The Online Photographer

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

Original contents copyright 2016 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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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

Original contents copyright 2016 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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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)

Original contents copyright 2016 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.

TOP's links!

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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

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

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

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

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."

Portfolio Reviews (La Belle Vie)

Llewellyn Lafford of La Belle Vie, which has an 11x14 studio stand camera on display in the sitting room. More about that below.

I'm happy to report that my in-person Portfolio Reviews have been going swimmingly. I've done four so far (Bill, Bob, Ed and Ben). Each person's photography has been completely different. Different kinds of work, at different levels of development, different concerns—making four very different portfolios. What the photographers had in common is that all have been unusually thoughtful and bright people capable of discussing their work (and other things) at a high level, and they're all very engaged with their photography. It's been challenging for me, but also quite rewarding. I can sincerely say it was a pleasure to meet each of them.

Having learned more about doing these reviews as I go, I'm making a few changes. The price will stay at $100/hour; I've done some calibrating to other, similar teaching/review services offered by other similarly qualified instructors, and that price seems to be nicely in line with the standard. In the future I won't be offering refunds in exchange for writeups, though. I just got health insurance for the first time since I struck out on my own and it's "like to break me" as Huck might have said. (It's my second biggest expense, between the mortgage and my son's college tuition.) I need the income from these reviews if I'm to be doing them. (Also, no one's done a writeup yet.) I'm limiting sessions to three hours, although you can book sessions on consecutive days if you like (Bob did that). From now on I believe I'd like to start the sessions in the afternoon, at about two or three—I write in the morning, and it discombobulates me to break that rhythm. But later we'll go have a meal, and that's off the meter.

I had anticipated that only people who live nearby would be interested in a portfolio review with me—the first client, Bill, came from nearby Rochester on a day trip with his daughter, who sat in on our sessions—but all three of the others came from various distances; Bob from Virginia and Ed from Massachusetts near Cape Cod. Ben lives in San Francisco but was visiting his and his wife's parents in the New York City area. Ben's wife Suzanne accompanied him here and joined us for lunch—she was as interesting and accomplished as her husband—but didn't sit in on our sessions.

A La Belle Vie breakfast, first course

For people who will be traveling here, I'm going to be recommending La Belle Vie (French for "the good life") Bed and Breakfast in Penn Yan. Llewellyn and Laurel, who run the little inn, are retired computer professionals from Brooklyn. They welcome visitors in a splendid and distinctive restored 1860s Italianate Victorian mansion that's renowned locally (deservedly so). Both seem to be ideal innkeepers, warm and personable. And they take their hosting duties seriously—the breakfasts are magnificent, for one thing. I can attest to that, because I joined Ben and Suzanne for breakfast they morning they left.

Llewellyn is a photographer. He won First Prize one year in Life in the Finger Lakes magazine's photography contest, and the camera in the picture is on permanent display in the living room—it's a Rochester-made Folmer studio stand camera with a Wollensak lens.

All in all I think a stay at this charming B&B would amplify the experience for people coming to visit. La Belle Vie isn't offering discounts for TOPpers but that's because their rates are already reasonable.

The only thing is, you should probably make plans if you want to come in season. Rooms aren't too hard to come by in the off-season (although a reservation never hurts), but during the season (June through September) the earlier the better. You'll need to make reservations at least three weeks in advance and probably more.

Of course there are plenty of other places hereabouts to stay—including a very basic Microtel in Penn Yan, short on amenities and charm but also cheap. And naturally it's up to you.

If you'd like to schedule a portfolio review, please let me know.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Take Time

Do you do post-processing every day?

What I was suggesting in the "Processing Strategy" post a few days ago was that on the first pass working on an image, stay loose, take it easy, work fast, and don't stress—get it mostly right. And then step back and stop working on it. Then, let it "ripen"—live with it for a while, think about it; "feel your way into it" as a friend of mine says. If an image still has power / interest / energy for you after some time has passed, that's when you spend the time to really work on it, to more closely calibrate it with "just right" or "perfect."

In the Comments to that post, Adrian Malloch had this to say, in part:

"Just looking," and the passage of time, has been a necessary part of my slow-photography practice too. However, the impatience of my commercial clients who, despite having had the proofs for three weeks, suddenly want 37 selected images graded and processed urgently, means that their poor planning becomes my rushed processing.

My sympathies. I suspect all pros know that feeling. In fact, "pro" work in general means getting to good results quickly and efficiently...rushing, usually.

I made the case for this once in back in the old days talking about home darkroom work vs. commercial labs. The custom fine printers were generally much better printers, and faster, because they did it all the time and had to make good prints quickly, spending the least possible amount of time and materials. Where the custom lab guys fell down is precisely in that they were forced to use...the least possible amount of time and materials! That's why the home darkroom worker could sometimes make a better print. What they lacked in fluency and practice they could make up for in time and care. Where the custom lab guy might have no more than seven minutes and two sheets of paper to make a "finished" print, the home darkroom worker could take four hours and twelve sheets of paper if she wanted to.

Where the home darkroom workers fell down is that they didn't work often enough to stay "fluent." They never pushed themselves to learn how to work quickly and efficiently. Never had enough reason to.

Do you post-process at least a few images every day?

If you don't, you should. Just to keep your hand in. Regularity makes for fluency. Even if it's not an image you're going to keep, spend a few minutes fixing it. (Even if it's not yours. As I think I mentioned a while back, I sometimes snag random images off the Intertoobs and fix 'em. Why? Just to keep my hand in.)

This is a picture I processed yesterday. It's kind of a bleh, meh, second-tier shot. I don't like it, would never print it, and consider it an also-ran. So why bother with it at all? Because I want to get good at B&W conversion, and that mostly means exercising my judgement of tones on a regular basis. I want to practice on skies, and on questions such as, how dark a gray should the lake be in this shot, taken at dusk, to "read" like the scene really looked and felt to me? This is practice, pure and simple. Like a pianist playing scales.

Really, the ideal way to master post-processing (or darkroom printing) is to learn to work both ways—fast and slow.

When you first work on a new image, act like a professional—work quickly and fluidly. Pretend your client wants 37 images delivered yesterday. Get to a good-enough result fast. Then move on to the next one.

Later, act like an artist or hobbyist...bring your full judgment to bear on those (no doubt fewer) pictures that still interest you. Study the file; determine what it really needs; question everything; work slowly and fastidiously. Be a craftsman (or -woman). Take your time. Get it just right. Not close but just right.

Speed and fluency is the great advantage of the pro. Time, thoughtfulness and detail-orientation is the great advantage of the amateur.

You need to learn both ways of working to really get good.

Mike
(Thanks to Adrian M.)

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Jay Pastelak: "You're so right about looking at what one has done. As a teacher, I have many students who don't really look at what they have (or have done: in a final critique I once had a student bring in a comped piece in which a label was unintentionally flopped). As a result, they have no idea what to do to the file in processing. I'm not sure if their lack of looking is merely a result of their inexperience or a manifestation of a cultural notion that the technology will get it right. It's one of my huge frustrations in teaching because I can't seem to find a way to teach them to look. And brother, have I tried."

Mike replies: I know what you mean. My former teacher, now friend Paul Kennedy, who taught lighting at the Corcoran School of Art for years, once told me that the hardest thing about teaching lighting was getting students to actually look at what the lights were doing. They were much more comfortable following setup diagrams and so forth. He had an exercise where one student would slowly move a hot light, and the other student's assignment was merely to look at what happened to the light on the subject while the light was moved.

Michael Martin-Morgan: "Quite so. Most people when they play on a computer choose a video game. My video game? Photoshop—great fun!"

Kenneth Tanaka: "In a typical week I do some form of post work perhaps three of seven days. Other days I'm either doing camera work or other things.

"After nearly 20 years working with images I'd like to offer two thoughts outside what's already been noted. First, contrary to the old chestnut, practice will not make perfect when it comes to image refinement. In the absence of some external feedback or aesthetic guidance chances are good that practice may make you worse. In today's digital environment it's very easy to succumb to 'trying' one set of filters and HDR widgets after another. Bit by bit (sorry) your images begin to take on a kitschy, cartoonish appearance where the treatment overthrows the whole message of your images. Unless you force yourself to remain tethered to some aesthetic model constructive to your visual goal it becomes easy to lose sight of what you're trying to accomplish. Learning short-form and long-form treatment routines, as Mike suggested, is essential. But you must first find rails best for your work.

"To that end, make every effort to see good printed work whenever possible. Work whose treatment you not only find appealing but that accomplishes the kind of visual messaging you feel you need. Learn the master art of restraint. It's very, very hard to find such work within the amateur photo sites. I strongly recommend museums and galleries whenever possible. Online, sites such as Lens Culture and L'Oeil de la Photographic are excellent places to see a broad range of work and treatments.

"Second, and this may seem radical, consider partnering with someone who does post-processing, and perhaps printing, professionally.  Paying an experienced retoucher, or even a talented art student, to put the finishing touches on your images can be tremendously enlightening and more productive for some projects."

Joe Holmes: "Ken Tanaka's advice, 'consider partnering with someone who does post-processing,' is spot on. Every time I've worked with a professional post-processor or printer I've seem them bring out my images in a way I could not. And I picked up their techniques each time—invaluable! But even non-pros can show you tricks you hadn't considered. Watching a friend work an image is worth a hundred YouTube videos."

A Processing Strategy

Just thought I'd mention that the most important part of post-processing for me is simply looking—looking at what you've done. I never "sweat" post-processing on the first go-round—I  work quickly and fluidly to get it "mostly" right. I don't worry about it much or fret over it. In my view, it doesn't make any sense to labor and suffer over processing an image your first time working with it, because you don't know how you feel about it yet anyway—how would you even know what you want to do?

What I like to do is get it mostly right on the first pass, and then live with it for a while. If it "catches" in my brain and I find myself going back to look at it repeatedly, then after a week or so I'll be more familiar with the picture and how it's working, and I'll have more of an idea of what I want it to look like. That's the time for the careful—and time-consuming—post processing. On the second pass, I never start with my first result—I start over from a duplicate of the raw file and do it all over again. I like the opportunity to work from the top with a clearer idea of where it is I want to end up.

On occasion I'll make two or even three different quick versions to look at to help me decide which direction to go.

For instance, in the previous post, the top picture already doesn't look quite right to me. But the second picture is having the opposite impression on me—I'm sensing that that one's close to where it needs to be. These kinds of feelings about processing decisions tends to take some time to "settle."

This approach does derive from fine print making. The natural thing to do when making prints is to make a "good enough" guide print without fussing over it too much, then put it up on the wall for a week and study it. By the end of that time your ideas about what it should look like will have gelled, or become clear. At that point, I start all over again knowing much better what I want to do.

Working quickly on "first passes" has an additional benefit, in that, over time, you learn to see quickly what files need and which way you want to go in realizing the picture. It gives you a certain freedom, ease, and fluidity with post-processing decisions.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Open Mike: Portfolio Review with Mike Johnston

UPDATE Mon. a.m.: I've had lots of response to this, including a reader who wanted to swing by yesterday afternoon! It will take a while to sort through all the answers and get a calendar going, so you might not get a response from me right away. —Mike

Solitudinous, Secluded TOP World HQ

Are you in a rut? Doldrums got you down? Does your photography need a jumpstart?

If you happen to be passing anywhere near Out-of-the-Way TOP World HQ, why not stop and spend some quality instructional time with Mike, your portfolio, and your project plans?

Tailor what you want:

• First, tell me your level on a 1-2-3 scale, where 1 is casual and recreational and 3 is ambitious and experienced.
• Then, tell me the level of what you want to accomplish: 1, 2, or 3.
• Finally, tell me how hard you want me to go on you, on the same scale: if you're a 1 I'll take it easy and go gentle, if you say 3 I won't pull any punches.

If you're a 1-1-1 you'll get a very different review than if you're a 3-3-3. What are you? You decide. And you get to decide how thick your skin should be.

I'll talk to anybody on any level, including levels above my own (I'm actually pretty good at that). Bear in mind I won't be much good if you're a professional and you bring a portfolio aimed towards getting paying work from image professionals such as ad agencies or editors. I've been out of that world for long enough that I don't know the trends and fashions.

Cost: $100 per hour for up to 6 hours (but see bold paragraph below). And I'm very sorry, but I don't want to do this remotely. Part of the reward for me is in-person contact and the chance to view real prints. My life is too virtual already.

What you need:

• A finished, presentable portfolio of personal work, between 12 and 30 photographs
• 2, 4 (all in one day) or 6 hours (over two days), not including the meal we'll share.
• A filled-out Questionnaire, which I'll give you when you sign up
• Attentiveness and an open mind

Mike Johnston of TOP. Photo by Mr. X. Trans.

If you have future project ideas, by all means write a paragraph about each, and bring "seed pictures" if you have any—those early examples of what you'd like to do more of.

You can bring examples of additional work outside of the main portfolio if you like. We'll talk about your direction, what your strengths seem to be, how you might be spinning your wheels, and ways you can make the most of your opportunities.

One thing, though—camera talk verboten! We can discuss ways to improve your seeing and your shooting skills—I can even give you specific exercises—but we'll be talking about how pictures work visually and how your visual concerns come across. I will not discuss whether you ought to get a Canikon or a Nicanon. Just pics, aesthetics, goals, and vision.

If you will write up a post about your experience with me, showing some of the photos you brought and telling others some of the things you learned, I'll refund half the fee.

I'm within driving distance of New York City. Here and back in one day would be tough, but driving in one day and out the next would be easy, and there are plenty of nice places to stay overnight in the area, from B&Bs to hotels.

If you're flying, you'll come into Elmira, NY (ELM), or Rochester, NY (ROC). I'm one hour from Elmira and an hour and fifteen minutes from Rochester. If you're flying a private plane or charter, there's Penn Yan / Yates County Airport (KPEO) less than ten minutes up the road.

The Finger Lakes are a great destination for a photographing trip when the weather's amenable.

I can do up to two of these a week. Contact me for scheduling.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the Sunday Grab-Bag of TOP, covering many topics.

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Weekend Exercise: The Power of Two

Time required: 1–5 weeks
Difficulty level, on a scale of 1–5: 5

...Forgive me for this one. In the early part of my life I wanted to be a teacher, and I'm still a frustrated one at heart. I know a lot of you are more experienced photographers than I am, and might not think you need workshop-type exercises to hone your chops. I'm certain I could learn a thing or two about shooting from large swaths of my readership, just as I learn from your comments every day.

Then again, it's a fact that teaching can still be effective even when the students are more talented than the teacher. It's still the student carrying out the exercise and bringing his or her own talent and intelligence to bear on the assignment.

I've been feeling an interest lately in coming up with some practice exercises to help people see more effectively and understand their own work better. Not necessarily technical exercises, not necessarily about camera handling or settings, not necessarily problem-solving (much of the intellectual interest of professional and commercial photography, I'm convinced, resides not in visual thinking but in problem-solving). Some of these might even be things you could do without a camera.

I'm going to give one a try, and then maybe a few more at some point. There are some didactic difficulties with some of the ones I have in mind—for instance, if I create a visual exercise and then give an example or two of it, then people might tend to think that performing the exercise is related to mimicking my examples, even though my examples might not be very good. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

The power of two project
So here's the first exercise. (It's pretty involved—some of the later exercises will be simpler.)

1. Find another photographer to work with.

2. Do this with a digital camera, even if you usually shoot film. Each of you shoot between 500 and 1,000 exposures on an identifiable theme of your choosing. Red, bushes, motion, lonliness, fire, skin, a certain place—doesn't matter what you choose, just something that provides a loose framework (but try not to be too rigid and limited—it needs to be something that can hold your interest over 500 to 1,000 shots) [UPDATE: See Ken's modification, below. —MJ]. It should all be new shooting, done over a shortish period of time, from a single day to perhaps no longer than a couple of weekends. This is an exercise, so don't sweat the shooting too much; just get the shots in the can.

Don't verbalize to your photo-friend what you had in mind. Don't review your own work yourself, past whatever occasional chimping you do as a part of your regular shooting habits.

3. Trade cards. You're each going to edit the other's work.

The first challenge will be for each of you to get a handle on what the other person is up to. What's the commonality in the shooting? Where's the consonance between the better pictures in the set? What the other person up to, or after?

Right there, you might find some surprises. Your shooting has to communicate what it is about, on its own, to the other person. It could well be interesting to see whether you manage to pull it off. And, if you don't, what the other person sees instead!

4. Each of you make a "first pass" edit on the other's work and come down to about 1/10th of the amount of the original shooting.

5. Share your first pass edit with the other photographer, and get the other person's opinion of his or her own work. Don't show the 90% you've rejected, just what you selected.

But when you take the other person's work back for your second pass edit, you're still in charge—you're the editor. You can be influenced by your friend's opinion of his or her own work, but the final decision is up to you, and you should still do with their work what you think is best.

6. Do a second-pass edit on the other person's work and cut the number in half. At this point, you have between 25 and 50 pictures in the selects, and you have, of course, two sets between you.

7. Duplicate the sets so that you each have both sets on your computers.

8. Each of you then edits from that second pass down to a final edit of between five and twenty pictures, in whichever way seems to make the strongest, most cohesive, and most coherent set. You each do this on both sets—both on your own work and on the other person's.

9. Hold two separate discussions in which you look at each pair of edits in turn. Talk about what each person came up with. Do this first with one person's work, then the other. Discuss it; argue it, if need be. Each of you can make your case as to why you made the final selections you did.

You can bring other people in at their stage to field their opinions as well.

10. Finally, the original photographer specifies his or her ideal final set, again working just from the chosen pictures, not going back to include previous rejects. You can pull from each person's final set. It might be the edit you already chose, or you might choose to go with your friend's edit, or you might combine the two in some way—use your edit but go with two or three pictures the other person liked, or use mostly the other person's edit but preserve a few of your own favorites.

The whole process could take 1–5 weeks to complete. Err on the short side.

•     •     •

I'm not going to try to tell you what you should get out of this exercise. The point is to learn about your own work from having someone else make the decisions about it, and to gain some experience editing work that you're not personally ego-involved in, at least not directly.

The first time through, though, I'd recommend not working too hard at it. Do this all reasonably quickly. Be careful and thoughtful, sure, but this is the sort of thing you'll get better at with repetition, not by being super-careful and overthinking when you do it the first time.

If you're lucky enough that you both get something out of the exercise, try it again. Or, if you enjoyed it but didn't think you worked particularly well with the friend you originally chose, try it with a different friend.

•     •     •

I have at least two more exercises in mind, but I have to shoot some examples for them. No promises, but I'll keep this line of inquiry in mind.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2014 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 (partial comment): "Good exercise in trying to communicate with a lens. May I suggest that participants select non-objective subjects? Selecting 'Red,' for example, will be pretty...well. Selecting 'Isolation' would be a much better challenge for an andragogical exercise."

Mike replies: Good modification. So adopted.

RobinP: "Between 500 and 1,000 exposures—what!? Some of us just don't work that way. I 've had my latest camera just over three months and in 'heavy use' it has less than 1,000 exposures. Must be the legacy of considering the cost of every exposure with film, but if I don't get the shot I want within three exposures then I move on. The excercise you describe would probably occupy me for maybe 50 exposures max.

"I'd rather do the 'editing' while out with the camera than be faced with too much choice when back home looking at the PC screen."

Mike replies: Of course I'm not really the teacher, so any two friends who actually did this could modify the rules to suit.

But if I were the teacher, I'd assign you to go out and shoot 500 exposures in a day at least a couple of times. It's not that hard, and you'd learn something from the experience—even if you go right back to your usual way of working. Which you probably will.

Nick Cutler: "I really like the sound of this, but have one rather terminal problem: I don't know any other people interested in photography! I think that's the main reason for being interested in this project: I don't have a clue if any of my pictures are any good, or what I'm supposed to be doing in Lightroom, or anything, really. So is there anyone else in t'same boat so to speak, who might like to collaborate? Ideally in the UK perhaps?"

Mike replies: So you, like RobinP, have actually already found an avenue to learn something important from this exercise—in your case, it's that you need to find a few photo-friends. I'd make it a high priority if I were you. It's a big part of the attraction of this hobby, and a big part of the fun of it, too. Go forth and seek! You'll be glad you did.

John Krumm (partial comment): "I take it by edit you mean selecting?"

Mike replies: Yes.

How to Sign Photographs Part 4: Expert Opinion

Here is Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

Introduction: Okay, so I've heard back from three individuals: a senior museum curator (well known, with many fine books to his credit); a very distinguished gallery owner (photography art dealer) with four decades in the business and an impressive list of credentials and lifetime accomplishments; and a serious photography collector who invests substantially in fine art photographs and occasionally advises galleries and museums on emerging trends. Since two of the three prefer to remain anonymous, I'll present them all that way. You'll have to take my word for it that they are among the top people in the field, but they are.

Note however that these individuals do not speak monolithically for their entire professions or categories; they're individuals, and speak for themselves, and this short post should be considered a sampling of opinion rather than a survey of opinion. Note also that our dealer tends to concentrate a bit more than the other two on the work of living artists who are still working and creating new work (that is my notion, and I'll let you know if any of the three wish to contradict that).

Here are their answers to my short questionnaire.

•

Mike Johnston: Do museums generally prefer signed prints over unsigned ones?

Museum curator: Yes, certainly, but the actual history of the makers and objects always needs to be taken into account. A signature is a clear indication of both authorship and of quality (that is, a fine print rather than a work print, press print, etc.), so it's obviously necessary to have a signature in all cases in which one is to be expected. Historically, of course, we know that there are many bodies of work that were routinely not signed—in the 20th century, important figures like Eugene Atget basically never signed his prints and Stieglitz did so rather rarely. In those cases, we go by other criteria to be assured that the authorship and originality of the print are what we want. With 19th century work, a handful of artists either signed their prints or affixed facsimile signature ink-stamps...but many more did not. With contemporary work, it is natural for collectors to expect that all works would be signed—there is, after all, very little good reason for not doing so.

Collector/investor: Marginally, but for vintage prints it would be rare. Instead, verso stamps are common* and would be fine for contemporary prints as well.

Photography art dealer: Yes, collectors want signed photographic prints. The only exception would be estate prints with some form of documentation from the estate representative, with documentation.

•

MJ: Is there a generally accepted preference for prints signed on the front or the back?  

Museum curator: There is no strong preference here from collectors—it's more the preference of the artist. My personal preference is for signatures on the back, leaving the front "clean."

Collector/investor: Absolutely, back.

Photography dealer: Personally,  I prefer to see prints signed on both the front and back. Do not know how others dealers feel about this issue.

•

MJ: If there is a recto signature, should it remain displayed when the print is framed?

Museum curator: My preference is no; this strikes me all too often as a kind of affectation, adding little or nothing to our appreciation of the image itself.

Collector/investor: Hell no.

Photography dealer: It would be optimal if the signature is visible on the recto when matted, but [it is] not always possible.

•

MJ: Does the presence of a signature make any difference to the value of a piece, or is that too dependent on related issues and specific cases to make a general statement about? 

Museum curator: See my answer to [the first question] above. In the cases in which we would expect a signature as a sign of authenticity and print quality, the lack of a signature would pretty consistently have some impact on the value/desirability of the work. In the cases in which a signature isn't expected in the first place, it would obviously make no difference.

Collector/investor: Very rarely.

Photography dealer: The photographer's signature is always important. Hard to offer a first class vintage photograph to a serious collector without a signature or substantial attribution.

•

If I receive any more answers to my queries I'll add them to this post and alert you to the edit.

My thanks to all concerned!

Mike

*In a follow-up email, our collector/investor added the following: "[Where stamps are concerned] a lot depends on the facts and circumstances. I suppose we can also add blind stamps to the list, although that is hardly common anymore. I think a rubber stamp is more common and more archival. But to address one example of variability, for iconic photojournalistic images it is more desirable to have all sorts of press information stamped and pasted to the back than it is to have modern print with a big signature.

"I suppose that for modern prints, if [the print] has any value whatsoever—which, let's face it, is a one in a billion proposition—it is usually clear what a finished print is and what it isn't.

"Another issue is editions, a modern phenomenon. That is usually in light pencil on recto."

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Jim Hughes: "Regarding the signing of prints: I have a large 'Tomoko in Her Bath' print that Gene Smith gave me as a birthday present (long story—he wanted to give me a watch, but Evelyn convinced him I'd rather have the actual and spectacular, if a bit dinged, print which I'd reproduced in the 1974 Minamata essay in Camera 35). He inscribed the print, almost invisibly, in a dark area in the lower left with a black ball-point pen, probably a cheap Bic. Lee Witkin, who matted and framed it for us (reluctantly, it seemed, since he'd always had a tough time getting prints from Gene to sell in the gallery), had taken to calling this, Gene's final signing practice, 'Signed in the image with Stylus.'

"Subsequently, this print hung in my office on a wall that backed my computer desk; the searing image of suffering and love is the one I looked at every day as I sat down to write another chapter for my biography of Smith, a process that took many years.

"Witkin's book The Photograph Collector's Guide, done with Barbara London, is an excellent source by the way. It includes examples of many photographers' signatures. A couple years back, ICP attributed on its blog a note to Helen Gee at Limelight Gallery in the 1950s as having been written by Gene Smith when, in fact, it had been written by Minor White. When I saw it online, I suspected the language did not sound like Gene's and checked the Witkin book for other possibilities. White's reproduced signature was clearly an exact match while Smith's, of course, was nothing like the signature at the bottom of this note. So rather than admitting the mistake, ICP just removed the document from the blog without a word of explanation."

And the Winner Is...(Yes, More About Pens)

Those of you who don't make and/or sign prints must be nearing terminal sufficiency on this topic, but let's face it, if you aspire to be an art photographer in the accepted sense you do need to make physical objects. A few more items:

1. To sign or not to sign, and where: I'm collecting some data on what the art market actually wants and expects with regard to the signing of artwork. I've sent a very short questionnaire to several museum curators, eminent gallerists, and serious collectors. I've already gotten two very useful replies, and if/when I get a few more I'll summarize the findings for you. A foretaste, though: in contrast to what I wrote yesterday, not everyone agrees with Ken that a recto signature isn't necessary.

2. Front-runner emerges: After signing many dozens more prints, it has emerged that my favorite pen of all for Canson Baryta Photographique paper is the Prismacolor Premier Illustration Marker Fine Line .05 black pictured above. This pen is almost always sold in sets of various colors or tips, so I thought I'd offer a direct link for the single pen alone. Here's the single pen and here's the page at Blick Art Supplies where you can find all the pens in the series. Hope this helps someone somewhere.

My endorsement is not a guarantee that the manufacturer's promise that "these markers contain premium, pigmented, acid-free, archival ink that is lightfast, permanent, non-toxic, and water resistant" is absolutely true at face value for your papers and your conditions. Just sayin'.

I'm also finding it's a good general-purpose writing marker, and it's not expensive ($1.61 ea. if you order 12), so I've ordered a dozen to have on hand. More working pens in the house is seldom a bad thing.

3. Ctein's take: Ctein was psyched that a recto signature isn't considered mandatory (we both came up in the era when it was), and he and I had a phone conversation about the various options for the back of the print: a stamp, a plate or label, and a third interesting option—but I'll let him tell you about it.

Mike

ADDENDUM from Tech. Ed. Ctein: Personally, I'm delighted to find out that collectors [at least some —Ed.] would prefer that I don't sign and title my prints on the front. Decades of practice have made me very good at that, but it's the most nerve-racking part of the whole printing process. A slip-up can ruin a print. If it's an inkjet print, it's a nuisance and some wasted time and a modest amount of money. If it's a dye transfer print, many, many hours of work go down the drain. It is much easier signing in soft pencil on the back; I've never screwed that up.

Regarding the signing of inkjet prints, stamping with ink raises all sorts of concerns.  The inherent archivality of the stamp is the least of mine. Inks are notorious for penetrating, bleeding, or outgassing. You'd want to have  an ink that would adhere to the paper, would not smear, would not penetrate if you're printing on fiber-based paper, and won't transfer anything or outgas solvents to a sheet of paper below it  (whether or not there is an interleaf sheet between the prints—those are not impermeable barriers). These physical requirements are likely to be very different for fiber-based prints and RC prints.

Signing in soft graphite pencil (e.g., a retouching pencil) is an entirely safe practice. Signing or stamping on the back with ink is an unknown.

With one exception: rather than physically stamp, you can print the information on the back of the paper with your inkjet printer. At least in theory. You can even scan in your chop or your signature and print that as well.

There are two practical issues that arise here:

1. The first is whether the ink  would properly  adhere to the back of the paper and not smear or transfer to an adjacent sheet—not a problem with fiber-based papers, but it might not work with RC papers. You'd have to try it.

2. The second is that it requires running the paper through the printer face-down. That may or may not scratch the surface of the print. It will depend entirely upon the printer and inkset, the chosen paper path, and the kind of paper: RC  vs. fiber base, glossy, semi-matte/gloss, or matte surface. Matte surface papers, in particular, are notoriously easy to scuff and mark. Again, you'd have to give it a try with your particular paper and setup.

For what it's worth, I just ran the experiment on my current setup: Epson 3880 printer, rear paper diagonal feed, and Canson Baryta Photographique paper. I'm delighted to find out that front-side scratching is not a problem. I get an un-marred print whether I print the backside first or the frontside first (allowing a day of blotting and drying after printing the frontside before printing on the back).

I'm pretty sure your mileage will differ, but I'm a happy camper.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2014 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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Ming Thein: "We must have tested 30+ different pens over the last few months as part of the Ultraprint development process. I've found that either the Faber-Castell pigment markers (grey body, silver clip) or the dark blue bodied Pilot 'Drawing Pen Pigment Ink' pens work best—on both Canson Baryta Photographique and Canson Infinity Platin Fiber Rag (the latter of which is my personal preference)."

Kenneth Tanaka: "Just to be clear...I think people should 'sign' their photo prints any way that makes them happy, including potentially not signing them at all. My earlier remarks were 'observational'; I was reporting what I have observed having had the opportunity to closely inspect many, many prints of many of the most influential photographers of history. That is, I was not attempting to be prescriptive.

"Signatures are, of course, symbols of authentication and authorization. So to the extent that a signature represents an artist's authority it will naturally be desirable to a collector if all other factors are equal. But they often aren't 'equal'; that's the hitch. There are, for example, more than a few situations where a photographer never signed highly-desirable 'vintage' prints of his work, but did sign much later and poorer prints that often go unsold, or bought-in, at auctions.

"Then, of course, there is the whole issue of the authentication of the signature. One of the most famous cases of photo print fraud in our times was the case of the Lewis Hine prints which were signed. I am acquainted with someone who was burned by this incident, having purchased a 'Powerhouse Worker' print from an established dealer. Despite the Hine signature, an expert thought that the print just 'looked too pretty' to be authentic...which it was not. (The collector received a full refund, by the way.)

"But I digress. Few, if any, of us sell into the 'Art' market , so 'Forever Authentication' is not really a major factor for consideration. Marks made by pencils, pens, crayons will all last more than long enough to do the job. (In fact the 'lasting' nature of most marks is what gives conservators headaches.) Our signatures are principally marks of pride of authorship. So again I recommend that you sign your photos wherever and however it makes you happy to do so."

Mike replies: Good points all. Especially the observation that it's unlikely ever to be a serious issue for most if not all of us. What I'm learning from the other experts I'm consulting also seems to indicate that there is considerable latitude for preference—what the photographer prefers, what her or his customers prefer, what the gallery owners prefer. So the best thing is to do it your way—then that will become what is characteristic and expected of your prints, if and when anyone in the future is paying attention.

Terry Letton: "For what it's worth, the prize of my minuscule print collection is a portrait of the Indian poet Rabandrandath Tagore. It is not signed but is stamped on the back Studio of Edward S. Curtis. Good enough for me."

Richard Alan Fox [whose question started all this —Ed.]: "Super thanks Mike."

Clayton Jones: "I make B&W prints, but on matte paper. My favorite paper is Epson's Hot Press Natural, which accepts a signature beautifully with a #2 pencil. This means a light signature can be applied. My favorite pencil for this is the Papermate Sharpwriter #2, an inexpensive mechanical pencil that can be purchased at CVS and Walgreens (just about anywhere).

"During the short period when I used glossy papers, I used a Staedtler Marsmatic 700 refillable pen which was loaded with the same light gray pigment ink I used in the printer, so I knew it would last as long as the print. I have never liked bold, black recto signatures which pull the viewer's eye and compete with the picture. I like the signature to be there, but not draw attention to itself."

David Paterson: "Messing up prints while attempting to sign them is definitely an issue with me, so for some time now it has been my habit to print a digital signiature and abbreviated date in the bottom right-hand margin of each print. I don't sell a huge number of prints but I have never had a complaint since I started doing this."

Mike Starts a Fight

This morning I am consigned to Starbucks. Ach. Exile!

Starting a fight was the last thing on my mind when I wrote that post about coffee yesterday, but it provoked a very bitter response from a (now former?) TOP reader named James, who thinks I have very bad judgment about coffee and concluded that therefore I probably also must have very bad judgment about photography, too. He wrote:

I've heard your story before from many other people. I have to imagine that tens of thousands of people would claim that they roast better coffee at home than they can buy. What seems more likely to you, that tens of thousands of people are simply biased in favor of their own DIY creations, or that craft coffee is a fancy sham? And all of the qualification that it's just your own subjective preference? It still reads as humblebrag to me. And I don't like it, and I'm willing to credit you less even about photography because of it.

I did not see that coming, I admit.

I defended myself as best I could (you can read the whole exchange in the Comments section if you care to), noting that home-roasters like me can afford to use better beans and can control freshness—timing—much more easily. To quote me own self:

I just ate some steamed broccoli, and it was better than any broccoli I've ever had at a restaurant. (Really, it was.) That just means I waited until the store had a fresh batch, handpicked the best looking bunch, fixed it just the way I like it, and then ate it sixty seconds after it came off the stove. It doesn't mean I think I'm a better cook than every restaurant chef.

The more I think of it, though, the more that I think this disagreement has some pretty strong parallels to personal photography.

I used to make a similar argument way back in times past about home darkroom workers vs. custom printers. Home-roasted coffee is actually quite comparable to what a skilled amateur printer could do in a home darkroom compared to the output of a commercial custom or exhibition printer. You could often do much better work because you weren't constrained by the amount of paper you could use or the amount of time you could spend, whereas the professional printer was heavily constrained by both. You had the luxury of working on your own presumably consistent negatives, with the same materials over and over again. He might have greater skills and much greater adaptability—better ability to cope with a range of deficiencies in negatives from a wide variety of sources, the quality of which ran the gamut—but even so he couldn't necessarily overcome your inherent advantages within the restrictions of the commercial setting.

John Gossage relates that Charlie Pratt used to work all day to get a print as close to right as he could get it, then he'd let it sit for three days while he contemplated it, and then he'd get back to work on it and refine it till it was just right. On the other hand, a commercial printer I knew well at the time, at a high-end lab, when printing the lab's highest-priced custom product, was given a maximum of three sheets of paper per print and had to print a minimum of five negatives an hour. Whose prints do you think were better? Or at least, whose prints do you think looked better to Charlie?

Even stronger is the issue of calibrating the results to personal preference. I've got a supply of beans called "Geisha" (Panama Geisha Hacienda La Esmerelda) that have won prestigious competitions and are a consensus choice among connoisseurs as being among the very best. Guess what? I don't like Geisha as much as I like Phil's Kona. By trying many premium green beans and picking the ones I like best, then buying those in bulk and roasting them again and again, I'm tailoring my process to my personal and perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic tastes. Professional roasters and baristas, when they're trying for a result of the highest quality (which they don't have the luxury of doing very often), are aiming either at what they think is best or what they think most people will think is best. That's not the same as what I would like best. Reverting back to the parallel with the custom printer: note that even with the most skilled printer in the world, the photographer's input is still essential. Voja Mitrovic is a legendary custom printer, but Peter Turnley still works with him to get each of his prints just right. (Actually those two know each other so well now that they're on autopilot to a significant degree; Voja knows what Peter likes and Peter trusts Voja to eke the best result out of his negatives.) Ctein is doing some work for me now, and he's a supremely skilled printer, but he'll still send me proofs so I can suggest changes. And we'll go back and forth as many times as we need to until the prints are just right...according to me. That's not a sign of weakness or lack of skill; it's an accepted and necessary part of the process for a really good custom printer working for an art photographer.

Was I a better printer than Voja? No, but with my favorite film exposed and developed by me, printing with my equipment and materials, with the luxury of all the paper I wanted and as much time as I wanted to spend, and with my own preferences being the only preferences that I needed to satisfy, yes, I was. And that ain't "humblebrag." (That was a new word to me.)

The parallel extends to editing—and this is where amateur photographers can be "truer to themselves" than other people could be if they were editing the work. Pros shoot and edit based on an exogenous—outward-oriented—standard. They have to provide pictures that conform to a standard, accepted idea of what's "good," so as to please their clients and their clients' broader constituencies. Amateurs, on the other hand, beholden to no one but themselves, can afford to be much more idiosyncratic—as idiosyncratic as they like, actually. And sometimes, the more so the better. I've always considered it a sign of emerging maturity when a student first becomes able to reject conventionally "good" and "perfect" shots from the raw mass of his or her shooting, and begin to choose less perfect, less standard, but more personal and expressive shots to work with.

Maybe you disagree. But then, if you do, it still kinda proves my point, doesn't it? You get it the way you want it. Your personal photography belongs to you, and no one else. And no one else gets to tell you you're wrong about your choices, or what you like and don't. Quite a luxury, when you think about it.

Mike
(Thanks to James Liu)

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Featured Comments from:

Pen Waggener: "Mike, I have to agree with you on this one. I've run a small-town coffeeshop for nearly a decade, and we've been roasting our own beans in tiny batches since way before it was cool—including some of Phil's Kona when I remember to order it. Our bean this morning was a funky Dry-Process Guji Shakiso Ethiopian that we got from Sweet Maria's, and I know a few customers are going to be very excited about it, and another few are gonna call me out because it's too different from our other offerings. I think we make really great coffee, but business requires compromise, and you have the luxury at home to tailor your compromises very specifically to your personal tastes and budget."

Rob: "Haters gonna hate."

Mike replies: I don't think James is a hater at all. In fact I know he's not; he's very thoughtful. I'll be sorry if I lose him as a reader. I didn't mind his comment. It was cogent and he expressed his opinion clearly. I disagree with him in this case and take issue with his characterization of me, but that doesn't even necessarily mean he's wrong. Maybe I just haven't had enough exposure to really good craft coffee. As I said, I'm not an expert by any stretch.

V.I. Voltz: "When I recently worked with a custom printer I paid a daily rate and supplied the paper. I do not pay by the print. That is the way to get the very best output you can."

Mike replies: Smart.

Tim: "I don't know how to tell you this, and I hope you're sitting down, but I don't automatically trust your opinions. Bet that as it may, I almost invariably find them presented in an entertaining—and, sometimes, even enlightening—way, but I also find that I always have to combine your opinions with others, including my own, on a given subject. Shocking! (I will probably never roast my own coffee, but I certainly drink enough to have enjoyed this article.)"

Daniel: "f you are in the mood to experiment, I'd recommend my pals at Entimos. They started off as home-roasters too a while back and now roast as a company. On your scale of 1–10 I'd rank them at 11, but I might be biased.  :-) 

"And since you're into books, I'll pass along one I consistently hear coffee geeks reference: Everything But Espresso: Professional Coffee Brewing Techniques. It's pretty highly renowned if you can find a copy."

Mike replies: That was the most helpful technical book I found. I based a lot of my method on it.

JTW: "From personal experience (with purchased, decent quality, beans) I was amazed at the difference that a change in burr grinders made. At some time Mike, when the mood strikes, can you venture into the mine field of burr grinders for coffee beans?"

Mike replies: I would if I could research it sufficiently. I haven't come up to speed on the subject enough to make recommendations. But a good burr grinder is reputed by many experts—including Scott Rao, the author of the book mentioned just above—to make the biggest difference of anything when you're trying to improve your morning cup. And that was my experience.

James Liu [the James of the post —Ed.]: "Mike, I'm glad you took my comment the right way. I for my part, would not consign you to Starbucks.

"As for access to beans, I'm not even entirely sure you have the very best access to beans like you think. Cafe Imports (and a couple others), who sell wholesale, has a much deeper line than Sweet Maria's, probably more than Sweet Maria's and all the rest put together. In fact, I bet you that your retail green suppliers pick and choose green from a couple of specialty importers themselves. Next, if you're a pro roaster, the importer will send you samples of a bunch of different coffees (potentially more than 20) from each origin and you taste them side by side in a cupping. Then you order the one you want based on your tastes (in collaboration with people whose palates you trust) and you buy that coffee and dial it in over the course of several production roasts. Many roasters have 'direct trade' relationships with farmers where they talk about what works and what doesn't (harvest, processing, nutrients added to the soil, and so on), which microlots from what parts of the farm are worth special attention, and so on. If you're Intelligentsia or one of several other roasters, you're also your own importer and can have even more impact on the beans going back to farm. I can go on. The point is that I know roasters have more control, and there are some that I trust with getting it right, and some (among those) I expect to roast in line with my subjective preferences.

"No, I've never roasted commercially before, but I was a pretty serious barista, and I had some aspirations to roast and even took steps toward that goal once.

"As for your cooking and home printing analogies, I get what you mean. One time, I made some scallops for friends and it was very well received. A week later, one friend even told me that the scallops I made were better than what he ordered from Longman and Eagle (who have earned a Michelin star). I told him of course mine were better, I had all afternoon and evening to cook one dish for a few friends, and the restaurant has to make a full menu for guests.... It's like the commercial printer. There are so many constraints on what gets put on a plate at a restaurant, and the amount of attention that any single plate gets. I'm confident that every single line cook at Longman is better at cooking than I am. I still think I cook better than what the restaurant can turn out when I mean to. (That's not humblebrag, that's just plain brag.) So of course your broccoli is better.

"Where I depart is that I don't think coffee roasting belongs in that category. Cooking and (commercial) printing are more analogous than either is to roasting. I think roasting coffee is more akin to baking baguettes, or barbecue—worthwhile as a hobby, but the true artisans are going to simply blow you out of the water because the ten-thousand-hours rule and the equipment matter a great deal more. Some things work better at scale. A commercial wood-burning oven for the baguette, the capacity to low-and-slow over smoke whole racks of ribs at a time, those matter. It's not quite making your own car or DSLR because you want to, but it's a little farther in that direction than I think you're giving the industry credit for."

Mike replies: I can accept all that. Thanks.

Gildas: "My favorite coffee was the stuff my gran would home roast (in her oven) and then grind a spoonful just before making a cuppa. The smell and taste made the whole world perfect. She got the knack of doing it because the only good coffee available in her region of France post WWII was green beans straight off the boat in big over-the-shoulder bags normally sold to factories that make filter coffee. She got the habit and never stopped I guess."

On Assignment with my iPad Air

This week's column by Ctein

Those of you who've been following my peripatetic photographic exploits know that my computer of choice has been a 15-inch MacBook Pro, now of advanced age in computer years. It's allowed me to do the same kind of extensive and serious photographic editing, adjustment, and manipulation that I would do at home. With the addition of a first-generation iPad, I could even work on a portable studio quality monitor, which was exceedingly difficult to come by just a few years back. (Today, a retina-screen-equipped MacBook will provide that quality of display.)

What I've discovered, though, is that while it's awfully cool to be able to do fullbore image work on the road, I hardly ever do. Simply put, I don't have enough time when I'm traveling. I barely find time to do a serious edit on the photographs I've made. At most, I'll set up some ACR conversion adjustments for when I get home and am ready to start the seriously-time-consuming work in Photoshop.

While I most definitely needed that studio quality display, 90% of the computing power (and storage and memory and weight, etc.) of my laptop proves to be wasted on my away-from-home photographic work. This has started me pondering how much of this I could accomplish on my iPad. It's one of the reasons I sprang for the 128 GB model this last time around and also bought the SD card reader (a.k.a. Camera Connection Kit).

My trip to Minneapolis in January overlapped one of the Chippawa Valley Roller Girls' matches, of which I have written previously. DDB and I went out to photograph the match. He's been doing this regularly, of course, and has gotten absurdly adept at putting together instant slideshows of the matches for the Girls to see at the after-match party.

Okay, not exactly instant, but it seems that way to me. He has lots of experience very quickly editing event photography on his laptop for posting to websites or creating presentations. He's got 100 times as much experience at this as I do and he's about 1,000 times faster. That's not hyperbole; his turnaround time is measured in minutes to hours; mine is usually months.

Last year I tried putting together a slideshow of my photographs on the MacBook Pro for an after-match party. It was pretty much a fail. My workflow and my machine just weren't up to the task. By the time my laptop could import 500–1000 photographs and bring them up for me to edit, an hour had passed (DDB's laptop is many times faster). I finally punted and just let Preview cycle through the JPEGs from the RAW files on the SD card, unedited and unsorted. The Girls were happy enough, but it wasn't professional and it sure didn't satisfy me.

Now, that's with my normal workflow. If I put some serious thought and effort into the problem, I likely could have worked out a new workflow that would demand substantially less from my computer and from me. But, for something I was doing only once or twice a year, it wasn't high on my list to get around to that.

Come last month, I still hadn't gotten around to that. Three days before the match, though, I started noodling around with the Connection Kit. I wanted to show my Olympus's cold-weather tests to Dave Polaschek, who I was having lunch with less than an hour later. What better way than to load them into the iPad?

  Fig. 1. Photos, an app that's part of iOS, reads the RAW files from my Olympus via the Camera Connection Kit and displays thumbnails for me to select from.

For this first attempt, I went the very dumbest (minimal learning curve) route and used Photos, the app bundled into iOS 7. It took only 0.8 sec per photograph to load the previews from the SD card (figure 1) and just twice that long to import the full RAW file. It was a matter of minutes to get everything from the camera into the iPad. And I started to think, maybe this was the answer to my roller derby slideshow problem.

Fig. 2. Once I've selected the photographs I want to import by tapping on the thumbnails, "Import Selected" pulls the RAW files into the iPad.

Not having the time nor inclination to climb a particularly steep learning curve nor throw money at the problem in the following three days, I continued on the simplest and dumbest path. That Saturday evening, post-match, found DDB and I sitting in the after-party bar, him with his laptop and me with my iPad. I had some 500 photographs to work through. As Photos was loading the thumbnails, I started going through them selecting the ones I wanted to import to the iPad (figure 2). Those one-inch thumbnails weren't clear enough to do a critical edit on, but they were good enough for weeding out the obvious failures. A third of the photographs went away that way.

Fig. 3. The "Photos" screen in the Photos app shows the photographs I've imported, sorted by date. Tapping on one of those photos brings up
the editing screen.

Fig. 4. The editing screen shows me a full-screen rendering that lets me make my final selections. Tapping the trashcan icon (barely visible here in light blue) in the lower right corner deletes the photograph.

When I was finished making my choices, I tapped "Import Selected" and returned to the "photos" screen (figure 3). Importing continued in the background as the selected photos appeared as thumbnails on this screen. I clicked the first thumbnail and a full-screen version popped up (figure 4). Now I could see what the photograph really looked like. If I liked what I saw I swiped sideways with my finger and brought up the next photo. If I didn't I tapped the trashcan icon in the corner and the photograph went away.

Fig. 5. The export screen is where I select which photos will go into the slideshow.

When I was done with that I had about 250 photographs left out of the original 500. I tapped the export icon in the lower left corner of the screen and that brought up figure 5. I tapped each of those 250 photographs to select it, a lot of repetitive tapping. There may very well have been a way to batch-select, but as I said, I didn't do any homework. It didn't really take all that long.

Fig. 6. Tapping the slideshow button on the export screen brings up the slideshow options and the button to start running the slideshow.

Now I had my slideshow. I tapped the slideshow button at lower screen left, kept the "Slideshow Options" at the defaults (figure 6), and tapped "Start Slideshow." There it was! I propped the iPad up on its smart-cover stand and let it run.

The whole job took me just about an hour from start to finish. I actually beat DDB by maybe 15 minutes (of course, when he was done, his edit was more polished and sophisticated than mine).

I'm not remotely suggesting this was the best possible way to create a slideshow on the iPad. In fact, since then I've downloaded iPhoto (now a free program). It's a lot more flexible than Photos with a lot more controls and editing capability, and it gives me more control over the slideshow, e.g., whether or not it runs continuously on a repeat cycle and how long each photograph is up for. There are likely even better tools out there—no doubt readers will suggest some. The important thing, though, is that it worked! Quickly, and with little effort on my part, I was able to learn how to accomplish a (self-imposed) assignment that previously I'd been trying to do much less well on my laptop.

Photos and iPhoto have an important limitation—although they understand RAW files, all they are displaying is the attached JPEG. That's entirely good enough for a slideshow like this and it's sufficient for a first, crude editing pass on my more serious work. It doesn't let me see the full quality or tonal range in the RAW photographs, let alone usefully manipulate it. Two apps that will work on RAW data are PiRAWnha and PhotoRaw. I plan to look into them but haven't tried either out, yet. I solicit comments from any readers who have used either of these as well as suggestions for other RAW-processing apps for the iPad.

There's still too much stuff I do while traveling, like writing and e-mail, that I haven't figured out how to do efficiently on an iPad. Yet. But, depending on how those RAW processing apps work out for me, I may pretty quickly find myself doing almost no photo processing on my laptop while traveling. It's likely I'll wind up buying one more laptop—a MacBook Pro Retina, natch. It won't surprise me if that turns out to be my last one.

Or...maybe it'll turn out that I give up the desktop machine and run solely with a laptop at home. That whole convergence business I wrote about a few columns back. What I do know, though, is that the iPad is continually encouraging me to reevaluate how I do things computerish.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein usually appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

©2014 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2014 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:

Ben: "Simple and nice workflow...thanks!

"For writing and email on and iPad, I like the Incase Origami Workstation, which is basically a case for the Apple bluetooth keyboard, but it folds open to support the iPad above the keyboard. I don't mind the Apple keyboard and I much prefer having a case for the keyboard than an iPad keyboard case, as it offers me a lot more flexibility. I've found I can do a lot of email correspondence with this setup. It even works on an airplane by writing emails, saving them as drafts, then just sending when I have an Internet connection again.

"I did give up my desktop; I balked at the new Mac Pro, so I sold my Macbook Air and bought a 15" Macbook Pro with retina display, and I've been very happy with my new setup. I can do a lot on my iPad mini, and everything else on the retina Pro. Perfect!!!"

Huw Morgan: "Sounds pretty painful compared to getting the right tools for the job (e.g. Surface Pro and Lightroom). Kinda like using a hammer and nails to assemble Ikea furniture."

Chris Exum: "Your article has changed my workflow. I just successfully imported my X-Pro1 raw file into iPhoto, which did not work the last time I tried. I am now able to import a Fuji RAW file into the Photosmith app (I previously had to shoot RAW + JPEG for this to work) from the iPhoto album. I use Photosmith to tag and rate my photos. Photosmith then syncs my photos to Lightroom along with my tags, ratings, and IPTC info.

"The above workflow is my 'on the road' workflow. Then when I get home, I use LR/PS for editing, using my rating system to identify the photos that I actually want to edit. If I want to do any editing on the iPad, I have been using Snapseed. It's easy, fast, and does a respectable job. Not up to pro standards, but makes a decent image to upload to facebook or email to friends/family. Thanks for making me rethink my workflow!"

Alun J. Carr: "n addition to iPhoto, you really should install Snapseed. This was developed by Nik Software (the Viveza and Silver FX plugin, and Nikon's Capture NX people), who also made desktop (Mac and Windows) versions. Nik was swallowed by Google who killed the desktop versions, and made the iOS and Android versions free. Snapseed is an amazing piece of software, using Nik's U-Point technology for localised adjustments in an incredibly tactile fashion on the iPad; in fact, there are aspects of U-Point in Snapseed that are far superior to the implementation in the plugins for Aperture/Photoshop/Lightroom. Working with Snapseed on an iPad is such an immersive, tactile experience that it feels like an artist working in oil or acrylics (I have experience of acrylics, but not oils).

"Anyhow, it won't break the bank to try it."

'Give That Cat the Boot': Editing 101 (Classic Mike)

[Originally published on The Luminous
Landscape in October 2002]

-

The little three-letter word "pro" (it aspires to be a four-letter word but comes up a bit short) has the longest "legs" of any marketing term ever used in photography. Why? What's so important about being a "pro"?

The way I look at it, most professional photography is very competent. On a ten scale, professional work averages in the 8 range, sometimes achieves a 9, and seldom falls below 7. Okay. Fine-art photography and working photojournalism, on the other hand, can sometimes sink to the 4 to 6 level—when you take more risks, you fail more—but they also give us almost all the 10s.

I've never really understood the eternal appeal to the amateur of the three-letter word.

Pro quality
After having thought about the matter for two [Ed. note: now three] decades, here are the first principles of what actually, in my opinion, distinguishes pros from the the rest of us:

• They shoot a lot more.
• They edit a lot better.

This week's column isn't about shooting, but I'll make two comments in this context. Pros have two distinct advantages. One is that they accept assignments, and the other is that they shoot even when they don't want to. Assignments are important to your skills because they can stretch you—they don't allow you to fall back on your typical M.O., whatever that may be, and go shoot whatever you're most old-shoe comfortable with for the umpteenth time.

Why can't amateurs do self-assignments? Well, we can. But we seldom do, because it requires discipline, and discipline is a commodity in short supply for most of us...especially when we're telling ourselves that we're doing something "for fun."

Also, the things we invent for ourselves as self-assignments usually aren't as challenging as the things an art director or a commercial client can sock a professional with. To give you a brief example, a pro studio photographer I once worked for once had to shoot a naked woman wrapped in roofing material, and, later, a bike messenger climbing a skyscraper with a pigeon perched on his helmet.

You can't make crap like that up.

This segues into the second point about shooting, which is that most amateurs shoot when they feel like shooting—when they want to, when they're feeling enthusiastic, when they're motivated. Pros shoot whether they want to or not. This is a big advantage for the pros. The more time you spend shooting, the better your results will be. Drag your arse out of the house on a regular basis, and you will do better than if you don't.

This is why I always encourage amateur photographers who want to get better to set time or volume goals as opposed to results goals.

Edit like a #$%!&er
But where pros really have it all over amateurs—and where most amateurs are all wet—is in the realm of editing.

Most amateurs are so bad at editing that they don't have to look any further for the reason why their photography is not as good as it could be. In no particular order, here are a few of the pitfalls of amateur editing:

• Amateurs don't limit themselves to the best shot. They'll "work" a subject and shoot a roll or two, and keep every picture they think is good—even if there are eight or ten of them and even if several of the pictures are very similar. Friends, the very soul of good editing is to pick one that really matters and throw the rest aside. You gotta choose. Difficult and painful though that may be.

Pick the one you're gonna go with: Rarely published variants on the most famous portrait of Ernesto (Che) Guevara by René Burri

• One of the very hardest things for amateur editors to do is to let go of near-misses. We may have had high hopes for a particular shot. We may have almost achieved something great. But always remember, the key word there is "almost"—not "great." Let 'em go. I know, it's tough.
• Sometimes amateurs don't shoot enough to even get a good shot. Everything they're dealing with editing is in reality a near-miss or worse! When all you've got is chaff and there's no wheat, it makes editing exponentially tougher. Solution: entertain in your mind the possibility that all the pictures you're trying to edit from actually suck, and there isn't a single good one in there. Hey, it's not so bad. It happens to all of us sometimes.
• Amateurs are sentimental. It's not the greatest picture of a kitten, but he's such a cute little kitten. How could anybody not like the little guy? Be ruthless. Give that cat the boot.
• Spend time at it: Sometimes amateurs fail in editing simply because they don't bother to do it. In general, pros spend a great deal more time editing than amateurs do. First of all, they have to, because they shoot a lot more. But they also know that editing is the flip side of shooting—the other side of the same coin, the other end of the same stick—and almost as important to the final result. Remember, pros aren't necessarily more talented than you are: they just shoot a lot more and show a lot less.
• Don't confuse related but separate issues with the picture in front of your nose. Example #1: You used your best new Leica lens you're so proud of, and the picture is soooo sharp. Bah—if it's a bad picture, the fact that you took it with your new 28mm Summicron just means it's a sharp bad picture. Cull it. Example #2: The picture looks kinda like a famous shot you saw in a book. You're not entirely sure what makes a good picture good anyway, so you chose something that looks like somebody famous took it. Sorta. Example #3: You worked so hard to get that shot—you got special permission to get some kind of special access, you went home to get your super tele zoom, you waited for just the right light. Clue: you get zero credit for crap like this. Viewers will not be saying to themselves, "Well, it's a pretty ordinary shot that really doesn't do anything for me, but you know, I'll bet he worked really hard to get it." Don't be sentimental about your own labor. Let go of your memories of how much you wanted it to work and how hard you worked to get it to work, and just look coldly at the picture you got. You get the idea.

• "To thine own self be true." Sometimes we take good pictures that are other peoples' good pictures. Some are you, some aren't. Know the difference.

'Almost' doesn't cut it: an alternate image from Dorothea
Lange's shooting in the pea-picker camp

How to become a better editor
So how do you get better at this? Well, the usual admonitions apply...be organized, keep up with it (wish I could take my own advice), don't set impossible goals, keep moving on. But here are a few specific strategies that may help you improve your editing skills.

1. Use time to your advantage. Time can help you sort a jumble into a kind of order that makes sense. I recommend editing in two stages—a rough first pass, and then a more considered hard edit after some time has passed. When work is new, it has a different effect on us than when its novelty starts to wear off.

2. Get input. Ask other people! See what others respond to. At the very least, they bring less emotional baggage to the pictures. It's worthwhile to remember that you're the final arbiter, and you're under no obligation to be bound by other peoples' taste. But, assuming you have sufficient spine to make the final decision alone, input may help clarify.

3. Look at real pictures. Don't imagine. Don't edit in your mind. I personally think the best way to do this is to use an Editing Board, a place where you pin up prints of pictures you're trying to sort out your feelings about...in fact, I recommend this so often that my face turned blue a long, long time ago.

The Editing Board is a mystery and a delight, definitely one of the more cool things about photography. If I take fifteen work prints that I just shot and put them up on the board, I might think at first that all fifteen are of roughly the same quality. Then, after looking at them for a week, I find that I really like three of them and couldn't care less about the other twelve. I can't tell you exactly how this happens. It's like, I don't know, cream rising to the top or something. It takes some time, but once that separation occurs there's little doubt in your mind as to which is what. Try this. I can't guarantee it will work for you, but it might. And if it does, it's a powerful, powerful tool.

But however you work, whatever your method, just make sure you look at the actual pictures.

4. Be three times as ruthless as you think you have to be. You get better by doing your best and then moving on, not by trying with infinite patience to salvage everything you shot in the past that has the least little bit of merit (a typical amateur gambit, and one that serves to keep amateurs locked in amateurishness).

5. Finally, don't take editing lightly. Well, not if you aspire to actually accomplish something, that is. If you're just dorking around, be my guest and do any tomfool thing you want! Editing is a very important part of the process of being a photographer. If you're still reading this, chances are good that it's an area where your game could stand a bit of improvement.

And I'll let you in on a little secret: that's true for the majority of photographers.

Yup, even pros.

Mike

Copyright 2002, 2014 by Michael C. Johnston

[Note: This post is a "rerun." Because your host is recuperating from a health event and trying to minimize workload, the Comments Section, usually lively, is closed, but only for these "Classic" posts. Please join us in a few days when comments will be welcomed as usual. —Ed.]

It's Good to Look at Pictures

I did get to spend about five hours yesterday working on picture selections for our first book. (Despite being distracted. We're having some family drama.)

I'm always surprised by how easy it is to imagine editing photographs, and how different it is to actually do it. This has been consistently surprising, if such a thing is possible. To edit you have to actually do it, and to do it you need to actually look at photographs, let your visual intelligence take over.

I should back up and explain that I'm editing pictures for a book we plan to publish next Spring. One first book, as an experiment—an experiment to see how things go. Hopefully more after that, but for now, this one. I made a call for work, and got more than 2,000 suggestions from readers.

My intention has been to simply put all of the "possibles" into a "bin," if you will, for winnowing later. It hasn't gone like that. What happens is that when I put a "possible" into the document and look at it and it just doesn't fit, I know pretty quickly that it doesn't belong and then there's no more need to leave it in. So a lot of pictures have gone into the bin and then come right back out again, hours or days later. The ones that stay are the must-haves, the ones I feel rock-solid about. And once you get a certain critical mass of those, then you've got a core that dictates what else goes and what doesn't go. It becomes a simpler matter: does this go with what you already have? Does it belong with the others?

The "rejects," of course, are rejects just for this project. Accordingly, some of the pictures I really like but won't be using are suggesting other projects to me! For example, this wonderful shot by Sergio Bartelsman:

Photograph by Sergio Bartelsman

That's a great shot, and in the right company it could really sing. It doesn't "fit" in this first book, but it got my mind churning about future projects where it might fit. "Anonymity," a book of unrecognizable/recognizable people? This photograph would never do for identification purposes, but I'll bet this fellow's friends would know it's him in an instant. A book about negative space, where something in each photograph is a shape of featureless or near-featureless black? The possibilities pile up. These are just examples, and this is just one picture—a number of other pictures are likewise suggesting their own possibilities. I don't want to give up too many ideas.

Another interesting thing is happening, something I'm very familiar with and always enjoy—some photographs that didn't grab me at first are showing "legs"—staying power—while others I liked at first aren't lasting. The way I've always edited my own work (when I'm working, which isn't often any more) is to take the best shots from a recent batch of shooting and put them all up on the wall. Then I just look at them for a few days. What happens is almost like a form of magic or alchemy. I'll start out with ten or twenty shots I feel are all approximately equivalent in quality. Then, after two or three days, I'll have a handful I like and a handful I don't. Then when five or six days have passed, there will be two or three shots that I just love (well, if I'm lucky there will be), and the rest I just don't need to see any more.

It's like they sort themselves. Some of my initial selects for the book have traveled the same arc.

I did make a rookie mistake that I take full responsibility for. I should never have given the words "quiet color" as a cue. When you make a call for pictures, naturally people want to give you what they think you want. I just got loads of pictures that in some way illustrated the concept of quietude—pictures of emptiness and desolation, unpeopled landscapes and featureless seascapes, minimalism, lots of pastels and washed-out color, lonely scenes, out-of-the-way details. That wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but then, I didn't make that very clear, did I? My bad, mine alone. All I was really after were pictures that use unexaggerated color...easy on the sliders, maybe I should have said.

It's just very difficult to find the right way to give a call for work with an enabling cue rather than a limiting one. Take a look at this page to get an idea of the kind of pictures that people think illustrate the word "quiet." Nothing wrong with any of it, except that a little goes kind of a long way for me.

I can promise that our next book—assuming the first one goes okay and there is a second one—will have a very robust cue, one that will be enabling but not limiting. (In fact, I can give you that cue right now, if you want to be thinking six or nine months into the future. It's this: birds. Do not send me anything now—really, don't—but I thought you might want to set it it percolating.)

Back to Quiet Color. We're aiming for 32 or 36 pictures—the book designer will tell me exactly how many we have room for when he does his first concepts, and he hasn't started on that yet. So far I have made about half of the final selections, and about two-thirds of those come from TOP readers one way or another. But I'm in the process of going through all the submissions again, and I'm about a third of the way through that.

My mood is good, though. What overrides everything else is that it's good to look at pictures—always perks me up.

Good day to you, too.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 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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Need Your Help

Need a spot of advice—anybody know what the best type of pen to use to sign inkjet prints with is? I'm having trouble researching this. I'm interested in "best practices" in terms of permanence and archivalness. (Citations would be great.) In the old days I knew all the options for signing darkroom prints, but the times they have a-changed.

(This has nothing to do with our current print sale—completely different topic.)

TIA,

The Management

UPDATE: I contacted several image permanence organizations (not Wilhelm Imaging Research, because apparently they don't want to make themselves accessible to the public), and had a response from the Library of Congress Preservation Department. They cited ISO 18916 as a standard for marking pens, and named as an example the Kaiser-Schreiber film marking pen. They were careful to point out that their mention of this product is not an endorsement. 

However, the article "How to… Mark Objects in Museum Collections," Illinois Association of Museums, Summer 1997, #16, says, of the Kaiser-Schreiber, "This pen is designed for marking film. The ink fades dramatically under any light, on acrylic resins, and when immersed in water." Which is not encouraging, and leads me to believe that the L.o.C. and I might be talking at cross purposes. A quick scan of the ISO standard didn't shed much light, but I don't really have time to peruse it.

So I ordered a package of ten sheets of Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique inkjet paper (Ctein's standard paper) and the following pens, all but the first two based on readers' recommendations:

• Kaiser-Schreiber film marking pen
• Hollinger non-fading black Pigma pen
• Prismacolor Premier fine-line marker
• Sakura 30081 Pigma Micron
• Uni-ball Signo Broad UM-153 gel ink pen
• Pilot permanent ink marker
• Faber-Castell Pitt artist's pen

I have no idea yet how I'll test these pens on this paper for lightfastness or lengevity, or if I'll even try, but at the very least I can see how they look and figure out if they dry adequately and don't smudge. —MJ

Original contents copyright 2013 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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A Better, Brighter Flickr(?)

The photo sharing site Flickr, sometimes written with a lower-case "f," which seems to be used by a disproportionate number of the more talented of the many photographers in the world, has changed its look and organization. As you might expect, its users have...er, some opinions about that.

Go ahead, see if you can read that whole comment thread. According to one estimate, more than 20,000 comments so far.

The way I see it, the problem with things like this is that artistic people take into account the interface when they're deciding how to organize and present their work. If you change it, it's not so much that the change is bad, it's that it doesn't appear like the person whose pictures you're looking at expected it to appear. (Shades of what I was talking about the other day regarding shuffled-up software user interfaces.) It's one advantage of paper publication...the "published" work is at least set into a semi-enduring form that can't be recast willy-nilly by others later. Clearly, however, books are no longer the primary way photographers share their work and look at the work of others.

Mike
(Thanks to Bob Blakley)

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

Ben Syverson: "My issue with the Flickr redesign is that the photos have no room to breathe...it looks like a contact sheet, whereas the old design was closer to a gallery wall. The eye needs that 'white space' (not necessarily white) for visual relief, which is why we started putting room between words and paragraphs hundreds of years ago.

"I get why you would use this design for mobile devices, where you need to maximize screen utilization, but it's just overkill on the desktop. I have a feeling the idea came from an engineer rather than a designer, which would fit the historical pattern of horror vacui as an 'outsider art' impulse.

"One great quote from the Horror vacui Wikipedia article: 'There is an inverse relationship between horror vacui and value perception.' That pretty much sums it up. It's hard to appreciate an individual image when it's crammed into a mosaic of 20 other photos."