, then, here is TOP's list of the top tech titles.

Classic Large Format

1. The Ansel Adams Photo Series: The Camera, The Negative, and The Print, by Ansel Adams and Robert Baker (Little, Brown, 1995). (Best to consider this a matched set instead of three separate books—but you only need these three, and can dispense with auxiliary titles. Note also that I'm not recommending the "Ansel Adams Guides by John P. Shaefer." The correct ones to have are the ones at the links. I understand the covers of those have now changed, to all white.)

Adams's technical writings were developed throughout his lifetime, starting with a rather opaque single volume called Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography way back in 1935, proceeding to the Morgan & Morgan volumes kicked off in 1948 that were reprinted numerous times, and culminating in this wonderful set from 1980. A thorough revision, carried out just before the master's death, these were made with the help of many people, including Adams's last assistant, John Sexton, co-author Robert Baker, and Jim Alinder, then the Director of the Friends of Photography in Carmel. Adams was an American institution by the time this project was done, and his publishers, The New York Graphic Society, spared no expense and took painstaking care over these books. Their clarity is admirable, and Adams's generosity, ebullience, experience and deep knowledge come off equally vividly.

The books have now segued (as Adams predicted, in these very pages, that they would) into describing materials and processes that are obsolescent and beginning to become historical. However, my feeling is that no photographer will fail to benefit from this extended encounter with Ansel Adams as teacher.

Recommended for the hardcore techie, meaning, dedicated large-format B&W photographers of a mathematical cast of mind who are not afraid to get into sensitometry—and purchase a densitometer: Beyond the Zone System by Phil Davis (Focal Press, 1998). Considerably more rigorous than Adams and Archer's Zone System.

Basic Digital

2. Scott Kelby's Digital Photography Boxed Set, Volumes 1, 2, and 3 (Peachpit Press, 2009). This might seem like a digital parallel to the above, because it's another three-volume set, but, really, there's nothing in the young field of digital that can remotely match the authority and time-tested seriousness of the Adams titles. Scott Kelby's books are best-sellers and widely enjoyed (he's been the #1 computer-book author for five years running—and I'll always be grateful for an important mention he gave to TOP in Layers magazine during our rather precarious early days). They're easy and fun to read and chock full of info. Big on tips 'n' tricks, they have something for everyone. Just one mild caution, which is not a criticism of the books but an admonition to the reader: the books repeatedly say they're telling you how to do things "like a pro," which is true, but bear in mind that "pro" pictures are generally (I say generally, son, generally) fashionable, competent, standardized, surfacey, and most often anonymous and interchangeable: there's nothing wrong with competence and the ability to get a clear picture when you need to, Lord knows, but a lot of devoted amateurs would rather know how to do things "like an artist" than "like a pro." I'm just sayin'; will go shut up now.

If you already have one or more of the three volumes, you can buy the slipcase separately.

Like Bryan Peterson's Understanding Exposure that we were discussing the other day, Scott's trio is best suited for beginners and some intermediate photographers. If you no longer fit into those categories but would like a "core" digital text, I suggest waiting for the forthcoming new third edition of Peachpit's Real World Digital Photography by Katrin Eismann, Sean Duggan, and Tim Grey, which should be along shortly. It's available for pre-order now.

Concepts and Approaches

3. On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide by Bill Jay and David Hurn (Lenswork Publishing, 2007). Ominously, this essential book is listed as "out of stock" at the publisher, and has been for some time now, if I'm not mistaken, and there is at least a chance that there are issues over the rights following the recent death of co-author Bill Jay (I am going to miss Bill Jay). If you don't have it yet, better turn over rocks (if not move mountains) to acquire it while you can. Of course, maybe it's just awaiting its next printing. But ya never know. (There is a "DVD Version" listed at Lenswork without much elaboration. Don't know about that, but I'll try to find out.)

The Professional

4. The Moment It Clicks: Photography Secrets From One of the World's Top Shooters It's gratifying that this book, which has lately been so popular, is so good. Joe McNally, who has the energy typical of pros but is, shall we say, unusually self-effacing and friendly, works at the more glamorous end of the profession, and he's a pretty unusual photographer, working at a high level—that's a pun for those in the know, as he's known for working at high levels, literally—that's a self-portrait, above—but also finding time and funding for a massive personal project making portraits of 9/11 firefighters.

His book gives lots of really practical and genuinely valuable advice, but also gives you a very good window into what it's like to be a top pro today. You probably already have this, as it has been distributed to everyone on the planet able to pronounce the word "camera," but if for any reason you don't....

Light and Lighting

5. Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting By Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, and Paul Fuqua (Focal Press, 2007). Lighting is probably the photographic subject which is least often learned from books. It is, first of all, mainly the province of studio and commercial photographers, who have evolved among themselves a sort of extemporaneous apprenticeship system known, of course, as assisting. In return for working hard for low pay, the assistant learns the tricks of the trade from, as it were, the master of his or her choosing. Other ways of learning lighting might include hand-on classes at technical schools—the Art Center in Los Angeles and R.I.T. have outstanding courses in lighting—or simply through experimentation and the personal experience of trial and error. Among all these ways of gaining knowledge about lighting, books bring up the rear.

This might not be the case if all books on the subject were as intelligent and knowledgeable as Fil Hunter and Paul Fuqua's. Their discussions range from "How Photographers Describe Light" and the concept of the family of angles, to specific surfaces and backgrounds and strategies of approaches to picturing different materials such as glass or metal. Our full review, by Geoff Wittig, is here. Geoff says of the book, "it is much easier reading than one would think; the concepts and their application flow so logically and are so clearly explained that it's entertaining rather than a dry slog."

In the category of lighting, two more books deserve mention. The first is our friend Kirk Tuck's great best-seller Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography, a book with a perfect title that is perfectly descriptive of the book's contents. The second is the companion book to The Moment It Clicks, Joe McNally's The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes, which might be thought of as "Strobist in book form." But then, maybe David Hobby will one day write his own book....

Photojournalism

4. Photojournalism: The Professionals' Approach, 6th edition by Kenneth Kobré (Focal Press, 2008). This is the book that started me down the road to writing this post, when someone mentioned Professor Kobré's "Lightscoop" flash attachment in the comments the other day. The longtime "bible" of photojournalism and the most-used textbook on the subject. It's been around for years, and it's been years since I've seen it.

Subjects include:

• covering news, features, sports, politics and contemporary issues
• narrative picture stories
• finding features and catching candids
• environmental and interpretive portraits
• recording sound for multimedia and video
• shooting video
• creative use of the strobe
• digital shooting & darkroom techniques
• concept photography & illustrations
• newsroom politics
• picture editing
• shooting within the bounds of the law
• controversial pictures & ethical discussions
• expanded history of photojournalism
• internships and after
• freelancing and business practices.

Nature and Outdoor

7. Landscape Beyond: A Journey into Photography by David Ward (Aurum Press, 2008). Generations of color nature and outdoor photographers got kick-started by two essential books: Galen Rowell's Mountain Light (currently out of print) and John Shaw's original Nature Photographer's Complete Guide to Professional Field Techniques of 1984, the cover of which was a white egret on a blue background (a revised, updated version from 2001 is available as John Shaw's Nature Photography Field Guide). David Ward's book is exemplary among a more recent crop of titles, and reflects the vibrant British nature photography scene. And you've got to love a book the first chapter of which is entitled "Simplicity."

David Ward. Photo courtesy Calumet U.K.

Geoff Wittig reviewed this book for us last year. He said, "Landscape Beyond is David Ward's eloquent, thoughtful exploration of the aesthetic structure of landscape photographs. This is several planes higher than the customary 'rule of thirds, golden hour light' type of discussion. Ward instead delves into perceptual theory, the properties of beauty, and the nature of mystery. The book is illustrated by his photographs, which are quietly breathtaking. They convey an impression of the contemplative beauty to be found in the natural world."

Image Editors

8. Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers: a professional image editor's guide to the creative use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC by Martin Evening (Focal Press, 2010). Criticisms that this book is long, thorough, and complicated have always struck me as slightly absurd: Photoshop itself is difficult, complex, and definitely industrial-strength, indisputably the app of choice for imaging professionals. Why buy any book that won't help you master it thoroughly? A simple, dilettante-friendly book about Photoshop would be analogous to a book called "Anybody Can Fly a Fighter Jet—in Six Easy Steps!!!" Yep, tough subject: so is calculus or vascular surgery. You're not going master it from your easy chair with a game on.

The 2010 edition contains a well-received DVD.

Of course, it obviously only makes sense to buy a how-to book about software if it covers a program you use. So, alternately:

...For Aperture: Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 3 by Don Scoppettuolo. I have it on inside authority that this is the book that Apple's Aperture tech support people are trained on. It also includes a well-regarded DVD.

...For LightRoom 3: I don't use LightRoom, and don't know enough about the available books to make a choice. However, TOP reader Bahi Para, who teaches Lightroom, tells me "For Lightroom 3, I'm happy to report that the standard is really high but there are still two that stand out: Kelby and Evening." He notes Kelby's distinctive sense of humor and his talent for conveying a lot of information straightforwardly, and says Evening is for slightly more technically-minded people who might not enjoy Kelby's lighthearted approach.

...for GIMP: Grokking the GIMP online—read it online, download for free, or buy a printed copy. Shouldn't a free program have free documentation?

Optics and Lens Focal Lengths

9. EF Lens Work III: The Eyes of EOS. (Canon, Inc. Lens Product Group, 2008. Currently backordered). This might seem like a throwaway on this list, but not so. What's more important than understanding lenses and focal lengths? My own object of obsession in this category, long ago, was The OM System Lens Handbook, a book I almost memorized. (You can always tell which company is really feeling its oats at any given point in history: it's the one with the book out.) Although this is overtly a catalog of one manufacturer's products, you shouldn't necessarily avoid it for that reason. The discussions and examples of focal lengths and the copious supporting material—much of it excellent, especially the sections on manufacturing and the science of optics—make this a great learning tool for photographers of all stripes. Even ones who shoot Nikon, Pentax, or Olympus! I wouldn't be without it.

EF Lenswork III is also available as a free download in several parts.

Legal Handbook

10. Legal Handbook for Photographers: The Rights and Liabilities of Making Images, by Bert Krages, Esq. (Amherst, 2006). What, this doesn't fall neatly into the "how-to" category for you? Well, it probably should. Bert Krages is the author of the deservedly famous "The Photographer's Right" page, a single sheet meant to be carried in your camera bag. Legal Handbook for Photographers is similarly succinct (128 no-nonsense pages) and similarly useful. Like it or not, we all deal with legal issues every day (especially these days) and your default shouldn't be ignorance. Not fun, maybe, but essential for any photographer.

An augmentation for photographers beginning in business: Carolyn E. Wright, Esq.'s Photographer's Legal Guide. Carolyn Wright writes the popular Photo Attorney blog.

Camera Raw

11. Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS5 by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe (Peachpit Press, 2010). I've made the case that what I'm about to describe is true of most books, from The Scarlet Letter to The Bush Dyslexicon. : books hit you different at different times of your life and at different stages of development. Certainly it's true of photo-technical books that they're better if they're there for you when you're ready for them. (Similarly, if you've moved beyond them, it becomes almost impossible to read them—it's been a long time since I was able to read a text on basic B&W printing, for instance. I've gotten to the point that I often know what books the authors were reading.)

Anyway, I read the late Bruce Fraser's Camera RAW when Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) was new and Bruce's book was the first one on the market, and it opened up digital photography for me—previously, the headache of setting white balance (WB) for every shot was just an intolerable intrusion into the flow of shooting, and it was that or be frustrated by the camera's often addled guesses (although cameras have gotten better since then). I was ready for it, it was ready for me, and I had something as close to a Socratic experience as you can have with a tech book. Now there are a whole passel of camera raw books—even one "for Dummies." Justified or not, I retain an durable affection for this one, which has been, for several editions now, thoughtfully updated and revised by the imaging polymath Jeff Schewe. Friends don't let friends shoot JPEG.

Okay, that last comment went overboard!

Not a book, but a nice way to learn RAW, especially (but not exclusively) if you use Adobe Lightroom, is Michael Tapes' excellent and expertly made video "RAW Without FUD" ("FUD" means fear, uncertainty, and doubt) from RawWorkflow.com, makers of the WhiBal.

Digital Printing

12. Mastering Digital Printing by Harald Johnson (Course Technology PTR, 2004). Although this is definitely the first book you should have about digital printing, it should almost be called an "everything but how to" book. It covers virtually everything about digital printing except, well, the nuts 'n' bolts of how to actually do it. That might be part of what makes this book so useful and so enduring—it doesn't get caught in the trap of describing a limited set of ephemeral and transitory hardware and software products. You'll probably have to learn how to print online anyway, since everyone has their own combination of camera, software, and printer and the issues are often particular to each. But this is a great backgrounder. It sits on my shelf next to The Printed Picture by Richard Benson and Nash Editions: Photography and the Art of Digital Printing by Garrett White.

Oh, and for the nuts 'n' bolts missing from Harald Johnson's fine book? Try Uwe Steinmuller's Fine Art Printing for Photographers: Exhibition Quality Prints with Inkjet Printers, 2nd Edition from Rocky Nook. (I've also sent away for Vincent Oliver's printing DVD, but it hasn't arrived yet so I can't say anything about it.)

There. I was determined to cram The Printed Picture on to this list somehow, even though it's a "what to" book rather than a how-to, and I finagled it.

Hope this list helps. I'd be interested in your contributions and criticisms. Cheers,

Mike
(Thanks to Geoff Wittig and Bahi Para)

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Readers' Suggestions

Suggestions are welcome. Please tell us what you like and why you like it. And please, on the honor system, don't mention anything in which you have any stake or interest.

I won't be able to feature every suggestion, just a few, so be sure to see the comments for more.

Tim McGowan: "Great post, thank you. I've read a lot of photography 'how to's,' and the one book that really helped me with composition is... [Many more reader recommendations past the break —Ed.]

P.S. To the Previous Post

P.S. I didn't feature Maggie Osterberg's picture for this reason, but, apropos of the discussion following Ctein's post yesterday, if you look at her picture really large you can see one of the reasons why the manufacturers believe they can get away with a little slop in the focusing accuracy and precision of cameras. It's not evident at the smaller sizes, but the focus in this picture is just behind his eyes a bit—the front of his face is just a little soft. It in no way reduces my enjoyment of the picture, and I'm certain Maggie knows exactly how to focus her camera and where to focus her pictures—no criticism intended at all. What it illustrates, rather, is that, in most photographs of 3D subjects, exact focus is a compromise. And, in many cases, something will be in the plane of best focus—even if it's not exactly what the photographer intended. I'm not saying competent focus doesn't make or break a lot of pictures—it does. (It certainly makes or breaks a lot of lens "tests.") But in many more cases, it doesn't matter much. If you take a picture of a garden and focus a third of the way in, it won't matter if the actual plane of focus is a foot closer or a foot farther away—you're approximating anyway. A little slop in the focus is something that some camera-consumers are not even aware of—and therefore, it's something that camera manufacturers can get away with. Whereas if you look into it (even if you don't look into it very hard) it quickly becomes clear that exact focus of a camera on a subject is not a trivial problem at all.

O.K., I realize it's a bad habit of mine to discuss actual photographs in terms of technical points. Hope I haven't offended Maggie....

Mike

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Random Excellence: Maggie Osterberg

Maggie Osterberg, Dad, November 2009

What can I add? Great face, great light, great tones. And that expression—! When this flashed on my screen, big, I was almost startled. Wonderful.

I found this by following a link in a comment Maggie made the other day. I went first to her website (or one of her websites, anyway) and from there to her flickr favorites.

Have you ever noticed that there's sometimes a narcissistic component to your enjoyment of certain pictures? In that they're ones you wish you'd taken yourself. I believe (or maybe I should use the word "hallucinate" instead of "believe," pace Scott Adams) that I can appreciate all kinds of work—well, most kinds—but I admit I have a special affection (maybe "bias") for work of the kind that I most like to make myself. There's a component of jealousy, almost, in my appreciation of work like that: "I wish I had taken that." 

Here it is large.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Scott Reeves: "Well-put, Mike, and great photo. I often think that photos I admire fall into two large groups. The first is images where I would have seen the potential for a good photograph but the photographer renders the image better than I could have. For whatever reason (usually simply more talent) the photographer has better execution in the making of the image than me.These are the ones you discuss in your post and the group that the presented image belongs to.

"I believe there is a second group, however. These are the images that I look at and say, 'I never would have seen a potential photograph there.' I think of these as images of recognition—they call on me not to execute better but to see better. They are rarer than the first group but perhaps more exciting."

The Lens is Not More Important Than the Camera

By Ctein

There are widely-held sentiments in photography that don't hold up under close scrutiny. Recently, a reader made the remark, "...besides, the lens is more important than the camera." This is not an uncommon feeling among photographers. It was frequently expressed back in the film era, the general argument being that a camera body, no matter how exquisitely crafted, was really nothing more than a box for carrying the lens and the film, and those were what really counted.

That thought shows a serious lack of appreciation for what a camera body is responsible for. Even back in the days of relatively simple mechanical cameras, the camera body was responsible for accurately setting the exposure, both lens aperture and shutter speed. It was responsible for holding the film flat, perpendicular to the optical axis of the lens, and in the correct plane of focus.

None of these responsibilities were easily fulfilled, and camera tests regularly demonstrated that. Failure wasn't always reported. Possibly the most pernicious open secret in the business was just how badly most camera bodies worked at holding the film flat and at producing accurate focus. Even 35mm had its problems, but the runouts for medium format and sheet film cameras were astonishingly large. Furthermore, stability was frequently an issue; many camera bodies, especially the flimsier and more "amateur" ones, could be brought into exquisite adjustment with little effort. Sadly that would not be likely to hold for more than a dozen rolls of film.

More than one photographer has reported on the mediocre performance of a kit lens or even an expensive prime used wide open without realizing that the fuzzy photograph they made was actually the fault of a camera body that wasn't holding the film flat or matching the focus screen position to the average film "plane."

The addition of electronics and automatic functions to camera bodies upped the ante. Electronic shutters did make shutter speeds more accurate, but the camera's built-in meter was responsible for determining what that shutter speed should be. In the most modern of cameras, focus was also determined automatically, with that technology introducing its own set of uncertainties.

Digital camera bodies take that to an even more extreme level. Not only are all the aforementioned characteristics still the province of the camera body, but now a camera body has the "film" built in. There's a lot more flexibility to that silicon chip than a roll of silver emulsion, so really it's more like buying into a family of films. Still, buying a digital camera body is like deciding that you're always going to be photographing with Kodachrome (25, 64, or 200) slide film. You get a look and a feel, an image quality that is characteristic of that camera. That remains true no matter what lens you slap on the front.

Oh yeah, they still haven't solved the focus issues. Many lenses, even cheap ones, are a lot better than people think they are. Well, at least now we can count on the "film" staying flat—even if it's not where the focusing screen or the autofocus module thinks it is.

To be sure, poor lenses ruin a lot of photographs. But, so do poor camera bodies. It's no easier making a camera body that achieves exquisite quality than it is a lens. And, unfortunately, it's no more common.

Ctein

P.S. My Digital Restoration from Start to Finish book sale has three more days to run. The sale ends Sunday, the 15th. Thanks to all past, present and future purchasers!

ADDENDUM: Quite a few commenters are missing a most important point and focusing on a body's features, not its real functionality. It's not about what the camera maker claims the camera body will do; I am talking about what most of them actually do. No platonic ideals, here; most camera bodies out there perform at less than their theoretical best in some aspect or another. In many cases, to a greater extent than many people realize, it's well below that theoretical best.

A good lens on a poorly-performing body will give you poor results. Really. Truly.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

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The Number One Photography How-To Book

The new third edition of Chicago commercial pro Bryan Peterson's book Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera was just published yesterday, and is now shipping.

Quietly, under the radar (under mine, anyway—I already understand exposure, at least as well as I'm ever going to), Understanding Exposure has become a huge, vast, gargantuan bestseller, one of the best-selling how-to books in the history of the medium. It's a book for beginners and some intermediate photographers, but—well, beginners and intermediate photographers love it. Just take a look at some of the 763 (!) Amazon customer reviews for the second edition. And don't forget, we all start somewhere, sometime*.

Bryan Peterson (right). Photo by Jason Schneider.

The 176-page new edition is published in paperback by Amphoto books, and costs $25.99 at bookstores (or $17.15 at Amazon. Here's the U.K. link).

Mike

*Or maybe some of us just need a refresher, or a bit of remedial work. Not long ago I bought a whole book on Layers, because that's something I just don't understand very well for some reason. I'm going to read it, too, I swear. 

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Featured Comment by Ben Mathis: "I have to admit that this book was an immense help to me when I was getting started in photography. It explained the why and how of the aperture/shutter-speed/ISO triangle so clearly. I now recommend it to anyone getting into photography."

Featured Comment by Jim in Denver: "I was at a photographer's store/gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyo., chatting to one of the guys there, and he mentioned that there is no one 'right' exposure for any given scene or photograph. That is the type of advice that can totally confuse a beginner but completely liberate an experienced photographer. That single, offhand remark as changed the way I look at photography, to a huge benefit."

Featured Comment by Jan Ignatius: "I can definitely vouch for the book (I have the second edition). When I was starting out with photography, Understanding Exposure finally made everything click for me regarding the 'exposure triangle' of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. It also taught me some new techniques like panning and zooming during exposure. Whenever a friend or a colleague asks me for guidance on getting started with photography, I happily recommend the same book."

Featured Comment by Matthew Miller: "It really pains me whenever I hear someone talk about an exposure 'triangle,' and because this book puts so much emphasis on that visualization, I don't recommend it.

"Not everything that has three properties is a triangle! Crucially, these particular factors are linked in a different way: they work like the dimensions of a cube (or rather, rectangular prism), where the volume is the resulting exposure.

"The triangle explanation, on the other hand, simply confuses the nature of the relationship. Let's say a triangle with dimensions 3, 4, and 5 corresponds to ISO 400, ƒ/4, and an exposure time of 5 seconds. Great, we can draw a nice diagram. Okay, now, increase the shutter speed to 10 seconds, and draw a proportional triangle...hey, wait! That's impossible!

"The same thing happens if you make the factors be the angles of each corner—it just doesn't work out. Even for triangles which happen to be valid, the change to exposure isn't illustrated at all by what happens when you change part of a triangle.

"The 3D visualization might be more difficult to present nicely in a printed diagram, but I'm pretty sure a decent graphic designer could handle it.

"Clearly 'it's a triangle!' works as an explanation for many people, but I don't think I'm just being pedantic in objecting to it. Having the wrong visualization may be fine for introductory understanding, but having that stuck in ones head can make moving beyond that harder. It'd be better for the book to talk about 'here's three unrelated things!' than to present it as a triangle."

Gordon Lewis replies: I get what Matthew Miller is saying about the inadequacy of a triangle to illustrate the relationship between shutter speed, aperture and ISO. For what it's worth, the analogy I like to use is that light is like water flowing out of a faucet. The shutter speed determines how long the faucet is open. The diameter of the faucet controls the volume of water flowing during any given duration. The size of the glass you hold under the faucet is the ISO; i.e., how much "water" it takes to fill the glass. The higher the ISO, the smaller the glass and therefore the less "water" it takes to fill it. A "correct exposure" fills the glass to the brim without causing it to overflow. I'm not claiming this is a perfect analogy, but at least it gets across the idea of what would happen if you make any one of the three factors smaller, larger, longer, or shorter.

Featured Comment by dale: "I will support Bryan's book, not simply for his explanation, but the way he presents it. I too had acquired the math back in the '60s probably around the same time Bryan did (we are the same age). But Bryan, who would be equally adept at selling Ginsu knives, has an appealing energy in his presentation and a solid interest in your success. I can credit him with a few lightbulb moments generated by his books and a significant one (Satori) in the first few minutes of a location workshop. I too had been uncomfortable with the term 'triangle' and modified it to 'triumvirate' whenever I felt the need to explain such stuff. Overall, as his success in print indicates, Bryan has a knack for instruction and is a good guy to hang out with, too."

The Flash Adds Seven Years to your Age

The internet is chock-a-block full of exhaustive and polemical analyses of "photographic quality," which to me is like arguing about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. The end of the Holy Grail Quest for perfect "quality" is like the end of a rainbow. Low noise and perfect color and sharpness in the corners never made a better picture. Bah, sayeth the Curmudgeon.

Similarly fastidious analyses of pictures, though—that I can get into! That's fun. I was delighted by this statistical analysis, written by Christian Rudder, of 522,000 "profile" pictures on the internet dating site OkCupid. The testers collected "millions of judgments" (I'm quoting, not mocking) from respondents as to which pictures they found most attractive, and then collated these judgments against the photos' EXIF information.

I'm sure you'll be interested in the whole article, but the short take is that the results are fascinating. Among the findings:

• The use of more expensive cameras makes you look more attractive, although...
• ....Panasonic Micro 4/3 cameras make you look the best—by a large margin*.
• Use of flash adds seven years to your apparent age.
• The wider the aperture the better! And...
• ...iPhone users get the most sex.

Not sure I get much out of the "time of day" metrics, but your mileage might differ. In any case, a fun and different article.

The major takeaway: turn off the on-camera flash for pictures of people!**

Mike
(Thanks to Richard Chomko and several others)

*A fairly mystifying and seemingly arbitrary finding, in my view—the only explanation I can think of is that only people who are relatively "in the know" about photography would care to own Micro 4/3 cameras at this point in history—but there it is in the chart. That explanation also might account for the high showing of the second-place camera type, "Leica point-and-shoots," which scored the highest in the p/s category, also by a large margin.

**Unless you're a Strobist reader and know how to do it right.

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Featured Comment by John Camp: "I love stuff like this. It's so compelling, while at the same time, so meaningless—it's the data equivalent of Cheetos or 'CSI Miami.' Who couldn't love the fact that the 'best' photos are taken with Panasonic 4/3 cameras...and who couldn't think of seventeen reasons why sampling problems didn't corrupt the whole set? Good stuff, I say; the mathematical equivalent of pulp fiction."

Featured Comment by Scott is not pig!: "Hi Mike, I don't think they are asking subjects which picture is better, they are asking them which person they want to date more. So the actual conclusion is that Micro 3/4's users are just a damn good looking bunch. Or maybe people who value aesthetics and photography as a hobby are sublimely attractive. Or maybe Micro 4/3 owners like to take pictures of beautiful people and send them to them and the beautiful people subsequently use them for computer dating. In other words, I suspect some mediating variables!"

Featured Comment by Richard Skoonberg: "I have a Light Scoop for on camera flash and it's pretty cool and fun to use. With it my flash doesn't add seven years to people's age. Check it out."

Mike replies: Hey, the guy who developed the Light Scoop is Ken Kobré, who wrote Photojournalism, The Professionals' Approach. The major how-to text on the subject of the last thirty years. That book would make my top dozen of photo how-to books.

Photographers: Banned

Drawing by Chris Robinson

In Britain, several newspapers have devised novel and innovative ways to protest a craven ban on photographers by a football (soccer) club (team). The club is refusing accreditation to any outside photographers "in a plain and simple cash grab," hoping to force the media into purchasing photos from the team's approved supplier.

To protest the ban, one newspaper, the Plymouth Herald, didn't use photographs at all in reporting a recent game—it used drawings, including the one above showing the winning goal. Another paper, the Sun, ran a game report without once mentioning the names of the offending team or any of its players.

Barry Petchesky reports.

I hope someone from that part of the world will keep us apprised of future developments.

Mike
(Thanks to WLH)

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Featured Comment by Tony Collins: "I was at school with the artist Chris Robinson. He has been instrumental in setting up a trust to rescue a huge archive of westcountry press photos and negatives that were about to be thrown out: The South West Image Bank."

Featured Comment by John Beardsworth: "Letting clubs determine what photographs get published is a fast track to sport news and sports journalism becoming just another sanitised, mendacious arm of PR.

"To give you an example of the harm this can do, at my club there's been a long-running  fans' protest campaign against the owners and their leveraged financing scam that's eating £50m a year out of our profits—money that could be better invested in the team, for one thing. The campaign is non-violent (bar one or two idiots) and a very visible part of it is to boycott official merchandise and wear the club's original green and gold colours rather than our red and white. The club does what it can to silence the campaign, for instance banning players from talking about it and taking down banners with 'controversial' slogans such as 'LUHG' (it means Love United Hate Glazers). But they can't stop people wearing the colours in the stadium or the anti-Glazer chants. Imagine if the suits could control what pictures were shown though. That's just one well-known example.

"This makes me loathe Southampton even more than I have done since 1976.... Don't ask!"

...And to Redeem the Tarnished Honor of Philadelphia...

...Comes this magnificent piece of news, via Theresa P.

(This post is a follow-up to Scoundrels of Philadelphia.)

Haverford College—which is on the outskirts of, yes, Philadelphia—has restored to its rightful owners a valuable 1641 letter by René Descartes that was only recently authenticated. It rightfully belonged to the Institut de France, from which it was stolen by the infamous (and ironically named) Count Guglielmo Libri some 170 years ago.

The last time one of the stolen letters turned up, the current owner held it for a huge ransom that the Institut couldn't afford to pay. So guess what Haverford did with theirs?

They gave it back.

"Haverford values social responsibility and commitment to community as much as we value rigorous academics,” said Haverford president Stephen G. Emerson, '74. "While we’ve certainly benefited from having the Descartes letter in our collection [...] there was really only one possible course of action: do the right thing, and offer to return the letter. We certainly hope someone else would do the same for us if the shoe were on the other foot."

Emerson gets TOP's mensch award for that. (Okay, TOP doesn't have a mensch award, but if it did, he'd get it.) Haverford, not surprisingly, has one of the oldest honor codes of any American college. What a shame that more of the movie villains from The Art of the Steal were evidently not exposed to concepts like "honor" and "doing the right thing" back when their minds were still impressionable.

(Jeez, and after all this time, I find the college I should have attended. Only 35 years too late. You know what they say: oh well.)

Haverford's president again: "In our ever-shrinking world, when strangers become friends and then partners at the click of a mouse, we want to do all we can to show, by example, what it means for scholars and citizens to collaborate for the common good."

Bravo.

Mike
(Thanks to Kent and Theresa)

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

Terrorists ’Sick of Being Treated Like Photographers’

Radical extremists object to being mistaken for common photographers.

As one member of a Coventry-based Al Qaeda cell explained to us, "I resent being treated like I’m some sort of photographer. [...] Photographers are a blight on society, and obviously I damn them all to Hell, but I find the assumption that carrying a camera makes me some sort of 'photographer' insulting in the extreme."

(One only wishes this were a bit more far-fetched.)

Mike
(Thanks to Erlik)

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

Scoundrels of Philadelphia

Quick, what do the city of Philadelphia, the dictator Hitler, and the tyrant Bonaparte have in common? They're all three among the greatest looters of art in history.

I know injustice is everywhere, but it still rankles me to hear about it. Last night I got around to watching The Art of the Steal (it's also on Netflix), the documentary film about how the immoral scoundrels who run the city of Philadelphia stole the private Barnes Collection.

Albert Barnes was an eccentric doctor who built a peerless collection of impressionist and early modern art back when it was unpopular and nobody else wanted it. He wanted the collection used for education and left the art behind arranged exquisitely in a building he had constructed specially to house it. He endowed a Foundation to care for it and left a very specific will stating his intentions for his Foundation and his paintings. Henri Matisse called it the only sane place in America to view art.

Albert Barnes

Primary among Barnes' wishes were for the collection to continue to be used for education, for public access to be restricted, and for the art to remain where it was. The film documents how the dastardly monied interests of Philly—Barnes' avowed enemies—managed to subvert his will and his wishes and steal art now worth $25 billion right out of the guy's house.

We condemn the Taliban for destroying the Buddhas of Bamyan, but the Brahmins of the Main Line have destroyed a unique artistic legacy just as callously, and with greater, and more cynical, calculation. It's a story that should enrage not only any art lover but any lover of justice. Utterly shameful. The pillaged Barnes Collection in Philadelphia is slated to open in 2012, and although it is certain to be popular with museum-goers, I hope it remains a perpetual disgrace and an eternal shame to the city of Philadelphia among those in the know for as long as it's there. The people who did this may be rich, but they are low class.

Another collection
Ironically, seeing this film comes on the heels of a particularly luminous experience I had recently that is similar to what Albert Barnes intended for his paintings. I reunited with an old high school friend who lives in Chicago now, and she took me for a visit to her parents' house in one of the city's oldest and most elegant neighborhoods. It was a lovely summer day, with high clouds and warm breezes. The house is just stuffed to the scuppers with really major art, mainly of the color field school—Kenneth Noland, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and one of my own great favorites, Jules Olitsky, not to mention some more modern painters (there was a three-section David Hockney screen in the front hallway) and many other art objects such as furniture, sculpture, and early religious icons. I hardly have words to describe the experience—just being able to imagine living amidst that astonishing art every day took my breath away and left me in a state of awe, wonder, and delight. Everything seemed to fit vividly together—the tour from my friend who grew up there, her erudite yet bohemian parents, her courageous sister, the patrician old house, the balmy weather, the loyal little dog. And everywhere I turned, a painting with the presence to make your eyes widen and your stomach muscles tighten. It was one of those perfect and perfectly memorable experiences, and one I will remember always. In fact, one of the best experiences I've ever had with art in my life—and that's saying something.

I hope my friend's parents have seen The Art of the Steal.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Mat P: "The Art Law Blog has covered the Barnes move, The Art of the Steal, and the reaction to it quite extensively (for a blog)."

Pentax 645D Shows Up on Ebay

An outfit consisting of a new 40-MP Pentax 645D body and DFA-645 55mm ƒ/2.8 lens—a.k.a. the poor man's Leica S2—is being offered by Breguet Camera on Ebay. The price is $11,188, which breaks down to $10k for the body and $1,188 for the lens. I think we've already established that the menus are available in English, but don't forget that Pentax USA doesn't warranty this camera.

The 55mm DFA lens is weatherproof and is the equivalent on the larger format of Pentax's famous 43mm Limited.

I checked with Pentax USA, and there still no word on possible plans to import this camera here to the U.S.

Coincidentally, Breguet Camera happens to be the outfit that sold me my new Minolta 35mm ƒ/2 RS the other day. I can't speak for them generally, but my lens arrived from Hong Kong lickety-split, very well packed, and exactly as advertised. Just sayin'.

Mike
(Thanks to latent_image)

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Featured Comment by Kent: "$10k for the body. Hmm...the lowest current price here in Japan is ¥757,800, which converts to about $8,825 at the current exchange rate.

"Who's it for? The same people who've always needed a larger-than-35mm format. Commercial photographers whose work might end up really big somewhere: posters, outdoor signage, store displays, the side of a bus, etc. And of course landscape or fine art photographers who sell large prints. And...me, if I could afford it. Just 'cause I want one. Fortunately (or not), not only can I not afford it, but that pesky little thing called 'reason' keeps telling me that very little of my work is likely to end up on the side of a bus.

"But if I win the lottery, watch out...."

Featured Comment by Tregix: "I had the chance to play with a 645D yesterday. It gave me a very very positive feeling.

• It is surprisingly comfortable to hold, more comfortable than a D3 or a 1D to me.
• It is big but not that heavy (again compared to a D3 or 1D). It can get out of the studio easily.
• The autofocus is quite fast (with the 55mm ƒ/2.8 SDM).
• The view finder is, well, whoa.
• I felt that the shutter was less noisy than a D700…but I dislike the D700 shutter sound.

It looks like Pentax is changing the MF game.