The Online Photographer

SWIM: A Major New Development in Computational Photography

Guest post by Chris Kern

What may be the next major development in the use of artificial intelligence to improve photography is currently the subject of a well-funded research program by major players in the camera and software industries, according to a friend of mine who serves as a consultant to the project and who agreed to let me post a summary of the research as long as I don’t use his name or those of the participating companies. He and his colleagues call it SWIM, which is an acronym for 'Shoot What I Meant' (i.e., not necessarily what I actually saw in the viewfinder).

The essence of this technique is to train a neural network to optimize the images made by a camera in real-time based on advanced machine-learning techniques. This involves feeding millions of pictures to the neural network until it figures out how to produce good ones. Prototype cameras that employ this technology have already been made available for testing to selected photographers under strict nondisclosure requirements. The software is computationally intensive and requires a lot of specialized supporting hardware. While the eventual goal is to make these techniques available in a cellphone camera, currently a much larger enclosure is required: something the size of a current full-frame DSLR.

Accordingly, the researchers arranged with a manufacturer of high-end cameras to build a few prototypes, which look exactly like the company’s top-of-the-line 'professional' reflex model but actually contain a mirrorless sensor, leaving room inside the body for the auxiliary data processing components and high-speed satellite uplink that are required to perform the image transformations. As a security measure, the prototype emits the sounds of a mirror-slap and a mechanical shutter, and a haptics module even imparts a little shake while the camera is simulating the mechanical actions of a DSLR, although of course the software completely neutralizes any blur caused by camera motion—and even subject motion, for that matter.

A module for sports photography eliminates the need for the 'spray and pray' technique commonly used when shooting fast-moving events and, consequently, reduces the time spent by the photographer or photo editor to cull a large number of only-slightly-different frames. The AI software, which needed a different training set of images for each sport during the machine-learning phase, analyzes the action and anticipates the precise moment a play will reach a critical point, then triggers the shutter once to capture it. According to my friend, a panel of seven experienced photo editors judged the system to be accurate 92.1 percent of the time for basketball, 89.5 percent of the time for international football, 84.0 percent of the time for American football, and 81.7 percent of the time for baseball. (A cricket module was abandoned because the researchers concluded that the machine-learning effort would never terminate.) In addition to anticipating the optimal moment to snap the shutter, the AI system uses selective focus to blur any extraneous players and automatically removes other distracting elements, in a manner which I gather is analogous to Photoshop’s content-aware fill.

The module for photojournalism is a derivative of the one for sports photography, but has been trained to anticipate the precise moment when a political figure or celebrity will strike the most awkward pose or display the most bizarre expression. Hit rates, according to my friend, were even higher than for the sports photography examples, and would have approached 100 percent except for a consensus among the experienced photo editors that some of the images were 'too disgusting for publication.' (My friend declined to describe these outlier images, saying that was sensitive proprietary information.) Conversely, the portrait module waits for the subject’s most flattering expression before triggering the shutter. The portrait module also optionally employs an anatomical-improvement feature to discreetly modify the subject’s features according to a menu-selectable attractiveness parameter.

A landscape module is still under development, according to my friend. In addition to making generic improvements to light, color, shadows, and scenic elements, it can be trained on images by famous photographers in order to emulate their style exactly. For example, my friend used the prototype Ansel Adams module to shoot 'Moonrise, New York, N.Y.' He made the photo at high noon on a sunny, cloudless day from a vantage point in Secaucus, New Jersey, and the software automatically 1.) changed the perspective of the Manhattan skyline to match that of Adams’ famous photo, 2.) introduced a rising moon and cloud bank in the appropriate locations and proportions, and 3.) adjusted the lighting with a tone curve that is indistinguishable from that of gelatin silver prints of his Moonrise picture that were made by Adams himself. Further machine-learning along these lines has temporarily been suspended, however, pending a determination by the project’s legal consultants whether training a neural network to perfectly recreate the style of a dead photographer constitutes identify theft.

Now I suspect some of you reading this post think the introduction of this new AI technology will remove all the challenge and therefore the satisfaction from the process of making great images. I confess that was my initial reaction, too. But upon further reflection, I realized that possibility must be balanced against the potential advantages of these cameras for the experienced photographer. No need to get up before dawn to catch the perfect sunrise. Or to stand around for many hours, hoping for the emergence of a dramatic storm that never materializes. No more worrying about that irritating tourist who always seems to wander between your camera and the subject just before the decisive moment to capture a perfect street photograph: yes, the camera will automatically recreate the scene as though the interloper had not occluded your view. And needless to say, your loved ones will be delighted with the way they look in your family snapshots after you crank up the attractiveness setting. Artificial intelligence holds out the promise of finally eliminating the frustration many of us feel when a day of shooting doesn’t turn out the way we had hoped.

In any event, it’s coming whether we like it or not. You can’t stop progress.

Chris

Here's Chris's Flickr page. No, really. —Ed.

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

mark dannenhauer: "SYNC: The Truly New Breakthrough in Image Making

"Michael, Mikey, Mike, somehow I thought I knew you. Regular readings of TOP had me convinced that you were a hip guy. But today I read your posting of one Chris Kern’s post about SWIM. With all due respect, I can’t believe that anyone would advocate for such an antiquated platform, let alone that you of all people would publish it.

"SWIM at first glance seems cutting edge, a clever blending of old and new technologies. I could see it dominating the marketplace, except.... SYNC is newer, neater, just all around superior, especially for the price. Let me tell you why. (Dislcaimer: I have no financial interest in this breakthrough technology. I have joined SYNC solely on my own dime.)

"Some people assume SYNC stands for Shoot Your New Camera, as if your new 'camera' was super-hipster-system developed for the masses shooting fashion, sports, money, arts, landscapes, Austin Texas street scenes, etc. In fact, SYNC is an international open source effort for anyone and everyone everywhere to Shoot Your Now Consciousness.

"What’s revelatory, game-changing, about SYNC is that it eliminates hardware and software altogether, mostly. Let’s say you have an image in your consciousness. It could be a real life scene, or one by another photographer, or one by an artist, poser, or advertiser. Using SYNC’S patented processes, the image in your consciousness is automatically transferred to the consciousness of anyone with a SYNC subscription, complete with all original characteristics and desired modifications intact. Hardware, software, computer platforms…all things of the past, why not post about harness making, Leicas, or left-handed cameras for crying out loud.

"If you must have old world, and I do mean old world, old guard, passe, finito, what-century-are-you-living-in image transfer, there is an optional, hardware-based add on. (I did say, mostly without hardware.) SYNC sends your image to SYNC ADD—an add-on device where you can specify either a why-would-you-want-it paper print of your image OR a 3-D printer spit-out of a three-dimensional model of your image to your choice of scales. Animated 4-D versions of the device are in development.

"Introductory subscriptions to SYNC are available now via GoFunMe, today only. Subscriptions are of course valid only for the duration of your consciousness. Sign up now for the best, longest-lived deal!

"SYNC = 0 cameras/0 lenses/a lifetime of years. Your choice is clear. After all, it’s either SYNC or SWIM."

Mike replies: Why am I suddenly hoping for April 2 to get here?  :-D

Stephen S.: "This may be an April Fools' Day joke in 2023, but given that Samsung phones already seem to use AI to generate better images of the moon when they detect you're trying to photograph it, there may come a day when much of this article is real."

JimF: "April Fools??? Probably not. Sounds possible to me. Funny what we classify as progress these days. Next step, Neuralink rose-colored glasses. Why see the world as it really is at all?"

Project People and Process People

Reader JH wrote this as a comment yesterday. Thanks to him for permission to make it into its own post. —Ed.

Guest post by JH

According to a fellow I worked with back in the early '70s at a high tech company, there are two types of people that work at companies, project people and process people. Project people want to complete whatever they are doing and move on to the next project. Process people enjoy doing the work and often hate to see a project finished. Project people work toward meeting a goal. These types of people work in all fields, but those who become engineers or accountants tend to be more process people. For accountants, it's easy to understand. I've employed many engineers and often had to pry projects out of their hands to get a product to market.

It's like that with writing books. A project person will define the book well enough that they work to the goal of creating a finished work, starting with a table of contents and writing it in sections that allow putting together a finished work. Doing even a short book takes many hours, thousands in some cases if research is needed, so it's easy to see how a process person gets entangled in the work and has trouble finishing the project.

I'm a project person and doing books for me is easy. I've written 10 textbooks and one business/humor book over the last 25 years. Almost all came together from assembling short articles or web pages I had already written, with perhaps 10% requiring research, so they are more editing that writing. I had plenty to pull from; over that same time frame I have written over 1,000 technical web pages (created after I found what a mess trying to publish on Wikipedia was), more than 300 monthly newsletters, and over 400 technical articles. A few product catalogs and instruction manuals too.

What I learned early on was that I was not a fiction writer. I have a folder of ideas for science fiction stories or books, but I never liked what I wrote—too much like my technical writing.

My business book was droll humor about the tech industry—a put-down of tech—but it was too early, and no publisher would touch it. Self published, I think I gave away more copies than were sold. Maybe it's time to add a chapter about Silicon Valley Bank and reissue it.

The idea has been brought up that you, Mike, could do what I do, gather articles into books. The missing element is market—who or what is the market? Is it self-help for photographers? Critique of selected photographs? Ideas, anyone?

For books, the Internet has changed how people get information and it has become harder to get sufficient revenue from books to make them worth the effort. In my case I have an organization sponsor and a captive audience; the textbooks are tied to training and certification and generate good revenue for the organization.

I'm generally reluctant to offer advice, but I would say keep doing what you do now. Be honest with yourself about what you do well and focus on it. Trying to be what you ain't ain't no fun!

—JH

So, speaking primarily of working at photography, would you say you're a process person or a project person? Is that a useful conceptual framing for understanding how you work? —Mike the Ed.

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Nicholas Hartmann: "A favorite quote from I don’t remember where or whom: 'There comes a time in every project when you must shoot the engineers and go into production.' I also found during my service in volunteer association leadership that the best way to get a project done was to give it to a freelancer, whose ingrained way of making a living is to complete a job, send the invoice, and go on to the next job. The best way to kill a project, conversely, was to give it to an academic, whose survival reflex is to string out projects as long as possible and study every aspect of a problem in order get more funding, add to his/her bibliography, and achieve higher staus in the cutthroat university hierarchy. (A Texan friend of mine once defined your 'project' mentality as 'git 'er done' [past tense: 'got 'er did'].)"

Adam Isler: "My own experience in business of the last 40 or so years, the last 20 in software, is that the process/project orientation is a useful distinction to draw, given, however, that we recognise it as representing a spectrum rather than a purely binary distinction. Most people will probably orient more to one pole than the other but few will do so absolutely."

Kirk (partial comment): "JH's comment, and defining of the way people work, is brilliant. Project versus process. I wrote five 40,000+ word books and did all the illustrations for them in the space of three years for Amherst Media. None of the books took me more than four months from receipt of contract to completion. I have to be the most project driven person I know because I did all of the books while maintaining a full time schedule within my commercial photography business. And I rarely missed a daily swim practice. Nicholas's realization that the best way to get a project done is to hand it to a freelancer is so true. We live to get stuff done successfully and then move on quickly. No question. Time is money."

Charlie Ewers: "The division into project and process folks certainly rings true in my experience. I'm very much a project person, although I'm an academic, but my co-author (also an academic) on a recent book is so much a process person that we almost came to blows before we got the final version to the publisher. There was always one more thing he wanted to work into a chapter, one more photo he wanted me to get, one more edit on material that had already been edited to death. We got it done and we're both proud of it, but it's truly a wonder that we're still friends."

Ask Mike

Got any photography questions? You'll be helping me out.

I can only answer the ones that I know off the top of my head. As I said to a reader once who had an insistent question, if one of us has to go do research, I don't see why it shouldn't be you.

I'm not the one to ask about technical niceties, because my interest, and hence my knowledge, is limited*. (The older I get, the less I think technique matters in photographs. You need what you need, and as long as you're not a professional doing work on assignment, you won't need much. Henri Cartier-Bresson said it took him three days to master his first Leica, and when Peter Turnley made the switch from film to digital he hired an expert to teach him, and they worked intensively for three days, and that was that—done, back to work.) But I'm pretty good with content, process, method, artmaking issues, motivation, direction, aesthetics, accomplishment, and so forth—mostly from the creator side, not from the perspective of the appraising art critic looking on from outside. I've always been on the side of photographers. I guess if you read here much at all you'll be broadly familiar with my strengths and weaknesses**.

I'm asking because I've got an empty tank this morning when it comes to ideas of photography-related things to write about. If you can think of a question you'll be helping me!

Mike

*And getting more so all the time. When he was in his retirement, I asked Rudolph Kingslake to write about optics and lenses for the photo magazine I edited. He had studied under the great Conrady at Imperial College London and was the former Head of the Optical Design Department at Eastman Kodak, the founder of the Institute of Applied Optics at the University of Rochester, and the author of six books on optics and lenses. His response was, "I don't know anything any more." I couldn't understand that then, but now I'm beginning to get it.

**Speaking of weaknesses, Robert Roaldi's joke: "A retired guy decided to get a part-time job for some extra cash. At the interview with the much younger manager, the interviewer asked the old guy what he considered to be his greatest weakness. The old fella said 'My honesty.' Young manager says, 'That's interesting, I never thought honesty could be a weakness.' Old guy said, 'I don't give a damn what you think.'"

Original contents copyright 2023 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

PaulW: "Would you ever consider writing a book on B&W photograhy? I love B&W photography, monochromatic really, but I've never become good at it. I've always felt like I stumble through the process haphazardly, and any success I have leans toward luck more than knowledge or skill. I'm competent with photographic technologies, lighting, composition, and I can even make a good color photo, but B&W really trips me up. With your years of experience I can't imagine you not having some great pearls of wisdom to pass on to others. You've done this in many of your posts here on TOP, but I'd love to see all that great knowledge put into one place."

Mike replies: Film or digital? Or both?

Actually the photography book I'd like to write would be called "Classic 35mm Photography" (or that could be the subtitle), and there would be two parts: one volume of history, how-to, and the technical underpinnings, and the second volume a selection of 60 or 80 pictures (maybe two or three of them mine) with commentary. Now would be a good moment for it, what with the renaissance of interest in old film cameras.

The trouble with books is that they require intensely front-loaded effort. Imagine promising to work for a new employer for a whole year, or two, at which time he will decided if, and how much, he will pay you. And your chances are maybe one in four that you will achieve minimum wage for the effort expended. You can see the problem. A body's gotta eat. People with more energy or more resources can take the risk; as a recovering chronic depressive (it's much better now than in the past, however), my energy has generally been rather on the low side.

William Giokas: "What would be a good travel camera? I could take my Leica and a 35mm lens to keep things simple. But, I would probably miss a zoom lens."

Mike replies: I once asked Ansel Adams what kind of camera he used, and he replied, "the biggest one I can carry!" Which was his standard answer. So the answer to your question comes down to, what's the biggest one you will carry?

My suggestion therefore has three tiers:

Small: IF (big if, get it?) you are only going to look at the pictures on your phone, tablet, or laptop, or post them on social media, a good late-model smartphone. The limitation of course is quality when zoomed in, and quality and maximum print size when printed.

Medium: Your choice of a good small, light Micro 4/3 body with one of the two Panasonic 12–60mm lenses on it. The smaller one is very good; the Leica-branded one is faster and a little better, but heavier. My feeling is that you don't want to be changing lenses on your carry-around camera when photographing is not your #1 priority, and having that extra reach out to 120mm-equivalent will be a crucial benefit of carrying a zoom.

Big: IF you want to make prints, ever, a Fuji X-T5 and you decide on the lens(es). Our friend Dennis Mook posted his thoughts about that paragon of camera brilliance (still my top pick as the most recommendable camera across all brands and models) at The Wandering Lensman. Alternately, for maximum capability and versatility in the smallest package, the OM System OM-1 with the 12–100mm lens as your only lens (a "nested" 20mm pancake is nice to have to make the camera lighter and smaller when you need that, say, when you're going out to dinner or traveling through airports).

Peter Komar: "Part question, mostly requesting your opinion on, so-called street photography and mostly film shooters. My view and opinion is that most of what I see on YouTube is that it’s all mostly very amateurish. Yes there are/were some real artists, the Turnley brothers, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Vivian Maier. My gosh I wish the current street photographers would just buy their books or view the body of great images the above three produced (in the case of the Turnley brothers they are still going strong). Well, I guess this turned into a rant but I would like to hear your opinion on our current situation where anybody shooting film has a YouTube channel and label themselves as a street photographer. Yes there are some good ones out there but mostly the rest are just boring."

Mike replies: Street photography is one of the easiest genres to work in and one of the most difficult to do well. So you just need to remember that most people doing it will just not have much actual aptitude for it, or won't have the time or dedication to do enough of it to yield consistently good results (it's very low yield per hour put in and number of shots taken), or won't have the discrimination and taste to know which of their own pictures are really great and which are average, or mediocre, or that just show them "playing the same old games" (we all have our tricks that we play, some of which become notorious as clichés among the self-appointed critics on the Internet). And there's close to zero market for it, so it's sort of like poetry in small literary and prestigious general-interest magazines: highly competitive but for no real reason.

It's an area in which gatekeepers and shared group experience would be very helpful. And those two things are sorely lacking, if not missing altogether, on the wilds of the Internet. So I'd be inclined to seek out websites dedicated to street photography, or cooperatives, or individual artists who post new work on websites or Instagram.

If the old rule is that 95% of everything is crap, then 99.9% of street photography is crap, but the remaining .1% is still a hell of a big heap of work and it's all out there. You just have to work to find it.

robert e: "How do you figure out what to charge for one of your prints? (Or, for that matter, a digital image?) You may have covered this before, in which case a link would be appreciated, assuming that finding the link doesn't fall under 'research.' ;-) "

Mike replies: Wish I knew. I think before you charge for prints you make a commitment to be the kind of photographer who sells prints. Just charging for a random print now and then is bound to be awkward.

When I was at the Corcoran, we were ostensibly being trained to be art photographers, i.e., doing self-directed creative/expressive work, having shows of framed prints occasionally in which prints were for sale, trying to get into juried shows and the like, trying to get gallery representation, getting published. Very distinct from professional photography, photojournalism, or hobby photography. If you want to know what an art photographer does, just go to the website of a successful one and look at his/her c.v., and you'll see the activities they target.

At that time, we were told that $350 (and this was in the mid-'80s) was acceptable for a student print, but once we graduated we should aim for $750 or so, $650 at minimum. But $650 in 1985 when I graduated from the Corcoran is $1,800 now, and I don't think I've ever gotten that much for one of my prints from that day to this. Of course, I never really played the game, so that probably makes sense.

A few things I think I do know: 1.) the less you charge, the more buyers will complain and push back; 2.) if you charge a lot, your print quality and presentation better be impeccable; and 3.) becoming a salable art photographer takes every bit as much marketing skill, savvy, and effort as being a working professional competing for jobs. Just a different kind is all.

Mike Plews: "How do I get a digital inkjet print that is as beautiful as the ones I used to get from Portriga Rapid back in the day? I can get nice prints from my printer but not that nice. Something is just missing."

Mike replies: Forget digital! How do you get a B&W film negative print on fiber-base gelatin silver paper today that's as beautiful as the ones we used to get from the old Portriga Rapid?!

Bob Keefer: "As a fellow chronic depressive, I'd be interested in your strategies for staying engaged with a photographic project—or with photography generally. I'm not looking for ways to deal with depression; over the years I've learned to keep it under control, mostly, with diet and exercise and the seasonal use of a happy light in the morning. I'm interested in what to do when your photography is in demand—you can get your work shown in a gallery or publication—and yet you're struggling for that next idea, wanting to find something that doesn't feel endlessly repetitive and that isn't boring to create. Travel helps, as does the occasional new lens, but you can sink a lot of money in that kind of diversion without getting much in return. Any ideas for curing photographic ennui?"

Mike replies: Just work. And you work by playing. Go out and do. Do something stupid or silly. Follow your id. Let the work come to you. But get out there with the camera in your hands.

Mark L. Power told me once that when his students complained, he used to sympathize, help them analyze, hold their hands, commiserate, soothe, etc. But finally he realized that they only complained when they weren't working. Go out and look, and look some more. Get the camera in your hands and start messing with it. If nothing works today, just shrug and try something else tomorrow. Shoot till you get one that turns you on and see if you can figure out a way to string another one to that one. Or set some silly goal that takes you places—nineteen pictures of feet in 19 days; ten good pictures that include clock faces; walk up and ask a stranger if you can make a portrait of them until you get 50 rejections. Find the highest point you can get to in five towns and keep going back till something happens. Anything can work. Work is what it takes. Just go work.

Aakin: "What are your thoughts on shooting in JPEG?"

Mike replies: Well, Bruce Fraser's Camera Raw was one of the turning points of photography in digital for me, and I've shot in raw ever since, but the times are very different now. In-camera conversions are excellent now, cameras no longer have problems with white balance, and high-resolution sensors have much better dynamic range. JPEGs from good cameras today are much more correctable in post, too. Raw can be better for some styles of photography, and can offer more flexibility, especially if you've mastered a sophisticated editor like Photoshop or Capture One. But JPEGs look great now, can be simpler to work with, and can streamline your workflow. I'd say go for it, and if it works for you, don't give it another thought.

The thing that will tell you if you need to do something differently are the pictures themselves. If you're getting what you want, then don't change. If you're coming away dissatisfied too often, then do something differently. There are no rote rules.

Kirk: "If you had ample funds, ample time and access to any gear you wanted where in the United States would you like to go explore? What kind of project would you make of it? How would you produce it? Where and how would you show it to an audience? Do you see the possibility for a resurgence of bricks and mortar photogrpahic galleries? If you had to choose between being out photographing your passion or spending the time in the office printing the results of past passions which would you choose? How would you choose? Given we only have so much time in front of us would you consider the idea of legacy (printing, arranging, showing) or rather, embrace the fun of the process of shooting? Which is more important to an artist, having a good and ample social media presence or chasing after publication in a book which might reach several thousand people? Is the black and white print still the gold standard in an age in which people can reach thousands and thousands of viewers using good social media platforms and the skills needed to attract audiences? Do we do ourselves a disservice as artists in constantly mining the past as opposed to embracing the future of our photographic craft? Another travel and value question: What are the 10 best places in the USA to see great photography in gallery environments? Can you speak to their individual attributes? What do you think the impact of images made solely through 'text to image' Artificial Intelligence will have on the market for collectible photography and/or commercial photography? How can we of a certain generation keep up with progress/changes in the art of photography (styles, content, craft) without defaulting to just mining the legends from a time when barriers to entry made defining 'stars' easier? What do you think of the current styles of street photography? It seems so many younger practitioners are copying each other by using film Leica M cameras and 28mm lenses. Snapping semi-candid opportunities and displaying online in the same styles. Is this the death knell of street photography? What would you like to see more of in this genre? Less of? Do photographers retire? Do artists retire? Why is there a resurgence of film based photography right now? Are there cultural trends that would explain this? Why are Americans so 'home centric' in their photographic interests? Should we be more open to international trends and styles instead of endlessly worshipping American documentary and landscape photography from the far past? How often do you get to New York City, Boston, Miami, San Francisco or Santa Fe to visit galleries? Of those galleries you visit which are your favorites? Recommendations for new shows of new photographic works? Given that publishers are disinterested in funding new books by artists, preferring to have artist help with both funding and marketing of books amid the skyrocketing prices for production do you see a time when photo books by any other than proven money makers like Annie Leibovitz just die out and photo books cease to become a venue for up and coming photographers? How will that affect future photo artists? Why do you disregard Leicas with such prejudice? So many of the cameras are so good and can still be had used for affordable prices. I'm curious to know what puts you off besides the 'idea' of price. Have you visited the Humanities Research Center at UT Austin? The Gernsheim Collection of Photograph, the recent acquisition of Elliott Erwitt's work and the Magnum Collection on loan from Michael Dell would seem to make it a top destination for critics, collectors and pundits on the subject. Do you have plans for a visit? Do you need a place to stay?  :-)  "

Mike replies: Wow. I can't top that, Kirk. My general answer, quoting David Vestal's mentor Ralph Steiner, is: "In Spite of Everything, Yes!" (It was the title of one of his books of photographs.)

(P.S. I am not prejudiced against Leicas. I've owned or shot extensively with a number of them over the years. More than I've owned Canons, Minoltas, Hasselblads, or several other brands.)

From Terry Burnes: Phone Photography Followup

Photo by Terry Burnes (not taken with a phone)

Terry Burnes wrote the post "On Phone Photography" last Friday. As a followup to that post, here's the key for the pictures on his website that were taken with a phone vs. a dedicated camera.

First, here's Terry's online album, 199 photographs.

Next, here are the ones that were taken with a phone:

• 11–22
• 76
• 77
• 79–89
• 97–137
• 140
• 143–186
• 188–190
• 193–4
• 197
• 199

That’s 118 out of the 199, by Terry's count.

Even if you didn't try to sort them out without knowing which was which, it might be interesting now to go look and see how much difference you can detect.

Finally, here is Terry's response to all the Comments on his post:

I want to thank everyone for the thoughtful discussion of phone photography. A few clarifications: Several commented on the phone's ergonomics. I just want to be sure that everyone knows that on most phones, pushing either volume control (up or down) will trigger the shutter. So, use the touch screen to set your focus point and adjust exposure if necessary. But then trigger the shutter with the volume buttons that feel more like the release on a traditional camera. Likewise you can plug in the simple ear buds that come with most phones and use the volume control on those to trigger the shutter. The Shuttergrip is quick to attach and remove and allows easy, stable one-handed operation of the phone, leaving your second hand free to shade the screen from direct sunlight if necessary. I sometimes use my second hand to shade the lens from sun too. I rarely take the kit pictured in my post with me. Mostly I just use the phone, but if I do want an accessory, like a lens or two or the grip, with me I just slip them in my pocket. The lenses are smaller than a ping pong ball, the grip a bit bigger.

Thanks again to Terry for sharing his experience in his post!

Mike

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

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

longviewer: "I've chosen not to invest in a phone for its photo capabilities, so none of these images could be made at my price point. Glad it works for many, but it's not my cup of cocoa +coffee +Irish cream."

Herman Krieger: "In regard to phone photography, don't call me, I'll call you."

A Visit to the TOP Corner of the World

Words by Euan Forrester
Pictures by Euan Forrester and Kathryn Toews

We stayed at La Belle Vie (photo by Euan)

Mike wrote a post recently hectoring his readers to come visit him at TOP World Headquarters in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York. While his post listed many interesting museums and wineries, those weren’t the aspects of the area that got us the most excited on our recent trip to visit him. And when I mentioned to people at home that I was going to upstate New York, all I got was blank stares. So we wanted to share a few of the things we saw in the hopes of cajoling a few more readers to come out and see this perhaps-underappreciated part of the world.

Howe Cavern (photo by Euan)

My favourite non-Mike part of the trip was visiting Howe Cavern. The "traditional tour" of the cave is along well-built walkways amongst well-lit rock features, but we booked the "adventure tour" which involved a special suit (it's muddy), headlamps, and a guide. I would be too scared to explore a cave like this on my own, but our guide was fun and interesting and took our minds off how frightening it was to wiggle through Fat Man’s Misery.

Sampling the waters at Saratoga Springs (photo by Katie)

Katie’s favourite non-Mike part of the trip was Saratoga Springs State Park. She stumbled onto it randomly while Googling around for how to spend an afternoon one day, and we found a short walk where you can sample water from five different springs. I was skeptical, but they all taste different. We didn’t plan this day at all, but I get the feeling from the maps of the area that there’s lots of little random gems like this to discover.

We got "spectacular fatigue" at Watkins Glen. Note the relative size of the people on the bridge. (Photo by Euan)

Mike did mention Watkins Glen, as did a reader, but it only got a sentence and it deserves much more. If we could do it again we’d put this last because it set the standard for beauty everywhere else we went, and nothing quite matched up. It’s a long gorge, and around every corner was another beautiful waterfall. We eventually got “spectacular fatigue” from the constant bombardment of beauty.

At the Watkins Glen International raceway it seems there are often amateur events that aren’t advertised but are inexpensive to attend. And being amateur events, I expect it’s easy to get up close to the race—and even to the pits. It can be a little tricky to find out when events are happening, but we chatted up a security guard for information.

The Grand Canyon of the East (photo by Katie)

Letchworth State Park is home to “the Grand Canyon of the East.” Never having been to the Grand Canyon of Everywhere Else, I was intrigued. We initially planned to hike along it, but it turns out to be better (or at least easier) to see by it car. There’s plenty of viewpoints, a nature centre that’s quite interesting, and three large waterfalls that are easy to get to.

Katie pausing at an overlook (photo by Euan)

There’s plenty of hiking in the area: whenever we were off the main Interstates we could see small parking areas with cars indicating one hike after another. We did a short hike called Vroman’s Nose, which is an interesting glacial formation with a moderate slope up one side and steep cliffs on the other.

A private showing of Winogrand prints, just for us! (Photo by Katie)

Mike wrote about the George Eastman Museum recently and his “one more thing” at the end made me really excited to visit: the chance to put on white cotton gloves and see prints up close and without glass in front. My only problem was that I didn’t know what photos to ask to see, and I didn’t know they have their collection online to browse.

So when I called and they asked, I blurted out the first name that came to mind: Garry Winogrand. But then they asked “Which project?” and I was stumped again. The gentleman kindly said that they’d arrange for an overview, and we we arrived we saw that he’d selected some matted prints and then a collection from Women Are Beautiful. It was the perfect choice: I have most of Winogrand’s books but not that one, and Katie wasn’t familiar with his work at all and this provided an excellent entry point. It was a magical experience that left me tingling with excitement.

Playing at the Museum of Play (photo by Euan)

Also in Rochester is the Museum of Play, which was also recommended by a reader. It’s excellent. I was expected a stuffy, dusty, collection of toys behind glass and instead we found a Sesame Street neighbourhood to walk through (complete with a cab to drive Elmo wherever he wants to go), a scaled down grocery store to practice our cashier skills, an automatic Etch-a-Sketch that took our picture, videogames to play, dance moves to show off, and a giant Mr. Potato Head to play with.

The mists of Niagara (photo by Katie)

Niagara Falls didn’t disappoint. We saw them from every conceivable angle: standing right beside the top as they plunge over, looking up from the bottom on Maid of the Mist, feeling their power on the Journey Behind the Falls, and from our restaurants and hotel room high above. Despite all this time staring at them over the course of two days, I still felt that I had not fully appreciated them: they’re too big to fully comprehend.

Mike and friends (photo by Euan)

When I met Mike, it was easy to get over the asymmetrical nature of our relationship (I’ve been a reader for about a decade, and he of course knew nothing about me), and we talked about plenty of things that involved photography and plenty of things that didn’t. I showed him some prints and we talked about the work I’d done and the difficulties I was having. Our breakfast at La Belle Vie the next day was delicious and the conversation was similarly wide-ranging. Despite Mike’s admonition that “people meet writers hoping for a special extra something, but our best selves are already in our writing,” I respectfully disagree and I left feeling energized and happy.

Buttermilk Falls (photo by Euan)

If you’ve been thinking of a trip to visit Mike, I highly recommend it.

Euan

©2017 by Euan Forrester and Kathryn Toews, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP/Yale Spring Photo Book Offer
(Ends June 30th or when supplies run out)

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

Frank Petronio: "Looking for that thumbs up button...."

Terry Burnes: "Our California-raised son attended college at Colgate University in Hamilton New York not far from the Finger Lakes. We visited that area at least twice a year while he was there. I must say the Winters, and even Fall and Spring, can have daunting weather. Almost every visit ran the gamut from sun to snow. But what a beautiful area with a huge amount of history. We visited many of the places mentioned in this post and more. Even took a week long cruise on the Erie Canal in a little rented boat.

"On an RV trip around the perimeter of the USA in 2006 our three favorite states were Texas, Florida and New York. Why? It was the diversity of each and the way they contradicted stereotypes. New York State is so much more than New York City. Go!"

Jackson Bart: "Upstate New York is such an underrated place. I was in Cazenovia last summer, so beautiful there."

Flying With a Camera (Part II)

Guest post by David Raboin

Part I is here

Long Shadows Cast on the Great Basin… The primary challenge of editing photos taken from an airliner is correcting the contrast. Straight out of the camera my aerial photos are flat with all the vital information packed into a small hump in the middle of the histogram. My usual editing process starts with two steep curve adjustments layers, one layer for color and another for luminosity adjustments. On top of those layers I sometimes need to do multiple local adjustments using luminosity masks, gradient masks, or soft edged brushes. I consider the above photo a triumph of my process. For years I struggled to create accurate shadows in my aerial photos. Then, on an uneventful flight last spring, while looking down on the shadows of houses in the Los Angeles suburbs in late afternoon, I got to thinking about how shadows look from the air: they’re dark, low contrast on the inside, and sharp edged. How do you lower contrast and at the same time darken in photoshop? Decrease the pitch of a curve! I cracked it. Now, to darken shadows without exaggerating the contrast throughout the entire image, I use a curves adjustment layer with a luminosity mask to isolate the darkest tones. Then, I pull the upper right curve’s anchor point straight down until the shadows are suitably dark. It’s a simple,noise-free solution and I think it looks great.      

Without making a conscious decision, my dissatisfaction with that first online gallery set me on a path to becoming a serious photographer. Within a few years I was carrying a bag full of DSLR kit on every trip. My home library swelled with Photoshop manuals. And, most importantly, I became fascinated with photography as an art. I devoured all things photo related: books on composition, photography history, photo blogs, and endless image browsing on the web. By 2006, three years into photography, I was beginning to feel confident in my growing skills. I could capture the glow of sunset on a wall of thunderstorms and correct the contrast in a photo that peered through six miles of hazy atmosphere.

Thunderstorm Over Nebraska and the North Platte River The biggest challenge when composing aerial photos is portraying the sky’s volume. Airliners cruise roughly six miles above the earth and it’s difficult to impart that depth in a two dimensional image. Often I find myself flying near a massive thunderstorm, some of them reaching 50,000 feet, taller than two Mount Everests or six El Capitans; but, without a visual size reference in the frame, the size of the storm is lost in a photo. While dodging some heavy weather on our way from Chicago to San Francisco a couple of summers ago, I was fortunate to get a chance to photograph this monster cell floating above the Platte River Valley in Nebraska. The backlighting makes the storm look suitably dark (severe thunderstorms are puffy white billows when viewed from the sunny side) and, the North Platte River sparkles for a hundred miles towards the horizon. I couldn’t have planned this, it’s too perfect. Finally, a photo that shows the true size of a thunderstorm.     

Today, my bag is packed with a Canon 5D Mark III and an assortment of Canon lenses, both zoom and prime. I travel half a million miles every year. My job is flying planes, so I don’t have time to baby my gear. My camera bag gets bashed through security, crunched into overhead bins, rained on, and left unguarded in public places for long periods. Over the years I’ve only had one major mishap. Once, after a particularly difficult trip, I drove out of the airport parking lot with my camera bag still on top of my car. That’s one way to justify an equipment upgrade, and I love to upgrade....

Over the decade that I’ve been flying with a camera, technological improvements in both cameras and post processing software have made previously impossible shots ordinary. Now days, with improved high ISO performance, I can take aerial photos of city lights at dusk while also preserving the details of the landscape and sky, something I wouldn’t have dreamed of in 2010. I imagine that not too far in the future I’ll be able to photograph noise-free moonlight on cloud tops while screaming along at Mach .78.

Moonlight Ride Above Denver Taken with my Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 16–35mm image-stabilized lens, this photo pushes the limits of current technology. I used ISO 8000 at ⅛th second and ƒ/4. There’s a little more noise than I’d like in this photo and the lights of Denver aren’t as sharp they could be, but we’re getting there. I’m excited for the future of night photography. (Full disclosure: this image falls into Mike’s new “Photo Art” category due to some heavy Content Aware Fill to remove reflections from the windshield)

Although it took a lot longer to get here than I’d originally planned, my career (thanks to low oil prices and industry consolidation) is now that of a gentleman aviator. I’m fortunate to fly beautiful modern jets between America’s major cities, stay in posh downtown hotels, and live the life of a flaneur and street photographer during my overnights. I hesitate before complaining. However, any job that requires strict adherence to procedure can become brutally routine. A sense of loneliness creeps in while spending half the month flying around with strangers, and doing a job that, when done right, leaves no trace and little memory. The camera helps turn that around. With a camera, airline flying becomes a scenic cruise, an adventure, a story waiting to be told. As we track down the lonely corridors of vapor, I’m looking for something beautiful that I can share when I get back down to earth.

My Current Ride: Airbus 320 Getting ready to push back from the gate at San Francisco International Airport

To see a collection of my best flying images please visit my website: www.photos4u2c.com

You can also follow me on Instagram and Facebook.

Dave

Note: All photos were taken in accordance with federal aviation regulations and company policies. Safety of flight is every pilot’s primary concern and the camera only comes out in low workload situations.  

Words and images ©2016 by David Raboin, all rights reserved

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help keep TOP flying!
Join our support campaign or buy something

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

Warren Jones: "Wow, Dave, nicely done sir. Thank you for sharing your images and story with us. I very much enjoyed it."

Dave Van de Mark: "I have thoroughly enjoyed this guest post. Would love to see a more detailed view of the processing carried out for the some of the photos. As a 'ground' landscape photographer, rendering the proper degree of contrast relative to other (tonal and color) variables in pursuit of a satisfying and realistic print, is the hardest thing I typically encounter. And rarely have I been totally satisfied. And as David demonstrates so clearly with his stunning photos, that journey has been challenging, but with new possibilities always appearing on the horizon (pun intended). It's the same story for me and I'm sure glad he shared his. Thanks to you Mike for this guest post."

Flying With a Camera (Part I)

Guest post by David Raboin

Cloudburst Above South Florida. Much of photography depends on luck. Beyond skill, you sometimes need to be in the right place at the right time. As an airline pilot, the odds are stacked in my favor. I fly thousands of miles of every workday and I keep a camera close. When the sky opens up, I am ready.

I recall the morning when I felt the first pull towards photography. That day, I was scheduled to fly the dawn departure from Knoxville, Tennessee to US Airway’s hub in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was a new first officer, a copilot, new to the Knoxville crew base and fairly new to the airline. In the fluorescent glow of our company’s crew room, amidst the faded safety posters, boxes of earplugs, and stacks of unfiled paperwork, I met the rest of the crew. Captain Simpson, a former Baltimore cop who came up in aviation the hard way, approached me holding a styrofoam coffee cup in one hand and our flight release in the other. He took a detective’s measure of my enthusiastic smile. In front of him stood a small town kid who’d only traveled on an airliner twice before falling ass-backwards through America’s booming 1990s economy into his first airline pilot gig. My uniform was brand new, the sportcoat a size too big and the pants two inches too short. He could see I was nervous. I hadn’t yet learned the art of the confident flight crew introduction.

“Yeah, we’re flying with an FNG, Don. He’s with us all four days,” said our middle-aged bottle-blonde flight attendant as she dug through her purse looking for a preflight cigarette. Given that I was a "new guy," you can guess what "FNG" stands for.

“I’ll go out and get things started,” I volunteered.

The plane, a 32-seat Dornier 328 turboprop, waited out on the dark ramp. The southern summer night air carried the scent of fresh cut hay, and birdsong mixed with the buzz of the cicadas. Sunrise would be here soon. Holding a flashlight in my mouth, I fumbled around in the dark flightdeck, flipping switches and checking gauges. Our auxiliary power unit came to life, cracking the country morning calm with its industrial turbine whine.

Forty minutes later, with the sky now light enough to give shape to the Great Smokey Mountains along the southern horizon, we lined up for takeoff. Don’s veiny right hand pushed the power levers up to the takeoff position. The Dornier bucked as its twin 2180 horsepower engines burst to life. The six-bladed propellers bit into the soft morning air. The acceleration pushed us back in our seats. With that much energy applied to an object, a transformation must take place. In a moment we were sailing through the dawn sky above the Tennessee Valley. I looked down at the landscape of sleepy horse paddocks nestled between dark ridges where plumes of vapor rose from mysterious folds. We were climbing fast with a light load but still below the highest peaks of the Smokies, which stood black against the morning sun. Who knew America’s Eastern mountains were so massive? Below us, the Tennessee River and its tributaries twisted like silver ribbons leading off into the misty distance.

Air traffic control broke the spell. “Bluestreak 4120 contact departure.”

With the landing gear retracted, and the after takeoff checklist complete, Don turned to me and said, “Yup, some mornings are prettier than others.”

The altimeter wound up through one thousand feet every 30 seconds and the sublime landscape faded into the familiar grey haze of long distance air travel.

US Airways Express Dornier 328 Deplanes in a Snow Squall, Akron-Canton Airport, Ohio. This is the first airliner I ever flew, the Dornier 328 high-speed turboprop. In the 1990s, the DO-328 featured state-of-the-art avionics and was the fastest, highest-flying turboprop in the sky. The Dornier’s technology and high performance were lost on our passengers. They deemed our tough little airliner a “puddle jumper” and complained about the cold walk from the airplane to the terminal.

Up at cruise altitude I had time to reflect. At 24 years old, I had already been flying airplanes for six years. Almost all of my flight time was logged in light-aircraft as a student pilot and then flight instructor flying at the University of North Dakota. For a kid who had been lured into an aviation career by the pilot writers, I felt cheated, a victim of false advertising. Where was the poetic beauty of flight, the inspiration, and adventure? Midwestern flying had been all flat horizons and a monotonous grid of farm fields. And, the University, with its strict procedures and challenging syllabus, sucked all the fun out of something that I had been told would be transcendently joyful. I never encountered the sublime beauty of flight as described in the aviation books and magazines.

But then, in those few seconds above Tennessee, it felt like I was granted admission to a larger, more interesting world. Maybe those writers weren't lying after all? I was finally let in on the big secret. Earth and its possibilities expanded. Immediately, I wanted to share this hidden world with more people than just Don and that toothpick hanging from the corner of his mouth, but how? Throughout those long years in North Dakota I had a dreamed of becoming the next pilot writer, following in the footsteps of Saint Exupery, Ernest K. Gann, and Richard Bach, but that wasn’t going anywhere. Writing frustrated me. I couldn’t string words together in a way that equaled the rush of experience. What I wanted was an exact recreation of that dawn flight above the Tennessee Valley. I probably stated the obvious: “I wish there was some way to take a picture of that!”

Last Light on the High Sierras. Pilots have a unique perspective on the world and I think it’s important that some of us make an effort to share our experiences with the non-flyers and those who keep their window shade pulled down to better watch movies on transcontinental flights. The earth, and even the lower 48 states, are filled with many uninhabited areas and rugged, inhospitable landscapes. If that’s not enough to capture your imagination, there are also infinite shows of color and light that play out as the sun perpetually tracks across the sky. I remember a definition of art that I picked up somewhere in my travels: “Art is any human creation that causes the viewer to think about of the world in a new way.” That’s why I’ve carried a camera on every trip I’ve flown since 2005.

That beautiful Tennessee sunrise happened in the summer of the year 2000. To that younger me, buried in student loan debt and earning less than $20,000 per year, photography was out of reach. Also, I wasn’t sure if it was possible to take quality photos through thick flightdeck windows. Back in the film era, buying a camera never crossed my mind, but then I was saved by two miracles. First, my little airline picked up the leases on five used Dorniers, which pushed me far enough up the seniority list to upgrade to captain. And then, at the same moment in history, digital photography became affordable to the masses.

By the spring of 2003, I was comfortable in my new role as an airline captain and, for the the first time in my life, my checking account was swelling. I bought my first camera, a 3.2 megapixel Canon Powershot S30. I felt extremely lucky. Even though I had no photographic experience and no artistic training, I was sure that the new digital imaging technology combined with my unique job would yield interesting results. That initial naive confidence drove me forward, and because I didn’t know any other way, I took on photography the same way I would’ve approached learning a new airplane. I started by learning all the technical details and limitations of the camera while also seeking the advice of the professionals. I read a lot. My Canon Powershot went everywhere with me including my flight bag. I was soon carrying that camera on every trip. Within a few months I was making competent photos. I soon had enough interesting images to start a crude online gallery.

The gallery quickly became a minor obsession where I’d spend hours changing the order of my photos, playing with the background colors, adding new photos, and deleting the weaker images. At that time, I was one of the few pilots posting photos on the internet and my gallery started to draw some attention. The positive feedback—the 2004 version of Facebook Likes—piled up, but I still felt a nagging dissatisfaction with my photos. To me, the gallery was a cartoonish outline of airline flying, not even close to the real thing. Foremost, I saw the limitations of my little camera. With that first camera I could only make photos from the flightdeck in strong, contrasty light. My Powershot couldn’t capture the soft light of dawn or the twinkle of city lights on a clear winter night above the Ohio Valley. But beyond the technical issues, I felt my photos lacked the magic dynamic force I’d seen in some other’s photography.

I started to ask myself, “How do photographers make their images come alive?”

[Continued in Part II]

David

Author's Note: All photos were taken in accordance with federal aviation regulations and company policies. Safety of flight is every pilot’s primary concern and the camera only comes out in low workload situations.

©2016 by David Raboin, all rights reserved

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.

Would you help?
Join our support campaign or buy something

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

[A different] David: "As an airline captain, I understand. Oh the things we see! I've got some beautiful photos, but nothing beats being there. And for every nice photo I have, there'd be a dozen more where I've looked and thought 'now is not the time.' But those ones are well etched in my memory."

Readers' Pictures: 'People Working'

All day tomorrow, Saturday, we're having a quick, impromptu picture-and-writing contest.

The theme is "People Working." Your perspective on what "people working" means can be your own—conventional or original, classic or quirky. The picture can be any interpretation of one or more people doing a job, or at work, or working on something.

If you think you have a picture that suits, and you want to share it and don't mind having it judged, please send it to us. Send one picture only, along with 25–125 words about the picture.

Our anonymous celebrity judge will pick a generous handful of entries which we'll put up for discussion on the site within a week or so. Finally, from those finalists, Mike will pick three overall winners to receive first, second, and third prizes, plus a few "honorable mentions."

Should be a fun way to see some work and discover different peoples' takes on the theme.

How to Play (Rules and Regs)

One picture per entrant. (Seriously, please send one picture only.) The picture must be your own—previously unpublished, taken by you, and for which you own all the rights. (All rights stay with you. You grant us permission to publish your picture on TOP but we will make no claim to your ownership rights at any time.)

If the picture you send is more than a year or two old, tell us the year it was taken. Also, if you're 18 or under, please mention it.

Format
The JPEG picture must be 800 pixels wide, sRGB color space (even if B&W), and not watermarked.

Send it to me in the body of an email [UPDATE 10 p.m. Saturday 8/10: Contest is now closed. No more entries will be accepted]. For your email, use the subject line:

peopleworking

Just the letters, no spaces, all lower case.

Make sure the subject line of the email is "peopleworking" (no quotes) or it will not get to the right mailbox.

Include your real name!

We will not open attachments. Anything outside the word count limits will be disqualified. Your writings could be edited for sense 'n' syntax. DO NOT send words separately from pictures—if you forget the words the first time, resend everything together. (TOP's Incompetent Assistant is not nearly organized enough to match up pictures and words sent hours apart, believe me.)

The deadline is 10 p.m. Saturday night, Central Time (Chicago USA time zone). (At ten o'clock sharp Saturday night, once the contest closes, I'll announce what the prizes will be. No hints, but I can say they'll be better than bubblegum and a new propeller for your beanie.)

This is sorta just for TOP regular readers (commenters or lurkers, doesn't matter), so if you would be so kind, please don't go blabbing about it all over the wild and woolley Internet. We'd prefer for it not to go viral (hence the short notice). Of course, anyone can come read The Online Photographer any time, and they're welcome, but we don't want to encourage an avalanche of outsiders who will swoop in just for the contest and never visit again.

So, to recap: your email should contain:

• The subject line peopleworking
• your JPEG, 800 pixels wide, sRGB
• Your 25–125 word written caption or paragraph, and
• The real name under which you are normally and usually known.

If you have any questions, please read this post again!

Have fun. Stay loose!

Mike
(Thanks to anonymous)

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.

TOP's links!

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

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Your Turn: Andrew Molitor

-

Recipe Culture

By Andrew Molitor

As humans, for almost anything we do, we seem to want a set of step-by-step instructions: a recipe. We use recipes in our jobs, to cure our addictions, to lose weight, and, with somewhat less success, to make art.

Photography has a recipe for everything. What f-stop should I use for landscapes? Where should I place the strobes to take a portrait? How can I do the Brenizer effect? Where in the frame should I place the subject? Answers to these and a thousand other questions can be found in the form of simple step-by-step directions in a thousand books, on a thousand web sites, and at a thousand workshops. Worse, we tend to communicate in recipes. When we're asked how we did a certain thing, our reply as often as not is in the form of simple step-by-step instructions. The industry conspires with us: for every photographic problem, there are a dozen gadgets which solve precisely that problem, each packaged with a little booklet of instructions.

Cooking has long worked well with recipes. So why should photography be any different? In the first place, photography is  (or can be) art, and the ability to produce an identical cake day after day is rarely what we want to do. In the second place, cookery has had centuries of effort expended on standardization specifically to make recipes work. A measured teaspoon is more or less the same size everywhere in the non-metric world, as is a cup. Baking powder has roughly the same concentration of sodium bicarbonate in it regardless of brand. To get a handle on how far cookery has come, try reading a cookbook from 200 years ago. It's quite different—and almost completely useless in modern terms.

Dictating taste
Why is this "recipe culture" a problem? Surely it's not necessary that everyone should earn a Ph.D. in optics and deduce everything else from there. The problem is not that we start with a recipe, the problem is that all too often we end with the recipe. When investigating what is to us new territory, of course we can usefully start with a couple of recipes, and try them out. All too often, though, we find a recipe that works and we stick with it.

The problem, really, is at least threefold:

• Every recipe contains tacit assumptions, without which it will not work
• Recipes tend to suppress learning
• Recipes tend to dictate results, which tend in turn to dictate taste

Hidden assumptions mean that, frequently, a recipe simply won't work for you. Photography has a lot of variables—enough that making all of them explicit is difficult. Such-and-such a technique only works with a full frame sensor, or has to be modified in such-and-such a way for a crop sensor. This technique assumes that the day is windless. That one only works with a sufficiently fast lens. And so on.

When we have a recipe that works, we have a very human tendency to stop there. We don't dig into it further or take it apart and see what makes it tick. One can argue that this is inherently bad by itself, but there is a practical point as well: when the unspoken assumptions of the recipe are no longer true, the recipe will fail. Usually at the worst possible time.

Finally, recipes dictate results. We come to expect portraits to be made with one of a handful of lighting idioms, and, if we do, then we assume others to be simply wrong. If we refuse to place our subject on a one-third "power point" we're never going to win the first prize in the local camera club's annual picture competition. Perhaps it's worth thinking about how many photographers have built careers around simply using the "wrong" lights, or the "wrong" post-processing effects.

A simple recipe for composition might produce pleasing pictures when seen one by one, but produces a certain sameness after you've seen it too many times.

Credits, clockwise from upper left: Barry Skeates, Thangaraj Kumaravel, Paolo Dala, and Jeffery Turner. All photos Creative Commons licensed on flickr.

What can we do about it? We can try to communicate less in recipes than in information. We can make a little effort to push ourselves whenever we catch ourselves blindly following a recipe. We can experiment more, and cleave to orthodoxy less. We can remember that if it looks good, it is good. If it looks good, it doesn't matter where the lights were or what the white balance is. If it looks good, it doesn't matter which of the thousand parameters are "right" and which are "wrong."

Andrew

"Your Turn" is a series of guest posts by TOP regulars (longtime readers and/or frequent commenters). Sometimes they are posts from readers' own blogs. Want to submit one? Here's how.

Andrew Molitor writes software for a living, occasionally writes about photography for himself, and fondly remembers being a mathematician 20 years ago. His blog is here. He lives and works in Norfolk, Virginia.

TOP doesn't update on Saturdays. Have a great weekend!

©2013 by Andrew Molitor, all rights reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

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

Stan B.: "One of my biggest revelations about 'the creative process' came during my brief assisting career when a photographer came up to the studio I was working at, all excited to show his latest. I became excited in turn—this pro was going to unveil his latest right in front of my very eyes! And there before me were a couple of the worst Grade B Helmut Newton imitations I've seen to this day.

"A grown man, a working professional, actually excited about consciously having made sub-standard imitations! A sad day—and a learning experience nonetheless."

Mike adds: During my short assisting career, it was my pro himself who proudly unveiled the artwork. I'll see your Helmut Newton and raise you...Vermeer.

Really. They were so tasteless I think I was actually speechless, not a small accomplishment in my case. But he had the recipe right!

Andre: "Your own personal style isn't always a good thing. My mother's signature photographic style with family snapshots was to shoot too high, resulting in pictures with lots of sky or blank wall/ceiling and little of the intended subject. Distinctive? Yes. Good? Well...I know a lot about what the skies and ceilings of my childhood looked like. If my mom had followed the recipes, I'd likely know a lot more of what my siblings and I looked like back then. :-) "

Jimmy Reina: "One night, in response to a member's submission at a local camera club meeting, a colleague suggested, 'You know, you are never supposed to shoot into the sun.' It was a photo of a sunset."

robert (partial comment): You say, 'Perhaps it's worth thinking about how many photographers have built careers around simply using the "wrong" lights, or the "wrong" post-processing effects.' I'm interested in your opinion about this sentence. I agree with the spirit of the article, I tend to avoid the conventional, but there is a difference between rules and recipes."

Bron: "Nice post Andrew. As an artist/craftsman (the ancient craft of gilding) who has tried to blur any distinction, I believe good art requires a foundation of good, technical craft. But that is all it is, a basis. I have recipes I start from, gram scales and measuring cups, but every mixture is often modified, to meet changing conditions or just to modify working qualities. My best art starts from an idea and grows, all by feel. As in cooking, if you stray, you'll have some failures, but you will also have some grand successes."

Tom Clifton: "Hmm, when cooking, I have never met a recipe that I didn't alter. A recipe is a starting place; from there, find out what works and what doesn't."

psu: "On recipes in cooking: 'The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by demonstration, a knack posing as knowledge. We say "What's the recipe?" when we mean "How exactly do you do it?" And though we want the answer to be "Like this!" the honest answer is "Be me!" "What's the recipe?" you ask a weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.' (Adam Gopnik, from The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.)"

Crabby Umbo: "Interestingly enough, the only people I know making a middle-class living are those who are shooting catalog and retail, usually pick-up days at the companies studios—and if you do that, you do the same stuff the same way all the time, unless the art director is 'trying something different.' When I was in management, I actually had to let a guy go who was OK, but who, every time he got an assignment, tried to 'reinvent the wheel,' mostly to the detriment of getting the assignment done. And he really didn't have the chops to make it wonderful anyway. He would have held on to his job if he had just thrown the lightbox on the thing the same way every time."

Mark Hobson: "I have avoided cooking by recipe simply by not owning any cookbooks. Instead, I have consumed lots of full course meals—a.k.a., picture monographs—all of which tasted great and have left me with a delightful aftertaste which continues to inspire me to make my own edible creations, all of which are, of course, cooked from scratch."