The Online Photographer

I Love This Camera

I always feel a little bit like a dork for suggesting that the distinctions between the "Big Three" normal-sized FF cameras—the D700, 5D Mark II, and A900—amount to anything more than personal preference. Aren't they all good enough cameras to take pictures with? It's like deciding between big, expensive new Mercedes, BMW, and Audi sedans as basic transportation. Each is flagrantly overpowered, overengineered, and overbuilt. All three are going to get you to work and back with more competence, luxury, and comfort than you need. And half a second's difference in the 0–60 times are not going to make much difference when you're gliding away from a stoplight with a Malibu in front of you and a Fusion in back, a Camry on your left and a Sonata on the right. Yeah, you might have your preferences. But any one of the three will do. This whole notion of "which is better" sometimes seems like such...primate behavior. It can all get a little excruciating at times.

And yet, dang me, I love the Sony A900. (Here it is on Amazon.) In a way that I don't love the D700 or the 5D Mark II. Did when I first used it and do now. Granted, it's 20% too big and 20% too heavy, give or take 5%. (Although I wouldn't want the size of the grip to be any smaller.) Other than that, it makes me happy. I love its feature set, which is to say that I love what it does have—fantastic image quality, big, clear viewfinder, straightforward controls and menus—and, just as importantly, I love what it doesn't have, too: no pop-up flash, no Live View, no video mode.

As an aside, you'll have to believe me when I say I know people like a lot of the things the Sony doesn't have. Like and use. You don't have to send me any lectures—really. I don't need convincing. I use the outstanding Live View on the K-5 all the time (partially because the camera focuses better in low light with LV, but never mind that). Strobist has more readers than TOP, so my canny brain is able to deduce that there must be people out there who use flashes. I've been to YouTube, so I realize that, yes, people shoot videos.

Part of the appeal of the features that aren't there is this notion I've always had that cameras—really, technological devices of any kind—should have what I need and no more. This is in part an aesthetic stance—an aspect of connoisseurship. It doesn't make some peoples' radar, and I know that. It is also in some senses a phantom goal, because what one person needs, another person doesn't, such that any two people—even two people who find the idea of basic simplicity equally appealing—also stand a good chance of not agreeing about what's essential and what's extraneous. Finally, I also realize that the idea of simplicity is so unfashionable in this age of software-controlled everything that it's almost been blasted into nonexistence. Devices that do one thing well have become as quaint as a Model T or a mechanical watch.

The Sony A900. Essence de camera.

An automotive analogy again: I hate cup-holders in cars. Hate 'em. Hate the fact that people demand them; hate the fact that you can't buy sports cars without them. (And I should tell the amusing story someday of my nomad status with regard to word-processing programs. Thank the lord the newest version of Pages has a WP option—another shelter from my wandering, for now.) How about just not drinking in the car? Do we need a hotplate and a mini-fridge in there too? Minivans come with TVs in the back. But then, I admit I like my car stereo. How about a mattress in case you need to sleep? The old New Beetle had a flower vase, which made me want to visit dealerships in the night with a hammer. Don't get me started on idiotmobiles that have complicated internet connectivity from the driver's seat.

You're in a car—so drive, already. Stop playing Nazi Zombies. Keep your eyes on the road. Concentrate on what you're doing. Wait till you get home to brush your teeth. So you say you want to take good still pictures? Here's your camera.

The big Sony's big marketing gimmick, at least at first, were those 24 million pixels. (I'll have more to say about that later.) Set that aside, though—imagine the same camera but with a 12- or 14- or 16-MP sensor, say—and the camera would still be essentially a no-nonsense purist workhorse. When the A900 came out, I thought it was ironic that a big electronics company had made a more classic, purist camera than any of the traditional camera companies had; but since then the S2 has arrived, and it's even more simple and classically single-purpose; and anyway it's looking now like the A900/A850 were one-off anomalies rather than a stable development direction for Sony.

Still, part of the appeal of the Sony is that it's pretty purely pure camera. Not a lot else there. And I like that.

Mike

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Featured Comment by photogdave: "I see your point about camera features, which is why I shoot my film Leicas more than anything else. But I think you would absolutely hate my car [below]! It sleeps four, has a two-burner stove, fridge, sink with running water, two dining tables and cup holders!"

Featured Comment by John Camp: "The problem with simplicity is, not all buyers have the same definition of 'simple.' I don't even know if a Venn diagram would suffice to illustrate the multiple concepts of 'simple.' I think what you, and many more people want, is not a simple camera, but a custom camera.

And, you may eventually get one, if you're willing to thoroughly understand the camera-as-computer. There's no particular reason that the software couldn't be designed so that, say, Live View couldn't be shut off, or the pop-up flash disabled. The K-5, for example, offers a good Live View and a pop-up flash, and it's two-thirds the weight and considerably smaller in dimension than the A900, so Live View and the flash can't be blamed for adding size or weight. If there was simply a software switch which would make the K5 Live View or flash invisible to the user...what's the problem? The problem, of course, is purely conceptual....

This issue has been endlessly hashed over on the L-Camera, the Leica forum. Despite the fact that some Leica lenses can't be readily focused (at all—like the 135), a good many members of that forum would reject Live View if it were available, even if it could be shut off and made invisible, because they don't like the idea. They don't like the idea even though it would radically improve the function of the camera, and that they could make it invisible if they wished.

To me, this (and rejecting such concepts as cup holders in cars) is like Puritanism—you can't stand the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time...or living in a slightly different mode than the one you approve of.

To get down off my rant, I suspect one subliminal reason you like the Sony is because you have said you liked Minolta at one time, and when you pick up the Sony, you can sense the Minolta gene. The same thing happens to me with Nikons, even though I don't use Nikons much anymore.

Mike replies: I see your point, and you're on to something, but I would argue the opposite when it comes to your point about Puritanism. I have no objection whatsoever to anyone wanting cupholders or TVs or even (pace photogdave) beds in their cars. (Heck, people can even drive pickup trucks as a fashion fad for all I care :-) What I dislike is the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of the market. What happens is that enough shoppers want cupholders, such that all the car makers are afraid to make even one car without cupholders because they're afraid it might affect sales—and then the people who don't want cupholders are left without options.

And it's not a question of invisibility—in my favorite sports car, for instance, my elbow lands on what should have been the center armrest—and goes smack into a cupholder. It's annoying, and there's no simple fix. In the next-to-latest version of the Miata, to name another example, they put molded cupholders in the doors—where they whacked many drivers in the leg whenever they closed their doors. A little two-seater sports car shouldn't have to have cupholders. It's not a commuter car. It's a car you get into to have fun driving.

(I assume people are getting that this whole cupholder thing is also a metaphor. So we don't have to get into the specifics of various camera features, which we would have more of a tendency to argue about.)

Cupholder in the NC-1 Miata (just to the left of the steering wheel). The door pull had to be located awkwardly and the cupholder hit people in the knee in the car's tiny cabin—Mazda had to redesign it because of all the complaints. God forbid they just leave the silly thing out.

The problem is that certain things sell, so certain things become mandatory add-ons because manufacturers think their absence might affect sales—then consumers take those features for granted, and every product that lacks those things is criticized in reviews and downgraded on simple checklist-style consumerist evaluations. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People don't buy the Kinderhauler because Leaping Lemming magazine marked it down thirty points for having only six cupholders whereas the Lumpenmobile provides 24. It's not always because the people don't want all the featuritis—it's because the products without all the features don't comparison-shop well, and because it requires connoisseurship to understand how something that isn't encrusted with a zillion features can actually be better than something that is.

Leaving aside the A900, as well as perhaps the well-designed 645D, the only company with the courage, discipline, and vision to currently make a truly "simple-enough" camera is Leica. Nobody else does it. Not even in the realm of point-and-shoots is there a single camera that's as simple as a 1985 Konica MR-70 (a.k.a. "Mister Seventy"). And that's in a market with how many hundreds of choices? Would there be a consumer revolt if, say, one out of every hundred point-and-shoots was minimalist? So the people who wanted that could have a choice?

So nobody's saying anything about Puritanism. I don't want to deny the masses their precious cupholders. I just don't necessarily want to be forced to do every dumb thing they do and be forced to buy every last dumb feature they demand, that's all.

Featured Comment by David Adam Edelstein: "+1 for the curmudgeon crowd. I finally snapped and cashed out my entire Canon kit for an M9 (I already had M lenses). When astonished friends ask me why, I say 'because the M9 has. no. features.'"

Featured Comment by David Luttmann: "I found it felt cheap and plasticy in hand. No meat to it."

Featured Comment by Andy: "Mike, the Lotus Elise doesn't come with a cup holder. If you want one, really want one, the dealer will sell you something that looks like a silver ring with a thong you can install yourself. For $247. Lotus really doesn't want you to have a cup holder either."

Featured [partial] Comment by Christian Dönges: "I suggest that the answer is not to find the lowest common denominator, but rather to build a platform that is customizable to the needs of each individual user.

Can't do it? Sure we can! My guess is that just about every iPhone on the planet is unique: you buy a basic package and then install whatever apps you need to turn it into your iPhone. Need to add a feature? Get a new app. Don't need the feature anymore? Delete the app. Simple.

Why don't we do this with cameras? I don't know. Thom Hogan has been writing about this concept forever, so it can't be because the idea is secret....

(Incidentally, I've been suggesting something similar to engineers in the automobile industry since about 2002. Nobody home there, either. ;-)"

Featured Comment by Kelvin: "The cycling world has already gone through this. Someone took the minimalist thing too far and ended up with taking brakeless fixed-gear single speed bikes off the velodrome and onto busy city streets. Your curmudgeonly ways are dangerously close to current youth hipster chic philosophy! :) (These are the same youths now running around with Lomos and waxing lyrical about the wonders of expired film.)"

When Good Profiles Turn Bad

By Ctein

Last week I wrote about a problem I was having getting good prints of my Apollo/Soyuz in Floodlights photograph. You can read that column here; the condensed version is that I couldn't get the flood light beams to print out with smooth and even gradients unless I turned off color management and handed over the rendering to the Epson 3880 printer driver.

Several readers suggested that this was a problem with out-of-gamut colors, an idea I rejected because the gamut preview in Photoshop told me that everything in that photograph was well within my printer's color range.

Well, I'm un-rejecting it. And therein lies a curious and important tale.

Mike Chaney, of QImage fame, kindly agreed to look at the file and see if he could figure out what was going wrong. He observed that when he previewed the gamut for a different printer that he happened to have, he did see out-of-gamut colors, something like the preview above. Their locations aligned pretty well with the harsh breaks that I was seeing in my print's rendering. I brought Dave Polaschek (the printing engineer on Photoshop) in on the discussion, and the three of us batted it around for a bit, for, you see, I still wasn't seeing any evidence of out-of-gamut colors in my previews.

I still don't know for certain that there are out-of-gamut colors in that photograph for my printer. There's no test that I or Dave or Mike can run to determine that for certain. But it looks like a duck. And it quacks like a duck. And there are webbed footprints in just the right (or wrong) places. So we think it's a duck.

This is important because it means I can't entirely count on gamut previews to tell me if all my colors are properly printable. Neither can you. Most of the time it works pretty well. For this photograph, it failed very badly.

Does it squish?
Why doesn't gamut preview work like it's supposed to? It lies in the problem of rendering out-of-gamut colors in a pleasing way on a printer. Color films and decent digital cameras can record colors that no printer can print. Furthermore, an RGB color space like your display uses isn't a one-for-one match with the CMYK color space a printer works in. There are colors your monitor can display that can't be printed. What do you do about those colors? Well, it's that problem of squeezing a pint into a 12-ounce can, again. The only way everything is going to fit is if something squishes. Colors in your photograph that fall outside the ones the printer can print get mapped into colors that it can print.

Without getting technical about it, the software that creates the profile that color management uses has to make some assumptions about how that mapping occurs. For the sake of computation, it also has to treat some out-of-gamut colors as if they were in gamut so that it can deal with them at all. Consequently, there is not really a clear and accurate boundary in the profile or in the gamut preview between colors that are in gamut and colors that aren't. The boundary is fuzzy.

The printer, though, doesn't think so. If it gets thrown a color to print that's outside its comfort range, it will print something, but it may not do it very well. ICC profiles don't understand a particular printer's idiosyncrasies very well. The printer driver is more likely to be written to take into account said printer's foibles.

Most of the time this kind of situation won't jump up and bite you. It bit me good in this photograph. I can think of a few others I have that I've yet to print successfully where I think the same thing may be going on. I'm going to try printing them with color management off, letting the printer control color, and see if it works better.

If profiles can cause problems like this and give misleading results, why not just avoid them all the time? Because 99+% of the time, profiles won't cause problems like this, and they will render in-gamut colors much more faithfully than printer-managed color will. Printer-managed color will not produce superior color most of the time.

As I wrote previously, if you consistently get better results from printer-controlled color then full color management, something's wrong with your system. Either with your profiles, your software, or how you're using them. I can't help you fix that, I'm afraid. All I can do is give you the heads up. On occasion, though, printer-controlled color can save you from a nasty boundary condition failure.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Where There's Smoke (OT)

I went outside this morning to find a strong unpleasant smell in the air, which I immediately blamed on Jim, who is re-roofing my neighbor's house. What's he doing over there? I thought. Later, when I could see haze and smell the smell driving to get some dinner, I realized it must be a distant fire. By "distant," I was thinking that maybe it might be in the next county.

Turns out it's way up in Minnesota, in the Boundary Waters area around the Gunflint Trail, inland from Grand Marais, on the north shore of Lake Superior. That's more than 350 miles from here. They've named it the Pagami Creek Fire. It's been burning since August 18th—it was ignited by lightning—but a couple of days ago it increased in size from 10,000 acres to 60,000 acres because of high winds.

The smoke plume from the Pagami Creek Fire on September 11th, from space.

The smoke reached Chicago today.

Strangely, sometimes it smells good, like burning leaves, and sometimes it smells bad, like a chemical plant is what's on fire. Strange.

I'll have to apologize to Jim. Bad ack. Wasn't his fault after all.

Mike

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Sign o' the Times

And in the Handwriting-On-Wall Dept., the major digital camera review site Imaging-Resource has published a review of—yup—the Apple iPhone 4.

Cue Prince.

Mike
(Thanks to Michael S.)

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Featured Comment by Brad Nichol: "I am really pleased to see this. Most camera review sites along with their traditional forum bases have treated the iPhone and mobile phone imaging as a nasty little disease that degrades the whole photography world...meanwhile the 'great unwashed' have embraced the devices with pure passion and produced some of the most compelling photography in history.

"If the information I have seen is correct over half of all the images taken each day are taken on a smart phone, with the iPhone top of the heap.

"Parallel to the traditional photography websites have been the development of 'mobile photography' sites, which seem to concentrate on apps, images, videos, photographer bios and much more. Many traditional photographers wouldn't dream of visiting these sites. It's their loss. These sites are fascinating, turbocharged with artistic sensibilities and a great insight into the future of photography.

"It's not so much writing on the wall as it is graffiti writ large in technicolor, monochrome and apped till it floats.

"I must add I do have a bias. I run workshops on iPhoneography and was an early adopter, but it truly has been one of the most exciting things I have been involved in photographically."

Featured Comment by Bob Rosinsky: "The Instamatic of our era. Kodak R.I.P. Half of my retouching work from consumers originates from iPhones."

'Gypsies' by Josef Koudelka

Just republished—one of the all-time great photo books, the book that made Josef Koudelka's reputation—Gypsies.

I hadn't intended to buy this because I already have the original. But Stan B. writes to tell me that I need it anyway. He says the reproduction in the new edition is far superior to the original, and that there are many (49) new pictures—the added photos every bit as good as the 'first batch,' according to him.

Discount for hyperbole if you must, allowing for the fact that Koudelka ranks #1 among my all-time favorite photographers in the World ever; but this is as close to a must-have as photo books get. I'm sure I will have more to say about the new edition, and how it compares to the original, after my copy arrives.

I would say his best book is this one, but good luck getting that.

The new Gypsies is from Steidl, so Steidlimbo* looms. You have been warned.

Amazon link
Amazon U.K.
Our page for other links
Book Depository

Mike
(Thanks to Stan)

* Steidl has only one press and runs it around the clock. When editions sell out, they have to await their turn for reprinting, and sometimes that never happens. Availability is therefore always dicey with Steidl titles. Sometimes there are plenty of copies; sometimes there just aren't. Sometimes there aren't for a while and then there are; sometimes the opposite. You just can never be sure.

For example, it appears that Ernst Haas: Color Correction, which we were talking about just the other day, has already entered Steidlimbo. Possibly helped along by us, I must admit.

UPDATE: To clarify—the new Gypsies is being published by Aperture in the U.S. and Thames & Hudson in the U.K., but in both cases it's printed by Steidl at Number 4 Düstere Strasse in Göttingen, which in turn means that the hazard of potential Steidlimbo pertains. Sorry for any confusion I caused by not making this clear earlier.

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Photo by Iain McKell, from the series "The New Gypsies"

Featured Comment by Mark Seel: "If you like Gypsies, you should check out 'The New Gypsies' by Iain McKell. These travelers are from the British Isles, but they look pretty authentic. Interesting stuff from an up-and-coming photographer."

Featured Comment by Kirk Tuck: "Absolutely my favorite documentary photographer of all time. I love Gypsies and will buy this edition just because I've worn out the previous one. Good call. Thanks for the heads up."

Sporting Note (OT)

TOP Sportswire—Just in case you don't follow tennis (and who doesn't not follow tennis these days? Even I don't, and I try), you have an opportunity to watch history in the making this afternoon, if you happen not to be otherwise occupied at 4 p.m. Eastern Time.

Novak Djokovic is having a year of years.

As Sports Illustrated puts it: "Nadal is all that stands between Djokovic and one of the greatest individual seasons in tennis history, a campaign that would rank favorably with Rod Laver in 1969, Jimmy Connors in 1974, John McEnroe in 1984 and Roger Federer in 2006. The 24-year-old Serb is 63-2 with nine titles and can become just the sixth man to win three majors in the same year, joining such esteemed company as Laver, Connors, Mats Wilander, Federer and Nadal."*

Novak Djokovic. Photo from his official website.

His comeback against Federer on Saturday was one of the greatest in the history of the game, against one of the greatest players in the game. Down two sets, Djokovic (it's pronounced "Jock-oh-vitch" by Serbians and "joke-oh-vitch" by Anglophone announcers) came back, then faced down two match points with Federer serving. Awesome. Epic. Barely believable. (Of course, I missed it. And I meant to watch.)

It's never a foregone conclusion against the great Spaniard, of course, but Djokovic has beaten Nadal five straight this year, all in tournament finals. It's as close to being owned as Nadal has ever been. A Nadal victory today—as astonishing as this might sound—would be essentially an upset. He has a lot to prove; if he does it, that will be something to see too.

Worth watching today you have the chance. An athlete having this kind of year doesn't happen very often in any sport.

In the U.S., it's on CBS.

Mike

*This seems to be wrong, now that I think of it. Don Budge won the Grand Slam in 1938. Laver did it twice, which I guess is covered by naming him once, but it still doesn't seem right to lump him in with the group that has won three majors without saying "at least" in front of "three majors," since the Grand Slam consists of winning all four majors. So why no love for Budge? Because he was an amateur? That was the thing to be in those days.

UPDATE: CBS is not even airing it in my market. I now officially hate my CBS affiliate.

Have to watch it online, which is annoying because I don't quite have the bandwidth. Must get cable...and cable modem....

UPDATE #2: Djokovic won, 6-2, 6-4, 6-7 (3-7), 6-1. Very curious final. Sort of a redux of Wimbledon, which followed the same pattern. Djokovic completely dominated in the first two sets, then Nadal fought ferociously and took the third to a tiebreaker, which he won handily. At about that time Dkojovic started having trouble with a strained muscle in his back, getting massages on the changeover and needing a medical timeout. With Djokovic on the ropes and Nadal resurgent, you would have thought that the fourth set would have been Nadal's, or at least close. Not so. Djokovic broke him early, and then again later, and won easily. By the final games Nadal had essentially given up, to a degree I've seldom seen, standing flat-footed while watching Djokovic's passing shots.

Which made it quite awkward when the interviewer after the game opened with some canned bull about how Nadal never gives up no matter what...odd in that we had just watched him give up. Makes you wonder which match the interviewer had been watching.

I have to believe Nadal just doesn't think he can win against Djokovic. He's 0-6 against Djokovich this year, all in finals. Given how dominant Nadal has looked at times over the years—like nothing can beat him—this is pretty amazing.

I ended up watching the match online, which was fine—the early stop-and-start bandwidth problems eventually disappeared. The big problem were the horrible announcers, who were pretty awful, blustering and blathering on and on with ridiculous comments, seemingly half of which were wrong. Where's Bud Collins when you need him? (Which reminds me, I don't care for NBC much, either.)

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Sony A900, Part the First

I'd like to mention that it is truly a pleasure to work with my friend Peter on his occasional postings here. The response we got from yesterday's essays—the written one as well as the picture essay—has been very gratifying.

Meanwhile, on that subject, there's an interesting article about another famous 9/11 picture, the troubling "Falling Man," here. Zach Bagnall sent me this. It's the first time I've seen other shots from the sequence.

But 9/11/11 is over; onward to today's back-to-life-as-normal postings.

You might have noticed that I, uh, am not really doing camera reviews any more. (Points gun at own foot; BANG! Not a very smart thing, given the main subject of this site. There's a reason for it, though, which I will get around to explaining one day.)

In any event, I'd rather just use the cameras and talk about what comes to mind as I go. Kind of like I did recently with the Ricoh GXR.

Next up, I'll be using a Sony A900 for a while, which means it's fine that I'm not writing a formal review, as the A900 is now officially Old, capital O, having been introduced about thirty years ago. (Expressed in digital years, which are even worse than dog years.) It's still a perfectly viable camera, it's just that it's a known quantity to the Netizens and hence nobody will be Googling "Sony A900 review." So I'm safe.

Taken out on Road DT, west of town, night before last, looking west, 7:08 p.m.

Same spot, looking east, a few minutes later, 7:21 p.m.

I had to cheat on the second shot. It was quite dark by then and the right exposure for the ground and sky—I was going for just the right shade of dark rosy glow in the sky, which in the big file is marvelous—wouldn't hold the moon, which was too bright by that time. It's just a featureless white blob (without, however, the usual fringe of purple, and that was good). So I went out last night in the St. Mary's church parking lot and snagged a donor moon to chop in.

The donor moon—deliberately blurred.

Annoyingly, I had to blur the donor moon. Know why? Because my ratty old Konica-Minolta 28–75mm ƒ/2.8, temporarily the only lens at TOP World Headquarters that will fit the A900, won't focus at infinity. Well, it will, but it will turn straight past infinity when it's set on manual focus, and it's difficult to see where exactly infinity is in the semi-dark. (Sigh.) So to match the slightly soft horizon line in the second picture I had to blur the donor moon to match.

Not sure why I bothered, as I am not going to print the picture. Too pretty. I have trouble taking my landscapes seriously; there are too many people out there who are too much better at them than I am.

I superimposed it directly over the real moon, but I know those of you with long memories will bring this up whenever I get sanctimonious in the future about documentary purism. I know Oren G. will never forget this, for one, because Oren never forgets anything.

First observation re the Sony A900: it is truly a pleasure to work on these huge files in ACR. I love that. (Second observation: my computer needs more memory.)

No place I'd rather live
We have had some absolutely gorgeous days around here in the past couple of weeks. Wisconsin's other three seasons are ordinary: summers are intermittently hot and surprisingly muggy, white-skied with water-laden air; springtimes are rightly known as "two weeks of mud between winter and summer"; and the winters, though periodically beautiful, are overly long. But autumn—fall—fall is Wisconsin's glory season. The light, the smell of the air, the clouds, all the lovely foliage colors at and around the warm end of the spectrum—it's just...wondrous. Wisconsin weather just comes alive at this time of year; for the next two and a half months, there's no place on Earth I'd rather live.

Too bad it will never last. Winter always claims it in the end. But getting there is nice, indeed.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Paddy C: "Your seasons (or should I say your view of them) are a lot like ours here in Ottawa. I could live in an eternal Autumn and never grow tired of it. I even like November!"

Featured Comment by Steve G., Mendocino: "Yes, you do do camera reviews. Their style and content are different from those of the other websites and/or magazines covering photography, and that is precisely why I read and value them. Keep doing them—or not doing them, if you insist."

The Thousand-Yard Stare

By Peter Turnley

At 6:30 a.m. on September 12th, 2001, in the rubble of Ground Zero, I saw a fireman sitting alone, looking into the distance with an unfocused gaze. This was a look I had seen before in war zones around the world, when someone’s life compass has been shaken so profoundly that all sense of direction has become confused. They call it the thousand-yard stare. As I made several photographs of this man he looked right through me, oblivious to my presence.

I thought about the man in this picture for many years afterward. Somehow I often thought that in his gaze, I might find some clue to understanding better my own feelings and confusions related to what I witnessed inside the perimeter of Ground Zero during the night of September 11th, 2001.

Ten years ago today
On the morning of 9/11, I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center towers, the only clear thought that I had was that I needed to get there. My mind and body went on autopilot. I had to get to New York. I gathered my cameras, film, and some clothes and ran out the door and headed out.

On the way to New York City, I received a phone call from the girlfriend of my twin brother David, who is also a working photojournalist. She tearfully told me she had not heard from David for hours. Knowing him as we did, we both knew he would have gone to the center of the action. She feared the worst.

It was of course very difficult to get into the city as all of the bridges into Manhattan had been closed. It was a NATO press pass from covering the war in Kosovo that got me across a bridge from the Bronx into Manhattan. Once in, I got as close as I could to Ground Zero and then got out of my car and walked. As I walked, I encountered more and more smoke, mud, and water. At Broadway, a river of ambulances and fire trucks headed south. Suddenly there appeared a huge sprawling of mangled iron and steel and smoke and fire coming out of the ground, all clearly delineated by the night-lights.

There I encountered an intimidating police line. I didn’t want to cause a problem for anyone; I didn’t want to be in the way. So I ducked under an awning of a building, where I stayed for half an hour. Then a person wearing a fire hat and jacket with two cameras around his neck walked through the police barricade and came in my direction. I asked him if he had been making photographs; he said he had. He rolled his eyes and said with emotion that he had never seen anything like it. I introduced myself as a photojournalist. He looked at me and said, "you need to go make photographs." His words gave me courage, and I walked slowly right through the line of police without anyone saying anything.

I've never known who that person was.

I spent all night at Ground Zero, and I made photographs all night long. At one point, a nurse walked by wearing a mask. She looked at me and said, "Baby, you need a mask," and she reached to take hers off to give it to me. I didn't take it, but I will never forget the generosity of her gesture.

At about 5:30 a.m. I inadvertently fell asleep. I had sat down to rest for a short while in a building directly adjacent to Ground Zero. When my eyes opened there was light and I looked at my watch. It was 6:15. I walked downstairs and walked out into the rubble. There was still a lot of smoke, and fires were burning in all directions. One of the first people I saw was the fireman sitting in the rubble by himself looking into the distance. I raised my camera to make a photograph of his gaze, only a short distance from him. I shot several frames.

At ten o'clock that morning I felt that it was time for me to leave the zone. It wasn't easy. I walked a long way trying to find a place where I could leave the area. Eventually I came across a barricade. On the other side there were dozens of photographers, all trying to get into the zone—and one of the first people I saw among them was my brother David. We hugged; he hadn't even known that I was in New York. He had arrived at Ground Zero very early the previous day. From the look in his eyes and his expression, he didn’t need to describe further how intense his experience had been.

The fireman gets a name
Then, in 2004, out of the blue, I received an email from the fireman's girlfriend. That was the first time I learned his name—Sal Isabella.

She wrote that my photograph was the only proof anyone had that Sal, a fireman from Selden, New York, had been at Ground Zero, because he had never been able to speak to anyone about his experience. Linda wrote, "This photograph depicts what Sal tries to put into words but cannot."

I had promised to send Linda and Sal a print of my photograph, and despite my good intentions, got tied up traveling and forgot to do so. I received a second message from Linda months later telling me that she and Sal had broken up—but she asked if could I still send a print. But by the third time I heard from her, they'd gotten married! That time I made sure to have a very nice enlargement made and sent it to Sal and Linda.

By now, I felt a strong need to speak to the man you see in the photograph, so I asked Linda if I could call. When she and I spoke for the first time I thanked her for getting in touch, and asked to speak to Sal. She said to me that Sal couldn’t speak about that day and night, but that he would say hello. She also mentioned that Sal rode a Harley and that they had seen on my website that I had photographed Sturgis and Daytona for Harley, and that this might be a subject he’d enjoy speaking about.

A few seconds later a gruff, deep voice came on the phone. I said, “Hi, Sal, this is Peter, the photographer who made that photograph of you that day at Ground Zero." I told him I'd had a lot of emotions about spending that night there, and that I thought it might help me to know what he was thinking when I took that photograph.

I heard the man on the other end of the phone begin to sob, and this went on for quite a while. Then he gathered himself, and in a clear voice told me that he had lost one of his close friends there that day, Nick Chiafalo, a fellow fireman who had gone up into one of the towers and perished when it came down. He told me that he had arrived at Ground Zero during the day of 9/11 and spent the night looking everywhere for survivors.

He said had never gotten over not being able to find or help his friend Nick.

I said to him, "Sal, you need to know you are a great man and you should be so proud of everything you did." Again, he began to cry. A few minutes later, I said, "Hey, Sal, I hear you ride a Harley. What do you ride?" There was a gentle laugh and we spent a few minutes speaking about Harleys. Before we said goodbye, we agreed it would be very nice if we could meet.

Second encounter
Every year for the past five years, on the evening before the anniversary of 9/11, Sal and I speak on the phone. Every time we do, he invites me to come to Ground Zero on the anniversary so we can meet in person, share a drink, and honor of the memory of those who were lost that day. But I've never been able to go. Each year until this one I've been working overseas on that date.

Two weeks ago I met with Sal at Ground Zero, the first time we have seen each other face to face since that day ten years ago today when the picture at the top of this post was taken. As we hugged and greeted each other, Sal repeated many times, "this is a good day, this is a good day."

There was so much I wanted to ask him, but upon seeing him for the first time after so many years, I didn’t feel a strong need that we speak much—I felt comfort and joy at simply seeing him. After some initial words exchanged, before going to dinner together, I asked Sal if I could make a photograph of him at a memorial along the wall in front of Ground Zero. When he saw that tribute, Sal teared up and said, "those are my brothers there. I should have been with them."

Salvatore Isabella, Ground Zero, New York City, August 23rd, 2011.

I didn’t feel like a photographer with a subject at all. I felt like I was with a brother with whom I didn’t have to say much to be understood and to understand.

Sal and I went to dinner at a New York restaurant. As we were being seated, I asked for a different table, and Sal turned to me and said, "it doesn’t matter, Pete. The only thing that counts is that we're here together." It was true. Over dinner we shared with each other very sincerely and intimately the ups and downs of our lives these past ten years.

Sal is not doing very well physically, I'm sorry to say. He has serious respiratory problems resulting from having participated in recovery efforts for two weeks following 9/11, and several serious ailments caused by his time at Ground Zero. He doesn’t hide the fact that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder he thinks is particularly related to losing his friend Nick and other fellow firemen and citizens that day.

A few days ago, we spoke on the phone again, and we both commented on how wonderful it had been to see each other. At one point during the conversation, Sal got mixed up momentarily and called me Nick, the name of the friend he lost on 9/11. I didn’t deserve such an honor. Thank you Salvatore Isabella. You are my hero. Thank you to so many people! God bless.

Peter Turnley
New York
Sept. 11, 2011

All photographs © Peter Turnley/Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

To see a memorial portfolio of Peter's photographs, "Remembering 9/11," taken on September 11th and 12th, 2001, and the days following (including several never before published) please click here. —MJ

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Featured Comment by Bob Donnelly: "Peter, as your image of Sal the day after 9/11 is displayed on my wall at home I feel this wonderfully written update helps me understand more fully what Sal is going through. It has been three years since I attended your Paris workshop and that image I brought home had so many unanswered questions that now I feel fulfilled. I am still the safety officer on the local fire department and cannot fathom the horror that Sal and all the others witnessed. Thank you."

Featured Comment by Linda Isabella: "Peter, again we meet, albeit online. I regret that I did not accompany Sal, as his wife, for your meeting in Manhattan to share in that experience. I have also wanted to meet you in person since I called you that day in 2004. When I first came across that photo you took of Sal on 9/12/2001, it moved me like nothing else ever did. They say 'a picture paints a thousand words.' You stumbled on a moment in history that sad morning and captured the agony, not only in Sal's heart, but in everyone's.

"I may have shared this with you before, but you express yourself in photographs; I express myself in poetry.

Now I Feel American

By Linda Isabella

I never owned a flag before,
I never flew it proud,
I never felt the urge before
To sing our anthem loud.
It's not that I don't love this land,
But I never knew the pride,
And I never felt the pain of war
Or loved a soldier who had died.
It never crossed my mind to fear
That freedom could desist,
I never thought my heart would clench
Into this raging fist.
I never worried, never thought
That I would see the day
When hate would turn incarnate
To blow liberty away.
When airplanes in our friendly skies
Are cryptic, lethal bombs
That defile and annihilate,
And rape our nation's calm.
I've assumed that peace is guaranteed,
That justice never fails,
That my children won't see acts of war,
That liberty prevails.
But evil slashed America
And took it unawares;
On a sunny, still September day
A country screamed its prayers.
And as we reel from tragedy,
As every heart unites,
America will stand again
In defense of human rights.
Now I feel American
Like I never felt before,
Pure blooded, warm American
In a country I adore.
Now there's a flag pinned to my jacket,
A flag outside my door,
And a flag that flies within my heart
For freedom evermore.

"Thank you for being such a devoted friend to my husband and for recording the horrible tragedy we will never forget."

Apertures Made Simple (Part II)

...Or, "Sometimes it's not so simple." :-)

The basic rule of thumb I put forth in Part I of this article—to use the three middle apertures to get the best optical quality from your lens, whatever that range happens to be for the particular format you choose to use—was one of the very first things I learned in photography. My father gave me a Konica Autoreflex T3 for my 16th birthday, and the T3 had shutter-priority AE—you set the shutter speed with the shutter-speed dial and the camera set the aperture itself according to its meter reading. The viewfinder featured an indicator needle protruding in from one side and a vertical row of apparently meaningless (to me) aperture numbers. I just didn't know where the needle ought to be. My father had a professional photographer friend, the late Arnie Gore, and Arnie told me to keep the needle in the middle—to make the needle fall on the eight, if possible, or one number on either side of it, except when the shutter speed got down below 1/30th. Useful advice for a novice like I was at the time. I followed it for years.

Of course, as you might know, there are situations when "use the middle apertures" isn't optimal advice.

The first, most compelling reason is if you're doing some sort of specialty work. Portraits seldom look best when the lens is well stopped down; you'll usually want to experiment with wider apertures for portraits. At the other extreme, macro work often requires smaller apertures because depth-of-field is related to subject distance—the closer you are to what you're photographing, the less depth-of-field there appears to be. So macro photographers often stop down more. These are just two examples. There are many more such situations.

Next in importance is when you'd seeking specific visual effects that you think a particular picture needs. Two examples might be shooting wide open to get lots of bokeh and characterful aberrations, or stopping down more to get more of a scene in focus front-to-back.

Those two things have a heavy degree of overlap, of course. When a fashion photographer routinely photographs models on 35mm or full-frame digital with a 300mm lens wide open, it qualifies as both a specialty application and as a desire for a certain "look."

But purely in optical terms, too, different lenses are different.

For one thing, slower lenses usually clean up faster than faster lenses, for a given focal length. A 50mm ƒ/2.8 macro lens might reach its optimum and be diffraction limited* one and a half stops down, whereas a 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens might not clean up adequately until you reach ƒ/5.6—four stops. Which puts the lie to the old rule that you should stop your lens down "two or three stops" for the best results. Usually that advice works—just not always.

Almost no lenses are "diffraction limited,"** per se, but I did use a Leica 90mm ƒ/2.8 M lens once that reached optimum performance one stop down. And it was very good wide open. A lens like that can effectively be used at any aperture, with different apertures preferred only on the basis of your desired depth of field.

Then there are those dogs that just suck at every aperture. Fortunately, those are becoming much more rare these days too, as computer-aided design has become the norm and quality control has become mostly a solved problem. To the extent that some lenses are still of poorer quality than the best ones, that property can be said to be partly "designed in"—usually, of course, in the pursuit of cheaper selling prices.

Lenses of radically different focal length will have different characteristics as regards the usability of various apertures.

Even the very best lenses are still a mass of compromise and limitation. One very highly corrected lens I used once—it was a 100mm Zeiss Hasselblad lens —had a decidedly pentagonal aperture shape and alarmingly poor bokeh. Out-of-focus foliage was a bizarre sea of bright pentagons! So much for perfection; there's really no such thing as a perfect lens. (Just maybe one that's perfect for you.)

Know your apertures
The best thing, of course, is to know your lenses. I've always advocated using as few lenses as you possibly can—four at most, two ideally, and one if you're hard-core. One reason is that the fewer lenses you use, the better you'll get to know them.

I do sypathize with zoom lens users, who have an exponentially tougher time getting to know their lenses, because they have two variables to contend with instead of just one. With fixed-focal-length lenses, which I prefer, all you have to do is learn how the lens behaves at each aperture. With a zoom, you have to learn each aperture at each focal length. No wonder many casual amateurs and occasional photographers never do learn what's going on.

How a lens performs wide open and where it reaches a practical optimum can be important considerations. One of the better lenses I ever used was the tiny Fujinon 60mm in the Fuji GF645s. Unfortunately, the full stop or widest aperture was useless because its optical quality was so poor at that aperture. It really needed to be closed down one stop—two was better—to be used. Because it was a slow ƒ/4 lens, this was a serious limitation. I ended up using that camera a lot on a tripod—which was somewhat conceptually dissonant, since the camera was a small, portable rangefinder. The lens sure was beautiful at ƒ/8 and ƒ/11, though.

Note, too, that when I say a lens is optically best at its middle aperture, I'm not just talking about the point where it reaches highest certer resolution. Remember what I said last time: "A lens image is always a balance of many properties. Always." So center resolution might be best at ƒ/4, but is falloff? Is corner sharpness? Is evenness across the field? That magic middle aperture is just where the best balance of all qualities occurs.

As ever, being ever the empiricist, I'd advise you to learn your lens by looking. Now that pixel-peeping on our monitors is so easy, it's not a lot of work to shoot some scenes "up and down the aperture range" and simply look at the results. Don't get anal about this or that property—the absolute resolution in the center of the field or the precise qualities of the bokeh. Just look at examples and see what you like and don't like, what's acceptable to you and what isn't. You'll eventually get a feel for where the problems are showing up visually, and thus you'll begin to know when you'll want to use certain apertures or avoid others.

I groused the other day about how all cameras seem to be getting "good enough" these days. (Only a dyed-in-the-wool gearhead could grouse about such a thing!) But no matter how good lenses get, a really fine lens can still justifiably be a photographer's prize possession. And a lens you know well is almost always finer than one you don't, when it comes down to pictures.

Mike

*The term denotes the point in the aperture range at which diffraction becomes the aberration that degrades the picture the most. At wider apertures, other aberrations predominate and overwhelm the smaller effects of diffraction.

**When the lens itself is said to be diffraction limited, it means it's diffraction limited when wide open. These lenses do exist, but they're very rare, especially among consumer lenses for pictorial photography.

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Featured Comment by marcin wuu: Speaking of Autoreflex—Mike, I think you might find this image to your liking (it's of my son, as of now age 7):

"(And, in reference one of your previous articles, it was shot with sony A850—the best digital 35mm camera, save the A900 ofcourse :))"

Mike replies: Only cool kids shoot Konica!

OT: A Brief Note to the Still-Suffering

At every AA or NA meeting, a word of sympathy or prayer is usually spoken on behalf of the "still-suffering" alcoholic or addict—those who haven't had their eyes opened yet and are not yet trying to kick their habit.

Today is my 21st anniversary clean and sober. I got out of detox and rehab at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on September 9th, 1990, so September 10th, 1990, was Day One of being sober on my own.

If you're not there yet and you need to be, get there—go to a meeting. Not tomorrow; today. If you've been trying, keep trying. I know how hard it is. At a meeting you'll find a lot of others who know how hard it is too.

It's worth it. I used to say that being an addict and/or a drunk just tilts the graph-line of your life downward—things get worse and worse, no matter who you are, no matter how strong you think you ought to be. Quitting isn't a panacea—it won't automatically make you rich and strong and loved and secure and respected and happy and content with your lot in life. All it does is gradually tilt the graph line back upwards again...and things get slowly better and better.

It's really true. It really does. I'm living proof.

Mike

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Nikon Mirrorless Announcement Imminent?

Nikon Rumors is reporting that it has confirmed Nikon press events in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, Romania, and China, all for September 21st.

The World's Best Nikon Site, as usual, has a trenchant analysis of the possibilities: "Nikon followers are waiting for four things from Nikon: the D4, the D700 follow up, the D300s follow up, and the mirrorless system." ByThom.com analyzes the potential ramifications of each possibility with typical thoroughness on its "Quick Links & Comments" page. There's no permalink for this specific news item, so you might have to scroll down or go looking for this; the header is "The Strange September Situation."

Meanwhile, the SSS has resulted in one of the most perfectly hilarious press releases I've seen in 23 years in this business, good enough to commemorate in full. Titled "Comments on Media Reports about Nikon's imaging product," it reads—in its entirety—"Nikon understands that some article appeared in the media regarding Nikon's imaging product. Please note that Nikon has made no announcement in this regards."

I totally love this. They're confirming that baseless media speculation is baseless(!).

Good to know.

ByThom puts the skewer through that, though. "...Almost no matter what Nikon does later this month, they won't have correctly managed the perceptions of enough of their current and potential customers."

As if tsunamis weren't bad enough. It's a tough world out there, for sure.

Mike
(Thanks to Vlatko, TOP's Croatian Editor-at-Large)

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Featured Comment by Thom Hogan: "It's even worse than it first appears. I've discussed this with four different U.S. dealers so far. They all agree: the one product Nikon should announce this month and ship prior to Christmas is the D300s follow up. Their second choice would typically be the D700 follow up, though there's a bit of disagreement that enters at that position. Mirrorless was the third choice of three of the dealers.

"The (good) dealers know what they can sell the most of. None of them tell me that they can sell a lot of mirrorless cameras. Heck, those that already sell them here in the U.S. mostly report modest sales at best.

"This brings up the same thing that happened with automobiles: the Japanese aren't seeing the external markets as different than their home market, and that's going to cause them grief. It certainly is causing them to sell less than they could.

"Every now and again one of the companies takes a chance at something out of the box and it either succeeds (e.g. X100), in which case we get a lot of copying, or it doesn't (e.g. Sony R1), it which case everyone nods to themselves that it's a good thing that they aren't doing things out of the box ;~).

"The U.S. market will gobble up about 50 million of the ~150 million cameras made in 2011. Yet most of the products made aren't optimized for the desires of the U.S. user base. Canon, Nikon, Sony, et. al, need design centers in the U.S. (and probably Europe). They need to learn to take base technology platforms and optimize them for the local markets, à la Toyota and Nissan in the '90s."

The Answer to 'That' Question

Sometimes it's worthwhile to have a stock answer prepared and ready for those annoying questions life sometimes presents you with. For example, my house is full of books. Anyone with a house full of books has been asked the inevitable question: "Have you read all of these?" The real answer, of course, is no, because half the appeal of books is promise. But the question is annoying anyway.

My friend the poet Jim Schley suggested the best answer, and I believe he got it from somebody else (I'll have to ask). What you say is, "...And so many more." I adopted that right away.

So anyway, when somebody says, "That's a good picture. You must have a really nice camera," what I'm going to say is, "I do. And I know how to use it, too."

It's good to be prepared.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Julie: "I'm sure you've heard the famous story about Heifetz. After a concert when he was told his violin sounded great he held it to his ear and said, 'Funny, I don't hear anything.'"

Amazing Photograph of Saturn

When I get down to first principles regarding photography, it's that I love seeing things, and photography lets me see more things than I can see with my own eyes. One thing none of us will ever see in person that's really just astonishingly cool surfaced this morning, and my inbox is full of readers remarking on it—it's this picture of a back-illuminated Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini robotic orbiter.

The high-res online version is here at nasa.gov, and if you like this, you might like this short composite "flyby" video presentation—"No CGI, NO [sic] 3D models."

Mike
(Thanks to Eolake and others)

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Featured Comment by Stephan Summerer: "While I agree that NASA is the biggest and probably the most important space agency in the world it is important to note, and give credit to all, that the 'Cassini-Huygens' robotic orbiter is actually the work of a collaboration between NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and ASI (Italian Space agency). Disclaimer, I am actually Canadian but have lived here in Italy for 10 years."

Featured Comment by kevin: "The resolution of the Cassini cameras? 1024x1024 pixels, yes, that's right, one screamin' megapixel. They're also fixed focus since all the targets are at infinity. Remember, its not the camera.  :-)"

Featured Comment by David Bostedo: "As the writeup for the image on NASA APOD points out, this is also a picture of the Earth. It's the small dot in the upper left quadrant of the rings. I'm proud to say I work for the space group in the company (BAE Systems) that made the processor boards controlling Cassini (and a lot of other NASA missions). Needless to say, I look at APOD quite a lot, and I'm always astounded at the images that NASA generates."

Make a Trip to TOP on Sunday (and Other Blog Notes)

I've been working on a special post for Sunday that I still find moving even after having read it several times. I hope you'll stop in and reflect with us on that bitter day a decade ago. Good, good stuff from Peter Turnley, who spent a surreal night at Ground Zero in the wreckage of the towers on that fateful occasion.

In more mundane blog notes, Ctein reports a grand total of 155 orders during the recent Print Sale, 35% of which were international. A total of 250 prints were sold, more than half of them the Apollo/Soyuz picture. The least popular picture was the cinder cone trail at Lassen. He might have more to add in the comments to this post, so check that.

He started shipping prints on Tuesday and sends more every day. You'll get an email from him when your prints are en route, and you should receive your email by the end of September at the latest.

I'm still considering having a print sale of some of my own work, which is frankly quite difficult for me. I've never seen TOP to be for glorifying my work in any way; I'm a lifetime hobbyist like many of you, and I don't see how anyone would enjoy my pictures any more than anybody else's. The interesting thing, though, is that I have several pictures that are unique prints that previously could not have been duplicated. Eric Luden's Digital Silver Imaging enabled Mike Mitchell, who I knew of in Washington, to finally print his too-thin negatives from his shoots of the very early Beatles. They literally couldn't be printed before now. And Eric's DSI would also provide a means for me to reproduce several unique prints of my own, the negatives for which are long since lost, such as my portrait of Sally Mann. I think that might add some meaningful technical interest to a possible sale offering.

I'm considering it, still. And will keep you posted, as ever.

Mike

P.S. Oh, and I'm over my indigestion. Thanks for putting up with me this morning. :-)

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Comical

Camera Comics? PetPixel found these. I'm glad I didn't—find paper ones, I mean—because my house is already full of stuff I thought I just had to buy but really don't have any use for. Still, these are cool, I hafta admit.

Circa 1944–46, which explains the wartime theme.

Mike
(Thanks to Ben Ng)

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Featured Comment by karamanoğlu: "Hey, wait a minute! The guy on the left is a Brad Washburn wannabe."

Gimmicks We Don't Like

I was going to do a post called "Gimmicks We Like," but then I realized we don't like any gimmicks.

Mike, Curmudgeon-in-Training

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Featured Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "Hmmm; 'A trick or device intended to attract attention, publicity, or business' (Google). Some other definitions seem to emphasize that the technique in question is somehow dishonest, which makes rather a difference in whether it's a bad thing or not."

Mike replies: David, I was thinking more in terms of gimmicks such as extreme HDR, Leica-skin stickers for your iPhone, modern tintypes, 3D, aperture-ring bracelets and lens coffee mugs, auto-retouching programs, selective color like the red cloak in Schindler's List, etc., etc. Nothing sinister.

But of course I do like some of these gimmicky things. Just some. When I don't have indigestion and/or am feeling curmudgeonly.

DD-B responds: "I like the revival in old processes (Pt/Pd, as well as tintype and so forth) in principle, but I have yet to see anything I like much in practice. Maybe it's because doing that stuff is a gimmick today?

"Shot my first 3D photos last weekend, we'll see how that works out (with a Nishika 8000; 4-lens, for lenticular prints; snap3d.com in Toronto still makes such prints). I have a friend whose family is into 3D to the extent that she has Viewmaster reels of photos from her wedding, which I think is very cool.

"And I like my Nikon 24–70/2.8 mug, too, so there!  (I like it so much I don't use it; hmmmm.)"

Featured Comment by Patrick Dodds: "There seems to be an Internet trend towards declaring face detection a gimmick that is liked...."

Featured Comment by Doug Reilly: "Face detection is not a gimmick in a society with millions of closed-circuit security cameras. I call it a scary development in the science of surveillance."

Featured Comment by emptyspaces: "I try to dislike 'sweep panorama,' but I can't. Gimme that gimmick, please."

UPDATE: Oh, duh. I forgot body-integral image stabilization. That's a gimmick I don't just like, I love. —Mike

Does Equipment Matter? (Indigestion)

This morning, B&H announced some rebates on Canon Rebels. And I found myself composing a sardonic little notice to the effect that 96% of photographers could probably do everything they needed or wanted to do just fine with a Rebel, a 3100, or a K-r—and 96% of the other 4% could get by with one of those cameras if they had to, if that's what they had, if it was that or nothing. Only a few specialists might be left wanting.

Then Alexey M. sent me a link to a little thread on Rangefinder Forum in which intrepid participants belly into the fray and attempt to match sets of M9 pictures to the lenses that took them—without much success. 'Twasn't the fairest of fights, but the inevitable conclusion has a certain justness to it—that any of the four would effectively do as well as any of the others. True.

And I found myself hankering for an A900 again*, and yet again troubled by what lens I'd use with it, and thinking that maybe I might be perfectly happy with my old Konica-Minolta (née Tamron) 28–75mm ƒ/2.8.** And the fact is, I probably would be.

We have a long history in digital of evaluating "quality"—but that's partly because quality was highly variable in the early days and progress was rapid. I had great fun with a Sony F-707, but I certainly don't have fun wrestling with those nasty files today, if all I care about is a decent print.

But those days are gone. Any of the three entry-level DSLRs named in the first paragraph better the best we had, for any price, when the F-707 was new. It wasn't that long ago, but a lot has changed since then. MTBTI (mean time before trade-in) is rising, and more and more photographers are content with deliberately less-than-state-of-the-art solutions, such as the various mirrorless offerings. It's now the era of Good Enough.

I'm sure this is a transitory state I'm in this morning, akin to indigestion, which I also have. I'll come to my senses tomorrow and get back to...well, caring.

It not like I haven't traversed this question before.

Mike

*When it comes to the A900 I'm very much like my mother's late long-haired silver-dapple miniature dachshund, Wolfgang, who would scratch and bark and whine and worry when his tennis ball went under the radiator, until he'd drive you so crazy that you'd stop what you were doing and go over and get it out for him. He would take the ball in his mouth and trot around happily for a while, then place it on the floor next to radiator and nudge it with his nose so that it rolled underneath the radiator again where he couldn't get it. At which point he would begin scratching, barking, whining, and worrying again. We're both very annoying, Wolfgang with his tennis ball, and me with the A900.

**There's now a version in Sony cladding. Incidentally, this lens is very nice on APS-C, so it will probably be lovely on the A77 if you don't mind the longish zoom range. See, there, I'm starting to recover.

Featured Comment by Sumanta Chandra: "I am one of those persons who certainly fall into 'equipment junkie' category—however narrow the definition. Every time I got interested in a particular camera/lens, I would head through the 'holy' Google path of knowledge and enlightenment.

"Invariably, I would step through the same process:

• The strengths of the potential camera/lens would bring xyz benefits.
• This purchase will finally close all my equipment decision loops.
• I will never need to look at any classifieds ever.

"On hindsight, the Google path lead me deeper and deeper into the 'have all*, know much, do little' (mixture of decision paralysis and over equipment confidence) quagmire.

"Having bought the X100 (equipment junkie say first person to own one in India), things have changed drastically.

"I carry the camera casually almost daily, on weekends it is two M3s with Tri-X and T-Max and the X100.

"I shoot a lot more, and review my photos more diligently from content rather than IQ.

"I have almost stopped looking at classifieds altogether.

"I am not a photo professional, it is a pure hobby.

"Moral of the story: For me the X100 has been like a rehabilitation. Equipment really did matter.

"No Fuji did not gift me one, I had to buy it with hard earned cash."

*On last count, my equipment collection was close to 1000 pro camera/lenses.

Featured Comment by Jeff: "I shoot with the goal to make a pic good enough to print; then I evaluate the final print. The switch to digital a few years back did not change the goal, nor the basis for evaluation. Screen shots don't matter.

"Toward this end, I choose a camera based on a few key attributes. First and foremost I must like the way the camera allows me to see and frame the picture, then to focus manually and accurately. These old eyes only like optical finders; that eliminates a host of choices. Then it must be robust enough, and ergonomically satisfying enough, to carry everywhere and to easily use a few required manual controls. Finally the system must provide prime lenses that meet my shooting style and yield a high IQ for my sized prints. The rest just needs to not get in the way.

"That's how I ended up choosing the Leica M8.2. Does it matter that I chose this camera in lieu of others? Not to anyone but me. Would another camera better satisfy my needs and preferences? No need to bother; I'm shooting a lot and my prints are looking fine.

"Life is so easy when options don't muddle things."

Featured Comment by Kristin Oren: "I was glad you wrote "96% of photographers could probably do everything they needed or wanted to do just fine with a Rebel, a 3100, or a K-r—", because the K-r is what I bought on your recommendation! I love it and have a long way to go to know how to fully use it, but lucky for me the auto settings are really great. I've been taking lots of horse pictures, just for me, but just yesterday a friend asked if I could take some pictures of her horse and wants to pay me. So, I wondered, could I become a professional photographer with just a K-r? And here, I found the answer—yes! Two more questions. Is Lightroom good enough or do I really need the full Photoshop? And, what is the best crash course in photography out there?"

Mike replies: Hi Kris. I use Photoshop, but I now do about 95% everything in the wonderful Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) 6.0—which I believe is accessible from within Lightroom too, no? (I've never used Lightroom, so please forgive my ignorance.) I do think that Lightroom will serve for most purposes, based on the anecdotal evidence I've heard and read from its users. Maybe some of them will chime in in the Comments, although this post is getting a little old now and hence this will be seen by fewer people.

As for a crash course, hmm—tough question. The answers would be vastly different depending on your specific aims and goals. Since your preamble was to talk about your first paying job (congratulations on that, by the way), I'll make a leap that might be unwarranted and assume what you're talking about is learning how to be a professional...and the answer to that (still) is to assist. That is, you find someone who does exactly what you want to be doing, and offer to work for that person for very little money. In return you get to watch them work and observe how they run their business up close—which serves as a kind of apprenticeship. It's the traditional way for photographers to learn their trade, and if have clear goals and can identify a good person to work for, it's still the best way.

If you're just talking about a crash course in Lightroom, then I'd recommend Lynda.com.

Nobody Cares How Hard I Worked—But This Is Kinda Interesting

By Ctein

Once again I'm writing about that Apollo-Soyuz photograph that's part of last week's TOP print offering and was the subject of my column, "Nobody Cares How Hard You Worked." Indeed, I had to work quite hard to get this photo to look exactly the way I wanted, but who cares? That's my business and my problem. But why I wound up working that hard turns out to be most curious, and has raised a puzzle for which our best minds (well, me, Oren Grad, and Dave Polaschek) have no answer.

Intrigued? I hope so. Me, I'm gobsmacked.

Although I've been offering this photograph as a small digital print for a half dozen years, taking it up to 17x22" meant reworking it substantially. Of import was the rendering of the floodlight beams. In a small print, they are only something of an accent. They're what make the photograph unusual, but the eye doesn't spend a lot of time lingering on them; they're a framing device for the rocket.

In a large print, the aesthetic balance shifts considerably; one really notices the beams. And, well, truth is they were never rendered that well in the small prints. The tonality was harsh; the color and luminance changes abrupt. They didn't have the delicacy you'd expect of floodlight beams. but it worked fine in a small print. In the large print, I needed to get that delicacy or it just wasn't going to work.

No problem; moving shadow detail is routine. A little tweaking of a curves adjustment layer, a little playing around with a hue/saturation layer, some masking to limit the effects to the areas I wanted. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Except this time it didn't work. I spent two days and generated over two dozen test prints on my Epson 3880, using myriad adjustment layers of all sorts, trying to wrestle those dim blue beams into being well-behaved. No matter what I did, I never got results very far from figure 1, which is a scan of one of my test prints. What was truly bizarre is that on the monitor everything looked fine. Nice smooth gradients where I wanted them. In the prints, it was harsh and ugly. Now, I know better than most that WYSIWYG ["what you see is what you get" —Ed.] is a lie. The monitor doesn't look like the print. But it's usually some reasonable approximation.

1. This is a scan of a test print made with a custom profile. Observe how abruptly the floodlight beams fade out and change hue.

This wasn't even close. I was getting harsh print transitions such as if the colors were going out of gamut, but the gamut warnings were all saying it was fine. Be that as it may, the prints just wouldn't look anything like what was on the screen, and I couldn't figure out how to fake the values and colors to make the print look good.

After two days I gave up, set that photograph aside, and went to work on one of the others. Came back to it in two days and thought to myself, "Well, maybe there is a 'hole' in my profile." The thing about custom profiles is that they can't fix everything perfectly, and they emphasize fixing some colors better than others. Furthermore, printers will often have a sour spot in their color rendition somewhere down deep in the shadows where you won't usually notice. The Epson 2200, for example, was really bad about deep forest greens. After I got a well-made custom profile for it, it behaved beautifully.

Maybe the 3880 had a weak spot in the deep blues that I hadn't noticed before. I have the tools to deal with that; not only can I generate custom profiles, but I can hand the profiler specific photographs and tell it to make sure that the dominant colors in those photographs get extra special attention. And that's what I did.

The test print I ran out with my new, customized profile looked a bit different—but it didn't look any better! Okay, maybe my profiling system is broken. Let's try printing out the photograph using some of the Epson canned profiles that came with the printer.

They, too, looked a little different. And they were still all very wrong in fundamentally the same way.

At this point I'm starting to wonder if I might not have some kind of weird printer problem. When all the profiles print out bad in roughly the same way, no matter the source, that says it ain't the profiles. Let's get as much extraneous stuff out of the loop as possible and see what's going on. I turned off color management in Photoshop printing, telling it to let the printer manage the color. Then I turned off ColorSync in the Epson printer control panel and told it to use "Epson Color Controls" instead. That kept Mac OS from assigning a profile. I told the printer to use AdobeRGB color and let it loose. Now I'd get to see exactly what was wrong, unmassaged by custom profiles or Photoshop.

2. This is a scan of a test print made with printer-managed color.
Now the floodlight beams look great!

The print looked fabulous (figure 2). I got gorgeous, smooth, delicate gradients in the floodlight beams that looked just like what I was seeing on my monitor.

What the %$#@!!!

3. If you're having trouble seeing the differences between figures 1 and 2,
I've marked up this JPEG to show where there are harsh breaks
in the rendering in figure 1.

I have never, ever before in my life seen a situation where the standard, unmanaged printer driver did a better job of rendering tone and color than a good profiled workflow. Not even a little better, to boot. It was spectacularly better.

That's when I e-mailed Dave and Oren. I made a test file available to Oren, who also owns an Epson 3880 printer. He ran a couple of quick prints out, using one of his profiles and printer-managed color. He got essentially the same result I did. The printer made a good print, the profile made a lousy one. That was doubly important. First, it proved I wasn't making some stupid "is it plugged in" mistake (I still do that on occasion). Second, I'm running Mac OS and Oren is running Windows, so our printing chains have absolutely nothing in common; all the code is different. If this is a bug in how profiles get handled, or in Photoshop, the OS or the rendering engines, it's exactly the same bug in both platforms. That's beyond unlikely.

We're stumped. The colors aren't close to being out of gamut. Eight-bit versus 16-bit printing makes no difference. The OS doesn't make any difference. The actual profile doesn't make any difference. What does make a difference is letting the printer and printer driver have their own head and go whichever way they want to.

We have no idea why this works.

Put on your thinking caps. It's a fine mystery.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

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Speaking of Great Color Photography...

...You've got to see this, a Vimeo slideshow retrospective posted by Leica Camera to commemorate Steve McCurry being awarded the 2011 Leica Hall of Fame Award*.

Possibly the best short presentation of McCurry's work ever? And a compelling argument for him as a great photographer. Not to be missed.

Mike
(Thanks to Vlatko)

*I thought Steve shot Nikon, but never mind that.

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Featured Comment by Richard: "I had the pleasure of seeing McCurry's 'Retrospective' exhibition in the flesh in Birmingham (England) last year. The reproductions were excellent (and huge), and the exhibition as a whole was jaw-droppingly good. McCurry's use of colour is always impressive, but when seen on 6-foot-high prints it's little short of astonishing."

Featured Comment by ault: "My six-year-old daughter on watching the slideshow: 'Why are most of his pictures so sad?'"

Mike replies: Probably because the music is telling her to feel sad. The great Ralph Steiner used to do a wonderful demonstration where he would show four short films—the subject was abstracted, romanticized spraying water, from industrial agricultural sprinklers—each set to a very different piece of music. At the end he would ask the audience to ignore the music and tell him which of the four clips worked the best visually—and, by the way, which one was longest? The people in the lecture hall would then engage in a spirited debate about the "different" films and whether the shortest or the longest one worked best...and all four clips turned out to be exactly identical, of course. The only difference was the music. The result was so unexpected that numerous people in every lecture would insist that he was wrong and that the four clips had to be different.

Ralph said this happened every time he did the demonstration.

There Goes Another Ten Seconds...

...Of my fifteen minutes of fame.

Advanced Photographer magazine has included TOP in its September issue as one of "This Month's Must-Visit Websites." Here's what they said:

Our thanks to the editors. The September issue of Advanced Photographer includes reviews of the Olympus E-P3 and Canon 85mm ƒ/1.2 lens, and an article about grids for on-camera flash units. You download the issue digitally as well.

Mike
(Thanks to Patrick Dodds)

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.