Category Archives: Photography

“Smile, You’re on Candid Camera!”

Fungible Fotographers Fired

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Fungible Fotographers Fired

“There’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said last month.


The image is an Associated Press photograph that won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news. It was taken by Nick Ut on June 8, 1972.

Ms. Mayer immediately called her comment a “misstatement” that was taken “out of context.” She even tweeted an apology. But that’s what she said and apparently that’s what the morons in Chicago believe.

The Chicago Sun-Times fired Pulitzer Prize winning photographer John H. White and 28 other top pros this month.

Oh.

Wait.

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

In a statement, the “news”paper said: “The Sun-Times business is changing rapidly and our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news. We have made great progress in meeting this demand and are focused on bolstering our reporting capabilities with video and other multimedia elements. The Chicago Sun-Times continues to evolve with our digitally savvy customers, and as a result, we have had to restructure the way we manage multimedia, including photography, across the network.”

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

The Sun-Times will let its reporters shoot more video and photos. In fact, they are training the reporters to use iPhones to do it.

According to a leaked staff memo the training will include “iPhone photography basics,” as well as capturing and editing video on iOS, and uploading it to the appropriate social sites.

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a professional race car driver. We could round up 43 soccer moms, teach them to turn left, load them into stock cars at Daytona or Indy cars for the 500, and have the reporters record it all with their iPhones.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a board certified ophthalmologist. We could create an iPhone app and simply refract our own eyes. And train our neighbors to suck out cataracts with teeny tiny vacuum cleaners.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a professional football referee. We could round up a platoon of ex-high school jocks-turned Realtors™, train them in football basics, and turn them loose in September. Oops. Never mind.

Back to the Sun-Times.

You think they’ll get this picture with an iPhone?


Crash at LeMans

Do you really think any of the reporters in this famous photograph even thought to take the picture that won the Pulitzer .6 seconds later? Do you think any of them even saw Jack Ruby? The Pulitzer Prize winner is here.


Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald

If the Sun-Times reckons theirs is good journalism, it will never publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph again.

Chicago has long been okay with mediocre. I’m not. I hope you aren’t either.

 

“23 Hours Remaining”

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Warning: Tech joke ahead.

“I’ve gotten FAT.”

OK, that’s not exactly true, since I’m on NTFS and haven’t used FAT for years but I do have a lot of files.

I don’t make a living at photography but I do shoot to sell and that means I have what we call in the trade a “lot of shutter actuations.”

Three of my cameras since the 1980s really stand out: a Canon A-1, a Kodak DC-4800, and the new Canon 6D. Two of those are digital and I’ve scanned at least some of the film I shot before the turn of the Century.

That means my hard disk has gotten fat.

Every new photo from the new camera makes a 21MB file.

Some of those older photos are snapshots. Nice memories. Good for the refrigerator door. Not something I’ll put in a frame in the gallery. The rest are artistic or commercial.

I have probably 4,700 snapshots (there are about 10GB in 9,300 files) shot through 2000. The 3,800 images for printing or show from 2001-11 take another 16.7GB on the drive. I’ve never used 96% of those but I mean to.

2,127 shots in the 12 weeks since I bought the new camera, and another 300 keepers (576 files) out of those for 8.3GB. I’m ‘shopping and printing a far higher percentage of the originals than I did with any of the other cameras.

Assuming I might realistically keep 1,000 photos/year and print 200 of them, I’ll need 30 or 35 GB of new file storage each year just for gallery photos. That’s not as bad as I first thought but it’s still a lot to fit on my local drive so I went looking for online storage.

Google charges $0.085/GB/month for the first 0-1 TB which doesn’t sound like much until you multiply it by 12,000. Dropbox has an annual fee of $500 (OK, $499) for ½ TB.

Hmmm. Justcloud.com (something I’d never heard of), Backblaze (ditto) and a couple of others are under $50/year for unlimited storage with file versioning and more stars in reliability than Sugarsync or Carbonite.

Meanwhile, I ordered a 2 TB external drive because I need room for my next shoot. I did that because I still haven’t figured out how to install a non-RAID second drive in the second drive bay on my laptop. I’d RTM if Lenovo would give me one. I spent a while googling for one and nada.

The FedEx guy snuck the new drive onto the porch the very next day.

It’s amazing how 2 TB appears to fit in the same size box that used to hold 2 MB. The Quick Start guide has three pictures: one of de stuff in de box. One showing how to plug the wall wart into the wall and the drive. One showing the USB cable going into the drive and the computer.

I started copying files. Gonna take a long time.


Copying Files - 23 Hours Remaining

Copying 20,230 items in 792 folders (38.3 GB)
from Local Disk (G:\Original_Images) to External Disk (J:\Original_Images)
About 23 Hours Remaining

It turns out 22,163 (56GB) in image files of various descriptions transferred overnight the first night. 2,125 are in the dodged-and-burned-and-ready-to-sell category and the rest are originals.

This is becoming a gallery problem as well. About 180 of my fine art photos have moved over to the gallery.northpuffin.com site so far. I could have ten times that many online by the end of the year and that’s simply too too many for visitors (and buyers) to process.

The new camera can shoot production quality, HD video. I dunno what I’ll do if I start shooting video but I think my new hard drive will disown me.

 

Cropping Issues

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If you came here expecting a discussion of the corn used to make fine Kentucky whisky, move along. This is about photography.

A recent Miami Herald article about a West Palm Beach museum includes a shot of photographer annie leibovitzAnnie Leibovitz aiming a point-and-shoot camera at the reader. Kind of reminds us that a great photographer can take a magnificent picture with pretty much any box with a hole in one end.

But she still has to print it. That’s where I run into difficulty.

If Ms. Leibovitz printed her photos to fit in a standard frame with a pre-cut mat, (most) arts and crafts stores carry frames and mats with openings in only these sizes:

Frame Size Mat Opening Image Size Aspect Ratio
5″ x 7″ 3.5″ x 5.5″ 4″ x 6″ 1.5
8″ x 10″ 4.5″ x 6.5″ 5″ x 7″ 1.4
11″ x 14″ 7.5″ x 9.5″ 8″ x 10″ 1.25 (about 5:4)
16″ x 20″ 10.5″ x 13.5″ 11″ x 14″ 1.27
20″ x 24″ 15.5″ x 19.5″ 16″ x 20″ 1.25
24″ x 36″ 19.5″ x 29.5″ 20″ x 30″ 1.5 (exactly 3:2)
30″ x 40″ 21.5″ x 31.5″ 22″ x 32″ 1.45

(Frame and mat openings vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.)

Most digital point & shoot cameras had an aspect ratio of 1.33 (4:3), the same as analog television or early movies. However, a 35 mm picture’s aspect ratio is 1.5 (3:2). This means that the long side is 1.5 times as long as the short side. Several digital cameras take photos in either ratio, and nearly all digital SLRs take pictures in a 3:2 ratio, as most can use lenses designed for 35 mm film.

The Advanced Photo System (APS) film, a now-discontinued film format for still photography, has about a 7:4 aspect ratio, coincidentally almost perfect for HDTV except for how lousy an enlargement APS film yields. In 2005 Panasonic launched the first consumer digital camera with the very similar aspect ratio of 16:9; that matches HDTV and is the same as Ms. Leibovitz’ Canon G-15. 16:9 is the same as 1.77 which you might notice matches none of the standards in the table above.

Confused yet? Me, too.

I’ve taken thousands of photos with either a Kodak or Minolta digital. The Kodak has a 1/1.76″ (7.3 x 5.5 mm) CCD sensor, the Minolta a slightly larger 2/3″ (8.8 x 6.6 mm) sensor. Both are on the sweet spot 1.33 aspect ratio which means I had to throw away part of the picture for all their 8 x 10″ and 11 x 14″ prints in the gallery.

That’s one reason I changed to a full format digital for most shoots.

All these different aspect ratios is why everyone has cropping issues when printing photos. An aspect ratio of 4:3 translates to a print size of 4.5″ x 6.0″. This loses half an inch when printing on the “standard” of 4″ x 6″ with its aspect ratio of 3:2. Similar cropping occurs when printing on other sizes, i.e., 5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, or 11″ x 14″. In fact, the only two “standard” print sizes that capture all of the frame of a full frame digital or its 35mm uncle are 4″ x 6″ and 24″ x 30″.

There’s not much market for 4″ x 6″ or 24″ x 30″.

On the other hand, there’s a lot more market for 16″ x 20″ or 24 x 30″ than for a post card size print and I couldn’t reliably enlarge my early work to those sizes.

I want to compose in the viewfinder so I want to print what I saw. I’m homing in on 10″ x 15″ and 14″ x 21″ as the “usual” enlargements in my own gallery. The first is perfectly sized for the standard 16″ x 20″ mat; the latter for a 20″ x 28″ which is fairly large. Now all I need is a processor who can print them. And a mat cutter ditto.

Of course, every photographer has great photos in some odd-ball format, so I’ll print that palm tree with the sap bucket at 10:1 and frame it vertically. I’m working on an interesting 3:1 panorama that I will probably print on canvas and display as a loooooooooooooooog horizontal triptych.

I hope you’ll buy them anyway.


sugar beach

Changes

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I bought a new camera body before Christmas. It has me thinking about workflow.

beach girl

Sometimes I get distracted.I’ve been adding images to my gallery site and even added a couple of new categories: Harbors and Bridges and Aminals which my spell check doesn’t like much.

field strippedAnyway, I took a few files into the digital darkroom which is where the real magic starts. See, I never owned a chemical-based darkroom so having the classic manipulations — image brightness, dodging, burning, contrast control, and color balancing — right here at my fingertips is a miracle. I can accomplish any of those with far greater precision on this screen and see the results as I work, a benefit unavailable in the darkroom and particularly when using an offsite processor.

Digital techniques have moved photographers toward images that are finally as sharp as conventional darkroom prints. The new CMOS sensor in this camera still doesn’t have more color depth or resolution than an original positive or negative film strip, but it’s pretty darned good. 8″x10″ prints made from 35mm negative scans at 2400 dpi now match the best (conventional darkroom) enlargements; prints from properly sharpened 4000 dpi scans are already sharper. And I can print a 16″x20″ enlargement that is better than one from my earlier 35mm Canon A-1 film body. I’m already thinking about 20×24″ prints.

Back to the darkroom. This is the original shot of the trees on Krome Avenue that Andrew stripped bare more than 20 years. Click the link to see how taking it to the darkroom makes it pop.

So I also discovered a couple of older images in searching around on the images drive and put them into the gallery as well.

I seem to have 19,157 files (some are thumbnails and other dupes) in 750 folders on that one drive. That doesn’t count the “new” pictures I took in the last couple-three weeks. I need a better filing system.

And my new CMOS sensor makes really big files. BIG.

Somehow I managed to shoot 10 gigabytes of pictures in one day in Key Weird. About 400 exposures. Almost 12 rolls by the original count. Perhaps I should be less trigger happy with the power winder, since I threw away 8 gigs of them; that was the first cut. I still have about 25% of them.

I need a filing system.

But wait! There’s more.

My favorite “darkroom” application is PhotoPaint, a Corel product that has better controls and more interesting objects than the more widely used Adobe product with the similar name. Corel’s PhotoPaint doesn’t know how to handle the Canon RAW image files, though, so I’m having to learn yet another new program. I wanted to work in PaintShop Pro a bit (it has a file manager, too) and to read the camera manual some more but I went to the beach instead.

bahia hondawhistlerSculpture Key West was at two of the Civil War forts, Zachary Taylor and at the Garden Club’s Martello Tower but I didn’t get to West Martello. I liked Thea Lanzisero’s Starfish but the mysterious collection of “melting” manhole covers left me kind of cold. I didn’t see the art in Richard Brachman’s pile of firewood nor in Ursula Clark’s pile of grass clippings. On the other hand, Jiwan Noah Singh’s geometric pile of lattice and Tebilio Diaz’ Flotilla got my attention (you’ll see some of those in the gallery eventually) and I took a lot of shots of Sanchez’ (rusty) found objects in bloom. I also took a lot of pictures of boats and a lot of pictures of the (not all that good) sunset.

sculpture kwSo far I’ve winnowed out only about 50 of the 400 or so shots. Worse, now I want to go back for the next full moon to reshoot and to use the longer lens.

And I still need to change to a better filing system.


key west sunset

Eye Spy

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I take the odd photograph or two and have an ongoing juggling act with digital memory cards. We don’t have to keep film in the fridge or rush it to the lab any more but we do have to handle the huge RAW image files our increasingly large capacity cameras generate.

“I am going to look at the Eye-Fi memory card,” Liz Arden said.

Whoa. This is really cool. And my first thought was, Can it be programmed to go to Dropbox or just to my home network?

Warning: This is going to be a techie column.

Eye-Fi gets media where you want it:

During the quick set-up, you customize where you want your memories sent. The Eye-Fi card will only send them to the computer and to the sharing site you choose. Pick from one of over 25 popular sites including Picasa, FB, and more, but not Dropbox.

“Picasa works for me,” Ms. Arden said. Me, too.

Before I start to sound like a press release, the downside is that Eye-Fi cards are Secure Digital (SD) based only. I settled on Compact Flash long ago. The latest (camera) body I lust for as well as my current cameras are not compatible with any Eye-Fi cards because Eye-Fi doesn’t work with that storage media.

The Mac Geek Gab guys who introduced them to Ms. Arden “didn’t quite grouse about CF cards, but didn’t like that some cameras use them when SD is so prevalent that the makers of these devices don’t feel a need to do the same for CF.”

And that was a mistake on the camera makers’ part.

Compact FlashI settled on CF because it was the fastest, highest capacity, least expensive media and the cameras I like best use it. And it came standard with the first digital camera I bought, a Kodak DC4800.

The data backs me up. The Compact Flash can support capacities up to 137GB although mass market cards rarely go above 64GB. UDMA 133 has a data transfer rate of 133 Mbyte/s. And current cards are rated for 1,000,000 writes per block before hard failure which will long outlive my camera shutter. Looks like Secure Digital cards max out at a capacity of 32GB and have write rates of 200 Mbit/s (bits, not bytes.)

Even the Wikipedia article admits that “SD cards … may also not present the best choice for applications where higher storage capacities or speeds are a requirement as provided by other flash card standards such as Compact Flash.”

The Canon 5D Mark II was the first DSLR to shoot full HD video. With a 21.1 million pixel sensor, each shutter click writes a 25.8 MB file on the Compact Flash card. The standard CF card originally packaged with the camera will hold 78 JPEG files or 13 RAW files. I don’t even want to think about an HD video on the same “little” 512 MB card I use in the Kodak today. A modern digital photographer might carry three times more memory cards today than film canisters of 20 years ago.

I’m always looking for a better way to move the files from the camera to the laptop.

CFMulti advertises that it “opens new possibilities for Compact Flash (CFII) equipped devices.” This gadget puts an Eye-Fi™ WiFi SD Cards into a CF-shaped which plugs into the Type II slot. “Since most current high end DSLR and late model midrange digital cameras feature CompactFlash slots, CFMulti’s ability to provide them with Eye-Fi™ wireless protects camera investments.”

Better but it still uses the slower, lower capacity SD cards.

We’re getting closer to the grail.

That would be a medium format digital camera that writes a 4MB RAW file over 4G or WiFi in a tenth of a second. Maybe next year.

Mr. Grove promised, you know.