I certainly don’t have the world’s best photobook collection, in many ways it is not even a collection. There have been no rules applied in its creation. Some are gifts, some were too cheap not have a look. Heteroglot I think is the word. Some are missing, loaned, purloined, misplaced in moves-Mark, you still have my Paul Strand and my Friedlander One Eyed Cat!

I don’t buy as many photobooks now as I used to, even though the availability and selection has never been better. A Photographer’s Place may be gone, but we have our friends now at Dashwood here in New York. It’s a treat going in there, I feel guilty because I rarely buy anything there. Aren’t we all a little cash-strapped? But photobooks are as much for the lookey-loo as they are to to buy and own. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent as a young photographer scanning the spines of photobooks in a variety of bookstores over the years. I was not alone, this was part of “the education” of becoming a photographer. There was a distance and an intimacy that is the paradox of any obsession. Libraries, books and old things can do that. They create a silence, a place to dwell in.

Probably some good work but I will never get to browse any of them. How can I know if I like it? I don’t make friends easily…

Despite it’s inefficiencies, the old school publishing model put books in the pews of this old church and you could go in to worship every other sunday. Or like movie marquees, the titles on the dust-jackets offered a world that was just out of reach. Photobooks in days past had the element of the exotic and foreign about them, a club that you could never join, but aspired to. We don’t like that anymore, it gets labeled “elitist” or “un-democratic” or not “accessible.” And our aspiration has been exploited by innumerable contests where the only path to success is to win!

The photobook of yore was where I learned what is was to be a photographer. As unrealistic as that sounds. Almost by default, there was really no other place. You read Forwards and dust-jackets and biographies, all 606 pages of Shadow and Substance, the life of W. Eugene Smith by Jim Hughes, or the Weston Daybooks, a two-volume set-and you put yourself in their tripod sticks. There was no one telling you how, in art schools you surveyed the same books and imitated your professors, commercial photographers used assistants, so you assisted. Workshops offered a chance at shouldering up next to your idols, for a short while, but the photobook could be your constant companion. And through it you got to know a photographer’s work over time and with respect to what was relevant in your life at that moment. Most of the photobooks I “know” I don’t even own, but have tasted over the years, either in libraries or in stores. Let me share some deep dark secrets; I don’t even own a copy of The Americans! I’m such a fraud! And oh how I wish I had stolen that Life & Work Werner Bischof from the Kingston Public library in 1992! Now its out of print…

Joke: Brett, when you go down to the market don’t forget to get peppers…

December 21. I can’t go on this way.  I must acquire a formula for my portraits. I compromise anyway-and give far too much of myself to an unappreciative audience.

Yesterday, I quit-put down my prints on which I had spotted all morning. Poor technique? Yes, but not my fault-finger prints and scratches and bad retouching done by others-retouching necessary to make an American of questionable age look like a vivacious senorita. I quit, I say, and paced the floor the afternoon-the worst reaction to professional portraiture I ever had. It made no difference to me that rent was due and the work had to go on….

Yet here I am this morning at my desk, working harder than ever, attacking this negative almost with a ferocity, as though it were one of the tasks of Hercules. The outward and superficial reason that if it is not done by tomorrow I cannot go to El Toreo Sunday!-and five foot letters announce Silveti y Nacional!

(What was I complaining about portraiture the other day? Same as it ever was!)

Tell me what a twenty-five year old living with his parents in Ajax can learn from Edward Weston in Mexico in 1924 about being a photographer-? Maybe if I figure out SEO finally I can go to the Bullfights on Sunday? But this was part of “the education,” learning what came before. Photobooks were the cathedral of the ancients, but they didn’t seem ancient even when they were. When your only point of reference is the book on a shelf Weston is just as alive as the person next to you. Ansel Adams wrote The Camera, The Negative, The Print in the early 80’s, detailing principles that had been in use for decades. It was neither new nor old, it was just “Photography” and part of the curriculum.

One of my teachers said that a student of his had learned black and white printing mainly from looking at photobooks-he thought that this is what a good print should look like, and since he had no access to actual prints, it was all he had to go on. The point being, photobooks were responsible for many aspects of the craft and it’s transmission over the years. For many it was the sole point of connection to the medium. We now have the luxury of unlimited search the world over, seeing what is going on in Uzbekistan is now possible, in the days of the photobook, you were limited to what was published. Here we have another facet; for better or worse, the photobook was a gatekeeping mechanism. Making it to a store shelf confers a status on the work, it also reinforces status. Now from the point of view of me seeing what is going on in Uzbekistan I much prefer the internet. But from the point of view of separating wheat from chaff there is nothing wrong with a few barriers to entry.

Sadly, I never really internalized these rules.

We take the online community for granted already, but pre-internet, you suffered your successes and failures alone. Or you shared letters with friends and classmates. One photobook that was very important to me early on was Ted Orland’s “Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity”, mostly cobbled together from a correspondence between the author and another young photog-Sally Mann. It is sort of their modern day emails to each other, published. But because they are letters, we get a care and depth of expression that is timeless. In the book you get a picture of what “emerging” photographer meant circa 1973-1984, the drudge-work, the uncertainty, but mostly the idealism. It is not unlike blogs today, at least the blogs that I like to read. Photobooks were web “point-oh” you could say.

Ted’s Photographic Truths: Photographers fade faster than photographs…

The last point I want to make about photobooks is that recently some have become fetishized collectibles. I suppose in a world where images are in infinite supply, we must ration every possible point of purchase in order inflate their value. I don’t feel this is a healthy situation. It is a sad fact that inefficiencies of the old publishing model meant that photographers made no money creating books, they never sold well, and the bulk of them were then remaindered and then pulped. But you can go down to Strand and revel in the exhaust of this process, and pick up copies relatively cheap. In the secondary market they have long lives, like those people I suspect you see at company parties year after year but never find out their names. It is comforting to know that they are still there. Now a lot of good work is going into print on demand- a place where I can’t browse, move in alongside, live in, a virtual marketplace of limited runs that sometimes are created to sell out, be buzz-worthly, and appreciate in value. At least that is what the email blasts are urging me to do, only twenty copies left!

Obviously I have mixed feelings about this. I love that anyone can self publish a great book, except for the fact that it will have little impact beyond an even smaller number of people that the old publishing model serviced. But I’m ready to see the end of the day dominated by a few large imprints publishing yet another book no one needs to see. Taschen you know who you are. Breasts. Really? And I am a fan of the breast, clearly. But I am not a fan of the last few years of pseudo-porno photobooks depicting behind the scenes of any number of moral low-tide pools. Publishers think or know these books sell well enough to justify their production. And photo books where magazine fashion photography is paraded as art. Ya know, without the typography these pictures are BO-RING.

But I think the photobook does not serve the same purpose now. It is not the wooden church of the photographic, the point of first contact. It is becoming a quick status symbol. A collectible to flaunt your discerning taste. A tick box on the list of photographic things you try when you are starting out, like toy cameras and tilt-shift. None of them will be around long enough to show the next generation of photographers what it was like back in your day.

TO: ALL FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHERS

This is a reminder of The Times’s policies on digital manipulation or other alteration of photos.

As you know, under the contract you signed for The Times, you warrant that any photo submitted for publication “will be original and unaltered (unless it is a photo illustration, pre-approved by your editor and fully disclosed in caption information materials).”

The Times takes this obligation very seriously; the integrity of photographs and other material we publish goes to the heart of our credibility as a news organization. The prohibition on unauthorized alteration of photos applies to all sections of the paper, the Magazine and the Web site.

This passage from the newsroom’s “Guidelines on Our Integrity” explains our rules in more detail:

Photography and Images. Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions). Adjustments of color or gray scale should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction, analogous to the “burning” and “dodging” that formerly took place in darkroom processing of images. Pictures of news situations must not be posed.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

If you have any questions about what is permissible under the rules, please consult the assigning editor.

Sincerely,

William E. Schmidt
Deputy Managing Editor
The New York Times Newspaper
Division of The New York Times Company

The gloves will have to wait. But they have come off. Obviously some battening down of hatches is going on after the Edgar Martins débâcle. It is to be expected. It is also the first time I have ever gotten any official direction in writing with respect to “a policy” on alteration…well corporate communication is always an oxymoron. I did know what was permissible out of common sense. You wonder who doesn’t? As for that bit about consulting your editor if you have a question, well, in my experience Photoshop is most useful to them as a box to make the monitor higher. Raw converters, high radius sharpening, LAB colour, moire, curves vs. levels, shadow-highlight, none of this is going to get you more than a wha? Honestly, it is not their job to understand digital capture technology or be digital referees. Their job is to understand pictures and make intelligent assignments. They do this very well.

Part of the reason I was approached by the Times to do work for them was that I was outside of the newspaper world. I had not cut my teeth on newspapers, I did not go to J-school, I had never shot a grin and grab nor a high school soccer game. I don’t have that memory bank of solutions to photo problems that go through a 24mm lens close to the subject if you know what I mean. Which is not to disparage what journalists have to do. There are necessary limits implied by the mandate, I will get back to that.

My development in photography had come totally through editorial magazine work, and the editors that were calling were also veterans of that world. Their learning curve was steep also. While some may have had experience on newsmagazines or financial reporting, none had significant newspaper backgrounds. But the sections I was being assigned to were not “news” sections, it was feature fare like Dining, Arts, Style. I was not being asked to “report” on anything. I still got chastised early and often however for my scant captions. I figured the less I said the better. I did not want the responsibility of reporting, since I am not trained. My mandate is to take the intelligent handoff from an editor and make good pictures in my style. That’s what they wanted me for. Which is not reporting, probably not journalism, and may or may not be reality either. By the standards above, almost everything I was assigned was a photo-illustration, in that I directed people, moved furniture and generally futzed around until I got the photograph that I wanted, whether it was a portrait, a still life or interior. This is standard editorial practice.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

“Illustrations of ideas or situations” might encompass any situation where I was present and made choices about photographing a person or group. But portraits and still life gets a pass evidently, unless the “people or thing” is “artificially arranged”, which takes me back in a circle to almost all portraits and all still life. I am no clearer after this clarification. (secret answer: there may be no answer to this for newspapers, read on…)

Tangential to that, (going somewhere, I promise) my cable provider has seen fit to scramble the location of the channels, I now have C-Span and NY-1 in the low digits. I am enjoying the Wendy Williams show for the first time. How You Doing? Fine, thank you, and getting up early on Sunday mornings for my long runs means that I get back around 10am, just in time for Richard D. Heffner’s excellent program “An Open Mind” broadcast from SUNY somewhere upstate, NY. For the last two weeks he has been interviewing Alex S. Jones, an authority on media issues, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times staffer through much of the eighties. He has a new book out called “Losing the News” “The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy.” Here is an excerpt from chapter one, “The Iron Core”:

Imagine a sphere of pitted iron, grey and imperfect like a large cannonball. Think of this dense, heavy ball as the total mass of each day’s serious reported news, the iron core of information that is at the center of a functioning democracy. This iron core is big and unwieldy, reflecting each day’s combined output of all the professional journalism done by news organizations — newspapers, radio and television news, news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters, and a few magazines. Some of its content is now created by new media, nonprofits, and even, occasionally, the supermarket tabloids, but the overwhelming majority still comes from the traditional news media.

This iron core does not include Paris Hilton’s latest escapade or an account of the Yankees game or the U.S. Open. It has no comics or crossword puzzle. No ads. It has no stories of puppies or weekend getaways or recipes for cooking great chili. Nor does it include advice on buying real estate, investing in an IRA, movie reviews, or diet advice. There is nothing wrong with any of these things. Indeed, pleasant and diverting stories are far more appealing to most people than the contents of the core, which some find grim, boring, or riddled with bias.

It has no editorials and does not include the opinions of columnists or op-ed writers or political bloggers. These things are derived from the core. They are made possible because there is a core. Their point of departure is almost always information gleaned from the reporting that gives the core its weight, and they serve to spread awareness of the information that is in the core, to analyze it and interpret it and challenge it. Opinion writers pick and choose among what the core provides to find facts that will further an argument or advance a policy agenda. But they are outside the core, because they almost always offer commentary and personal observation, not original reporting.

Inside the core is news from abroad, from coverage of the war in Iraq to articles describing the effort to save national parks in Mozambique. There is news of politics, from the White House to the mayor’s office. There is an account of a public hearing on a proposal to build new ball fields and an explanation of a regional zoning concept that might affect property values. There is policy news about Medicare reform and science news about global warming. There is news of business, both innovation and scandal, and even sporting news of such things as the abuse of steroids. An account of the battle within the local school board about dress codes is there, along with the debate in the state legislature over whether intelligent design should be taught as science. The iron sphere is given extra weight by investigative reports ranging from revelations that prisoners at the county jail are being used to paint the sheriff’s house to the disclosure that the government is tapping phones without warrants as part of the war on terror.

Alex feels we are eroding this Core, and are at risk of losing it altogether. The core cannot be maintained in any type of “free” way. Basic reporting is like digging ditches, rarely any glamour involved, you are not going to get an intern to go to Afghanistan for free to do this. It requires resources and commitment over the long haul. Notice also the distinction he makes between original reporting and opinion and analysis. Without the core, you cannot have the rest.

…So I get this email this morning reminding us all about the standards and practices involved and it makes me think-how do you square this circle? In other words, in trying to create a product more interesting to more people newspapers have enlarged the scope of their coverage well beyond the confines of the iron core that Alex talks about. Tthey have done this for a long time, except with staff photographers. Lately they have seen fit to hire outside the choir you could say. Which gets you Edgar Martins, an art star who has no connection to print and obviously no concern. Or it gets you Nadav Kander, (who I love) and a set of completely manipulated portraits that passes muster because as I read above, portraits and still life can be called photographs, except when they are photo illustrations. So is it not a photo illustration to completely change and insert a background? The Magazine, the website and the Newspaper all have to adhere to the same standard according to the letter above. If I am confused, imagine the lay reader.

Newspapers seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it too. The mandate to create compelling (which you can also read as trendy, fashionable, provocative) content may not always coincide with the mandate to report facts. When you start to mix up this iron core with sections from Agronomy to Zymurgy, (just leave my astrology thank you!) when you start to look outside the J-schools and newspaper ranks for editors and creatives, and when the pressure of the bottom line starts to pinch, then you get mission “creep”.  Profit and ambition can compromise integrity, and the reader loses faith in the core itself. News becomes confused with info-tainment.  Reporting start to look less like truth and more like the opinion of the newspaper owner.

We now are awash in opinion, mine included. I have no solution here but wanted to draw attention to Jones’ writing and his “core” idea. I believe that accountability reporting as he calls it is essential to our democracy. You are not watching your city council, but you know someone is. Dutifully, so that one day there is a paper trail, and a story can emerge of corruption or improvement. Technologists like to posit that the camera phone, the citizen journalist and the very transparency of information on the internet can provide what newspapers currently provide. But you cannot expect bloggers to be able to withstand the lawsuits that even a simple investigative piece could generate. Certainly that lone blogger could “tweet” for help but this is a naive fantasy. I heard Eric Schmidt of Google gush that the simplicity of fact checking on the internet means that politicians will have a harder time lying in public. Guess he has not tuned into C-Span lately. Maybe he needs to rescan his converter box to make sure he is getting all the channels…

A whole post and I only mentioned running once.

Something to keep track of those miles? Perhaps you are considering purchasing a GPS training device like the Garmin 405? The 405 has been out for quite a long time, I only got mine after Mac support was provided. More on that later. I got the kit which included the heart rate monitor. A wireless usb dongle is responsible for getting the data off the watch and into your mainframe computing unit.

The first question might reasonably be, do I need this? If you are coming to this blog for the first time the history is that I began running in June of 2008 it what can only be described as a full on-midlife crisis. But I digress:) The first couple of months were primarily concerned with survival. It was hot, and there was a lot of phlegm. But that will pass young Skywalker, er, runner. Eventually I got a Nike sport kit for my ipod, well, I got a nike sport kit and I got an ipod. Again, I repeat, do I need this?

I think starting out the ipod provided a welcome distraction from my gasps for breath, my flapping footfalls and jangling keys. Eventually all that went away. I apologize to all the other runners. The Nike sport kit was useful for a long while, it does a reasonably accurate job of recording your pace and time and distance. But the caveat “your mileage may vary” has never been truer. If you contemplate doing tempo workouts or intervals, the Nike sport kit will get very, very confused. It also gets confused if you run faster than about 8 minutes per mile or have very short strides. Calibration is difficult. Nike has you run a specified distance to teach the unit I presume the number of strides you make to cover that distance. Getting the unit to be accurate to less than 10% is difficult, and if you intend on covering more than 10 miles, guess what? Exactly. Not.

So enter the Garmin 405. What was innovative about the 405 over previous models was that it looked more like a real watch, the size was not too big, the controls were minimized by using touch technology, and the wireless data transfer function was added. Depending on your point of view, all the additions were great or absolutely disastrous.

Speaking from my own experience these are the pluses and minuses:

The GPS function is very accurate over the terrain I have covered, meaning Brooklyn, Manhattan, the suburbs. I have not used the watch in dense forest or mountainous areas. But it does work under the tree cover I have experienced on light trails. If you tend to begin runs from the same point, the GPS will acquire a signal quickly and hold it. Later you can even see where you crossed from one side of the street to the other, the accuracy is to within a few meters.

There are a bewildering array of functions you can use, you can set GPS waypoints or use it to navigate. I have not explored any of this. What I use it for is monitoring pace, average pace, heart rate, distance and time. You can customize the data fields that are displayed, or have the watch auto scroll through the fields perpetually. I tend to like to see heart rate and either pace or average pace. When you check pace instantaneously you may be surprised, it can vary tremendously, about a minute either side of what you are actually doing. In practice you need to check a few times to make a mental average. Or you can use average pace, but this will be the total average, so if you are doing a tempo run for example, it will include the warm up lap which will distort the total. But overall you can get an accurate gauge of your pace at a point in time, and you quickly teach yourself through “biofeedback” what your pace and heart rate are based on your own internal GPS watch, which can be very accurate. Having used the watch now for 8 months I can tell within +/- 5 bpm my heart rate, and +/- 20 sec/mile my pace. But this is for paces that I know, as you get faster you will need to relearn the differences. I can tell a 8 minute mile from a seven minute mile, but beyond that, since I don’t regularly run tempos under 7, I have no idea. Later in my marathon training I have some speedwork at 6:51/mile assuming I can get there. I think I will be focused primarily on not puking.

So this is what it can do (and more) but what about usability? Touch technology is coming to us whether we want it or not. And for the most part, the iPhone and other touch enabled devices work very well. Where they have difficulty is in adverse conditions. Moisture interferes with most touch devices and the Garmin 405 is no exception. You would think that since running is often associated with, oh well, I don’t know, SWEATING, that this might have been a dealbreaker for some. It can be.

The instructions say that the watch is not to be immersed, although you can and probably should rinse the watch off after use. But overall the water resistance of even the two pushbuttons is somewhat sketchy. Sometimes they just don’t respond to repeated pushes, stabs, jabs, or profanity. And then a minute later all is fine. Same with the bezel. The “innovation” of the 405 was the inclusion of the touch bezel, that allows you to select functions by touch and scrolling, or circling around the bezel. On “dry land” this works fine. Throw in a little sweat or rain and it is easier to leave well enough alone and just let the watch count what it is counting. Attempting to access functions while the watch is wet is difficult. Not impossible. It makes the watch less reliable and you wonder why four sealed buttons would not have worked as well. I have learned to deal with it and I think the trade off is size. The newer Garmin 310XT is waterproof, aimed at triathletes, and is much larger overall. Or that could be the improved GPS part too.

With regard to the wireless data transfer, it makes sense to remove the usb port to improve water resistance, yet the watch is not really happy in water. So now you are adding another layer of difficulty in getting the data off the watch. And to be clear, there are two exposed charging pins, why you could not do data transfer and charging at the same time like the older larger 305 is one example of how improvements are not always improvements.

I can’t speak to the experience on a PC, but the Mac support was long in coming, and now that it is here it is fair to say you might be less than impressed. I am using the software on an older PowerPC G5, which Garmin does not officially support but acknowledge that it does work. I can report, it does work. Period. (NOTE: there is a firmware upgrade for the 405 available but good luck getting it onto the watch! I l almost bricked my watch attempting it. Be very sure you need to bother before going down this road.)

…the trials of miles, gain, loss, max, avg, calories. where does it all end?

(picky readers will notice it says 19.57miles not 20 miles. I stopped the watch outside the park to buy a water and a banana for after, but did not restart the watch on the way home. Therefore: Never stop the watch! It does have a setting where it pauses when it detects you are not moving. Like that moment you collapse on the hill…)

The wireless ANT dongle (Another Needless Thing?) does not like going to sleep and waking up. You find yourself quitting the Garmin Ant Agent program, replugging the dongle, and relaunching the program. It may take a couple tries to sync. Eventually it gets done. Transfer to the Garmin website, well, YMMV again. Garmin has been rolling out a lot of software updates lately on their server side, I have found it easier to manually upload the data. Once uploaded you get a map of your workout, splits, averages, max values etc. You can generate reports of all your runs, although I cannot get average pace over many runs for some strange reason. Sometimes the simplest things…

That might be a suitable conclusion for this user review, “sometimes the simplest things.” I started out asking “do I need this?” It turns out that that is a very interesting question with regards to running overall. I cannot say there is an answer to that. Recently I started leaving the iPod at home, and found the experience very enjoyable. But sometimes, like last weekend and last night, it was fun to blast away with the tunes. I’m not much of a data junkie, however, keeping some kind of training log is essential I think, much like a daily journal, you can find insight in the record keeping. And the data is useful, you can see improvements, you can find encouragement, you can see how weather and time of day affect your performance. Or you can keep track of food and clothing, which is just as important. Gotta go back to ye olde paper and pen for that!

You don’t need any of this to run. A simple Timex will do, plus some indication of distance which is now available on websites like WalkJogRun.net or MapMyRun.com. Or just run dammit. I have no problem with that. If you are training for a distance event, I feel these devices do give you useful data that you can use during your runs to train better and more effectively. Just don’t expect to get a runners high off of them. That was what the running itself was for, remember?

Pros: size, accuracy, durability, website improvements hold out hope for better in the future from Garmin

Cons: touch bezel is a mixed bag, Mac support is thin, wireless is unnecessary

Overall: maybe you can get it used? And used to it…Not as bad as all the above.

Around mile 6.

Everyone is away, nothing is doing, we are into August. The gallery openings and free booze are a couple months away, the blogosphere is awaiting the next Edgar Martins to grace the stage, and I have just completed week three of training for the NYC marathon.

Week four is a rest week, the idea is that your muscles get a chance to recover a little from the steady overload they have been experiencing the last three weeks, which culminated in a 16 mile run Saturday evening. See above.

In photography it feels like progressive overload all the time. The steady drum beat of what to do next, how to keep the little ship from sinking. But in August, you really can’t do that, no one is around to hear the sound of your one shutter clapping.

For a while I have been tempted to write in bold caps “PHOTOGRAPHY IS DEAD” as the headline to a post. Catch me in a bad mood and I still might. Still photography for me was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Do I need a degree to say that? You might even say that the moon landing July 1969 was the culmination of all that still photography could do, to relate the actual imprint (via another actual imprint) of man on a landscape. Somewhere in a vault at NASA, exists the actual frame that was exposed to the 1/500th of a second of sunlight reflected from the boot imprint of Neil Armstrong. He also shot the same patch of lunar soil minus his bootprint, the moment before. It shows a great presence of mind to understand that there is the moon “before” and the moon “after.” And more than film or video, still photography is the exact medium in which to contemplate this. There is the film “before” and the film “after” exposure as well. The silver salts are like the lunar soil. Grains recording our existence. Wow. Pretty existential.

You could also argue, and I will, being that it is August and there is nothing else to argue, that at that moment photography died and the moving image became paramount in the culture. It was already happening, in Vietnam, for example, the shootout as it were between still and motion, I think still imagery won that war, pun intended. But the moon landing as it was shown on TV around the world galvanized the power of the flow of images over the still. A series of stills from an alien planet in real time does not have the same power. I remember when the Mars landers started sending back panoramas for the first time, and while the NASA scientists were besides themselves in the control room, the line by line reveal of the  Martian landscape was pretty ho-hum to me. I have watched a scanner work too long to find what it reveals to be that exciting.

I know I would get a lot of argument over whether stills or film was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Motion pictures have shaped our culture enormously. But I feel as a pure art form the still image has evolved the most.

I think we are at the other end of the telescope now, looking back at photography and what it did and meant to us. I say this because almost all of the work I see now is essentially nostalgic, nostalgic of a time or feeling or place or process. Recently Todd Papageorge published “Passing through Eden”, a collection of images from his years wandering Central Park. The work is completely modern in conception, the unrelenting gaze of the camera making what the camera makes, photographs, but the publishing of it is essentially nostalgic. I have read that TP urges his students at Yale to contemplate working in this genre, the lyrical documentarian, camera in hand, and he says he gets no takers. I think that for photography, quote-unquote, this period in the late 60’s early 70’s was the ultimate period, the point at which art photography reached its apogee to borrow a space term. It is hard to get any better than the unblinking, unrelenting, rigourous exactitude of the black and white or colour images of Robert Adams, Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, Eggleston, etc.

This power comes from that sense that you are seeing the trace or existence of something real. Like the lunar footprint, or the image of Lincoln in the Smithsonian, you look closely and it feels as if you can touch reality just on the other side of the glass. But this necessarily limits photography to what actually exists. As soon as you admit fabrication, the power ebbs. And for me the last couple decades of photography have been bouncing along in the nostalgic, either borrowing from painting, or borrowing from the history of photography itself. Sort of like current Broadway musical theatre, a recreation of a long gone heyday.

As I said, we started this trek away from photography during that moon landing. The essential difference between a still photograph and a motion film is that one exists and the other doesn’t. You can hold a photograph in your hand, see it, understand it, confirm it’s existence. You can only apprehend a film, it exists only in your brain as the joining of 24 frames per second by persistence of vision. To see the physical film, there is no motion. It exists only in projection. And you can’t even hold one moment, except as a still, a broken fragment of the whole. This makes motion film the idea medium of what might be, of fantasy. Nothing is real, so it needn’t be. You might argue that the power of documentary film suggests that we still value the real in motion film, but I think we equally value being tricked in film, the willing suspension of disbelief, the surprise twist, the Kaiser Sose at the end. It doesn’t bother us in motion to find out it was all made up. But in still photography, it does. You feel let down. Edgar Martin’d.

Photography is dead. Slowly dying since the 70’s, on life support the last decade or so, I think you will see motion film (video) in many of the applications where the still was used formerly. And I believe the internet is the natural home of the video as print was to the still image. Stills on the internet are not as compelling as motion is. Bandwidth is the only obstacle, otherwise we’d be there now. With youtube, we mostly are there.

Of course there are those that point out that Radio didn’t kill live music performance (although how many of us now know how to play an instrument?) that Television didn’t kill Film, or Print Journalism, and that the Internet will not kill Print. But this does not mean that different mediums have not had to adapt to different, altered or reduced roles. What we are seeing now is the decline of the still image and print. I don’t see any way that it will have in the Twenty First Century, the impact that it did in the Twentieth.

But it is August. Ask me again in September.

edit: another take here on fin de siècle. My opinion, Talk was no George.

Survival of the fittest may be a good title for this race which was held Saturday morning in a frigid Central Park. Temperature in the low twenties, a threatening wind, and a fresh blanket of snow on the park and park roads made this one to remember. Fewer runners than last weekend, but still a very large turnout in a winter wonderland. Had to hand it to the volunteers, this one should guarantee entry to the NCMY for standing there in sub freezing temperatures for hours watching the water in the cups freeze over. I could turn mine over at the water stop and none spilled out…

I ran this one with a friend as back of the pack bunnies, but as you can see by the graph, we snowplowed our way to negative splits. The bump at mile 6 was me taking a potty break. Here are the splits:

1. 10:12
2. 9:04
3. 8:53 

The first two miles was like learning how to skate again on a crowded rink, we were back in the third corral and it was pretty bunched up.

4. 8:41
5. 8:31 – 5 mile split of 45:21 – 9:04/mile
6. 9:17 – visit mr. john

7: 8:15
8: 8:12
9. 8:10 – second 5 mile split was 42:25 – 8:29/mile 

Totals 15k- 1:20:05 – 9:12/mile but the early crowding and the slippy start cost us a lot of time. At the end my friend had some mysterious jolt of energy around Cat Hill and opened up a 10 yard lead, by the last mile it had tripled- I didn’t see him finish. Nice kick. I was content with avoiding congestive heart failure…

We got lucky with the wind, which was not a factor although at the end heading northbound I was feeling it. But surprisingly not cold even at 25 degrees with the right clothing. 

End of year thoughts on running…

Some 500+ miles covered since June when I began. The calendar only says “June 1, first run”. I cannot remember how far or even where I went. Since then I have run in Ontario, Omaha, Dallas, New Delhi (ok, that was on a treadmill in the hotel gym…) and Bhutan-that was though rice fields.

It is hard to describe just what it is exactly that I have gotten out of running. Part of it is control, certainly, that I can make my body do something continuously, automatically even, that is outside of daily living and breathing. Like an engine, the body becomes a motor for the mind to drive around, and the world becomes the view out the window. It is not that far from photography really. The inner mind of perception looking out through an eye or lens or window onto the world. And the unfolding of a landscape rolling sideways. There are times in running where it does feel very much like this, like being in a car driving, or in a train looking out at the homes and fields and trees passing by. The way I am describing it suits my personality, for sure. I am describing being immersed yet distant from the world, and those of you that know me might recognize this characterization. For everyone else, welcome:)

“Fire up the colortini’s, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures as they fly though the air.”

I know I promised a review of the Eggleston show at the Whitney and part of that has been written. I just don’t know if I agree with it any more…but the prints are stunning, you should go just to get an idea of what colour should look like.

Maybe if i get inspired an end of year post with some dead certain conclusions about the state of the world we are in.

Liz Kuball bid adios in this post and it twigged something in my mind, a paragraph she wrote:

It is so easy, when your Google Reader is always full of excellent photographs, to feel as though the rest of the world is producing constantly, consistently, at a level you’re simply incapable of. It’s almost as if all the photographers whose blogs I read have become one photographer in my mind, and that one photographer never stops, never has to work, never gets sick or lacks inspiration. I know this isn’t true, of course—know that they all have their own struggles, that they all work hard to produce the work they do. But when all you see are the beautiful photographs, it’s hard to keep that in mind.

I have been turning this over in my mind since the Various debacle, what to make of the apparent future of photography. Not to rehash the whole thing, but I think that for me, what sticks out about Various Photographs was that is was very representative of where we are now, our taste, speaking of the internet world. Some would say it is wonderfully diverse, and perhaps it is, we now have available a tremendous mass of work, all made equal in a sense by the computer screen, 72 pixels is all you get. It is like submitting to galleries 35mm slides, the old saying, it makes good work look bad and bad work look good. What you end up with is this constant flow, and I think that is something that Various Photographs is trying to dip a toe into, this stream, to take a temperature, stir up some eddies.

Liz gets at it, how this stream affects you if you are making work. Never before have we had this kind of volume of work available. When I was getting going in Toronto in the early 90’s it was book stores, even that was overwhelming, although the volume of books has only increased.

I was visiting home last week and on the way back the rental car had XM satellite radio to keep me company, so perversely I listened to the comedy channel for 8 straight hours.  I do not recommend it. But I realized how similar the experience was to looking at photography and blogs on the net. It is one reason, the main reason, why I do not feature other photographers work on my blog. There are other places for that. But even then, I question the effect it has. It is like the satellite radio. How is it possible to make comedy unfunny? By massing it together in a continuous stream you realize that very few people have anything truly funny or new to say, and in fact will repeat themselves over and over in the same genres and topics. Careful here, I am not saying anything to the individuals, I am saying the stream defeats the purpose. Well, my continuous listening does that, but made possible by the stream. It is the effect of consumerism, the construction of a world dedicated to making it easy to consume things.

What the internet has done is turned photography, all of it, into another consumer product. Of course it hasn’t, but that is the effect.

We should not be so eager to treat the world like a box of chocolates.

I think what you are seeing is a generational thing amplified by the www. In the development of a photographer or artist there are stages that you inevitably go through, fascinations, being naive to certain things, unaware of what has come before, excitements at the discovery of an artist previously unknown to you, all of these things from the perspective of someone starting out are very different experiences compared to someone who is battling mid-career issues, etc. There are commonalities, like finding inspiration, finding places to show, sharing experiences. But it is this particular time, the confluence of technologies of digital photography, the www for sharing, a boom in consumer credit allowing amateurs to purchase gear that only professionals would have bothered with in the analogue days, all of this has brought an unprecedented number of photographers into the arena at exactly the same time and often at the same phase, that early discovery phase that used to go by fairly unnoticed in art schools around the country. And asking the same questions over and over. Of course there is nothing wrong with this per se, except as it has manifested across blogs and the www. So you see the consequences, a great deal of burnout, bad work, and this somewhat toxic flood of imagery.

Charlie Rose was interviewing George Will last night and they were discussing the Barack Obama nomination, and that task ahead for him. The charge has been that he cannot connect because of his “elitism” and Will neatly deconstructed that. He said in politics it is never the question that the elites rule the masses, but it is the question of “which elites” will rule. You hear so much talk about relating to the “common man” and often politicians like to portray themselves as the “common man” as much as possible. Well, I agree with Will here (perhaps the only thing I share with his views), I want an “uncommon man” as a leader, really, that is what we all want but do not acknowledge.

Similar goes for photography, photography may have it’s common charms, but I really don’t need a flood of common imagery. It is the uncommon we need more of.

Photography as Collection

The exquisite corpse: the future of photography, it is not about any one person’s work, it is about the mass. 

How collecting other work saves you from making your own?

These were all titles I considered for this follow-on piece. I am trying to put it in a bigger context. Where are we going in photography? Or where did we think we were going because we misunderstood the past…

By Tim Barber’s own admission, he functions more as a collector than as a curator. The web creates the possibility of bringing together unlimited numbers of photographs and the attraction is to ffffind something in that mass. I think this is where some confusion sets in. I think it is one thing to see collection as a valid strategy for curation (which it is in my opinion) and another thing to see collection as a valid strategy for making work. The trouble that TB gets into is that he conflates the one with the other. See it is perfectly fine to work in the typological mode, which is essentially being a photographic collector of types. The Bechers, Sander, etc. But they are not collecting ANYTHING, they are curating what they collect. Water Towers, Professions. 

To curate a show based on the photography of EVERYTHING, in other words to be a collector of photographs of anything is where you can get into trouble. The defense is that photographs can BE about ANYTHING. Yes, a photograph can be about anything, but it doesn’t necessarily follow it is a good photograph…

It makes me think of The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston. Thousands upon thousands of photographs. When asked what he was working on lately Eggleston responded, “I have been photographing democratically.” There is a lot in that statement.

This the “rationale” about Various Photographs, and the basis of a lot of photography, that it is somehow “democratic” because it is an artform that nearly anyone can do. And further, that this should be a good thing.  I have a friend who is legally blind, who reads text at a distance of about four inches, but who makes the most astonishing photographs I have ever seen. In the sense that photography is universal, you could say that photography is democratic. Anyone can take a picture. The act. Looking at it that way you can say anyone can paint. The act. But we are not so accepting of that, although David Letterman has some great Elephant paintings to show you. So there is the act, and there is the intention. An elephant can make a great painting but he or she cannot intend to make a great painting. At least as far as we can tell…

So what did Eggleston mean when he said he was photographing democratically? My sense of it is that his democracy was of the subjects within the frame. Do not read that as “all subjects are equal.” You can read that as “you can photograph anything.” But it is not about “the subject” it is about everything in the frame. 

His “war with the obvious” was not about showing us the beauty of the ordinary, which is how I believe many people take it, his war was with “obvious” subjects. A single object depicted in space in the center of the frame. Eggleston’s democracy was to see everything and depict with equal weight all objects in his frame. This is why he talks about the reproduction of Bresson’s Decisive Moment, typical of the era in that it was flat,  open, and low contrast, it depicted all elements in the frame equally, whereas when he saw the originals they were standard prints. It was the democracy of the reproduction that made the pictures work. Go back to read the afterward in the book and you will see what I mean.

This is the problem: how do you see THE FOREST for the trees. How do you see it all at once when you are looking at details. I believe the garden variety understanding of Eggleston’s importance is misunderstood, we think of him as a photographer of the mundane details (this is what Eudora Welty says in the introduction) that reveal existential meanings and the presence of life. My understanding of The Democratic Forest is the opposite, the book begins with a photograph of a solitary tree and a dedication to “The memory of my aunt, Minnie Maude Schuyler”, followed by a photograph of a map of the United States and world globe titled “Memphis, at the Travel Agent’s.” You don’t even need to see these pictures to get the implication-this is the war with the obvious, a dedication to a late loved Aunt who would not understand what was to follow save for this lone tree, an fitting photograph of a simple lovely subject dead-center in the frame. But that was not what he wanted to show, The Democratic Forest is the problem of how do you see the FOREST, all of it, the map of the United States and The Globe, and depict it from Memphis Tenn? How can you be simultaneously everywhere and here? How does a picture make itself out of the world?

So I am back to Barber. His show demonstrates what we have done with the legacy of Eggleston’s Democratic Forest. We have been concerned with people up trees. And the mundane, and the ephemeral, but I don’t think we have absorbed, or maybe we have abandoned the lessons of Eggleston which is to make pictures democratically, not “of everything” but of everything equally. In other words, photography is not about “the subject.” It is about the total, the picture, the picture “problem.” It is people AND trees if that is your bag.

Why do I think Various Photographs is problematic? 

It adopts the view that authorship is incidental, that photography can be characterized as collecting, and that you can photograph “anything.” 

It is the reverse: authorship is everything, photography is not collecting and it is not about photographing “anything,” it is about treating everything in the photograph as equal.

How do I know I am right? When you come out of looking at that show, or any similar collection like that you do not want to take pictures. Your reaction (my reaction) is, god, everything has been photographed. You are exhausted. Subject matter has been exhausted. Which is why it is not about the subject. To photograph everything is not to “see” anything. This is the sickness of the collector. It is impossible to collect everything. Collyer syndrome. And collection is only a substitute for understanding. If we could only collect, catalogue, name, describe, everything then we would know and control and understand. To dissect the exquisite corpse.

By the way, one version of an “exquisite corpse” is a drawing divided in three completed by different individuals. Maybe the single line of photographs was never intended…?

I’ll leave it there. My intention is not to tear down but to challenge. I write about what I react to, and what moves me strongly. In terms of the future of photography, whatever that possibly could mean, and Various Photographs, there is something there to consider. I think many people who saw the show saw “the photographs” and to them it looked like what they have come to expect from photography now, at least on the web. That met expectation, at least as I gauged it from the people at the show, the Saturday crowd, the more everyday crowd, not the photo-crowd, that met expectation is very much a barometer of where we are. Perhaps it is the failure of one kind of photography and the success of another. Perhaps photography has become “democratic” by becoming what many people wish, as opposed to photography being democratic by nature.

CLD: What artists, painters do you like to look at?

RF: Well when I…right off the top of my head I think of Hopper…I mean because I have seen the paintings so often, and then I think of the painting my wife (June Leaf) does, I think of…I don’t think so much of paintings really, I think of going out in the street and walking the street and look at people, that’s my favourite, that’s what I like to do…well that’s what…it’s great to keep up your curiosity about what’s around the corner…and it gets harder as you get older but I had that…to walk around with my camera and my curiosity of what is around the corner was important and there are many corners to turn…

moving on… The interview is pretty horrid but what comes out is that RF is extraordinarily sweet, grateful, and patient…

Does anyone have any links to audio or video of the NY photo talks? Anyone? Anyone?

It was apparent from the git-go that someone was not happy, I missed out on the early brouha but it seems the show is not hung the way Tim envisioned. Donald Rumsfeld to the rescue: you go to hang with the space you have not the space you want…

I think TB backpedalled a little too soon, while a single line would have been different and more like his website, I don’t believe the net effect would have been much different. He says it himself, it is a “mish-mash” and whether one row or three, there are a lot of pictures to look at, all sized and framed exactly alike. Three rows creates more narrative connections between different images, so I am not sure what the fuss is about. More likely it was an apology for curation, or curation 2.0 as we are supposed to call it.

Tim’s stated mission was to create “an accessible neutral venue” for a large body of work from all over the world. In this he succeeds completely. He also wanted “an exquisite corpse” and I can see that also.  There is always this populist democratic streak in photography, an anti-elitism. I think it is just the same old process where the new overturns the old. But this dogma comes up again and again, this kind of neutrality, objectivity, democracy. I think it is completely misunderstood.

This is obviously Tim’s show. If there has been a complaint that the NY photo festival is too much about the curators, I respond, so what? We NEED curators, now more than ever, and Tim’s show represents what you get when a curator abnegates responsibility. The point of curation is not to be neutral or accessible, the point is take care of the work and assume responsibility for revealing its meaning. So point one, you have to stand by what is on the wall, regardless. There is no spilled milk here. I think it is extraordinarily irresponsible to distance yourself from what you have done because of contingencies beyond your control. So what, get on with it. 

The real issue is the work on the wall and does it stand up and what is the effect? There are great individual images in the show. But what does it mean to create a group show of hundreds of photographers? For me what happens is the net effect is to de-authorize, horrible phrase, the work. It negates authorship. Suddenly a McGinley could be a Cox, a Kane could be a Traegeser, a Heller a Sutherland, and X could be a Y. What you are seeing is Barber’s own hand, you could interchange this show with a number of his own person galleries and be none the wiser, there would be smoke clouds, random livestock, people in baggy underwear and bloody noses in both. So he strips the work of the original author and substitutes his own imprimatur, and then takes the back door out by saying it is accessible and neutral, and oh, by the way, not what I intended.

I don’t believe it is fair to the people included in the show to be honest. It is reductio-ab-absurdum. One of the panel discussions was Curation 2.0 with Jen Bekman and Laurel Ptak. Guess who was wearing the ironic trucker hat? And really did not have a presentation to make. It was embarrassing compared to many other presentations. And this was one of the festival CURATORS. Breaking news, there is a responsibility there, take it.

Other embarrassments….

Katherine Wolkoff’s presentation on her work also springs to mind, this is one example of you not wanting to hear an artist talk about their work. And maybe we should not expect artists to do this, I don’t know that it is their job after the work is up (but see SN below..). Basically she is really enamoured with a pseudo victorian scientific sensibility coupled with the opposite Romantic sensitive artist streak and throw in a little 60’s environmental crunchy-granola for good measure. Yes it was that painful, sensitive and tortured. Just go see the pictures…

Kathy Ryan misattributes Simon Norfolk’s love of painting and gets a soft glove in the face…but don’t worry, they will hug it out…

Did I hear Rothko invoked again? I thought this was a photography festival, but it seems to be a painting festival. NOthing boils my blood faster than hearing that olde chestnut proffered about how much better a picture is because it evokes a painting…Dammit please can we just have our own medium thank you? I don’t hear people saying that book was so much better or that sculpture was so much better because it was based on a frick’n painting.  So SN got up there and said, I don’t like painting, and these examples I am going to show you are crap, which they were. I am being hyperbolic here, I do know that good work evokes and speaks to other work, there are resonances, references, riffs. Can I just for once hear someone say that picture is better because it is based on a Coltrane track? Then it would just be a reference, and not rationale. Painting and photography have nothing in common except they are a flat thing hung on a wall….and you need your eyes, altho I suppose the blind can enjoy paintings by touch. Oh no, another way in which photograph is deficient…

Simon Norfolk’s presentation was very smooth, this guy has a mind you don’t want to meet in a darkened alley. How this guy gets access to the places he does is a miracle. He basically makes you want to give up photography because the rigor of his ideas sucks all the oxygen out of the room faster than a fuel-air explosion. I think we all felt our innards leaving our mouths at the end.

Two things: he says he does not want to see another photograph of an orphan baby in a refugee camp because he was told that if he bought the bracelet and donated to this other thing and supported the whatever that he would never have to see another orphan baby photograph. In other words he thinks that the emotional confrontation photography sometimes employs is a dead strategy. He prefers the cool intellectual “unpacking” of the black box, although his rage is white hot. His own emotion on the subject tells you the weakness in this argument. To see his work without his own calculated tirade is actually less effective. SN is as much the picture as the picture. I wanted to suggest that he go on the road with the slideshow like Al Gore, because it was a great display. I think you need the emotion, you cannot help but begin in emotion. SN chooses to then take that and sublimate it to a more rigorous intellectual photograph, but I don’t believe it relieves us of having to witness pain, and I think we are on worse ground if we do.  Anyway that is just his choice. 

Second thing: that choice became the subject of an unfortunate question, does the aestheticization of suffering (in either mode, emotional or rational) diminish and exploit suffering? This was the the first question posed after the fuel-air bomb went off. SN ripped him a new one. It is a sensitive point, the charge that creating beautiful photographs of destruction somehow trivializes the evil underneath. He said, well, do you feel that way about this work, and the questioner blanched, and then SN asked the entire audience if anyone else felt that way, and I had the perverse feeling that I wanted to raise my hand simply because it would be fun to see what happened. There was no way you were going to have this argument with this man, the old admonishment, never argue with someone with a microphone applies. The vehemence of the response suggests that it has been thought about however. So there are two parts to this, there is SN’s own personal commitment to his work, which is unassailable, and there is the responsibility that art has in the world at large. Is it enough? What is the function of beauty in photographs of conflict? What is the function of photography itself? I think it circles back to painting sorry to say. There were painters and illustrators sent to most of the major american conflicts, the World Wars, the Korean War, Vietnam, possibly even BushOne v. Hussein and BushTwo v. Hussein. I don’t think anyone ever criticized these artists for making battlefield drawings or paintings, or suggested that it was somehow exploitive. Yet photography is always criticized for precisely this insensitivity. But can you remember a single War painting in the same way as a Nick Ut? 

SN employs his own “shock and awe” in this, by creating seductive work he gets you to look, and then he hopes you consider and think. In this way he is no different from the orphan baby photographers. Essentially this is all you can do with photography, or art, regardless of how tragic, awesome, sublime or liminal it is. What is unfortunate is that the photographer in making the work also assumes the responsibility of how it gets received and used in the world. Different populations will regard the images differently. The context of a coffee table book is different from a gallery wall is different from a personal slideshow and artist talk. Yet the photographer somehow has to control it all and that is impossible. His own explanation was the best I have heard, that going out in the world making pictures causes him to come into contact with people, and their stories are horrific and he feels absolutely responsible to act based on those realities. It is amazing that such an emotional man can create such cool work.

If you are still with me, I thank you for hanging in this long. I want to go back today and see the rest of the typologies exhibit so I might have more to add.

Went to the Ryan McGinley opening at Team Gallery last night along with 350,000 or so other lookie-lou’s to see or be seen. These are my impressions.

Straight off, some of the pictures are very beautiful. My favourites tended to be those involving the dunes and the human form, a large 8′x10′ print of two people tumbling naked down the side of dune is tremendous, another 11″x14″ of a far away person lit by a spotlight taking a dive off the top off a dune like a falling angel is wonderful. I can’t find it even on the artists site.

copyright Ryan McGinley

I looked on the Team Gallery website for these images and it seems they favoured more the portrait work and the more “lifesytle” esq imagery. To me this was not what I felt was strong. I probably am in the minority. But overall you could say the focus was beauty, and beauty in the moment. It is not much more complicated than that.

So then there is the other part, the whole production aspect of the work, the models, the assistants, the budget, the 4000 rolls of film, etc, etc. The re-imagining of 70’s style nudist magazines for a contemporary audience. This is a vision of something that didn’t exist at the time, and does not exist now. It is a complete fiction.

I think we all like to imagine our youth was spent or misspent in some sort of free innocence, we all have our own gardens-of-eden that we look back on. In this way I see “I know where the summer goes” as aspirational. It is very close to if not advertising in its effect. No one had what these kids had, well, perhaps a few. But you want it, at least judging by the throngs that showed up to the opening. You want to be close to this kind of life. McGinley is giving us access to something seemingly lost, prohibited, or out of reach. He is giving a shape to a current culture’s dreams.

It makes me think of On the Road.

On the Road is a fiction also, created out of the raw materials of the life of Jack Kerouac which were undoubtedly real, but the story is pure fiction. It went on to become rightly or wrongly the voice of a generation of Beats, and evolved later into a vision of freedom as it might be experienced in life and in art.  Sal Paradise is a beautiful loser, a searcher, a Tom Sawyer lighting out for the territories, well, at least Denver.

For me it is interesting to compare the dreams of different generations. For the generations that followed the Beats here is this jazz-inspired solitary poet figure, a little in awe of a greater man (Dean Moriarty). It is the vision of one poet, enough money for gas to get to the next town maybe and a cup of coffee left over.

“I know where the summer goes” is the vision of another poet, albeit one with tens of thousands of dollars, a production van, and cast of hired models.  Tell me which one is more innocent? Or true? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but a culture expresses itself through it’s aspirations, and this is a very commercial kind of expression. It leaves me feeling a little poorer.

Yet I like the pictures. Which fiction is truer?

I’ll be off for a week. In the meantime, check out the Bert Stern pics of Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe. Apart from the general ‘wtf’ reaction, it did make me think, we have our “JFK” again, I guess we need our “Marilyn”.

I remember going to see a show many years back of Patrick Demarchelier’s work. It was really awful. Beautiful prints of beautiful people shot beautifully. Stripped of their magazine setting, it was completely coma-inducing. Sometimes that happens, the work is made for a context and and cannot function outside of that. Something similar is happening here, although I feel much more protective of the Sartorialist in this example than Demarchelier. In other words I would rather see the Sartorialist succeed than see PD get his gallery rocks off.

What to say? The things I like; I like that the prints were a nice smallish size, I thought it was a good choice not to try to make these heroic prints you see everywhere. There was another gentleman in the gallery at the time and he was pressed up pretty close to them looking at the details. Small prints can create a kind of intimacy between the work and the viewer. Trouble is there was not much connection to be found. I really got no sense of the people in the photographs, somewhat as I had expected. My impression is that the web is good enough to convey what this work conveys, a sense of style in an instant. And the web is actually better in another way, the fact of the comments and community around the work feels much more interesting than seeing a collection of average prints in a white gallery space.

About the prints, they were fine, suffered a little oversharpening, a little of that digital thing were primary colors were oversaturated relative to everything else. As a group they looked cohesive which tells me a very good printer spent some time getting them all together.

On the way out I overheard a group going in and one said “ok, so the thing is, these are real people..” as an introduction to the show. I think now in photography we have come to expect that what we see is not real on some level, either from retouching or styling or the endless repetition of stars and famous people, the idea of photographing real people is somehow now exotic, and the exotic now commonplace. I did not have the heart to stop and explain that many of those folks were fashion editors and stylists. Certainly real but not “real.”

I wish there was more to say about “the work” but it was not the kind of thing where I come out of the gallery and feel really motivated to go out and take pictures. That is my benchmark when I see a show or a book, how juiced it gets me to want to do my own thing. Certainly others might feel motivated.

I’m going to conclude in a way that perhaps most of you do not expect. I think that overall the Sartorialist, hyperbole aside, is creating a wonderful thing if you just stick to what it is-a fascination with the details of style and dress and manner. Clearly he loves these things, and the people too. I would love to see more of that, more of his affection, more humour perhaps, more attention to the emotional moment. There is always somewhere to go. The invented can become authentic.

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Here is where we get into some hot water, a comparison of two sacred cows. The both moo, but differently.

So this is not intended to be scientific, but more hands on practical. Two weekends ago I had a 5D on loan so I decided to do a quick side by side, in a typical (for me) situation, alone on a deserted street…:)

Really what I am comparing are the lenses, in this case the Elmarit 21mm f2.8 (Can)(effective 28mm) against the Canon 17-40L f4.0. So right there is the bulk of the difference, a fast prime against a slower zoom. But this has been my point all along, looking at the development of Canon lenses they have put a lot of emphasis on zooms, and image stabilization, and no so much into primes. That, coupled with their low noise sensor means what they want you to do is shoot at a higher aperture and iso. So I thought I would try it both ways, the first is a comparison of both lenses at their base iso of 160/100 at the same aperture, f4, same shutter speed, handheld. As I said this is a typical situation, walking around handheld, being flexible and spontaneous. Leica on top, Canon on bottom. Processing in Lightroom with it’s default sharpening, and exposure adjusted to make them similar.

Not a great result for the Canon L series glass, all of the fine detail is missing. Or maybe this is the anti-moire filter of the Canon’s coming into play, but I doubt it, I have an older 24mm 2.8 that is much better than this. So I should be using that. What Canon wants you to do in this case is the following: f8, 1/60th, iso 400

Now we have the detail at f8, pretty much the only usable aperture on this L series lens in my opinion. There is a caveat to that however, and that is that the lens does not perform the same at all zoom focal lengths. So there is another issue there, knowing how this lens performs at various apertures, focal lengths etc. It is very uneven. And to greater and lesser degrees, this can be said of all zoom designs, it is impossible to optimize for all focal lengths. Even at f8, the optimum aperture, or should be for this lens, the performance drifts from excellent to marginal. It is generally good on center across the board at f8, but the corners are a different story.

So the story here is one of the direction camera manufacturers take in designing a system. Canon has gone for the most flexible, best all around approach, the one with the most checklist features, the approach that is likely to appeal to most photographers. And in truth, there are many situations where you absolutely need a zoom at iso 1600 to perform nearly like a prime at iso 100. But a lot of people have criticized the Leica as being something that few would need, at a price few can afford, with few real world applications. FEW!

But I think we have an example of differing philosophies, also of differing markets. Obviously there is room for both, and good reasons for both.

In this installment I want to focus on the Library mode since it is the weakest of the four modes. As I said before, in the development of Lightroom it seems there was a mass flowchart for the workflow and certain functions were demarcated to be Library only, when in fact you use them at other times…

Stacking for example, a feature that was added late, only works in Library mode. Lets say I am working on an image in develop, and I want to make a virtual copy to continue down a different path with an image. I have to go into Library to make that copy, I cannot make it directly from within develop. The same is true of stacking, if for example, I am working on a group of images shot at the same time, and a good example of this is when I bracket a room interior so that i can choose the best exposure later, in this case, I do need to be in develop to perform adjustments to see which indeed is the best exposure. This would then be the top of stack image. That is, if I could create the stack from within Develop. But you can’t, you have to traverse back to Library to stack and to promote the pic to the top. And then back into Develop. All of this is a waste of time.

The other interesting limitation is that you cannot stack in a quick collection, which is part of the Library mode. So even modal behaviours are not consistent. I am not sure why you want a quick collection other than to quickly collect a group of images to concentrate on them. Stacking could be very useful there. But once you have the quick collection, you are pretty limited in terms of going forward in the Library sorting mode. So it makes it a dead end feature. Also, the add to quick collection circle in the thumbnail row is dammed annoying. If you are not paying attention to what is a very small target of thumbs, you can inadvertently add an image to a quick collection. At least the fade in fade out menu alerts you to the fact. But it seems to be a feature in search of a problem. You can rate, flag and color code images hierarchically. There is no need for a dead end collection.

Stacking also introduced me to overlapping keyboard shortcuts, “S” in Library toggles the stacks, and in Develop it crops to the same aspect ratio, whatever that is. Given the number of times you need to move around the program using shortcuts, making them modal was not the smartest move.

Library mode in general is pretty limited to Folders and Collections. They are separate, there is no way to create a collection inside of a folder. For example, you have an edit of a shoot in a Folder, how do you represent that and keep it together with the original shoot-you can’t, the Collection has it’s own window. And in this I think Lightroom really belies its weakness as a pro level tool, the Library function, the digital asset management part, is at least as important, and often times more important than individual images, a funny statement for a photographer. But it is true, you come home from a shoot, and you have hundreds of images to sort and somehow represent a cohesive edit to a client or editor. You can create a slideshow or a web gallery, but going forward, successive iterations of this cannot be done, it is a one shot deal. In Aperture, you can create unlimited web galleries or blogs or slideshows and they all can live within the Project, and ultimately get archived with the project should you decide to export it and get it out of the Library.

I have been reading around the web and over on O’reilly there is the InsideAperture blog where they are covering a whole lot more than I am, but a post a while back caught my eye, the author was attempting to organize an image catalogue of 80,000 (yes that is right folks, EIGHTY THOUSAND) images. I was really tempted to post an answer to his welll meaning query-how do you catalogue 80,000 images, well, you start by THROWING AWAY 78.000 of them…har har. I guess I should take my own advice with all the contact sheets I have filed away. So let me tell you the structure of the archive, DAY MONTH YEAR! Is there really any functionality to be gained by sorting pictures solely by the day they were taken? And is that information not already in the exif? So you have a set of nested folders, and lets do the math, for example, three years, twelve months, 30 days each, something like a thousand folders to drill through, not that you would, mind you, but for what? Organization? But back to Lightroom, when you import to the Library, this is exactly what the import dialogue offers, to create subfolders inside Pictures with year month and day.

Organization is definitely a personal fetish, but I cannot fathom the need to see in the folder column, a series of folders named 2007-05-10, 11, 12, etc. If I am trying to recall a specific photo, asking me what day I shot it on is not likely to jog any neurons. Asking me what project or job I was shooting will however, because it is a context, and it has memories and associations. So, of course you are allowed to create your own folder structure, and I have. And I have managed to find a use for Collections, I use this to focus on a set of pictures for some particular task, like building a portfolio edit, or a set of prints for an exhibition. But this sort of reduplicates the folder structure, since the groupings are similar, Street, Portraits, Portfolio, New York Times assignments etc. Which brings me to my last gripe, when you begin moving pictures around in the Library, some dumb ass determined that you also move a copy of the enclosing folder! Which would make sense only if you thought it brilliant to keep your ducks ordered by the aforementioned year-month-day. So now I have some odd folders duplicated bearing the names of the jobs they were originally attached to, sitting in other folders. And for no good reason.

“Gowanus Antlers”

This is pretty much it for my general applies-to-all users commentary about Lightroom. Anything further will apply specifically to coverting M8 files, of which there are some tricks you may not know. I may also indulge in a little comparison with Capture One, a heinous example of UI welded onto an industrial strength Raw converter. At least for M8 files, it provides excellent conversions, a major crow-pie swallow for me. Fortunately I only have to haul it out for the odd tough nut. Lightroom does an excellent job otherwise.

You may think I have been hard on Lightroom and perhaps unfairly, but it is borne out of using it every day in production work. I have learned to live with many of it’s foibles, and I am glad that I have had this chance, with Aperture so slow out of the gate on the M8. We’ll see if Aperture can manage to extract all of the excellent characteristics of the Leica raw file, hopefully better than Lightroom, so I can go back to my sane folder structure. Otherwise, it will be a little bifurcated…

A while back I chastised Innova for their attempt at a fibre based look-a-like called F-Type gloss. The surface looked mostly like shirt cardboard, the kind you get when you buy a dress shirt. Well they seem to have gone back to the drawing board with FibaPrint Ultrasmooth Gloss. All I can say is WOW-my attempts at showing you the surface texture are not so good, but this looks very very much improved to my eye a near dead ringer for Ilford Multigrade Fibre.

Left to right, that is Innova without the gloss optimizer on the Epson R1800, the next is with the gloss optimizer, and the third is the real deal, Ilford multigrade fiberbase. The surface feel is great, the weight is right on, and the brightness is a little too much for me. This paper is very white, whiter than my previous favourite Hannehmuhle Fine Art Pearl. The Fine Art Pearl looks more like coated rag cotton, you can sort of see the weave structure underneath, whereas the Innova has more of a smooth baryta clay surface.

Notice the bronzing with Epson inks, the R1800 does not have the same set as the R2400, which I would expect to exhibit less bronzing. But I like the gloss overspray, it takes the whiteness off the surface and knocks it down, and there is no bronzing to speak of after that. Innova does have profiles for this paper, unfortunately for the R1800, they use the matt media setting which precludes the gloss overspray, otherwise the profile is ok. I will be profiling this paper however.

The other paper I tried out was Harman (née Ilford) Matt FB Mp. The Mp stands for microporous, and my experience with microporous papers in the past, Epson’s forgotten child Colorlife, was abysmal. That paper would never really dry, the surface was the worst kind of lustre surface ever, and the prints would squeak like cheese curds if you rubbed your finger on them. Well Harman seems to have fixed all of that, and the new Matt FB is another dead ringer for my other favourite paper, Ilford multigrade FB matt-see below.

It has exactly the same feel, surface, and color as the original. Also the downloadable profiles from Harman do a good job out of the box although I will probably profile this paper anyway. A great addition, especially for black and white.

Ok, it can’t be all wine and roses can it? Innova seems to have a problem with product naming, I was at Calumet looking at their paper specifier sample pack and there were names for products and no products and names that were similar to other names but not identical. They need to get that sorted out.

theonlinephotographer has posted a pro and con “review” of the Leica M8 and since it is not a review, and since there are so few pro’s I thought I would weigh in since I actually have used the camera…

this is really the limit of the pro:

I wasn’t able to do a whole lot of shooting with the M8—five sessions, none very long or intense, resulting in not quite a whole 1-GB card. (That’s about 80 button presses folks…) Outdoors the metering is pretty accurate and the default white balance good. The files are large and detailed, as you can see in the example below.

TOP feels the camera is primarily a “a handy note taker” and his four reasons for liking it come down to one of

• you already like it
• you already have a Leica
• you want what no one else can afford
• it might close to what I really think it should be.

None of which even remotely comes close to “reviewing.” He tosses in a few smallish jpegs to show that he actually pressed the shutter button.

The con-job goes on a lot further, and includes an anecdote about a long lost girlfriend who evidently had more money than sense according to the reviewer, which we are to surmise is how a lot of M8 buyers must seem to him. He says he won’t judge how others choose to spend their money, and then goes on to do just that. The tone is clear, “dear reader, from one sensible person to another, leave this camera to the uneducated, uncalibrated, and “chirpy.” This is probably the weirdest part of the whole article, and definitely the part where I actually lost a lot of respect for the author, as I found it demeaning, not humorous, and very, very….weird.

You can read the post yourself, but there is not much point I’m afraid. I can’t even understand the comments that this is a fair, even handed review, I mean, come on folks?

I have no idea why the need to go so far out of ones way to present such an obtuse appraisal of a piece of photo equipment. I don’t think that Leica themselves has ever courted this kind of reaction, of course, it is the legion of Leica-fan-boys that encourages this kind of reaction, (like Apple) and obviously this is to them: you are not going to see me get worked up about this 5000 dollar camera in the way that you get worked up…but let me get worked up just the same but hide behind a kind of ‘meh take it or leave it attitude.

So what is left? Let me list the chief negative points he makes:

1. as an M camera it is not that good based on build quality, shutter feel, responsiveness of the electronics
2. color fidelity suffers from Ir contamination
3. noise
4. lcd he says the worst part
5. everything else is not material
6. cost-only a chirpy uneducated idiot would spend this money

Let me address some of these issues:

In terms of whether or not the M8 is as good as other M’s-my basis of comparison is an 80’s build classic M6, bought used. There are differences, the M8 is definitely nosier, but this is a moot comparison-my M6 does not have a winder. If my M6 had a winder, it would be a louder. This is part of the Leica mystique that needs to go away, the relative loudness of the camera has never been an issue except for the shy, myself among them. And then a miraculous thing happened, I got over myself, got out of my own way, and found that it didn’t matter. A quiet camera will not help you much. A silent camera maybe, and they are out there. But it is overstated. You as a photographer are obviously in the room, are you not? The sound is not really the issue.

I can agree that the shutter feel is not as good, the M6 has a very soft release and is all mechanical. For the M8 Leica has gone for a three stage release that reminds me of the gilette shaver commercials….”the first stage activates the camera, the second memorizes the exposure, the third stage releases the shutter”. Why there are three when there only need to be two is beyond me. A two stage release would definitely preserve more of the feel of the traditional M’s. So I can acknowledge this is a chaffing point, and a significant one given that it is so so good on previous M’s. But then, I have never used a M3, which is supposed to be the holy burrito of all. See, this is how it goes, no one likes change, and so the criticism piles up. If TOP is criticizing the M8 based on how poorly it compares to the M7, then lets go all the way and criticize all M cameras back to the M3. This is obviously pointless. The M8 is its own camera, and has its own feel. Get used to it, as I have. This is hair splitting. It is not a hindrance to making pictures.

In terms of build quality my opinion is that the M8 is as solid as any other M. The camera feels solid, and has been with me daily since early February after the initial failure which was definitely early adopter effect. That was covered, and since then, there has been no problem. If we are talking comparative M’s I could probably complain about the build quality of my M6-it has lost a plastic bumper over the strap lug, and the shutter, that famous cloth shutter, has never been in spec despite service to tune it’s speeds. It is also widely known that the mechanical shutter of the M’s never really delivers the stated speeds above 1/125, whereas the electronic shutter of the M7 and M8 will delivery accurate speeds until self-destruction some hundreds of thousands of frames later. There is no comparison, older is not better in this case. And I finally have speeds up to 1/4000th of a second, great for shooting wide open in daylight. Try that with a M6.

The viewfinder, the primary interface in ANY camera, (or should be, no live view LCD is the same) is the best there is. Lets say that again-The best. It is better than my M6, as the M6ttl and M7 improved the focus patch to avoid flare. If you have not used a rangefinder, this is the chief selling point, the almost liquid transparency of the viewfinder, the kind of connection between you and what you are seeing that is only second best to eyesight. It is probably 50% of the total reason why you would want this camera in the first place. Compared to ANY dslr, whose viewfinders are muddy toilet paper tubes to look through this is still state of the art, a design over 50 years old. But other camera manufacturers have done the cost analysis and have concluded the viewfinder is now unimportant with the lcd on the back. Even the cheapest Minolta X700 from years ago is better than all of the dslr’s on the market today, save perhaps the 7000$ mkIIds. How’s that for a waste of money, 7000$ dollars just for a usable viewfinder! Positively makes the 5000$ Leica a bargin!

As for the responsiveness of the electronics the cameras firmware has changed three times since release, so there is obviously some work to be done. And yes mine did die mysteriously after 24 hours, so there are issues. But since then, it has been rock solid, and a great example of a simple user interface with a modicum of features. I believe any 1.0 release is difficult, and looking for example at the Canon ipf5000 debacle, proves that it is not the size of the company that matters, but experience. Leica as I have said, is very late to the table, and they have missed out on the experience an earlier M could have generated. But the engineering mountain was very high, higher than for dslr’s. As only the second digital rangefinder, they are doing very well.

About the color fidelity, this is where TOP really let us down, not really investigating what was fact and what was old news. Yes it is true that the original shipping firmware had horrendous white-balance issues, and the Ir thing. The current firmware has vastly improved white balance, to the point where I have ceased to notice it is problematic. Contrary to their report, skin tone is excellent. If you shoot jpegs you might get surprised now and again, but hey, if you shoot jpegs with this camera all I have to say is what are you doing?

About the Ir issue. I have written about this before, so there is not much to add, filter-up, and the issue is gone. I like the fact that Leica made a very bold engineering decision to optimize for the lenses, which is really the biggest draw to the Leica system. I feel this is another point that the TOP article failed to acknowledge, the real engineering feat of getting the rangefinder lens design to work as well as or better than it did on film, and adapt that to digital capture. And this is the point-if Leica had mucked with the output, if it had lost the characteristic of the lenses, then that would be it. Game over for them. The other 50% for me is the glass. And this is the part where “good enough” is not good enough to me. Canon L lenses were driving me mad. Of course I was comparing them to medium format glass, Mamiya 7 and Hasselblad, which is unfair, except in the sense that 35mm digital capture is now very competitive with medium format (film). See, if you could make a digital Mamiya 7, that would be my holy burrito camera. So it is very much about the optics, and Leica has done a backflip and accepted a high cost to maintain their advantage, and for that I am thankful, and also willing to accept some unprecedented trade-offs that ultimately make a lot of sense.

Much has been made about the necessity and cost of coding lenses, but look at the alternative-a new mount. We have the M mount, all mechanical, but we have a new imaging system which needs to incorporate focal length and aperture specific information to process the image. Short of going to an electronic mount, which every other camera maker has done, how do you preserve some of the best and most expensive optics in the world? You pay 125$/mount to code them, or do it yourself with a sharpie in the interim. This is another no-brainer folks, the solution is elegant, inexpensive and effective in comparison to every other idea out there.

Finally, there is the whole point for point comparison to the Canon xti, a 10mp consumer wunderplastik camera that TOP finds superior. There has always been the argument of “good enough for government” and I think this is where he gets stuck, because yes, the xti is good enough, on paper, and in average conditions sometimes. Leica is never going to win on features, it has no features, which is precisely the allure. Photography is absolutely not quantifiable in this feature for feature manner however. And this is where TOP really went down the rabbit hole, in failing to really dig into just what it is about the Leica that makes it such a great camera. I don’t think you have to mythologize to make the point either. The point of the matter is that if you like rangefinders, which are not all things to all assignments, and never have meant to be, and if you appreciate what Leica is good at, lenses, usability, a dedication to some traditional ideals, then this camera is fantastic. Of course slr’s are much more flexible, that argument was satisfied 35 years ago with the Nikon F. But the rangefinder has persisted, and blossomed and not for some arcane, effete, or otherwise unreasonable reason. It is easily the most fun I have had making photos in 25 years, and that is saying an awful lot. I have used lots and lots of cameras, in many different environments. I think the only other camera that is as fun is the Mamiya 7, and for a while, the 5D when I began using it. But after a while, the technology part of the dslr experience began to wear, the unreliable autofocus, the awful viewfinder, the feeling of separation from the basic exposure controls, dlsr’s just do what they want to do mostly, and you have to work overtime to wrest control back.

So where does this leave us? The podiatrist photo? Yes, it begins to make sense now. The review contained two pictures of store windows, neon signs each, one an Apple, the other the aforementioned foot, and a school exterior and a BMW, presumably the reviewers car. I guess that shows some affection for German technology?

Desultory would be an accurate description of the photos, boring, closer. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to not have at least tried to make decent photographs while using this camera. Perhaps the feet were sore and the podiatrist was calling? If that is the case, my sympathy, sore feet, painful bunions or perhaps a nasty case of athlete’s foot definitely needs more attention.

I think this was a case of what users of Apple computers have come to know as “a Dvorak” which is a kind of provocative “journalism” practiced by John C. Dvorak in PCmag.com in which the idea is to write something so wrong-headed, so hairbrained, or just plain stupid about Apple computers, and then sit back to watch the fallout. It makes for hits on one’s website, for sure but not respect. An awful lot of words to step around ‘meh, I don’t get it.

This is going to have to be an abbreviated part two since I am off to Berlin for the rest of the week. Achtung! While I am still enjoying doing most of my work in Lightroom, there are several major annoyances, real limitations that I want to explore. It goes back to Mode Mania, what I described last time as a decision on the part of the engineers to implement features in sets instead of as tools. It is as if there was this big flowchart at Adobe, and on the flowchart was “The Workflow”, and woe be it to the user who wants to use a tool outside of it’s place in the workflow. Here is an example of what I mean.

See the picture up top? On the left is Lightroom in Survey Mode. You want me to explain what Survey Mode is? Sorry, I can’t do that. I am sure there is some part of a photographers workflow where you want to plod image by image comparing one against the other to find the best shot, what Aperture calls the “pick.” For comparison I have included the Aperture screenshot of a similar mode, actually, I don’t know if it is a mode or not. It is just a discontinuous selection of images, I just command-clicked on four images from the film strip and they display, rearranging to fill the available space. It is pretty simple really, a discontinuous selection. Can Lightroom do that? Nope. You see, they invented this “mode” where you are supposed to do that, if you pick any number of images, and hit N I go into Survey mode, and the little X’s that you might not be able to see, that is how you get rid of an image in the mode.

Well lets go into how many ways this is silly. Why not just use command-click to choose any number of images as Aperture does, and indeed, the entire OS for that matter, if you want to pick a random assortment of anything, you command-click, or shift-click if the choice is continuous. So what does the “N” give you in lightroom? It gives you the “X’s. That’s all. So when you click the “X”, what does that do? It just deselects the picture from the survey. So now we have two keys, N, and X, all to do what we already know how to do with command-click. At first I was hesitant to click the X, because, what does that do? Does it reject the picture, or send it somewhere where I don’t know where it is? But no, it is fairly benign, mainly because it does nothing. But the point is, the behaviour is uncertain, and it goes outside the familiar vocabulary of the OS to do what the OS already does.

There is also a compare mode, where you can see two-up at a time. You can arrow-key through subsequent images to compare, and then swap any new image for the “select”. It is pretty crude next to the Aperture implementation, I think largely because the stacking feature was added late in the development game, and really it is the stacking feature that is limiting.

Stacks in Aperture-you can even stack other crap like contact sheets…

What Aperture gets right is the display of groups of images, stacks have space between them and are discrete, in LR, the grid of photos is never broken, so stacks only look distinct by a shaded border, that is easily lost. A “select” is not anything to LR, just a mode feature that goes nowhere. I can promote an image to be at the top of the stack by pressing shift-S, but this is not the same as making it the “select” in the stack. Why this is, I have no idea. Virtual copies is another LR feature that was added late I believe, and it suffers from mode-itis as well. You can only create a virtual copy from within the Library mode. In Develop, the option is gone. You CAN create a snapshot, a Photoshop term for how a file looks at a particular state in its edit history, a great idea, but these are two features that are really one, a virtual copy would do the same, assuming you could make one in Develop.

Stacks in Lightroom. Can you find them, one is open, another is closed…I highlighted the closed one. Too easy.
There are other weird inconsistencies in LR also, another is in the grid and loupe modes of the Library. Why it is called loupe, again, I have no idea. It is just one image from the library, and not a magnified view necessarily. But when you are syncing metadata, you can only do it in the grid view, despite the fact that you have filmstrip view at the bottom from which you could select a number of images. So you have to switch into grid view to do that. Over and over again, I find myself switching modes, all with different shortcuts, E, G, N, D, etc., they are easy to remember, but they seem to compensate for engineers forgetting how to create a toolset that simply operates across the program. If I can see one image or five or five thousand, what does that mean in terms of what I want to do at a particular point? My answer is that it means nothing, and task-based metaphors for programs are, in my opinion, a poor way to design a program.

Next time

Next time I will talk about LR’s metadata editing and syncing capabilities. You migh see where it is going. Yes there are too many buttons to press.

Since Aperture does not at the moment support the Leica M8, except by hacking the raw preferences, I have been “living in Lightroom” for the past month on New York Times assignments and in my personal work. I have some preliminary opinions about the two program’s strengths and weaknesses.

While the comparison is inevitable, I think at the core the two programs are essentially different beasts, designed with very different photographers in mind. The other interesting thing is that Lightroom went through a very public beta process to refine its feature set and functionality, and I believe that has had a tremendous positive benefit for the end product. Aperture is a very Apple-like product, a sort of take-it-or-leave-it approach, although the 1.5 update did address some of the most basic user issues like the library-package concept.

What follows is a very haphazard review:)

The Digital Darkroom-remember that Grandpa?

I poke fun at that phrase, the “digital darkroom” because it already seems anachronistic. Who talks about the digital darkroom anymore, meaning, who references the idea of a darkroom at all when it comes to photography? Photography has become so entwined with the computer that the two are inseparable now. I went to a birthday party last week in Williamsburg and in the loft space was a fully functional darkroom with slop sink and aristo cold light head, etc, and it was something of a marvel, the idea of the hand process. I don’t mean to be facetious about it, but my point is how Lightroom references the darkroom analogy, there is the “Develop” module and the “Print” module, the breaking down of photographer tasks according to this traditional workflow. Yes, they have added the “Library” module and “Slideshow” and “Web” but the core is “Develop.”

I feel Lightroom was conceived around the idea of photographer as artist and printmaker, and this is very strong in the program. The ease with which you can toggle between working on an image and printing an image is going to make the Ink and Paper manufacturers very rich! Never before have I spilled so much ink just looking at what I have shot, and mainly because it is easy. Lightroom fixes what is horribly broken in the Mac OS-printing-through the simple capability of actually REMEMBERING your print settings! In this is makes Aperture look like a joke, but really what it does is highlight the differences between the two programs. Aperture is better at handling “Gig-age” I believe is the term, masses and masses of images. It is not so good at loving one image however, as the printing is very basic, just as busted as in the rest of the OS, and inflexible. I do suspect the challenge of Lightroom will force Apple to pay more attention to printing, I hope anyway, because right now it is impossible to print in Aperture. Want me to enumerate the issues? I will.

• Whatever scaling algorithm Apple is using to produce contact sheets creates mashed potatoes out of thumbnails-mushy unsharp and useless to edit
• It’s handling of borderless paper options makes the fatal assumption that borderless printing is about printing to the border, and not simply the ability to use the entire paper surface. What if I want to align an image to one or more sides? Can’t be done. What if I need to print a gloss overspray right to the edge of the paper on the Epson R1800 but NOT print the image all the way-Can’t be done. Apple assumes borderless means full bleed and disables the margin settings when you make that paper selection
• Forgetfullness-just as in the rest of the OS, YSMV or Your Settings May Vary. You undoubtedly know what I mean here. Each and every time you print you need to physically set each parameter or who knows, it might, or it might not remember. Lots of wasted paper!

What does Lightroom do right?

• It’s layout options are innumerable and flexible and intuitive and splendiferous! You can put an image on paper just about anyway you can imagine, and then save that setting and it just works.
• Print sharpening. A very nice option.
• Elephant memory. Set it and forget it as Ron Popeil says!

Artists Gotta Get Paid

There are many other things that Lightroom gets right, features that ought to be in Aperture but are not. For example, it’s implementation of contrast masking with “Fill Light” and “Recover” is very very good, and it makes the “Highlight/Shadow” tool in Aperture look bad. While the Shadow part tends to work properly most of the the time, Highlight rarely does what it is supposed to, and creates halos regardless of the settings. So it never gets used. Usually I have to reduce the Boost, lower the Exposure and increase the Brightness to accomplish the same task. Award to Lightroom.

Lightroom’s curves implementation pays hommage to Photoshop’s Curves dialogue box, and goes one better by adding intuitive sliders if you need them. I just drag the curve, but for those not comfortable with Curves, it is very powerful. Also the interactive Histogram is shockingly effective, if you have not tried it, just drag around in the histogram and you’ll wonder how did they come up with that? I don’t use it but it is Freaky!

In contrast, Aperture’s Levels settings are not very useful, and I would like to see them scrapped for a Curves-like interface. Capture One manages to get it right (about the only thing) they have combined Curves and Levels into one and it is the most effective of all.

But back to getting paid. Here is another core difference between Aperture and Lightroom, the image management features. And it goes back to the different views that each program took towards the role of photographer. Lightroom as I have said views the photographer more as an image maker and printmaker, furnishing the ability to love just one image lovingly. I love it. Where it falls down is in its ability to wrangle a thousand images. And this is where Aperture stands alone. Artists gotta get paid, and Aperture excels in this arena, the importing, sorting, metadata, stacking, and output of many images.

In order to understand the differences I think it is relevant to talk about the beta process Lightroom emerged from. I think Lightroom suffers from what you could call beta-feature-request-itis, in that its workflow is extremely fractured into modes or “modules” all with discrete features that don’t operate universally across the entire program. The interface is littered with customization options which are a direct result of “feeback” from users during the beta process, and in my opinion this is what is essentially wrong with Lightroom, and where Apple excels in my mind. Aperture gives you a set of tools and then leaves you alone to decide how and where to use them. You can be in any “module” and use any tool because essentially there are no modes to the Aperture workflow. I can be sorting AND tweaking images without bouncing back and forth between “Library” and “Develop” as you do in Lightroom. Adobe even concedes this is a problem by its incorporation of the redundant and useless “Quick Develop” controls in the Library. The idea here is that when you are sorting and ranking it helps sometimes to see proper exposure for example to decide if you like the image or not. In Aperture I can be in full screen mode and have the adjustment HUD up to one side, I can do two things at once. In Lightroom, well, let me count the keystrokes to get there, I am in Library, so it is “E” for Loupe view, which is how you see just one image solo, then it is “Tab” or Shift-Tab” depending to hide the pallets, and then “L” twice for Lights Out mode, evidently you need to punch the guy in the nose twice to knock him out…and then what if I want to brighten an image I am ranking or keywording-can’t do it, it’s L-L-TAB back again. Lightroom only allows you to do certain things in certain modes or Modules, I call it MODE-MANIA and it is a servere limitation of the program. By the way, the shortcut in Aperture to do the same thing-F-from anywhere to anywhere, F is fullscreen, and the adjustments are available by typing H. That is it.

Organizational Tools

I know Aperture created a lot of confusion at first by it’s handling of organization, but there is method in the madness. Aperture has Projects which are the top level organizational tool. A project can contain anything you can create in Aperture, smart albums, books, web pages, subfolders, etc. It is not a folder but it acts like one, which is where the confusion sets in because you can create folders in Aperture but they are not real folders like in the Finder. And just to further confuse, you can create a Project of referenced images that reside in a real folder on the Finder, and the two share the same name. But, and this is a big but, it works. I think where it works best is with the working photographer model, someone who has jobs and clients and projects, and they are discrete entities. I have never put images into the Library directly. Had I had an archive of images for Stock for example, those could have gone into the mass Library, to be sorted later with smart albums or folders or projects.

Contrast the flexibility of the Aperture tools with Lightroom and you begin to suspect the Library module was bolted on at the last minute. There is a library level but no tools to sort it directly. You can have folders to organize images much like the projects of Aperture. And you can have Collections which are virtual organizations of images. But the Collections don’t integrate with the folders. Lightroom wants you to put everything in the library I believe and then create Collections out of that. Folders seem to be an afterthought. And there is no way to save web views, or slideshows inside of folders or collections that I have discovered. In other words you can’t have two different web galleries of the same set of images in a collection, in the same way you can have unlimited web galleries contained inside a project in Aperture.

My opinion is that the differences in the two methods of organization reflect the differing software developments modes more than anything. Apple came out of the gate with a definite strong statement-a monolithic library structure and a complete set of tools to slice and dice the data. Some complained that it was too strong, and through a lot of complaining, the 1.5 version allowed referenced images.

The beta process of Lightroom left it with a really wishy-washy implementation of Digital Asset Management, and no strong idea of what it is or how to do it. It really needs improvement.

The Conversions

I am going to say little about the conversions since I cannot compare the Leica conversions between the two programs since Aperture does not support the M8. And I have not put any Canon 5D files into Lightroom to see how they compare. My feelings on this however are that I am mostly agnostic about the results, because I see that I can get the same results out of almost all raw converters, and I can get different results too. For most of my work any one program would do fine and it is more important to be comfortable with the tools and features than to pixel-peep at conversions on screen. There are edge cases where one converter or another will yield better results, so they need to be in the arsenal, but overall a web jpeg is a web jpeg, and printed output has more to do with what inkjets do to paper and good profiles than anything else.

Conclusions

I would like to write more about the two programs since they are so similar yet so fundamentally different. Perhaps in a week or so after a few more jobs I can talk about some other workflow issues like Aperture’s implementation of lift and stamp, and Lightroom’s synchronize function, which I am keen to try more. There is also something I would like to say about black and white conversions in Lightroom vs. Aperture and Raw Developer, akin to different developers. For now just say that Lightroom is D76 to Aperture’s HC110B to Raw Developer’s Acufine, or something like that. Finally some pixel-peeping examples might show up too.

One week, and a half a dozen jobs later and these are the thoughts that I have had regarding the Leica M8. I really wanted to write a great review complete with lots of pixel-peeping pictures showing the M8 compared to the 5D, MkIIds, maybe throw in a disc camera for fun, but I don’t have time for that. Honestly, most of the difference comes down to different raw converters, you can make it look good or bad, depending. And it depends on what your expectations are. I’d say the comparison to the MkIIds is a little unfair, as there is about a 40% advantage in pure pixels, but you do see the difference in glass, that comes across in every image.  But the 5D is a fair comparison, they are very similar but very different.

The Good

If Canon could make a dslr with a simple shutter dial, an aperture wheel, an iso button and and real focusing groundglass they would make a mint. Oh, wait, they are already making a mint. I feel sad that I pushed my new F1 across the table at adorama three years ago for the 10D, which, while it is a great camera of it’s day, holds little romance compared to the F1. It seems like Canon has forgotten so many things while on their way to discovering new things. Like face recognition technology, who needs that-well, if you can’t focus the camera accurately, I guess you do. I don’t understand how we can have 150 years of photo history where cameras were manually focused and have it entirely thrown out in 5 years in favour of autofocus with no recourse. And before you say it, my eyesight is good enough.

So what does the Leica do so well? The viewfinder the viewfinder the viewfinder. Repeat after me, if you can’t see it you can’t shoot it. Or actually you can because the 5D is designed not to be looked through, I swear. It does a fine job, in fact a better job if you just leave it alone to its own calculations. I rented the 85 1.2L and used it wide open, and it is impossible to manually focus accurately, unless you are right on top of that something.

There is a trend here where it seems like the technologists have looked at all the pictures already made, all the “good” ones if you will, and decided, that is what we should do, make “good” pictures, like the ones we have already seen. So if in fact, you might want to deviate from that, say, use the 85mm for something other than a headshot in natural light, give it a try, you won’t come close. Not unless you fire up the strobe and turn the autofocus on and let the camera make all the decisions. So you are back to making “good” pictures.

Oh I have not spoken about the Leica yet. You camera manufacturers should know, it was a hit with the twenty-somethings at a recent job/party I photographed for the NY times. Everyone knew about it, there was lots of geek lust in air. Could it be a certain romance lacking from other more commoditized camera offerings? I think that is part of it. I think another part is like the resurgence in Vinyl recordings. I know, I am late to the party here. But said twenty-somethings all knew the mantra-vinyl is “warmer”. Analog is alive a well it seems.

Sure, you can cram more “features” into a camera, and here I will allow, image stabilization, while it makes me sea-sick looking through the viewfinder (silly me, I should not be looking right? what is the point?) it really does work. So this is the new paradigm. Canon will show at PMA a camera with enough pixels, say 15mp, that goes to ELEVEN, er, I mean shoots at an effective ISO of 12,800, or in other words, six stops over tri-X, and at that point, who cares what the lens is, you can have a lens that only goes to 5.6 and with image stabilization and 12,800 ISO, you can basically shoot under half a candle light. So go find me a half candle. And everything else we fix in software. This is where we are headed.

Oh I still have not spoken about the Leica yet. That is because it represents something that is rapidly being lost-hell it was lost even before it began. Most photographers abandoned rangefinders in the late 60’s, except a few artists and journalists. But the bulk went over to SLR’s, and Medium Format long ago. Just a few crazies left working with Leica, some Magnum types, and of course, Doctors and Dentists.

The concept is so patently simple it is a shock to those who are not familiar with it. It goes like this: What you see is all a lie, it just depends on which lie you like to operate under. In a SLR, everything you see with shallow focus, but probably outside, everything you shoot is in focus. In a rangefinder, everything you see is in focus, but really only part of it is, the rest is out of focus, depending. So either way, you are left imagining, what will the picture look like? I find it easier to anticipate the elimination of things mentally, rather than anticipate the inclusion of things mentally, get it? But it is the same either way. Think of the rangefinder as driving a car, you see everything, left and right, and you steer it. Think of the SLR as a dream state, inside a tunnel, with everything hazy and indistinct.

Am I supposed to talk about image quality? Yes it is good enough. I bet even a good quality 10mp point and shoot can do as well on a sunny day. Everything over 6mp is good enough at average sizes. But with the M8 you can do what you could not with a film based Leica, and that is print much bigger without it falling apart. 20×24 is about the limit for 35mm film, even then, it is falling apart, becoming air so to speak. But it is nice air, no doubt. Digital is another thing entirely, and I can see 30×40 and maybe, perhaps, 40×60, obviously not that tight, but very good depending on ISO. So you essentially get two cameras, a 35mm available light machine, and a medium format on-the tripod machine, in one.

I will honestly try to post a review, I do promise. Also, an appreciation of Aperture vs. Lightroom, since I am forced to use Lightroom because Aperture does not yet (exactly ) support the M8, except via a hack. And also Raw Developer, which is very very good, and makes gorgeous black and white. Don’t get me started on Capture One…

Hahmemüle on the left and Agfa on the right. You can see the cotton rag underpinnings of the Hanny on the left, the slight weave pattern, the texture. I guess this is “pearl” after all. And on the right, ah, the liquid smoothness that is an air-dried glossy gelatin paper. Certainly better than that Innova crap, but still lacking. Hundred bucks a box for 50 letter sheets-sheesh guys, Portriga was never that expensive!
At least they included a fine profile for my R1800 on their website-something that Innova has not got round to do. I have to say, “its not bad” overall, I guess it depends on what you like, it’s still “granular” to me, still too regular, too “manufactured.”
Maybe it never will be the same, the problems are different. Pigments need a microporous surface to accept the ink. In theory, a gelatin paper could be made for dye inks, but there is a drying issue, they take a long time to dry, in fact, they may never dry totally. So they are very unstable. HP and Canon seem to be sticking to the dye bandwagon, maybe it is time to jump ship?

Here is another take on that:
Reflections on Recent Digital Paper Offerings.webloc