The Online Photographer

The Little Game (Part 1 of 3)

I have a little game in mind, one that might be revealing and helpful to you in your work. There are three distinct parts to it. But I think it might be good to do it in order, so I'm only going to give you the first part today, for those who want to do it "in real time." If you don't want to play the game now, you can always go back and read all three steps later. But I think it will be most beneficial to do the first two parts before you know where it's heading—otherwise, I suspect you might be tempted (even subconsciously) to alter the outcome by manipulating the early inputs.

Here's the first step. This weekend, get a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper and spend some serious time looking over and reviewing your own picture archives. The goal is to write down the list of the 25 categories of things you most like to take pictures of, or that you consider within your area of visual competence and your usual practice.

I'm not talking about professional work or work you do to please others, unless that work also gratifies your soul. Pay attention only to your personal work, the pictures you take for yourself.

What do I mean by "categories"? Well, anything that can be identified. The most obvious would be genre—landscape, sports, glamour, portraits, or any other genre you can think of. Might be subject matter—kids, cars, clouds, or any of a myriad others*. Might be a type of strategy—constructed tableaux, still lifes**, aerial photography and so forth. Might be a certain style or look—snapshot style, documentary style, blurs. Might be a technical category—large format film, fill flash at dusk, studio lighting. Might be a certain commercial category—wedding photography, editorial portraits. It might be a property of the pictures—high HDR, light tones ("high key"), primary colors. Might be a theme—vacation destinations, loneliness, ancient holy places.

It might also be something more subtle—like a personal connotation, a kind of graphic design element, or a feeling, whether it's something you feel or something you're trying to make the viewer feel. It can even be something random or stupid. If it often inspires you to stop and snap a pic.

Anything you can think of along any of these lines. Just anything you can identify as being "one of the things I often shoot."

Or come up with your own possibilities. I've only listed a few, so don't be limited by the few categories I've mentioned.

Much as I'd like to provide a comprehensive list, I don't think it can be done. There are too many possibilities. But you'll see it in your work. Look for the commonalities, the patterns, the repetitions.

Pay special attention to those few pictures you've made in your life that you consider to be total successes, the ones you're proudest of. How would you describe the category they fall into? What is it about them that really cements their appeal, in your mind or your feelings?

When you get to 25, you don't necessarily need to stop looking, because maybe something you haven't thought of is actually more important to you than something you have on your list. For example, I've taken a few cat pictures I'm proud of, because I'm conscious that...well, that it's a category. But I might have overlooked the fact that bodies of water are an important theme in my work. So I might put "bodies of water" on the main list and jettison "cats."

•     •     •

This is the hardest, most work-intensive part of the Little Game, by the way. The next step is much easier, and the third and final step is all payoff, no work. This is 85% of the work, right here. But the more care you put into this step, the more dividends you'll get from steps two and three.

If you don't want to play, don't sweat it. Not every post is for every person.

But give it a try if you have time. There's more to come.

Have a nice weekend! I'm off tomorrow, but I probably won't be able to stay away on Sunday.

Mike

P.S. Even if the whole idea of categorization makes you grouchy, play along. Remember, it's a game.

*The Latin root of "myriad" means "ten thousand."

**That's the proper plural of "still life," by the way.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Peter: "My first thought was 'Twenty-five!?!? That's too many kinds of photographs. I don't have that many.' But then I decided to just do it and within a few minutes I had 21. Heeding your observation that this should be the most intense part, I kept going and was still adding categories after 35. Now I am reconsidering and re-ordering. When you announce Step 2, I will delete categories numbered higher than 25. Can't wait to learn what it is."

Mike replies: You're doing great. You'll get a lot out of this.

I found it difficult at first too because I was just doing it in my head. When I started looking at my actual pictures it became much easier.

Gerard Kingma: "I like the idea of a game, you got me interested. However! For me, there's a big 'Yeah, but...' to this game, namely that it appears to be exclusively about the subject of the picture. In my humble experience, the subject is, more often than you'd think, the least important aspect of the picture.

"People often ask me, 'What do you take pictures of?' and I usually say something like, 'Oh well, whatever's in front of the camera that makes me want to frame it and push the button.' Similarly, I read an anecdote once (probably here on TOP because I start here every day) about a photographer (and I hope someone can help me with the name) who, when asked the question 'What do you take pictures of?' replied something like: 'I don't take pictures of stuff. I take pictures about stuff.'

"Whatever triggers me photographically is usually a combination of light, shape, frameworthiness, quirkiness, and rarely about the thing that I point the camera at. During Jay Maisel's workshop that I was honored to attend in Maine he badgered us all week about three aspects that make an interesting image: 'Light, color and gesture.' The actual subject is not among those three, and not even the fourth, fifth or whatnot. As you always say, I'm just sayin.'"

Mike replies: I'm sorry to hear you say that, because it means I flubbed my writing task. I took (or tried to take) pains to explain that it's not "exclusively about the subject of the picture" as you say. It's just categories, and you determine the categories. "Gesture" is a category. I think "color" and "light" both need more specification to qualify and be useful ("light in darkness" is one of my categories—see here for a couple of examples)—but it's your list and they're your categories. You be the judge.

Also, the categories don't all have to have names that other people would understand. As long as you're clear about what you mean, you're fine.

And if I may have the temerity to suggest it, I suspect you might benefit from this exercise more than others.

YS: "I don't think you flubbed it, I've got quite the list now. It's an interesting game! I've got subjects, technical and artistic qualities down in my list!"

Mike replies: I'm doing it too, and it's not entirely easy to get 25. Don't forget to look at your phone photos too! There were some good clues for me in there.

Calibrate That Monitor!

I used to love these...great way to calibrate that monitor. I don't need them any more because my NEC came with its own colorimeter, but the Datacolor Spyder5PRO is on sale as part of B&H's Mega Deal Zone, which has been extended until Midnight Saturday. The sale price is only $89.99. (Current price at Amazon, where it's an "Amazon's Choice," is $134.36.)

Do note that your remaining window to get the sale price is very limited—it's Saturday evening Eastern U.S. Time between 6:00 p.m. (when B&H reopens from Shabbat) until 11:59 p.m. (when the Mega Deal Zone ends).

They're easy to use.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Editing Headaches

Which is better:

or

?

I learned a lesson long ago. I was on the Mall in D.C. for one of the regular "festival"-type gatherings of the throngs—I forget what it was, maybe the Fourth of July—it was hot—and I came across an open hydrant which had created a sea of mud in front of it. In the sea of mud, a large, muscular black guy was taking on all comers in mud-wrestling contests. He won a number of challenges, until a shorter, dumpy-looking white kid with a strangely confident smile stepped up. The white kid beat the big black guy. It quickly became obvious to me why: the big guy was not a trained wrestler, and the shorter guy was; I'd bet dollars to doughnuts the white kid had been on a college wrestling team and had put in thousands of hours of focused practice. But the bigger guy, without animosity, seemed genuinely curious as to why he was getting beaten. So each time he lost, he insisted on another contest—and he would lose again. There was no hostility in it. There was quite a large crowd watching, the whole time. After about four goes, the new champion begged off, washed all the mud off himself in the spray from the hydrant, and wandered away in the company of his girlfriend, and the black guy asked for new challengers. The crowd began to disperse.

As I watched all this, I took a roll and a half of pictures—maybe 50 frames or so. That was a lot, at that time. I probably took those 50 frames over 15 or 20 minutes. I didn't photograph quickly—I was taking care, picking my spots, doing the best I could. I figured I had it covered.

But when I got to the darkroom—what a headache! I made at least 15 workprints (my method at that time was to make quick 8x10 workprints on RC paper to edit from—my rule was that I had to make at least one workprint from every roll of film—that was to overcome laziness—and I couldn't make any more than six—that was to enforce selectivity at the stage of viewing the contacts with the illuminated loupe, which was the first pass in the editing process.

But rules are made to be broken, and I wasn't sold on any of the first six workprints I made of the wrestlers, so I made more. There just wasn't one standout shot that rose head and shoulders above all the others; a number of them were competent.

Now, I suspect that the best way to tell the story might have been to pick three or four that worked synergistically and mat them together, in a row. I didn't consider that at the time. (I'd been trained to be an exhibiting art photographer, but I wasn't one. I never did become one—the difference is that, then, I thought I would someday.)

I finally did manage to choose one, and I made a fine (i.e., final) print of the selection. (On Ilford Galerie, if any of you remember that!)

The lesson I took from the experience was maybe a little contrary: I decided I shouldn't shoot so much. I loved it when Jane Bown, the great English portraitist (I think she actually is English—born in Herefordshire and brought up in Dorset?), said that she noticed the first few and last few pictures she took during a sitting were the best, so she stopped taking all the ones in the middle! Heh. I'm always trying to take fewer shots, because the fewer shots I take, the more I try to get it right before I push the shutter button.

And the easier the editing is.

There are always editing headaches, though. Especially with landscapes—for me, landscapes are particularly difficult to edit. The differences are subtle and the effects you think you notice aren't always perceptible to others.

In this case, I think the second picture is stronger. It puts the main subject—the still surface of the pond reflecting the sky—a little more centrally, it prevents the black clump of trees in the upper left from drawing too much attention from the eye while still letting it balance the bit of fence at the opposite corner. And it shows more of the fence.

Took me a while to get there, though. They're so close to the same. Should have only taken one!

I should really go see if I can find that old shot of the wrestlers to show you. Surely it's around here someplace....

Mike

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Bandbox: "Re 'Should have only taken one!' Usually true, and the thing about digital is that you can shoot all around your subject and take as many as you want. I do it all the time with landscapes and interiors, and it's made me careless and less decisive because it allows me to put off the decision until I view all the images on a computer screen. The good shooting habits and visualization acquired over fifty plus years of using film have flown out the window."

Peggy C.: "When I first saw the images, I preferred the first one. I found my eyes being drawn to the sunlight on the field. However, once I started to compare them by bouncing back and forth between them, I found myself being drawn very strongly to the second image. I like the effect of the dark shore line, blue lake and the dark grasses and fence. If it were me, I’d even go so far as to crop out the field just where it meets the shadow of the shore.

"Drives one of my sisters-in-law crazy (for various reasons I truly enjoy, shhh) because she loves trees. And I mean, really loves trees...to the point that she believes it should be a jail-able offense to ever cut them down. Even if they are on another person’s property! However, my favorite time of year to photograph trees is after they’ve lost all their leaves. I am more strongly drawn to the pattern of bare branches than at any other time of year. Even in my astrophotography I am more likely to show the stars through bare branches. Probably why I am drawn to the pattern of the fence and grasses in your second photo. For me, the pattern is in the grasses."

Steve Jacob: "I used to take lots of shots of things that looked interesting, but didn't make interesting images. No amount of tinkering would change that. If I couldn't pick one it was often because none of them really grabbed me. When a series of images all have potential, it's usually obvious which one hit's the mark. If you have to analyse, if you have to look too hard, the chances are that none of them work. I learned to know what would possibly make a good picture, and what wouldn't. If I am not sure, I check in the VF, but I'm usually right the first time.

"I take far fewer images now, but I would have deleted the rest anyway."

Philip Storry: "I prefer the first. Mostly because it has more symmetry between the sky and the water. And more importantly, in the second picture you've lost much of the gradient in the sky. That's what suggests the symmetry—we can't see the deep rich blue of the sky above, but we can see the reflection in the water. And without that additional gradient from horizon to sky in the first picture, the suggestion of that deep rich blue sky is lost. The reflection on the water becomes almost incongruous.

"No matter which way this discussion goes, what's probably more fascinating is that this is an example of how a photo isn't reality. What you're trying to convey is, you feel, better served by the second picture. And if I never saw the first, I might have been quite satisfied. But having seen the first, I now imagine cloudless skies of deep rich blues—which may not have actually been the case. As ever, the camera captures a mere slice of both time and space, and you could have been hiding all kinds of things in your framing. There could easily be a building site to either side, or behind you, ruining the idyll that's presented! And yet the discussion is about the choice of a few degrees of FOV.... Isn't photography marvelous?"

Peter Williams: "The bottom photo seems more succinct to me. It also feels better balanced across the frame. It's the one I'd choose to show from the two if they were mine."

Paul: "Your wrestling story reminded of a workshop I took with a Magnum photographer. It was made very clear I was to be shooting for at least eight hours and at least 500 photos per day, preferably more. It was also explained we had to 'work the scene' whenever we came across something like your wrestlers and visually search whilst shooting, getting closer, moving back, forward, lowering oneself until we found the perfect spot. I would end up with perhaps 150 photos by just doing this. All slightly different and usually one or two outstanding images which I would not of captured if it had not been for this approach.

"Now Mike you probably would not have worked this way due film costs and it begs to think how many still approach shooting digital with the same way they shot film. Which just isn't necessary. These requirements proved to be the most important aspect of the workshop. It's very hard to explain, but let me say my photography changed for the better. I began to see images I had never noticed before. My mental, visual and physical approach with the camera also evolved—I loosened up, I was freer. I became at one with the camera and, Mike, the whole concept kept reminding me of your advice on reading Zen in the Art of Archery. It was impressed on me I wasn't to edit whilst shooting. Just to let go and not to think too much. Shooting like this and with a daily deadline looming over made me push myself like never before."

Dogman: "I recall William Eggleston saying he only takes one shot of his subjects because it's too hard to pick the best shot when there are several. I tend to agree but I usually make a few insurance shots anyway. Shot number two would be my pick between the two shown here."

Jack Stivers: "I liked the first, but it took a bit of time to reach that conclusion. I'm a little too familiar with this process and sometimes change my mind after as much as a year (or more!) of looking at the image I originally chose."

Sharon: "I quit posting photos for critiques on forums because the advice was always to crop out the sky. That ain’t my style.  :-)  . But it does seem to be your style so I might ask why have the sky at all in this shot. I like the fence post with chicken wire in the bottom left. That could be an interesting component."

John Krill (partial comment): "You should do more of these. I'm waiting to see what everyone says about the images. It's a good way to learn composition and what folks think is the best composition."

[For the full text of partial comments, see the full Comments Section. —Ed.]

Recommended Portfolio Boxes

A few suggestions for print storage boxes:

My personal favorites are Century Archival boxes. These are simple, sturdy, plain boxes but much more elegant than single-wall board boxes such as metal-edge boxes.

"Slimline" (shallow depth) Century Archival box

I prefer the ones that aren't too deep because once they're full of prints you can store them vertically on bookshelves. Of course that works better for the smaller print sizes. I particularly like the elegant 11x14x1 size, which fit on the same bookshelves I keep my photo books on.

8x10-inch Century Archival box

11x14-inch Century Archival box (1 inch deep, B&H; 2 inches deep, B&H; 1 inch deep, Amazon; 2 inches deep, Amazon.)

14x18-inch Century Archival box (B&H Photo, Amazon)

13x19-inch Century Archival box (1.5 inches deep, B&H Photo, Amazon)

16x20-inch Century Archival box

(For larger sizes, museum cases are sturdier. Read on.)

Solander cases
If you have the luxury of storing boxes flat, you're in luck these days. When fine, thick-walled archival Solander cases were made by American and British bookbinders, they cost so much that the market for them gradually withered away. I have an old Spink and Gabor (formerly "Gaborc") Solander case with a leather handle that is gorgeous. But now, China to the rescue!

Actually I don't know where these are made. China's just a guess.

Museum cases

The classic drop-back design was invented by the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander (1733-1782) while working for the British Museum

Anyway, offshore (shall we say) fabrication has made Solander cases accessible again. Here are two brands that are beautiful but aren't too expensive:

Archival Methods 14x18x2.5" Solander Museum Case (see the dropdown menu at the web page for other sizes)

Print File 14x18 Solander case (search the website for other sizes)

Note that the Print File cases are special-order products and can take a while to arrive.

For plain out-of-sight storage, search the term "metal edge box" at B&H Photo, Amazon, or other sources.

Plain ol' utilitarian metal edge boxes are acid-free and
will not rot your photographs

If you need a full-line archival museum supplies company, try Conservation Resources International in Oxford, UK, and Virginia, USA. Be aware that such businesses in general sometimes have a wait time before shipping product. CRI is better than some others.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Kenneth Tanaka: "I second Mike’s endorsement of the Century brand clamshell print storage boxes. They are rather pricey but they are quite robust. One key distinction they have over less expensive boxes is that the ends are robust enough to remain at 90 degrees rather than beginning to poke-out over time. I would also caution people to strongly consider whether or not they really need “museum cases”. Having spent much time in museum vaults handling museum cases my warning is that they are heavy. Darn heavy!. Their frames are made of wood and the panels must be made of lead (at least they feel that way by the end of a day schlepping them). If you go with simple archival metal-edged boxes (which are also just fine) be sure to get ones that feature drop-front bottoms. It makes removal of prints so much easier than simple closed-in edges."

Peter Komar (partial comment): "Wow, I actually own all three types of these cases, they all work quite nicely. My favorite is the hinged type with the carry handle but I only have one of that style. The others work just fine and I consider the last one for work-in-progress prints that have not yet been matted for presentation."

Rodger P. Kingston: "My biggest problem with portfolio boxes is that so few of them are available in digital print sizes: 8.5x11, 13x19, and 17x22 for example. If all us digital photographers can get used to these new sizes, you'd think that the box manufacturers could adapt as well. I'm forced to use the rather flimsy boxes and envelopes that printing papers come in (they don't look too impressive when you're showing work to a curator or gallery director). Does anybody out there know if any of these boxes mentioned above also come in the digital sizes? Or know of any other brands that do?"

Mike replies: Mark Hobson, who visited here a few days ago, told a funny story about using paper boxes for prints. He had a presentation to make at Kodak some years ago. He was careful to print the pictures for the proposal on Kodak paper—anything else was considered a major faux pas—but when he was in the elevator heading to the meeting at Kodak headquarters, he suddenly realized he'd had a major brain fart and was carrying the prints in an Agfa box! With no way to change at that point, he just soldiered through the presentation. He was lucky—it didn't turn out to be his last job for Kodak.

It's really strange that after a great many years with standardized photo paper sizes, we somehow decided to switch to completely different sizes for digital inkjet paper. It makes no sense, and furthermore I don't know by what odd mechanism the new consensus was reached. It seems to have to come about by some type of black magic or mass delusion. However it happened, it's pointless, needless, and confusing.

JOHN GILLOOLY: "I've been following these posts with particular interest. My personal experience is that when I use boxes, I seem to never actually open them! The prints seem to go in and never surface again. I have settled on a hybrid of your suggestions. I have settled upon 8.5x11-inch stock and I print various image sizes on that canvas. But I have decided to use the Itoya Art Profolio products. Most of my printing consist of 6x9 on 8.5x11 stock. Usually Epson Premium Luster or Portfolio Rag. Most of these prints are of family and I have been making a concerted effort to write the appropriate info on the back of each print. For these family images, I have been using the thicker volume book which has 90 pages for a 180 print book. For "art" prints, I do have some in the archival boxes but also mostly use these same Itoya products for that as well. I often pick through those books and send prints to a client for some occasion. But I love the idea that was mentioned of the 'wine party.'"

AN: "Regarding the change in standard photo paper sizes, I imagine it's due to copier/printer manufacturers (and copier/printer paper manufacturers) sticking with the ANSI standards they were already using before they all got into the photo printing market. Epsons and HPs and Canons and Ricohs were all primarily printing text documents before dabbling in graphics...and then better graphics...and then 'photo quality' graphics...and before you know it, there's a photo printer designed for standard document-size paper, and a bunch of paper options that have crept along the same development path in parallel. The fact that ANSI sizes are all a bit bigger than the closest classic photo print sizes (and therefore can be cut down, if desired) would just ease any friction in the transition."

Preserve Your Photos!

We heard from David Sparks about the Black Skimmer post. You might want to check out his response if you enjoyed that post.

David, who is 80, said, in part, "The Black Skimmer project and the other projects I am working on now is an effort to preserve some of the successful images in a format that will be more accessible to family and friends when I am no longer around. Unless I do something to give prominence to selected photos they will just remain part of the bloated Lightroom catalogs where they now reside."

I'd like to try to give heart to those who don't see any usefulness in their archives past their own physical lifetimes. I used to make two recommendations—one was to notate, on the back of prints, the people, places or things that appear in them, for the benefit of heirs and posterity. The other was to simply create a separate box and segregate all your best or favorite work into it, labeling it "---- ----'s Best Photographs" or something like that. The idea there is that your heirs might find it overwhelming to confront a roomful of photographic detritus and many boxes and filing cabinets full of unorganized prints and negatives, but few descendants are likely to throw out a single box labeled Grandad's best.

Of course, those recommendations seem very quaint now, unless you're one of the minority for whom printmaking is a part of the hobby. Few people have prints now and fewer prints start out as negatives, and you can't label a TIFF file with a pencil.

Still, there are a few logical ways to respect and honor some of the work you've done. A lucky few are able to find a repository for it, such an historical society or a curated archive, club, or local museum. (We're at an odd point in history, when exponentially more photographs are being made but exponentially fewer will likely survive the next hundred or hundred-and-a-half years.)

David's strategy is a good one—make small finished presentations that have a point and a purpose. I've always thought that another good way to insure the survival of work is craft—people tend to value beautifully made things, especially if they telegraph good craftsmanship even to people who don't entirely understand its value. Your own fame and the value of your work is another good preservative, as we've discussed several times, although that's neither really in our control, nor, for most of us, in the cards.

But generally, I'd say: try not to be fatalistic about it. Have some compassion for your own work! Have some sympathy for the effort you've put into your work and the fun you had making it, and don't shut the door on doing something that might help a little of it survive beyond your own span. Maybe you don't care, and that's fine—it's your work and you can do with it what you wish—but it's also not that hard these days to share it with others in a form that will let it last. Why not?

That part can be fun too, by the way!

Mike
(Thanks again to David Sparks)

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Rob de Loe: "Curate and print. I think those are the only two viable options. If you don't care enough to curate and print your own work, who else is going to care?

"Books are a great idea. I've been thinking about making simple photo books for projects. There are some very basic binding techniques that will get the job done, e.g., Japanese Stab Binding. Even something as basic as a nice archival box with interleave tissue sends a signal that something worth saving is inside.

"But the key is to curate. Choose your best work, and organize in ways that make sense (projects, themes, etc.). Or become famous so a museum will do it for you. That works too."

Nigel: "I am slowly making digital copies of my best negatives with a contraption I had made for the job.

"It is amazing and shocking to see London and Italy as they were forty to thirty years ago. These pictures taken when I was in my 'street photography' phase are now becoming historical documents, and certain pictures that were not interesting at the time have taken on a new life. The most interesting ones are the pictures I took for the short period when I first came to live in Italy and I was lucky to find a job with a local news magazine. Photography was much easier back then. There were not the neurotic privacy problems we have today if you shoot certain subjects.

"Regarding what I will pass on to the future: well, my theatrical photography will go to the musty archive of the local theatre. But I suppose most of my photography will disappear with me. It does not bother me at all. Most of my photography, particularly my hiking photography, is done to preserve memories for myself. I have/will make a few Blurb books of London and Italy 'as they were.' These are probably the only photographs that will be interesting to others and as they do not take up too much space may not end up in the house clearing skip. I am at an age where I have had to take part in quite a bit of what we call 'house clearing' of deceased relatives. It is a sad, brutal business. Inevitably one reflects on oneself whilst doing this awful job. We could only keep very little of what our relatives left us. It made me get rid of an awful lot of photographic gear that was lying unused for example. If my son keeps the few Blurb books I have made of holidays together and my documentary projects, I will be happy.

"Here is my ebook of Italy."

Joseph Brunjes: "My father died in October and I have the tough duty of going through his negatives and prints. He taught high school photography so he not only had thousands of his own negatives but hundreds of negatives from students. He photographed sports teams, clubs, and every day high school life for 30 years and has quite a visual history of his high school. Only a small portion of the entire collection was sleeved and organized. I found twelve 100 foot bulk canisters full of shot negatives with family and school related images intermixed. It will take me years to go through it all. Luckily for my dad, I still shoot film and can scan and archive his best photos in my spare time. His photos for the most parts are not artistic, but I have already found some real gems (and enough blackmail photos of my brother in his youth to last the rest of my life). It has also been fun going through the negatives of all the unknown students who left their negatives in the HS darkroom and were preserved by my father. It has helped me put my own collection of prints and negatives into perspective and I am currently working to make it easier for my family to know what is worth keeping."

 

Editing 'It Must Be Color'

Two ideas for future Baker's Dozens: subtle color, and matching colors. More about this later...I think if I announced another BD before presenting the acutely late "It Must Be Color," a number of you guys would put out a hit on me.

In editing the "It Must Be Color" submissions I suspect the big problem is that the concept isn't entirely secure in my mind. Mostly I'm pretty confident when it comes to editing; I have my methods and my typical "queries" with which I approach any given picture. But I recognize a number of different ways that readers approached the challenge—that is, the criteria by which you chose your own selections—and I recognize that many of them are somewhat different, but that your choices are valid nonetheless. This makes it more than usually difficult to eliminate contenders.

As you might expect, the big challenge, accordingly, is...eliminating contenders. Usually, the easiest parts of editing are the outliers: the obvious "nos" and the obvious "yesses." It's those "hmm, maybes" that are maddening. But in this BD, there just aren't as many obvious yesses and nos.

I would say in general the easiest ones to eliminate are pictures that I think are clearly good but that I'm not convinced have to be in color...rightly or wrongly, I think they'd work in B&W as well. And, the pictures that I admit have to be in color, but nevertheless don't seem to be entirely successful as photographs.

Two other kinds of submission I've been able to be a little harder on are standard naturey subjects, and pictures that are mostly just "of" subjects that happen to be colorful. But even these aren't easy to dismiss, because there are some of each kind that are very good.

I'll put up examples of each of these types, but not until I pick the final Baker's Dozen. Never know what's going to make the final cut until the final cut is made.

All in all this has been more than a bit humbling for Yr. already Hmbl. Ed. I can't say I've done much more than circle around the task for weeks, without getting down to work, but that's because I know I'm not on footing that's as solid as I usually stand on.

More anon; I'm gaining on it. Thanks again for all the submissions, and no, I haven't forgotten about the Younger Photographers group.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Joe: "I've been in your position, Mike, and it sure helps to be part of a small group making such decisions. It's also easier when there's a hard deadline with no extensions. Might not make for better decisions, but it makes for decisions."

Curt Gerston: "I’m looking forward to seeing your choices for this...I’ve recently assigned 'color' as a subject-assignment to my students, and it’s a bit difficult to explain the concept to middle-schoolers. I’m hoping to show your contest winners as examples."

Open Mike: Four Odd Topics

Subaru WRX STI

I guess I didn't actually want to take time off this week. I have stuff rattling around in my head as usual. I guess what I was really saying is that I need some more incubation time for thinking about the B&W submissions so I can build a better Baker's Dozen post...that's what I wanted more time for.

That's topic #1 for the "Open Mike" Editorial Page today: the role of TIME in editing.

The magical moment in photographic editing happens for me when you a) do a bunch of shooting; b) choose the shots you think are "good"; workprint a bunch of them and put them up on a wall or corkboard where you can look at them a lot; and then—here's the magic part—contemplate them regularly for three or four days.

The sorting takes place subconsciously, i.e., magically. Here's what will happen: you will start off thinking that all the pictures are more or less equal, and that all of them are pretty good. You will end up thinking that one, two, or three of them are really good and all the rest are throwaways.

What happens in between? I don't know. But it does. Call it visual intelligence. It takes time for this to happen...time going past, and time spent looking at your pictures with your eyes. It's easier, mechanically speaking, to edit on your computer, but better to do it with physical prints you can look at.

Time spent with your eyes on the pictures is the crucial key, and the fact that no one does it that way any more might be partially to blame for the fact that pictures are worse now than they used to be.

Topic #2: Crime in the United States is way, way down, and no one knows why. Recently the national murder rate reached HALF of what it was in 1990. We get distracted by the enormity of mass shootings, but that might be something altogether different than crime; personally I think it's an example of the sort of contagious mental illness that contributed to the epidemic of "anarchist assassinations" of the thirty years prior to WWI (which was touched off by, yup, an anarchist assassination), or the popularity of duelling in 17th-century France, which killed about one in ten (the literal meaning of "decimated") of that society's aristocratic and upper-class men, or the fact that every so often, suicide becomes popular. Popular?!? There's no other word for it...in Germany at the time Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther there was an absolute craze for youth suicide with a "romantic" cast to it. Suicide happens in clusters to this day. It has the same features as a fad. It worries me greatly that the psychological illness causing the craze or fad that has fed mass shootings now seems to be shifting to police assassinations; that is, socio-psychologically speaking, a very bad trend that needs to be stepped on in the strongest possible way, with the most concerted response we can muster.

But all of this should not disguise the remarkable fact that crime has declined very steeply in recent decades in the United States. The fact that no one can explain it just makes it interesting; explicable or not, it's still a very good thing.

Topic #3: As a car nut, I kind of hate modern cars. I hate electronic nannying, 500+ horsepower monstrosities, and feature-encrustation. We're approaching some kind of tipping point in automotive technology; I personally believe that a) self-driving cars will never happen but that b) all cars will be battery-powered thirty years from now. In the meantime, I still like what I like, namely, old-fashioned, light, moderately powered, "slow-car-fast" sporty cars that can be driven for fun on public roads rather than on racetracks. Luxury muscle cars shaped like trucks that have to be driven dangerously on closed courses to have anything approaching fun in 'em are decadent, twisted, and misbegotten, not to mention mentally unhealthy, if you ask me.

Saddest thing about modern cars: the traditional, simple, engaging, involving, connected manual transmission is going away. "Bah, humbug" ten times over! I don't give a flying fig if John and Jane Q. Public don't want stick shift in their appliance transportation, but cars meant to be fun for the driver to drive oughtta have 'em, dagnabbit. The reason I bought my 2014 Acura ILX is that the better engine (naturally aspirated 2.4 liter) only came with a stick shift. (Now you can't buy any Acura with a manual.) And no, I don't give a flying fig if dual-clutch automatics shift faster; it's my experience that matters to me, not the stopwatch. Who cares how fast road cars actually go? It's like caring about the golf scores of a weekend golfer. Matters not to anyone. What matters about cars is how fast they feel and how fun and satisfying they are to drive that way, not a meaningless tenth of a second here or there.

Here's a list of the cars you can still get in 2018 that have stick shift. And, per that article, special kudos to the Subaru WRX STI, one of the few cars left that comes only with a manual transmission.

Here's my ideal automobile: two seats side-by-side, rear wheels driven, a willing, high-revving, naturally-aspirated engine that's low-powered enough that it encourages you to stay in the powerband using the gearshift, with excellent, communicative hydraulic steering and excellent tires. Oh, and a convertible top. The Mazda Miata comes close enough to this ideal (or would, with the addition of some mods) that I feel like I'm safe for the end of my life. (The fact that I can't afford one is on me. At least it exists.)

And while we're on the subject of Mazda: the best and most practical general-purpose vehicle you can buy today is the 2018 Mazda CX-5. Some Subarus come close. Here's why:

• The best car is mass market, with more of its cost in the initial engineering and less involved in handbuilding, exotic materials, luxury features, spec-sheet excess, and the moneysucking combo of big advertising/small volume.
• The best car is an SUV because that's what's popular now—midsized SUVs are to 2018 what midsized family sedans used to be—but small enough for four cylinders and decent mileage.
• Gotta look really sweet. The 2018 CX-5 in soul red paint is gorgeous.
• Nice interior...but not too nice. Cars are meant to be used.
• Not too precious. Who wants the responsibility of driving something irreplaceable? Not moi.
• The CX-5 handles much better than most SUVs.
• Can be used to transport dogs.

I rest my case. I would rather have a CX-5 than a Ferrari—and I can say that, because I can't have a Ferrari.

Topic #4: In human culture, lots of things are driven by popularity. We do things because they're the things we do. Things happen in cycles; what goes up must come down; people do things because other people do them. I like cue sports, and the popularity of cue sports is plummeting toward death like two drunks careening down a ski jump on a toboggan.

This glorious antique Glass Pfister was fully restored by
Blatt Billiards in New York City

Pool used to be one of the most popular sports in America, believe it or not. When baseball was America's most popular sport, pool and billiards (now called "three cushion," a game played on a table with no pockets) were not far behind: in the 1920s, there were almost as many articles in the newspaper about billiards tournaments as there were about baseball games. Willie Hoppe's earnings rivaled Babe Ruth's. And there were 5,000 pool halls in New York City alone. (Now there might not be 5,000 in the world, if you leave out the Philippines.) Not for nothing is there a steady trade in restored antique pool tables...there are lots and lots of them out there. A pool table used to be as much of a status symbol in the home as a piano. (Neither are in very many homes now...but people in the future will look at the homes we build and wonder why in the world we put our kitchens in the living room and made the counters out of stone. We are truly weird!) 

Pool in the U.S. is in the process of dying. In much better health is a game that's popular in other parts of the world but not in the U.S., and it's popular in part because it's a much better game than any pool game. It's called "snooker," and it was supposedly invented by bored British imperial officers in India in the time of the Raj. They sure did a good job...the game is as subtle and rich as baseball. The Michael Jordan of snooker, the virtuosic Ronnie O'Sullivan, is still playing, and it remains to be seen what will happen to that game once he retires.

But Google "antique pool tables" someday, and poke around. It's really amazing what's out there. I hope to visit Bankshot Billiards, a local antique pool table restorer in Albany, and if I do I will file a report.

That's enough from me for today!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe: "Way back in the early '70s I bought a 1969 yellow Fiat 850 Spider. What a piece of junk. The thing broke down literally every few hundred miles. The convertible top leaked all over me when it rained and kept the interior freezing cold in the winter. And the tiny 850cc engine was smaller than some of my friends' motorcycles' engines. This is the car, with my then-girlfriend: 

"But hot damn that thing was fun to drive. Really fun. Really really fun. More fun to drive than any other car I've ever been in. It turns out that 850cc is plenty for a tiny two-seater. Zooming along with the top down in the summer, I've never felt less between me and the road (except when I owned a motorcycle). I had a friend who loved muscle cars and who drove a monster of a Camaro, and she took a spin in that Fiat one day and it opened her eyes. She had no idea what it was like to drive a car that probably weighed the same as the passenger door on her Camaro. She didn't become a convert, but she understood what I loved about driving that car.

"I wouldn't buy a Fiat again, and the breakdowns were way more of a pain than the joy the 850 brought me, but bring me joy it did."

Robert Roaldi: "Really, you need two cars. At least two. You need an everyday grocery-getter that does most things OK, starts every time, room for the dog, etc. Then, for that Saturday afternoon drive that you do for fun, you want a Miata, Alfa GTV, Volvo P1800, FIAT X1/9, etc.

"One car can't do it all; it's just like with cameras. You don't take a large format film camera to a cyclocross bicycle race, and you don't want a manual shift MGB in a three-hour rush-hour drive in a hot humid August heat wave. Having more than one can be expensive, but then you don't need to buy new ones."

Geoff Wittig, who masquerades as a mild mannered, middle aged small town doctor but is actually One Cool Dude, replies to Robert: "Robert, That's actually one of the many joys of Subaru's WRX STi. You can only get it with a hand-built six-speed manual transmission, and it's stupid fast, with chassis tuning that is perfectly calibrated for America's typical rutted winding two-lane rural roads. Yet it's a very practical daily driver; the back seat fits actual adult humans, and the trunk is quite capacious. My trunk generally houses a large tripod and a huge LowePro pack with two DSLRs and six lenses, with room for groceries left over. And you can drive it in the snow!"

CGarrison: "I’ve owned a lot of cars and motorcycles over the last 18 years and slowly progressed toward higher and higher power and complexity. This culminated in an R35 GT-R Nismo with 600 HP and a very smart AWD system. This car was amazing to drive at 8/10ths or above, but less inspiring most of the time. I also then had a 200 HP Ducati Panigale R which features an amazing engine, amazing brakes, electronic suspension, and amazing traction control/engine braking control, etc. What a fun motorcycle on a twisty road, but a nightmare everywhere else.

"I sold the Nismo and the Panigale and looked into a similar list of attributes as you described. I considered (another) Mazda RX8, a Honda S2000, a Subaru BRZ or WRX STi, and others.

"Here’s where I’ve ended up. For a motorcycle I have a hand built Ducati based upon an old air-cooled, carbureted Ducati 900SS motor. It’s loud, light, reasonably quick and a blast at normal speeds. It’s very simple in every way and almost the entire motorcycle was fabricated by hand.

"For cars I ended up with a Ford Focus RS. It’s at 350 HP, all wheel drive, has a simple and practical interior, has a very fun engine and transmission combination, and is an absolute blast to drive hard, anywhere. The AWD is similar in feel to a GTR but the car is so small and light that you can enjoy full throttle and all gears on the street.

"The Focus RS is a lot of fun and I’m keeping it, but the steering is light and noncommunicative compared to the GTR and certainly to any hydraulic RWD setup. The suspension is way too stiff in all settings, and there is an occasional feeling that you don’t quite know what the throttle and differentials are doing when driving hard. I still wanted something more pure so I then ended up with a car that ticks a lot of the boxes you listed, an Ariel Nomad.

"Rear wheel drive. Manual steering. Manual braking. Sixteen hundred pounds. Honda K24 engine and six-speed transmission with 240 HP. No electronic assistance at all. This is the most fun I have ever had driving anything. It’s likely not even close and I’ve driven a lot of cars on street and track. Ariels are expensive (Atom or Nomad) but offer such a pure driving experience and so much fun. You have to try one if you can. The Focus RS (a pretty aggressive street car) feels soft now, in steering, the clutch, the shifter, the throttle, everything but the suspension."

Mike replies: You've more resources than I. Unfortunately for me I mostly read about cars rather than drive them. I've never driven an Ariel and most likely never will, but I have memories of (briefly) driving a Lotus Super 7, the car that convinced me of the wisdom of "slow car fast" and set my preferences for light, go-carty cars. On paper, hear hear to your journey!

Baker's Dozen: Smartphone Photographs

For this fortnight's "Baker's Dozen" readers' portfolio, I asked for smartphone photos, and got as many as I thought I would...lots and lots. I have to apologize to the many people who sent great shots that I won't be using today. If it's any consolation, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing everyone's pictures and reading their comments. Great fun for me.

With several avenues wide open for exploring, I thought I'd concentrate on showing some of the things I think people particularly use smartphones for.

To make a colorful beginning, macro shots! Lots of people are finding that the tiny sensors (with their extreme D-o-F), excellent lenses, and SOTA processing are ideal for photographing things close up. Depth-of-field (D-o-F) is proportional to focus distance—all else equal, the farther away the plane of focus, the greater the D-o-F. The closer the object distance, the narrower the D-o-F (more bokeh, in other words). Another way of saying this: if you have three inches of D-o-F when focused on something nine inches away from the sensor, you'll have 30 feet within the D-o-F when you're focused on something 90 feet away. Specifics can vary, but that gets the principle across.

Tiny sensors and the very short focal-length lenses that are "normal" for the formats make macro photography pleasant. This would have been a very difficult shot to make with a FF DSLR. Peggy Collins, 58, of Lancaster, Antelope Valley, in Southern California shot this orangelicious poppy using a Samsung Galaxy S5. It's far from her only camera, though—she's been a serious photographer for decades (a Pentax shooter mainly) and is a part-time pro.

The inset picture is me cheating on the "baker's dozen" limitation by sneaking in an extra example of a nice shot that utilizes large D-o-F. It was taken by David O'Bryan, 49, of Mechanicsville, Virginia, on an iPhone 6+.

Rick Forgo's nighttime street scene is a perfect example of what I was talking about the other day in the "No Such Thing As Image Quality" post. Mature artists understand the properties of the materials and equipment they're using and apply them with sensitivity to best effect regardless of what those properties are. This is a wholly successful shot, regardless of how well it does or doesn't conform to the "ordinary and usual" notions of IQ. Rick, who is 34 and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, took it with an iPhone 4s, and says, "it's one of my favourite shots regardless of the camera used."

Here's a "particularly pleasing conjunction" (Huw's words), taken of Stonehenge from a slow-moving car in traffic where the road narrows. So what does this show us about phone cameras? That they're an excellent way for kids to enjoy photography! It was taken by eight-year-old Harriet Hitchin, who lives in England. Her father Huw reads TOP. Aside from being one of the youngest photographers ever featured on TOP, Harriet is obviously also one cool kid:

Note the shirt in the picture on the left! Love it. Father and daughter obviously have fun with photography together. Thanks to both. And nice shot, Harriet.

Continuing with the impromptu "daughter" theme, Bruce Greene's painterly iPhone 5 shot of his daughter in a restaurant illustrates what I think is another exceedingly important aspect of phone cameras: they're fun to play with. Not that you can't play with other cameras, as I should know, but I often find myself playing with the phone's camera in situations where I wouldn't ordinarily be taking pictures, just because I can. And play can be very good for creativity.

Full caption: "A loadmaster from the Tennessee Air National Guard's 164th Airlift Wing directs an all-terrain forklift onto a C-17 aircraft at the Kentucky Air National Guard Base in Louisville, Ky., Aug. 29, 2017, to support rescue operations in Texas following Hurricane Harvey. More than 30 Kentucky Air Guardsmen and 90 tons of equipment are being airlifted from Louisville to Houston to stand up an aeromedical evacuation and air cargo hub. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Lt. Col. Dale Greer)"

Switching gears, I think Dale Greer's dramatic news photo here illustrates very well what is conventionally meant by "the best camera is the one you have with you"—a role that phone cameras play for many people in many situations. Dale works as a public affairs officer in the Kentucky Air National Guard and frequently shoots news coverage with several D750 Nikons. On the day he shot this, however, he says "...my focus was assisting local news media who were covering the deployment of Airmen from our base for Hurricane Harvey relief operations. Thus, I was not packing my customary 20-pound load of camera gear; I only had an iPhone to shoot photos." Good thing he had that along—his photo went on to receive wide national distribution, including on network news programs. And of course TOP.

Anthony Reczek, Moon Over Nubble

Here's another example of not as good being better: lifelong New Englander Anthony Reczek, born and raised in Vermont, actually had his big Canon and a tripod along on this night, and took a picture of this scene with it, but says that "there's something about this smartphone shot that rivals the cleaner/clearer results of the 'better' camera and lens." Anthony recently returned to playing music (in nursing homes) after retiring from a career as a psychiatric social worker.

Burdette Parks illustrates for us the old "what if you see Elvis stepping out of a flying saucer?" principle: sometimes cool things you couldn't invent just happen in front of your eyes, and beg to be photographed. "This is a shot I grabbed during a rehearsal for a play we're doing here in November. The show is Sylvia and the young lady is playing a dog that has an operation in the course of the play. Coincidentally, her pet was visiting us at rehearsal and had just come from the vet. An unposed moment captured due to the quick availability of my phone." Burdette is 72 and lives not far from TOP Rural Headquarters—in the Adirondacks here in Upstate New York, about halfway between the villages of Tupper Lake and Saranac Lake.

Above: Ridley Scott. Below: Ridley Scott.

Continuing the doggie theme (because dogs make life better), Tim Bloomquist, 55, of Des Moines, Iowa, can't understand why people keep asking him why he named his dog Ridley Scott: "He looks just like him!" Well...except I'd have to say Ridley Scott's ears are just a little bigger than Ridley Scott's.

Of course, given the number of pictures on Facebook (slightly less than infinity—for the time being anyway) and the ease of texting pictures (or sending them the old-fashioned way, by email), the Number One use of smartphone cameras is doubtless for taking pictures of friends and family and sharing them. Kurt Holter of Frederick, Maryland, sent us this charming shot of his 91-year-old mother Facetiming with her soon-to-be one-year-old great-grandaughter near Christmastime last year. Kurt's brother, wife, and daughter were all sharing the moment with her. None of them noticed him taking a picture with his iPhone. Kurt's been a full-time photographer since he started out with a newspaper in 1976, but he says, "in all of my years as a photographer, this is one of my all-time favorite pictures."

Another of the undoubtedly interesting aspects of phone cameras is that you can get them into places normal cameras won't go—or won't go without a little more care and work. When Saturn was going to be occulted by the moon on April 17th, 2014, Marcelo Guarini prepared his small but optically excellent backyard telescope and waited. Holding his iPhone 5s up to the eyepiece of the telescope by hand, he took both this still photograph and also a video of the event. The telescope enlargement is around 120X.

I've seen phone pics taken through microscopes, too, and I've used mine to photograph through the viewfinders of larger cameras to show readers the layout of the viewfinder.

Of course, you can just use a phone for photography, too. TOP reader Giuseppe Pagnoni, a researcher and professor of neuroscience at a university in Modena, Italy, took this at a traditional wedding in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, of a group of women dressed up in their tehuana clothes waiting in line for their turn at the Ladies (Damas) restroom. He says he wishes he had used the Lightroom app to shoot raw (because of course we photographers are never satisfied and always want more). But he had his Ricoh GR with him at the time: "Sometimes you just prefer to use the phone because of the instant feedback and manipulation possibility." Besides the GR, Giuseppe also has a Fuji X100, and he says he recently made the "unreasonable" purchase of a Leica M6 with a Summicron 35mm, which he blames on me (the OC/OL/OY thing). Okay, I'll take the blame.

...And then there are apps, which are endless. Margaret Rainey of London, United Kingdom, took this picture on a rainy day in her native Glasgow, in Scotland, while playing around with the Slow Shutter app, which, she says, "is something I never do on my 'proper' camera, so this would not have been taken otherwise." I like it.

In the inset (yes, I'm cheating again), another shutter effect: a strange rubber propeller captured by Frank Petronio, who is 57 and reports that he lived after taking this. I can't even begin to explain why his phone created this effect; he didn't say if it was accidental or deliberate. But now I want to go up in a propeller plane.

And one more for good measure: Kristine Hinrichs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, happened across this sand graffiti while taking a break from traveling in the Pacific Northwest. A sweet shot she says is one of her most enduring.

•

Again, I just want to thank all the photographers featured here and everyone who submitted work. This one was painful; I had to leave so many nice shots out. Sorry again to be late with this—it took me longer to compile than almost any other post I've ever posted on TOP, about 12–13 hours. There were just so many submissions and so many different ways I could have organized it.

The next Baker's Dozen will be posted two weeks from now (well, with any luck) on Friday, November 24th. I'll post the call for work on Monday. Hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Mike

"Baker's Dozen" (13) is a new feature we're trying out. Readers answer a call for a particular kind of work, and then Yr. Hmbl. Ed. chooses a dozen to post along with one extra one for good measure.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Giuseppe Pagnoni: "Elated and humbled at the same time to be featured among such good pictures! While I wish I would have taken the picture with the Ricoh GR I had with me, mainly because of the high-contrast scene, it's kind of telling that sometimes we just prefer to use the phone: as pointed out before here, it must be the tempting combination of instant examination on a good screen (much better than camera LCDs), quick post-processing of the files, and sharing on the web.

"On the topic of image quality, I found that capturing raw images with the iPhone in Lightroom mobile really makes a big difference: even if you just export straight to JPEG, the output file has very little of the frosted-glass, plasticky artifacts that the heavy-handed noise reduction and sharpening algorithm of the iPhone (and most other cell phones) produce—you hardly notice them on the phone screen, but they become obvious (and jarring to me) once you open the file on your computer. Sometimes, I further process the file with the RNI Films app, which has a good selection of filters based on actual film emulsions and scanned grain and is often successful in removing the elusive 'digitalness' of the phone pictures (although I feel I should eventually grow out of this type of nostalgia).

"So, thank you very much for this. I am loving the baker's dozen idea and looking forward to the next variations on the theme!"

A Baker's Dozen: Large-Format Contact Prints

Up first is an image that isn't even a contact print, but might go one better. It's a unique image made directly in-camera on Ilford Harman Direct Positive Paper. Reader Johan Verhulst, 58, who lives in Lebbeke, a small village in the Flanders region of Belgium, uses a brass Suter Petzval lens from the 1800s on his Sinar P 8x10 camera. Because he rates the paper at ISO 2, he says "my poor models suffer a very high dose of flash light."

Denise Ross, Summer Sweet Corn, whole plate camera. Denise writes, "Age: not quite Medicare yet; location: home, by way of the Newport, Oregon, Farmers Market."  :-)  A beautifully simple photograph that I'll bet is considerably nicer "in person" as a contact print.

John Wyke writes from the North of Spain: "Here's me with one of my recent contact prints. I use the Intrepid Cameras 4x5 camera and I'm quite happy with the way it's going. I've always loved contact printing, and I'm happy to have a plate camera now rather than just medium format. I do my darkroom stuff at the La Puerta Verde photography school in Oviedo, Spain, which is run by my friend Ricardo Moreno (La Puerta Verde—Escuela de Fotografía). Although he offers courses in digital photography by necessity, his first love is analog and there are about fifteen of us who use various analog cameras, from Holgas to Hasselblads.

"I'm in the process of working on dual exposures contact prints like the one in this picture. I'm not quite there yet, but the joy is in the journey, not the destination. I'm also looking at Tintype style images. I do like the idea of a one shot, no copies, just a single object that you produce."

Stephen Schafer, Santa Monica Post Office, California (HABS index card)

Although the call was for contact prints, this is too interesting to leave out. Reader Stephen "Schaf" Schafer, who works all over California and Nevada, makes his living with 4x5 and 5x7 sheet film documenting heritage for the HABS/HAER/HALS collections. This is a sample of the so-called "digital contact prints" he submits along with his original negatives to the Library of Congress, where the work is in the public domain.

HABS = Historic American Buildings Survey; HAER = Historic American Engineering Record; HALS = Historic American Landscape Survey. This is true documentary work, and it's a great way to get out in the world with a camera.

William F. Whitaker, Three Vanities, 2004

Will Whitaker, 61, from Salisbury, North Carolina, says that most of the tools, processes and techniques he uses date back to the early 20th century, a period he especially admires in art, photography and design. "This image was taken with an 8 3/4" Wollensak Verito at approximately ƒ/6.3 (which is important because of the nature of the Verito lens whose character changes as it is stopped down). The Verito dates from 100 years ago, so fits right in with the aesthetic I admire so much."

At first I thought these 8x10 contact prints from reader Thom Bennett's website might be the same young lady at different ages, but it turns out they're sisters. Thom is 58 and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Currently he works in 8x10 but he says he will soon be acquiring a 7x17, which sounds like something he'll have fun with.

Although an in-camera original and not a contact print, I also couldn't resist including an example of the Tintypes people sent me, and this one's a whopper. Literally. In fact it sounds like Monty McCutchen is "all in": he shoots in 10x12, 7x17, 16x20, and 20x24 and, for the most part, contact prints his work with platinum/palladium, Pt/Pd gumovers, and Ambrotypes/Tintypes. (He did send me several JPEGs of actual contact prints.) He says he uses a lot of Lodima paper from our friends Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee, who you remember from our large format contact print sale a few years back. He writes that he resides in Asheville, North Carolina, "and within the confines of my own photographic geekery."

As they say in New Hampshire, eeyup. One measure of how deep Monty's geekery goes? One of his many ultra-large-format cameras is a 20x24 Ebony with a 16x20 reducing back! Ya gotta love that. He says of it, "I am acutely aware of how silly that sounds. At one time getting a 16x20 reducing back seemed to make sense. As the years have progressed I am having a hard time remembering the conditions in my life that would have constituted that decision being of sound mind and body."

Why "whopper"? The original of the JPEG shown above is a 20x24 (!) Tintype, which must have gobs of presence in the flesh—or, er, tin.

Of all the images readers sent in, this might have been the only Kallitype (an iron-silver alt process similar to Van Dyke brown). Although not his main way of working, Steve Wolfe of Columbus, Ohio, says he still occasionally shoots 4x5" black and white film, usually Ilford HP5+, with his Graflex Crown Graphic. He contact prints them and tones the prints with platinum/palladium.

By the way, if you're wanting to dip a toe into large format (LF) and contact printing, a Crown is a good place to start. I loved playing with those cameras. Vulch on eBay for a good one, and take your time looking. Great ones at reasonable prices are still being passed around among photography enthusiasts. Use yours for a few years then pass it back.

A lot of LF photographers I know make digital snaps of their setups when they work. (As well of promising scenes when they're scouting for locations.) Although the top picture above is from a scan and thus a bit outside the call, reader Gary Nylander, 59, of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, was kind enough to include just such a documentary record shot, taken with his phone:

With large format, you really do engage in a deep way with your subject—it's usually a relaxed, contemplative, engaged, take-your-time-and-get-it-the-way-you-want-it process. Nothing rushed or lucky about it, usually.

The picture in the picture is called Living the Dream: Stuff, and More Stuff

Since we're stretching the boundaries here (lots of readers sent things other than JPEGs of "purist," or straight, all-analog contact prints), I can't resist including this "selfie" by reader Mike Rosiak. "The print in my right hand was contact-printed from the negative in my left hand, Van Dyke brown process, on paper I hand-coated. The negative is on 8.5x11" Pictorico OHP film, printed from my Epson P600. Original image taken with a Lumix GF1, IR conversion by LifePixel, and using the Olympus body cap lens. Silver Efex Pro to make into B&W, then channels reversed to make the negative. So, the whole thing is pretty much a hybrid.

"The print behind me is another contact print, a Cyanotype. What looks like a print in the big red clip is my first 'negative,' which is positive! Early learning curve.

"Both Van Dyke brown and Cyanotype processes were in existence about a hundred years before I was born. (I'm 75). The Cyanotype print got a second place in a local (Southeast Pennsylvania, Northwest of Philadelphia) art group's Spring show, while the other print was accepted as a finalist in Pennsylvania's annual Art of the State event, and hung in the Harrisburg State Museum from June until September.

"I mostly shoot digital (99+%), haven't had a darkroom in maybe 20 years, but this stuff is fun to fool around with, and requires only a 'mostly dim' room."

Mike has two 4x5 cameras, a Crown Graphic and a (Kickstarter) Wanderlust Travelwide.

And here's Michael Boudreaux, 33, from Austin, Texas. "I shoot primarily a Hasselblad, a 4x5 Chamonix, and an 8x10 Deardorff recently purchased from Blue Moon Camera in Portland," Mike writes. "I'm holding my first contact print out of this (rugged) beauty, shot on Ilford HP5+, developed in Pyrocat HD and printed on Ilford MG Classic FB.

"I sit at a computer all day at work, so I gravitate towards vintage machines like goofy old cameras and quirky British roadsters." I get that.

You've met photography teacher Jeff Dionesotes before—he's the guy who bought my once-beloved SaltHill (made by my late friend Joe Saltzer, RIP) print washer when I moved away from Wisconsin. (Actually, I gave it to him—it was originally a review sample that I ended up paying nothing for, and thus it would have been unethical for me to profit from its sale.) This is a contact print of some of his students made with a Zone VI "Ultralight" 8x10.

...And, for good measure, one more:

Reader Chris Fazio, 61, of Chicago, Illinois took this dignified portrait of his 92-year-old mother this past September, on her birthday. He writes, "I started to get serious about photography in 2005, at the end of the film era! I love making contact prints using the Lodima paper Michael Smith makes." He has recently begun a project photographing people in profile.

•

That's it for this, the inaugural "Baker's Dozen." As I've mentioned, I'm going to try to repeat this feature at two-week intervals—at least for a little while. The next call for work is for smartphone pictures that you wouldn't have made but for the fact that you had your smartphone with you...but please read the call for work before submitting. I'm already awash in submissions (really fun to see them) so it's going to be important for you to follow protocol if you want your submission to be considered. (The amount of email I get is an organizational headache. An assistant, an assistant, my kingdom for an assistant!)

I had about three times as many submissions for this week's feature as I had space for, which is surprising given that traditional LF is such a small niche. It was excruciating to have to leave some of them out. I went for variety and "ancillary interest," you might say, and no judgement of quality is implied for those who didn't get chosen! I really enjoyed hearing from everyone and seeing your work—especially all of those who appended nice personal notes to their emails. Really good to hear from you. Sorry I don't have time to personally reply to anyone. (I really barely have time for email correspondences these days, if you're wondering why you never got an answer to an email. I do read everything that comes in.)

If you'd like to add an image in the comments, TypePad isn't really set up for that, but there's a workaround. First, the image must be on the Web and have a URL; and second, it can't be more than 470 pixels wide or it will get truncated. With those two conditions met, you can use this code in the comment box:

...Where the bit between the quote marks is the URL of your image. Leave the quote marks there.

That it for us for this week—I'm off to work on my book for the weekend. Hope you had as much fun with today's post as I did. We'll be back on Monday, and next week on Friday we'll take another trip Around the Web—I've already gotten started on that.

Mike
(Thanks to everyone who submitted work)

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Call for Work: Smartphone Snaps (Baker's Dozen)

Butters sniffing a purple onion skin.
Your shot need not include a dog.

Do you shoot with a smartphone regularly, especially a late model one, especially one you bought specifically for its camera?

My theory is that regardless of what you shoot with, sometimes you get a shot that works for you. Have you gotten a "hit" recently with your smartphone? Doesn't have to be art, just something you like. Show us something quirky or personal, something you wouldn't have shot if it weren't for your phone.

Send it to m c j o h n s t o n a t m a c d o t c o m with the subject line "bakersdozenphone" and I'll pick 13 of the most interesting ones and post them on Nov. 10th. The JPEGs should be saved in sRGB and 800 pixels wide, and please include them in the body of the email.

Let me know your name, age, and where you live, too. Any other comments welcome too, of course. Please don't forget the subject line, or I might lose it in the email stack.

Amish cauliflowers. Your shot need not be colorful.

Mike

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Another Function of a Portfolio

In the "How I Practiced Portraiture" post, Steve Caddy wrote:

So many of these problems boil down to a difference between what the customer thinks they're buying and what the photographer thinks they're selling.

Amen, and my experience was a vivid illustration of that.

Steve was probably talking mainly about the business dealings between the photographer and the customer, but it applies equally well to the aesthetic side of the transaction as well. When I started doing portraiture, in Washington D.C. in the late '80s, I took out a text-only ad in the Yellow Pages. I got a number of jobs from it, but a certain peculiar problem popped up—I had a difficult time determining what people wanted. I quickly realized that, when they say "portrait," everyone has a different thing in mind.

Sometimes the differences were subtle, but sometimes they were flagrant. For instance, one woman, it turned out, had in mind a romanticized, idealized, hand-colored B&W picture of her beribboned and well-coiffed pair of poodles, whereas another woman wanted what amounted to a softcore "boudoir" photo of himself as a gift for her husband (their marriage later failed, sadly). Neither one of those things is quite what "portrait" means to me.

Another rather vain gentleman of late middle age had a pile of example photos of himself that supposedly illustrated what he wanted. The only trouble was, the photos he showed me were a complete motley—I was mystified as to what they had in common (and I'm pretty good at that sort of thing). After considerable discussion and a lot of thought, it finally dawned on me—in all the various pictures he showed me, he had a certain "boyish" look. What he wanted was a picture of himself looking younger! (I was not able to satisfy that client, I'm afraid. In all my pictures of him, he looked about the age he, well, looked. He rejected all the proofs. Now you could satisfy a guy like that, but that was before Photoshop.)

So the first task with every client I got from the Yellow Pages was to interrogate them as to what "portrait" meant to them so I could figure out how to come up with what they wanted. In some cases this was easy, but in others it was not. Some people are remarkably inarticulate about all things aesthetic—all they could tell me was something along the lines of, "you know, a portrait." In many cases it was simply that people had a set idea of the style they preferred, and they were picturing it in their mind's eye, thinking that's what "portrait" meant—without realizing that their idea of "portrait" was only one kind of portrait.

Portrait

Portrait

Portrait

The solution to the problem worked extremely well. My friend who owned the frame shop in Georgetown invited me to exhibit about 14 of my portraits in her store. I was able to show not only exactly what I did best, but the kind of work I wanted to do—which turned out to be a great boon for my marketing. People would see my portraits, and if they wanted that kind of portrait I did, they would call me.

Those clients knew exactly what they wanted—they wanted exactly what I did. And, apropos Steve's comment, when either of us said "portrait" we both had the same thing in mind.

So I went from chasing a hodgepodge of wildly different ideas, never quite knowing if I was going to get what the client really wanted, to getting just exactly the sort of work I wanted to do.

It was a powerful demonstration of the purpose of a portfolio. Ever since then, I've been careful to explain to students that there are two purposes for your portfolio—one is to show what you can do and how good you are, of course, but the other is to attract the kind of work you want to do in the future. 

Mike
(Portrait 1: Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger, oil painting; Portrait 2: Audrey Hepburn by Yosuf Karsh, B&W film photograph; Portrait 3: Kevin Rollins, Former CEO of Dell by Kirk Tuck, color digital image)

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What else did you have in mind?
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bt: "I am in a somewhat unrelated field, architecture. One thing is for sure in the 'creative' professions. The work that you have previously done well is what leads to new work, usually of a similar character. Quite literally one thing tends to leads to the next. The old saying about this is: 'Be careful about what you get good at.' Because that's what you're going to be doing. You can try to change tracks, if you want, but it can take a lot of effort and, as you point out, there's a lot of motion and energy spent trying to define or even understand the (new) client and how you might deal with their needs, which you may not relate to or be a good fit with at all."

Bob Curtis: "'A good portraitist would be unlikely to admit it, but on a very basic level one might say that a portrait is a battle between two wills for the control of the sitter’s soul. The best portraits, then, would not be those where the artist wins too easy a battle (as with John Sargent) but the contests that end in hard-won ties: and the greatest of those would be between two champions, e.g,. Velazquez vs. Innocent X, or Rembrandt vs. himself.' —John Szarkowski, from the Introduction to Still Life by Irving Penn."

Ed Hawco: "All this talk of commercial portraits reminds me of my own short and horrific career shooting high school grad portraits. I will spare you the sordid details. But the mention of 'boudoir' reminds me of a friend who doesn't own a camera, has never owned a camera, and doesn't have a scrap of interest in photography. Yet he spent the better part of a year touring the Australian outback doing 'boudoir portraits' under contract from some Sydney-based studio that spent about 15 minutes showing him how to set up and focus the camera and trip the shutter. All else was up to him to figure out. When we get together and lament the woes of our lives he always trumps my short-lived and disastrous portrait career story with his own."

How I Practiced Portraiture

I love portraits, and used to do them, both for pay and for art. I got a nice "blast from the past" last week when when I did a senior portrait for the daughter of a friend of a friend. (Or at least I think I did—they have the proofs now and so far so good.)

I can't remember now how I learned about what constituted conventional practice. But what I did was to work with the subject or subjects in several different scenes or situations, almost always using natural light and "found" backgrounds. I would take several hundred shots. From these I would edit my selections and give the client/subject small proof-prints of six or eight choices. They would then pick their favorite, and I would make the final print. (This was when I was working with B&W film and making fiber-base silver gelatin prints.)

Sounds simple, but I experienced innumerable problems.

The most basic one was "who owns the picture." Of course, you know that the photographer owns the rights to his or her work, and retains them until specifically relinquishing them. Technically, legally, the client only owns the print or prints—the physical object—and doesn't have the right to reuse or re-purpose the image in whatever way they see fit. This is difficult for clients to understand, and if they do understand they often don't respect it because it seems unreasonable to them—they paid for the picture, it's a picture of them, and they think that means they own it. ("A dog with a pullet in his mouth owns the pullet," said the redoubtable Scotsman David Hume.)

You do not own images of yourself, however. The person who made the image owns the rights to it. This seems counterintuitive to many people hearing it for the first time. That doesn't mean the owner of the rights can do anything he or she wants to without the subject's permission; but neither can the client do anything he or she wants to with the images without the photographer's permission.

I never had "big" problems where this is concerned, just little ones, although I've certainly heard of big problems. My little problems included people refusing to return the proofs, framing the proofs (which were usually 5x7 or 4x6 RC prints), or having the proofs copied and enlarged as an alternative to paying me for a finished print. I solved the framing-of-proofs problem by having a mask made that put my name and logo on the bottom of each proof. This didn't work in one case, because the client framed the proof logo and all.) Because of that last, I finally resorted to including two finished prints in the sitting price (my last sitting price was $675 in the early '90s—and I photographed some prominent people, including a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, a U.S. Senator, a television star of the era, several members of recognizable political dynasty families, and a number of prominent citizens in and around Washington D.C.). Once, I sent a small JPEG of a portrait to a friend (of his mother) asking him if he wanted a print. I heard nothing back. Some time later, visiting his house, I found a framed inkjet print of the JPEG (which looked terrible, of course) on display! He had printed out the JPEG on his all-in-one dye inkjet printer, on bond paper. Yikes.

Framing was another headache. I was a custom printer and a recognized darkroom expert, and I put a lot of effort into making excellent fine finished prints. I included detailed framing instructions with the prints. I have no idea how many people took the next step and had them framed, but I know it wasn't everyone. For a while I would drymount the trimmed prints to heavy Rives BKF paper*; once, I visited a friend/client's house, and found my carefully-made, selenium toned, archivally washed fine print attached to their refrigerator with a magnet, among all the color snapshots and cute sayings. Yikes again!

But offering only framed prints is not an ideal solution, because peoples' homes are furnished in different styles and to different tastes, and there's no reliable one-size-fits-all framing option. People will prefer different kinds of frames.

I handled this problem in a neat way. I simply dropped off the finished prints at a framing shop (owned by a friend). Then I called the clients and told them their prints were ready and they could pick them up at their convenience at the shop. Most of them got the point and ordered framing for the prints they picked up.

Another problem, of course, which many of you (including wedding photographers) will be all too familiar with: they want to see all the shots. Editing photos is one of the hardest things about photography, even for experienced photographers. I've heard of wedding clients who complained that they "only" got 500 proofs when they "knew there were thousands of shots." Like the photographer is holding back all the good ones?

This problem probably gets down to who controls the image. The photographer thinks he or she gets to say what the best/final image is; the client thinks that's their right. The way I look at it, providing an edited selection of proofs is a compromise between these competing interests. If it were up to me, I'd just pick the best shot and the client would never see any of the others. If it were up to the client, they'd get everything (never suspecting how difficult it is to edit and choose for the simple reason that most people don't edit and choose: they just pick everything that strikes their fancy. That's why you see dozens of similar shots posted on photo sharing sites—the person who posted them "liked them all").

My experience was, the more proofs, the longer it took to get a print order. You can offer to help, but then you find you're teaching "Editing 101" to every new client.

The last problem is that most people are very picky about images of themselves, and quirky about what they want to see. Some people are sensitive to a certain perceived defect in their appearance, and they will pick a photograph of themselves that doesn't show that defect even if it's far from the best picture overall. Or they will pick a straight-on frontal picture simply because that's what they're used to seeing in the mirror.

Once, a few years ago, I will admit to making fun of an unknown woman for the picture of herself she posted on Match.com. There was only one single picture, and it showed her sitting on a porch, holding a beer, dressed in an impressively filthy T-shirt. It made her look like she had just come from spending a long period of time underneath a car. I made a joke of this to my brother, privately, but the thing is, my years as a portraitist gave me the insight to understand why she had posted that particular picture. Most likely it was that it either showed some little idiosyncratic feature of her face that she liked, or concealed some such feature that she disliked. And never mind the dirty T-shirt.

Anyway, for whatever reason, people often pick the wrong proof. You might say it's just a matter of taste, but I say no—it's my work, and I'm a better editor, and I know best. Anyway, I often made two finished final prints: one of their choice, for them, and one of the correct choice, for me.  :-)

Anyway, I always used to tell portrait clients to let their friends and families decide which one the best picture of them was, rather than doing it themselves. I'm sure that worked.

I've never worked as a portraitist in the digital age. I'm sure things are different now. I also suspect a lot of things are the same.

My portrait clients this past week were lovely people—friendly, gregarious and warm—and their confident and nice-looking daughter had the self-assurance of a well-raised child. She did a splendid job posing, and her mother acted as a stylist and did a very nice job of that! They were great to work with and I had fun doing the portrait. I do hope it suits their needs. I charged the price of a box of printing paper, and the gentleman kindly gave me a generous tip. So far I've send them un-watermarked small JPEGs as proofs with full permission to post them anywhere they want to. If/when they make a final choice, I'll send them a prepared full file for printing, and the name of a recommended printer.

The next thing I want to try is to hire a model for a portrait. I want to experiment with what it's like when I'm completely in control and the subject doesn't have any say at all. Should be an interesting experiment, and add to my lifelong learning about this kind of work.

The payoff in portraiture is when you happen to make a picture that the subject really likes. My '90s portrait of photographer Sally Mann that I showed in this post in 2015 (it's one of the few of my portraits I have in digitized form) was one of those—Sally really liked it, so much that she asked for the negative so she could print some promo pictures for her own use.

And she never returned the negative, of course. Sigh.

Mike

*This was self-defensive, mainly: it prevented framers from dry-mounting the print using too hot a temperature, which could impart the texture of the release paper to part of the surface of the print.

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The very picture of a blog.
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John Camp: "Most people don't understand this, but they are brilliant judges of faces—most people have a forehead, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin, etc., yet we are able to instantly pick out acquaintances from the thousands of possibilities we see passing us every day. That expertise is exercised with portraits: a good photographer gives us a professional example of a subject we're interested in from birth, and because it's a portrait, rather than an actual living face, we have no inhibitions about studying it closely, every pore and freckle. And we make judgments about them too: is it possible that the woman on Match.com did just crawl out from under a car, and was perhaps interested in attracting, say, a Harley owner? The beer and t-shirt would hint at that...."

Photo Library Management

No text

Mike
(Thanks to David Bostedo [and several other readers later])

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If you don't get it
Try this

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Kenneth Tanaka: "A cute and clever illustration! Related to your earlier topic on perfectionism, library management, whatever the materials being catalogued, is one place where a perfectionist is most welcome...indeed, required!"

Two More Wonderful Portfolios

What's called "Street" appears to be one of the main currents of photography among ambitious and skilled practitioners these days. It's a photography of found subjects that takes its style cues and approaches mostly from reportorial and documentary photography*, but without the focus on an event or a story, and with aims closer to pop art. Its closest analog might be populist art such as tattoos, customized hot rods (famously the subject of Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby), or pop-songs-by-the-people before the music industry gets sinks its chompers into them.

...But I shouldn't get started on deconstructing Street as a genre. (There's a rabbit-hole.) Basically just wanted to pass on two more photographers in case you have a hankering to look at more:

Photo by TC Lin

"Street photographs" don't actually have to include the street...they can, though. This is by TC Lin, one of the photographers in the Burn My Eye collective, who comments here on TOP as "poagao" or "TC." You can see more of his work here. I particularly like Portfolio 2, and the one of the new-style photographers and the bored guard in the museum.

Photo by Alexander Petrosyan

Alexander Petrosyan is a staff photographer at коммерсант (kommersant, or "businessman"), a daily newpaper in Russia that covers business and politics. He also enjoys a growing reputation as a chronicler and poet-photographer of St. Petersburg. A good article published at Huck magazine this past week emphasizes the street-photographer aspect of his work. More of his St. Petersburg photographs and his photojournalism can be seen at his website.

Mike
(Thanks to several readers)

*...with a smaller dose, perhaps, of those "amazing happenstance" kinds of photos that crop up on certain populist clickbait-type websites, such as these for example...

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At street level
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Jeffrey MacMillan: "Am stunned by the photos of Alexander Petrosyan. As said in the Huck article, they are short stories, each of them. Poetic. Comedic. I made the mistake of going to his blog. My cameras may be going on Craigslist soon. He has such a ridiculous number of notable shots. It may help that Petrosyan is in such an insanely photogenic city."

TC: "Wow, thanks for the kind words, Mike. I always enjoy opening up the browser each morning to see what's new on TOP, but it was kind of a surprise to start reading the post, scroll down and think, 'Hey, that looks familiar...is that...oh!'"

Color Correction

I got a marvelous comment yesterday from Peter Conway that deserves its own post, about the color-correction of aging eyesight (he and I are the same age):

Towards the end of 2016, I got a couple of new lenses, but they weren't Nikon or Sigma Art—they were from Abbott Labs, and replaced the "factory-issued" lenses which had cataracts (I'm 60 in two weeks).

After the first eye was done, I was shocked at how blue the world looked through that eye—until it occurred to me that the issue was likely that the world looked unusually yellow through the other eye. My ophthalmologist assured me that the Abbott lens had the truer colors. The three weeks between surgeries was an interesting period, with each eye vigorously disagreeing with the other on how things looked.

Now that both eyes are done, the world does look different, but more subtly than I would have thought after the first eye. It turns out that "Carolina blue" is actually blue to me now. And the green pill I was taking, which the pharmacy said was blue—well, it turns out the pharmacy was right.

I've started looking at some of the color prints I've made, and am pleasantly surprised that some actually look better than before—less muted than I had been seeing them. Others, though, are a bit over the top and will need some re-work.

So my question to you is, given all the color management technology available—profiles for our monitors, profiles for our printers, profiles for all sorts of different papers—is there any way to color manage our eyes? That's a lot bigger variable than I'd realized even two months ago.

I can't begin to answer his question, although I have what I believe is an example of older eyes leading a photographer astray—at the end of Ansel Adams's life, the art dealer who had made him rich, Harry Lunn, prevailed upon him to make "The Museum Set," a master edition of his greatest masterpieces, destined for museums. Which he did. Unfortunately, Ansel was very dissatisfied with then-current photo papers, and he also appeared to be having vision issues—the "Museum Set" prints are among his least satisfactory from a printmaking standpoint, nowhere near the spectacular balancing act of his best prints.

Basic color correction
By the way, to learn color correction, it's necessary first to simply memorize the major RGB complements (the three pairs of two opposites per pair), then teach yourself to see what color a picture has too much of. At that point, you know what to add.

RGB color wheel

Blue is the opposite of yellow, red is the opposite of cyan, and green is the opposite of magenta. So if you see just a little too much green in a picture, you know to add a little magenta. See too much cyan, add red. Thinking of it in terms of what color to add will gets you out of all sorts of trouble. And it's much easier to detect what's there than what's missing.

I've mentioned before that many experienced color printers have a "color cast preference"—a color they favor just slightly. I favor prints that skew just a skosh red; Ctein told me he favors cyan (which I believe is unusual—he's the only person I know with a cyan bias). Knowing your color bias preference helps you to keep it in check, for one thing! I'm always cautious about whether I might be adding too much red.

A little secret
Another issue with color correction is that most people have wildly varying tolerances for casts, and here's a little secret. While most people don't like even a little bit too much of certain casts like cyan and magenta, human beings in general have a huge liking for yellow, AKA "warmth." Whereas you might not even be able to get away with two or three points too much green or cyan, you can add five or ten points too much yellow and you might still be all right. (The theory is that "golden hour" sunlight is yellow and inherently pleasant to us.)

That's why the "color temperature" slider (blue-yellow) is so central to most editing programs. And it's also why yellow gets newbie color printers / post-processors into trouble they sometimes can't get out of. Why? Because judgement with yellow is tougher to "feel" correctly—everything from neutral to way too yellow might look subjectively equally good, just different. So which way do you go? Without experience, it's easier to get confused.

My preference was to teach people to always to get the color temperature, the yellow-blue pair, as neutral as possible first—with reference to your memory of the original scene—which in turn allows you to see other color casts more easily. Correct those, and only then add a bit of yellow back in to see if more warmth is preferable to you.

For practice, go to any photo site, the more amateurish the better, and start looking for pictures with color that looks "wrong." Figure out what it has too much of, and thus, what you would need to add. There's nothing stopping you from actually doing it, either—that is, nothing stopping you from downloading strangers' pictures and color-correcting them for your own practice. As long as you toss your copy out afterwards and don't actually nick their work.

Color correction is fun, and, as any experienced color printer will tell you, helps you see color in pictures much more readily* and accurately, too—and enjoy it more when you see photographs with color that "sings."

Mike
(Thanks to Peter Conway)

*To me, for example, the second picture in the "Two-Hat Weather" post, of the frozen waterfall, is a riot of colors!  :-)  Look at it again and notice the rust browns in the rocks and the cerulean in the ice.

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We like green
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Ben Rosengart: "Very interesting, Mike. I just forwarded this to my dad. He claims he's no good at color correction, but I maintain he just hasn't put in enough hours."

Stephen Cowdery: "Looking at the color graphic, I thought that my green perception was faulty—the green and chartreuse triangles appeared to be exactly the same. I opened the graphic in Photoshop and checked the info reading: R-0, G-255, B-1, for both segments!"

Mike replies: Sorry. I start with a Wiki graphic of unknown provenance, convert it to sRGB, and then submit it to the mercies of the TypePad blog software (which does change things). By that time it's far from calibrated—really just a rough illustration of what it's supposed to represent.

Here's another, possibly easier way of visualizing additive color:

Each primary color (R, G, or B) is the opposite of the smaller overlap opposite it. (Top image courtesy Wikipedia.)

The colors still aren't quite right but if you accept that these are just illustrations you'll be all right. The key thing to emphasize is just that you have to memorize the three pairs of opposites. Then, whatever color you see too much of in a picture, add more of its opposite.

Ranjit Grover: "The 'factory-issued' lens turns yellow, opaque and rigid with age. That is the reason it has to be replaced. The automatic white balance in our brain does a good job and we do not see the effect of the yellow lens as long as both of them are of the same color depth. But once one of them is replaced with a plastic lens we see the difference. The plastic lenses too are slightly yellow, but not as much as the 'factory supplied lens' with cataract. What one person sees as yellow may not the same as another one sees. There is no way one person can tell another person exactly what he sees or hears or tastes or feels. Neuro scientists call this problem 'qualia.' Qualia comes alive when we have two different lenses in our eyes. Or when one ear is defective. Probably qualia is what causes our individual color preferences."

Herman: "I'll stick to black and white."

Mike replies: That's even harder! But no worries, you're good at it. :-)

Ken N: "I use reference pictures to 'calibrate' my eyesight as I work. It was a trick I learned many years ago with audio editing."

Mike replies: That is indeed a very good trick. It helps a lot with B&W, too (apropos Herman). I used to keep a manilla folder of reference B&W's in the darkroom—eight to 12 examples of "perfect" tonality—and if I felt my perception getting a little off-kilter, I'd just look through them. Naturally I still remember some of those pictures!

MarkR: "I'm reminded of Claude Monet, who redid some of his water lily paintings after he had cataract surgery. He was reportedly upset that he had painted them too red."

Mike replies: The story of Monet's struggles with his vision in later life is very involved and complicated; one thing that stuck with me is that he apparently wanted to convey in his paintings how he saw, because it was very lovely, but he couldn't see well enough to paint it properly. At this point I'm not sure if that's some species of fact or just my interpretation....

Stephen F Faust: "Re 'The key thing to emphasize is just that you have to memorize the three pairs of opposites. Then, whatever color you see too much of in a picture, add more of its opposite.' ...Which explains why Lightroom has a blue/yellow slider and a green/magenta slider, but why doesn't it have a cyan/red slider?"

Mike replies: Because technically you can do everything you might need to do with just the blue-yellow and green-magenta sliders in ACR. Increasing both blue and yellow at the same time (moving both sliders to the left) is the same as adding cyan, and increasing both yellow and magenta at the same time (moving both sliders to the right) is the same thing as adding red. Try it. The problem with that is that it's not as intuitive as having three sliders in terms of looking at the picture, evaluating it, and knowing what to do, which is why in Photoshop I would suggest doing color correction in Image > Adjustments > Color Balance, which has three sliders.

Presumably Lightroom has the same three sliders somewhere too? (Or is it more automated in LR?)

John Krumm answers Mike: "To answer your question, Lightroom doesn't have that color balance tool. Lightroom adjustment options mirror ACR. I'll have to try it; it will give my neglected Photoshop CC something to do."

Mike replies: That's weird. I reviewed the correction options in LR using Adobe's online instructional videos, and looks to me like Develop > HSL falls into the classic trap of automated tech: it makes color correction—better make that "color enhancement"—easier to carry out, but more difficult to understand. 

Richard: "Color management of your eyes is really just knowing about their shortcomings and working within them. The biggest enemy, according to my research, is your own brain. That's why it's best to only look at something you want to color correct for a few seconds at a time. After that your auto color correction kicks in and you won't be able to see what's wrong anymore. And eat your carrots, of course. The normal caveats apply as well, paint your walls a non-pigmented grey, keep light levels low, and don't work when you're tired because your brain just won't be up to the job. The one other thing I would say is that there is no shame in using a ColorChecker to create a custom profile—especially when you shoot in weird mixed lighting conditions. Using a color checker or a calibrated grey card is like sharpening up your saw and planing your boards before you start a woodworking project. It frees you up to be more creative because you're starting from a neutral place."

What to Do with Prints?

As far as what to do with the prints you make—several readers asked yesterday—the classic solution is boxes. (I like to put other peoples' work on my walls.)

Print boxes run all the way from custom-made solander cases made by hand bookbinders, sometimes of exotic materials, in some cases specially designed for a particular portfolio, to the classic museum case, which is a hard archival case with a drop back and metal clasps, to a "metal edge box," which is a drop-front box made of smooth-surfaced archival board with metal fasteners at the corners. Museum cases are nice for home or studio storage but they're heavy and not as easily transportable as some other types, and they tend to be made in the classic silver-photo-paper sizes (8x10", 11x14", 16x20", 20x24") rather than the common inkjet printing page sizes (U.S. letter, 11x17, 13x19", and 17x22" in the U.S., for example).

A standard classic museum case for prints

My preferred solution is generally the so-called clamshell portfolio case, which is a self-hinged box made of boards of the type used for hardcover books, but thicker, lined with archival paper and and covered with a water-resistant acrylic-impregnated buckram cloth. These are long-wearing, sturdy boxes that aren't too heavy or expensive.

For extra prints, work prints, and rejects that I don't want to throw away, I used the cheaper (but still harmless to prints) metal-edge boxes.

Another kind of box I like is the Century Box. These are neatly made boxes about halfway between a portfolio clamshell and a paper box. Although they've been getting steadily more expensive over the years, they're still about half the price of a cloth-covered portfolio case. I used to make 8x10 fiber-base silver prints, put them in 8x10 Century Boxes, and stand them in bookcases like books. It's a neat and clean way to store prints while keeping them easily accessible.

If you were creating a presentation portfolio, the classic solution is to make a window-mat from white archival mat board for each print. In practice these mats get soiled pretty easily (when dropping portfolios at museums for review, some artists used to include a pair of white cotton gloves inside the portfolio case as a not-so-subtle hint to the curators to help keep the expensive mats clean). These days, it's common even in more formal settings to show loose unmatted prints. It's certainly the easiest way to store prints for private viewing, especially now that we use papers that don't buckle and curl. Even if you work hard on your printmaking, each physical print has much less work and expense invested in it, so it's easier to sacrifice them to viewers who won't treat them so well.

If you show your prints often to others, it's sometimes a good idea to have one set for handling and a pristine extra set that you don't let anyone touch.

As far as what size to print, well, I enjoy leafing through my boxed prints and looking at them, whether alone or in the company of friends or family. I'd suggest just printing to the size you most like to look at.

Still having trouble?
If you still find yourself overwhelmed with too many prints: get pickier. Edit more harshly, and work harder on each finished print. You should always be striving to improve your standards. One of the nice things about keeping boxes of loose prints is that they're easy to continually cull—you can remove prints that either no longer meet your printmaking quality standards or that are just pictures you've grown tired of and that you think no longer "work."

But don't cull too hard. Your work is your work, and you want to respect your older work even if you don't like it as well any more. Every now and then, especially when you feel you've reached a point of change or if you feel your photographs and your working skills have changed, start a new box...even if the old one isn't full. It's okay.

Mike

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David Bostedo: "Instead of a box, I prefer these (for my decidedly amateur photography): they don't allow for matting or other types of presentation, but the photos are very easily viewable and 'flip-through-able.' They're nicely made and put together, everything is archival/acid-free, and they've held up very well. I have a couple, and each can hold 48 13x19 prints (my preferred sheet size). I have only recently begun filling the second one, almost 10 years after I bought them. That's not to say that I've only printed 50 or so photos in 10 years. I've made hundreds of prints. But I've only kept about 50 for display. And not necessarily my 50 best photos (to me)... just the 50 I or others like to see.

"They come in many sizes, and also in more 'professional' versions with leather covers, etc."

How To Turn Pictures into a Project

I was only in Albany for a few hours last week. I headed out with a camera and took a bunch of pictures.

Occasionally I post the results of these little outings...you might remember when the tree service came or when I took a walk in Penn Yan. What you see of mine are usually simple "mini-sets" from one shooting session. I thought it might be useful to indicate the work process I'd use if I were doing any of these things in a more involved way, more seriously.

The basic process is reduced to essentials in a quote by Mark L. Power: "Shoot, think, shoot." That jibing between the one and the other is where the richness comes from.

The first step is to do some shooting and distill it into a handful of pictures you like, as I've done in these sets. They don't necessarily have to "go together," but can just be "the good ones." If the pictures suggest a direction, then the next step would be to go shoot a second time, perhaps with a picture or two in mind as a direction for the project—for instance if the two pictures here suggested "stone buildings" or "the vicinity of the capital building." I think the "idea" can be very vague at this point...it's more important to be open to whatever way you might want to take it.

Try your best to think of meaning, or feeling, and not just prettiness.

Don't forget that a set or portfolio of pictures can stand a lot of variety. As long as the theme, idea or raison d'etre is resilient enough to keep it from being just a bunch of pictures, variety provides dynamism. The fact that it's all your vision, style, and taste goes a fair way to keeping things coherent. Anyway editing for coherence and consistency is the last step, not something you want to start too early.

By the third or fourth photographing session—each time processing a handful of "good" or favorite pictures from the shooting—that's when you know if the project is maintaining any energy. If you're still energized and enthusiastic, that's enough of a sign that you should keep going. On the other hand, I get bored easily, and I suppose discouraged easily too, so I have to be careful—I don't want to give up on things too soon. It's important to know yourself; seldom is "energy" just limitless unbridled enthusiasm. A little judgment is called for too.

If the project has sufficient energy, then you're starting to accrue a stack of pictures. I say "stack," implying a physical form, as if they were prints, and that's intentional—always, always, it's better to look when you're thinking, when you're editing or evaluating. Don't work just with your mind—be sure you're working with your eyes too.

As the stack of pictures gets bigger, what I always find is that some of the earlier selects begin to fall away. For instance, of my "out for a walk" four, I only like the middle two now. So as you go along, you're both adding to the set and also culling it down. Let it evolve.

All of your visits to a place or outings for a project are valuable. Early on, you can see new things with fresh eyes, and the attentiveness that novelty provides is valuable. Later on you might be getting bored with the obvious shots and start to look for something different. That can help save your project from superficiality (a problem sometimes with photojournalism—the photographer "parachutes in," gathers some of the obvious pictures, then departs, having never really gotten to know anything deeply or specifically).

So when do you quit? At every stage of the process you have to balance thinking, or thoughtfulness, with openness. Even if you have the time and resources to keep adding to a project, every project has legs of its own...you'll know when you've got enough, when the set is a set and doesn't need any more. The longer and harder you work, though, the better the set usually gets, just because better pictures start crowding out less distinguished ones.

Photographers have definitely pursued projects for whole careers or lifetimes, and sometimes someone in a unique and uniquely rich situation can create a complete set of pictures in a week or even less. Stay attuned—it takes subtlety and good judgment to know when a project is complete. I should mention that a common mistake of amateur enthusiasts is to keep one idea going for way too long. They have access, and have learned how to get the goods, and it's easier to keep going than it is to start putting things in final form and moving on. You don't want to quit too soon (especially because of laziness, which is my flaw), but you don't want to drag things out either.

If I were to go ahead with the Albany pictures as a set, I'd plan three or four more trips to Albany to photograph, picking auspicious times of year. I might try to hire a local guide to squire me around. This is common practice among photojournalists working in foreign locations, often for security or translation purposes or both, but works just as well in places in your own country that you don't know well yourself. I'm not really much of a "city architecture" photographer myself—I really yearn to photograph people, but usually lack access (or the cojones to be bold with strangers). So I don't know that I'd devote a lot of time to making a whole project out of Albany. But that's how I'd go about it if I were doing it.

Mike

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Nigel: "I did professional theatrical photography some years ago. Then it was easy to make good photographs as I knew what photographs I had to take and how they had to look. When I stopped and went back to doing it for my own pleasure my photography lost direction badly. I would go somewhere and snap what I found without direction or purpose and what I got was photographs without purpose or direction.

"My solution was to decide on a subject and then create a project and shoot to my imaginary brief.I often also have several projects running at the same time. This makes me research my subject and I often know what I am going to shoot before I arrive at a place. The research also throws up new places to visit.

"The conclusion of a project for me is when I have enough material to do a Blurb or ePub book for myself. Whilst doing the book I often see that I am missing something so out I go to fill in the missing links. Having the production of a book in mind, means that I try to shoot the pictures I will need; the establishing shots down to the detail shots.

"My projects are quite varied, from just documenting a family holiday,a small project documenting the abstract patterns in the mud around some mud volcanoes we have nearby, two structures by Calatrava in my town, or my latest one which documents the sites of WWII war atrocities against civilians in the Apennine mountains which was sparked by coming across a little monument in an inaccessibile part of these mountains whilst doing another project on rustic Apennine architecture."

David Cope: "Timely. I'm starting to edit what is in effect an 'accidental' project. I've been shooting two (sometimes three) times daily for over a year during the dog walk.

"Recently I was thinking about what I should do to start a project when it struck me that I'd been doing one without even realising it! My daily dose of photography has built up into quite an archive. I'm not a spray and pray type so the workload is manageable and I've been doing first cut selects as I go anyway.

"It's going to be challenging for me (which is part of the fun) as it's an eclectic mix of images—found still life, landscape, reportage, abstract, nature close up, weather, farming etc. Mostly shot with B&W in mind but some work better in colour and I've no idea how to handle this as a series yet!"

Kefyn Moss: "Whenever I travel now, I always end up doing projects. The individual 'hero' image has much less appeal now. I'm looking for the 'essence' of the place I'm visiting but I don't go looking for it too actively but rather let it come to me—which can take a few days to a week or more for me to recognise. I have in the last few years done book projects locally which I set for a year (but which I felt completed by eight months) and others that lasted the length of a trip (six weeks) or more recently when everything was firing perfectly less than three weeks. Not being able to easily return to the location makes it more critical to speed up and streamline the process you describe Mike, but I've found that it just happens naturally now and really focuses my creativity. It's very satisfying."

Ed Grossman: "Being mostly a project photographer, it's nice to see this topic featured. What astonishes me is how much I've learned about myself through my portfolios. Being able to articulate how I'm connected to my portfolios not only tells me what they're about but what I'm about. My stronger self-awareness has bettered my life.

"One piece of advice I'd offer is the importance of making the work for an audience of one (yourself). This can't help but strengthen the art and your bond to it. Should you decide to share the work with an audience, your passion will radiate from it. I'm convinced that people can 'see' that personal connection in art and bond with the artist when it's present. In my opinion, doing what you love is a win-win situation."

The Weekly Flickr Video Series

A "face" by SteffenKahl from the "faces in places" project and book

Here's something for those interested in the "curation" of digital images in the new era—that is, conceptualizing, editing, and redacting pictures into coherent and fully realized bodies of work. The traditional methods—one person making all the photographs, one or more people selecting and sequencing them—may be on the decline. But as digital images proliferate, eventually the manner in which pictures are pulled together into projects is going to become ever more essential.

Here's an interesting set of examples—the Weekly Flickr Video Series. You can delve at your own leisure and according to your own choice. The ones I've watched so far have been well done and interesting, both for the images themselves and as documents of how people come up with projects. I first looked at the "faces in places" project, which formalizes a motif that photographers have long played with, namely, that humans are predisposed to see faces. The group's only rule is, "it has to be a naturally occurring face."

Londoner Jody Smith says that when he started the Flickr group, "I soon discovered that other people were a lot better at it than me"—and the group as a whole was better than any one individual photographer. If that's a harbinger of the way photographers will work in the future, it would emphasize rather than diminish the importance of conceptualizing and editing.

There's a book, the profits from which all go to a children's charity.

That's just one of many projects in the series. You can pick a different one that you think might have more appeal to you. Check out a video or two in the series if you get a chance...you might find some inspiration.

Mike
(Thanks to J. Brad Goodwin)

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Terry Burnes: "It's interesting how often the Faces feature in Apple's Photos application identifies some inanimate object as a face. Perhaps it is curating an exhibit."

Exposures Aren't Free

My friend Earl Dunbar from Rochester swung through town on a photographing trip the other day, and we had lunch in Hammondsport. Participating in the time-honored geek genre of "photo-friend across the lunch table" pictures, he took a few snaps of me with his cool Leica CL and 40mm Leica Summicron-C, and I set up the Fuji at table level and framed a shot through some bottles and wine glasses.

I've been bothered recently by a tendency to not take enough frames. Sometimes I'll take two, four, or six shots of something, think, oh, I've probably got it, and stop. Then I get back to the computer and have to face the fact that no, dummy, you didn't get it—should have tried a little harder.

So I've been trying to force myself to take more exposures lately. I kind of overdid it with Earl—I took more or less the same shot fifty-three times.

As everybody always says, "digital is free, you might as well take a lot of shots."

Are digital exposures really free, though? Not to me. The more shots you take, the harder it is to edit.

My now-very-ex girlfriend Sara had an expression. When you had a decision to make or were trying to figure something out, she'd say you have to "feel into it," meaning you have to let it in and then give it time to settle in order for your feelings about it to gradually clarify, like muddy water in a glass eventually becomes clear when the particles settle to the bottom. I've never been an immediate "yes-no" type of person when editing; I'm looking—hoping—for that mysterious je ne sais quoi that makes a photograph a little something more—doesn't always happen, of course—so I have to look at a frame for a while and feel into it before I know if it's a keeper or a throwaway.

The more frames, the longer that takes.

So shooting a lot has a high cost for me. All things considered, I'd rather get it right from life...pay close attention, be alert, get it when you see it. And only have two, four, or six shots to look at when you get home. More often than not, when I get a good shot, I know it before it reaches the computer. The late Jane Bown (who I guess is one of my heroes) said she noticed that the first shots she took and the last shots she took were usually the best, so she stopped taking all the ones in the middle. Which of course is startlingly illogical and also delightfully whimsical, so you can't help but like it.

Let's face it, no photograph in the genre of photographer-friend-across-the-lunch-table has ever been a masterpiece. The two friends involved might like it, though. Earl is good company and it was nice to see him.

Why I Photoshop
This also illustrates nicely another little insight I had yesterday, when I was putting up the "On the Way Home" farmland shot. I had finishing loading in the post when I suddenly realized I had Photoshopped one of the pictures slightly. Given what I've said about that around here lately, I realized I couldn't do that without acknowledging it. What I suddenly realized was why I Photoshop.

It's almost always to get rid of some "typo." Let me 'splain. A typo or misspelling in writing is a small annoyance, like a tiny bug pestering you. It serves to stop up the flog of the words and interrupt the communication and make you stumble a little...you think, wait a minute, 'the flog of the words?' Shouldn't that be flow? And you've taken your mind off what the writer was saying. Similarly, in pictures there might be little visual confusions where something looks like it's wrong somehow. It might distort a shape, or just not be "readable," or it might make something look like something else.

This picture is an example. Here's the unretouched frame:

If you'll notice, just behind his head, on the right side—my right, and yours—at the top edge of the frame, there's something dark on the wall behind Earl that creates a tonal merger with the shadowed side of his head. To me that looks almost subliminally like there's something wrong with the shape of his head—like it's a little deformed, a little squared off on the right side. That's just not a thought I want in the viewer's mind as they look at the photograph—that "what's wrong here?" thought. So that's what Photoshop is so nice for and the kind of thing I'll use it for. I seldom do things to "prettify" the picture, like get rid of the wrinkles on Earl's T-shirt, because doing that kind of thing just doesn't interest me. I use it more because I've judged what might be a visual distraction that "interrupts" the viewer's assimilation of the picture, in the way that a typo is an interruption of thought, and I'll fix that.

By the way—I'm changing the subject yet again—the photographer-friend-across-the-table genre always reminds me of my dear friend Nick Hartmann, who now lives in Phoenix, definitely one of the world's good guys. Nick's photography for many years consisted of photographing the life of his friends and family and then sending prints to them as gifts. This picture of Earl is sort of a Nick-ish picture. Nick's way of being a photographer is a very generous and other-oriented way to be one; a person could do a lot worse.

Mike

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Tony Roberts: "'We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole' —Henri Cartier-Bresson."

Robert Roaldi: "I read of an interview with Elmore Leonard once. Talking about his compact prose, the interviewer asked how he managed to write like that. He answered that he left out the parts nobody reads. Your story about Jane Brown reminded me of that."

sneye (partial comment): "Theoretically, increasing sample size should increase the probability of 'success.' But in practice, sometimes there is no image there in the first place or I am not quite in the right mood to engage with the subject or simply can't be bothered to sort out the rubbish."

Mike replies: That's true. But then, lots of times, the picture we thought we saw didn't turn out to be one. We always have to be open to that possibility. I'm still not quite sure if this is a good picture of Earl, or if I just missed in 53 slightly different ways.

Bob Johnston [no relation]: "I think that the number of frames needed depends on the subject or type of photograph. Your great shot of Earl is a photo of someone who was not posing. If he had blinked or moved a hand into an awkward position you could have missed the shot. Having said that, three or four should have been enough. Changing the background is perfectly ok in this shot.The intention of the image to show an impression of Earl is enhanced by the edit. A photograph of this type is not just about recording a moment. It's about your impression of Earl."

Mike replies: Re 'three or four should have been enough,' note that there were only four exposures where Earl was leaning forward with that engaged expression on his face.

A Very Important Distinction in Post-Processing

Here's a bit of food for thought. I'd argue that there's a crucial distinction in post-processing between two type of decisions that, although similar superficially, spans a divide like opposite slopes of the same mountain. Namely, the difference between changes you make to make the picture more true to the scene the way it was, and changes you make to make the picture less like the original scene.

I would argue that most routine post-processing corrections are of the former type. We change density and exposure, color balance, local contrast and sharpness, perhaps correct image geometry, not to depart from reality but to represent it more closely.

I constantly do this. I have a mental visual memory of the scene and I try to make the picture look more like the scene. A lot of post-processing falls into this category. It's not deceptive at all—it's corrective.

Even one of the very few pictures I've deliberately "Photoshopped" falls into this category. (I wish I could find it to show you but I've looked and looked and can't come up with it.) I re-shot the moon and inserted into a different picture. But the reason was because the moon in the original picture was blown out and grossly overexposed. I put the "new" moon exactly where the moon actually was in the picture, the same size. So it wasn't embellishment, it was simply a technical means of getting the picture to look the way the scene looked.

Warts and all?
Next comes a category of corrections I'll call "transitory anomalies." I was a portrait photographer in D.C., and I've always argued that a certain amount of "correction" is necessary to match the way our brains process images of faces. We're very, very good at recognizing and reading human faces—the more so the more they look related to our own. But we "see" certain things and not others. For instance, our brains are very good at distinguishing persistent characteristics from transitory characteristics. We are great at reading subtleties that pertain to persistent recognition—and we overlook features we know are undependable as markers of recognition. It's as if the brain "throws those out." It knows they're not reliable. A piece of jewelry or a headband, the way a person's hair looks that day, a pimple, stubble on a male. By removing those things from a picture, or de-emphasizing them, I don't think we're necessarily violating the literalness of the picture—we're just making it conform more closely to the way the brain actually sees.

Same thing with little bits of trash in a landscape. They're not persistent, they're transitory.

Of course you perceive that the ice is getting thinner here.  :-)  How much trash to you get to remove before misrepresentation sets in? Judgment call.

Looks like...
Next in the litany come things that mimic errors. When I was a magazine editor I always evaluated the seriousness of errors and typos in the finished, printed magazine based on how likely the reader was to be able to recover the intended sense or meaning. A gap         in a line is unsightly, but it doesn't impose on the reader's recovery of meaning. But a word that's grlsdgfb is more serious, especially if the missing or garbled word is needed to parse the sentence. There was a song long ago that used synth noises that at one point mimicked what telephones then sounded like. I thought that was a mistake even though it wasn't, because it always made me stop paying attention to the song and wonder if the phone was ringing.

An example of this: I remember a landscape I took where a few of the fallen leaves were turned a certain way to the light and looked like litter. I toned those down with the spotting brush even though they were accurately rendered by the camera. The reason was that they were actually leaves but they looked like something else.

To a certain extent I even think this is permissible when a visual element looks anomalous when frozen by camera perspective. If a person is standing behind another person, and the camera catches, say, just one finger poking out from the main subject's cheek, I think it's permissible to remove that. The reason is, again, to refer back to your brain's perception at the scene: you know there's a second person standing behind the first one a little ways back; both are moving, and visually they overlap. The details of how the images of the two people get confused is easily and effortlessly sorted by your brain. But the camera can catch a detail wrong, and the viewer of the picture doesn't have the whole perception to go on. So suddenly it looks glaringly odd.

An example of this is the famous "pole growing from someone's head" phenomenon. The classic example of that is John Paul Filo's photograph of the Kent State shooting that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971:

The anomaly happens because the brain is so adept at sorting such confusion in real life, and much less so in photographs. (A more seasoned news photographer might have taken a quick juke to the left before pressing the shutter—it's a bit of a rookie mistake—but Filo was a 22-year-old student at the time, and of course the scene itself must have been extraordinarily upsetting.) This change would not be permissible in photojournalism today, but for all other kinds of photographs I think that when you weigh one kind of misrepresentation against another kind of misrepresentation—which, when post-processing, you often have to do—it makes sense to make changes like this.

Of course you perceive we are now merrily sliding on the slippery slope. We're now extremely close to making mere cosmetic changes, the kind that sanitize and idealize pictures and make them more pictorial and illustrative. You really have to judge just how far you want to go with this.

What was done to the rickshaw picture in the two representations of it we have goes way, way over the line, so that's clear. If this had been my photograph, apart from color balancing and getting the density and sharpness right I would have only made three changes. I would have removed the black line labeled 1; I would have knocked down the value of the apple cart at 2 a little bit, without moving or removing it, probably to about the same value as the shirt of the man standing behind it or just a little less; and I might have considered eliminating the little white square at 3, but I think I would probably have decided against that. (It's a bit like a typo that a reader can easily figure out...and the world in photographs is like that, a bit messy.) Of course it's not my picture so I'm not the one who gets to decide.

But if we know that a line was crossed here, knowing where the line was is a more delicate matter.

But really, aren't all post-processing decisions like that? It's just like "going heavy on the sliders." It's easy to overdo any effect, not just "cleanup and removal." You can overdo cropping, or saturation, or contrast; in the same way, you can go overboard with cleaning up elements that are "distracting." Until, perhaps, you find yourself making wholesale changes in the look and the meaning of the photograph. In which case it has become a photo-illustration.

Where that line is is different for each of us—and it's our work, so we get to decide. But I think this idea of "more true to the scene" vs. "less true to the scene"—correcting the "mindless" camera image vs. tampering heavy-handedly with what you know full well was actually there—is an important distinction, and one that you might want to keep in mind to help guide your decisions.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Bill Shannon: "What I see in the original rickshaw image is four riders packed onto the back seat of the bike and the driver working hard to move them through the rain storm. This is probably his livelihood. To me the lie in the 'fixed' version, amongst other things, is that the two surviving riders are postured for a tight fit but there is only a phony blank space behind them and a missing glimpse of the fourth person.The exertion of the driver has lost its reason."

Jim Richardson: "I find quite interesting just how ham-handed the printer was in the use of the potassium ferricyanide in the 'straight' version of John Filo's Kent State picture. The neckerchief, the paving behind and around the woman student, the pants of the victim, and a few other places were hit pretty heavy with the bleach. To my eye (having been printing in much the same way in that era) the bleaching was meant to overcome the clutter, part of which came from the unfortunately positioned pole. I'm just wanting to point out in what ways the 'straight' print isn't totally straight either. But this manipulation is clear to be seen, while the rickshaw cloning is really meant to deceive. Intent matters.

"Also, if these are true crops of the various versions of the print, then it is interesting that the man on the left was cropped out, for much the same reason as McCurry's technician cloned out the third man on the rickshaw—because he's looking at the camera, which betrayed the photographer's presence. I find this to be a kind of fetish among us photojournalists, the wished-for fiction that we weren't really there, not actually part of the events of that day. We manufacture the myth of the disembodied observer, a myth that weighs heavy on us, in order to distance ourselves from involvement in the event."

[Jim, like Steve McCurry, is a National Geographic photographer. —Ed.]

Gordon Lewis: "I find it fascinating how flexible so many of the commenters are about the difference between truth and fiction in photography. Writing seems so much more clearcut by comparison. One is either writing a work of fiction or non-fiction. This doesn't necessary mean that works of non-fiction are 100% factual—human beings do, after all, differ on what constitutes fact vs. interpretation—but if the author claims a book is non-fiction then he or she has to be careful not to make --it up.

"McCurry, in my opinion, ventured too far into the Hollywood writing conceit of creating something 'based on a true story.' In other words, 'This is not what really happened, but in our opinion it makes for a much more marketable story.'"

[Gordon is a former Hollywood writer. —Ed.]

David L.: "For photojournalism I think nothing should be retouched or omitted. The pole in the Kent State photo is an example of a detail that can help triangulate the exact location. If the pole is removed, that could put doubt into the process. No Parking signs, advertising, etc. all should be preserved. 32 cents per gallon gasoline signs in old photos reveal the time period. Background menus and prices in photos also place the photo's era. For personal and private photos, no rules apply."

Tom Halfhill (B.S. Journalism, Kent State, 1977): "Although removing the background pole from John Filo's Kent State photo would be forbidden under today's photojournalism rules, it might be argued that removing it actually improves the photo's veracity—because, as Mike says, it's corrective. Those of us who have seen the retouched version a zillion times know that the girl is screaming over a dead body. But someone viewing the photo for the very first time might think she is screaming because her head has been impaled by a spear or rod. Only upon a closer look might a new viewer see the prone body. And even then, the viewer might still wonder if the girl has been hit by something, too. Try looking at the photo again with a fresh eye, and not with a photographer's eye. The first thing you notice is a screaming girl with something sticking out of her head!"

Bob Rosinsky: "I've had more than a few conversations with photo journalists about Filo's photograph. The consensus is that the the picture should not have been retouched. Sure, a more experienced photographer would have framed the scene differently. But the photo was not taken by a seasoned photographer. It was taken by a kid—a peer of the victim. It's luck that the young photographer was there and it's to his credit that he had the composure to take the picture. Photojournalism need not be aesthetically pleasing."

chris_scl: "This animated GIF I made out of your screenshots shows that many more objects were cloned, muted or even colorized in the rickshaw picture."