Blog - My Soapbox
It's official, we're going to Tibet in 2013 and you can join!
I wanted you to find out first-hand: we're going back to Tibet in 2013 and we will again take a group of photographers! The adventures in 2009, 2010 and 2011 have changed my life. This is your chance to experience this too.
This will be the fourth Himalayan Workshop, and believe me, you'll learn lots - lots about photography and a lot about the Nepali and Tibetan culture.
It's a wonderful experience that you will remember for the rest of your life! It is also a photo workshop.
» find out more at www.himalayanworkshops.com
PocketChris Light Meter is ready!
It's here, it's here! The PocketChris Incident Light Meter iPhone App has been approved and is available at the App Store.
It'll let you use your camera and a grey card to do what you usually need an expensive incident light meter for: metering in difficult light situations. Like a pro. Check it out!
An idea is born - PocketChris Incident Light Meter
Good metering is essential for good photography. So are good composition, good storytelling and good colours. But metering is above everything else for me. Photography is painting with light and if you don't know how to capture light, your photography will always be down to a hit-and-miss approach, always at the mercy of what the computer in your camera thinks is right (trust me, it's more often wrong than you think).
I've been pretty fed up with the trial-and-error approach of digital photography for quite some time. Take a shot, look at the display. Is it
too dark? Change the exposure, take another shot. Check the histogram. Is it too bright? Change the exposure, take another shot. Rinse, repeat.What has happened to understanding light and getting exposure right from the start?
You know me. I'm all about giving control back to the photographer. I'm all about busting photographic myths. And most important, I'm all about empowering photographers through knowledge.
Let's look at a few facts:
Fact 1: using an incident light meter will make it easy to get near perfect exposures. It does that by integrating the light that hits your subject from different directions.
Fact 2: an incident light meter will easily set you back $300 or more.
Fact 3 (and this is a lesser known fact): You can use an 18% grey card (cost: about $10) and some nifty math to achieve virtually the same results. All you have to do: take a couple of measurements with your camera and do some math.
It's interesting though how I ended up at this realisation.
It all started several years ago, when I got my first grey card. An 18% grey card. It turned out that in addition to helping me get great white balance, the card will also help me with getting exposure right.
For the last two years I've been handing out grey cards at workshops, helping photographers understand how this simple tool can take their photography to the next level.
Last month I spent a weekend at After Dark in Kansas City, a photography event that you have to experience to believe. It turned out to be a highly creative exercise while also allowing me to work in studio and available light environments with other photographers for three days straight. Wonderfully Immersive! And in the process, I ended up finally buying a light (and flash) meter. A Sekonic L-358. It set me back $300.
But I knew that in order to get to the next step, I had to make an investment.
Later that night, I sat in my hotel room, with the light meter, a grey card, and my DSLR and I did the first experiments, comparing the measurements from my DSLR with those from the light meter. I ended up spending the next 3 hours far into the small hours of the morning, shooting tests, comparing results, spot metering with my DSLR, doing math, with sheets of paper and a spreadsheet on my computer. Imagine a mad scientist and you're not far off :)
Once back in Germany I continued the tests, and after a few days with some more experimentation, I ended up with some solid math that worked well.
Now all I needed to do is make it simple for the photographers, and this is where my experiments with iOS development in 2011 and the experience with PocketChris came in handy. So I sat down and put it all together in an iPhone app: PocketChris Incident Light Meter.
The app is now in review at the app store and should hit the shelves within the next week.
You can find out more at www.incidentmeter.com.
Links: After Dark
An Incredibly Organic Process - Video from the Toronto 2012 4x5 Large Format Workshop
I didn't expect this workshop to sell out, but it did so, and pretty quickly too. I had such a wonderful time, and judging from the feedback, so did the participants. Here's the official workshop video:
Photo Day LIVE on August 18 2pm Pacific
It's another Photo Day and Chris has made his way up to the TWiT Brick House in Petaluma to talk photography with Leo Laporte and his guests!
The theme for this Photo Day is Photography outside the mainstream.
Among many other topics, Chris will hang out in studio to talk with Leo and his guests to talk about the origins of Tilt/Shift, taking pictures from kites, digging up 1850s photo technology to create true works of arts and - of course - he'll answer your questions!
Guests include Leo Laporte (Chief TWiT), Cris Benton (Kite Aerial Photography), Paul Sergeant (Tintype Studio) and Susan and Neil Silverman (travel photographers extraordinaire).
Tune in Saturday August 18, 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 23:00 Central European time!
Follow the show live at http://live.twit.tv/
Ask audience questions via Twitter (hashtag #photoday2012) or at http://tfttf.com/photodayquestion
4x5 Woes: Mills, Birds And A Leak
You know, one of the most satisfying things for me these days is to spend a day at an interesting location and take six or twelve pictures with a 4x5 large format camera.
It's hard work. It means to carry a heavy-ish bag over your shoulder and a tripod with a big camera attached to its end. It means to thoroughly set up the camera, check the angles, open the shutter, stick your head under a black cloth on a sunny day with
temperatures in the 90s. To focus on the focusing screen, you use a loupe that's hanging around your neck. It means to use a hand-held light meter, fish a film cassette out of your bag, load the camera, set the aperture, set the shutter speed, hope that you didn't get any of the steps out of sequence, pull out the dark slide and finally take the shot.It's error-prone too. It means that there are at least 10 different steps in the process of making one exposure where you can mess up. Accidental double exposure? Been there, have even done a triple exposure once. Forget to set the right aperture after metering? Yep, I have my share of overexposed large format negatives.
If it's that hard work and that error-prone, then why am I doing it? The answer is simple: in the end it's one of the most fun and rewarding experiences that I've had in a long time. Nothing beats creating something with your own hands and finally holding the result of that work in your hands. Or post it online for the world to see. Much more rewarding than any digital shot has ever been.
Over time you get better. Most errors you only do once, as it hurts to lose one out of just a few pictures you'll take that day.
Last weekend I brought my trusty Grafmatic film holder system, a revolver-type 6-shooter that allows you to keep 6 shots in one magazine. Very convenient, but also heavier than normal double cassettes. Which turned into yet another source of error. I accidentally brushed the Grafmatic at the wrong angle with my arm, while the dark slide was still pulled. This resulted in a nice big splash of light pouring onto the exposed negative for a brief time. Long enough to ruin the shot. So I thought.
I ended up actually being quite happy with it. Is it because it's one of my babies? Or is there something about a perfect 4x5 picture seemingly ruined by light leaking onto it?
Let me know what you think.
Here's another picture of the same day. And another one.
The kind of HYBRID stuff we do on the weekends
Dear Tokyo Shangri-La Hotel - I Dont Have A Budget Either
Dear Shangri-La Hotel in Tokyo,when I received a Flickr mail from your Digital Marketing Manager I was positively surprised. He wrote about how they did a guest chef event at their hotel, how the guest chef was from Firenze (aka Florence in Tuscany, Italy), how he liked my Tuscany pictures on Flickr and how they would like to create a facebook album with a Tuscany theme, which my pictures would be a perfect fit for and if they could use my work in return for links and credit.
In general I'm not at all opposed to these sort of deals, I believe that there are a lot of occasions where both sides benefit from them. I've done my share of pro bono work and I keep doing it as long as it feels right to both sides. I trust my gut.
However, if the commercial interest on one side is fairly clear to me, I believe I have the moral right to ask for compensation.
So I replied to the Tokoy Shangri-La Hotel Digital Marketing Manager and told him that photography is what I do for a living and that therefore I couldn't just give the pictures away for free.
From here this could have gone several ways. The Tokyo Shangri-La Hotel could have made me an offer, or they could have declined.
They did the latter, but their reasoning really surprised me. The reply I received concluded with "We very much appreciate your offer, however, unfortunately we don't have a budget for this event."
Wait. Say that again. "…we don't have a budget for this event…" - No budget for the event? Really? Does that mean you can't pay the guest chef? And the waiters? And the kitchen staff? How about the sommelier? And the Maitre D'? No budget…
Luckily I did have a budget when I bought the camera and the lenses that I took these pictures with, when I spent years of my life training my eyes and gathering the experience that allowed me to take these pictures, when I bought the computer that I post-processed the pictures on, when I bought the software that I used to post-process the pictures with, when I bought the colorimeter to calibrate my computer's screen so the colors of the pictures would look pleasing, when I paid for my Flickr pro account that allowed me to host these pictures online, so you could easily find them and ask me if I would give you my photography for free.
Sorry, Shangri-La Hotel in Tokyo, but sometimes little things like this make me get up on my soapbox.
PS: when I come to Tokyo in January 2013, could I stay at your place for free for a few nights? I don't have a budget for a hotel and I believe you've got those rooms around anyway...
Wir sind Hummel, oder: 4 Blendenstufen Push sind Pillepalle
Es gibt Workshops und es gibt Workshops. Im Fall der aktuellen Absolut-Analog-Veranstaltung in unseren neuen Räumen in Tübingen, war es ganz klar einer der spezielleren. Und das im positiven Sinne. Mit Begeisterung und Spaß haben sich die Teilnehmer den unwirtlichen Lichtbedingungen gestellt, vor die wir sie geschubst haben und was dabei raus kam, seht ihr hier.
Der Push
Am Anfang zum Aufwärmen und dran gewöhnen haben wir erst mal mit einem Push über 2 Blendenstufen angefangen. Standardprozedur, nix wildes. Nur wer meinte, der Push wäre nur zum "heller machen" da oder zum verkürzen der Belichtungszeiten in dunklen Situationen, der durfte sich dann über die ungewohnte Kontrastausbeute freuen. Bei prallem Sonnenlicht. Steffens Klappfalter war da dann sogar etwas überfordert, weil er keine tausendstel Sekunde konnte. Ergebnis: herrlichste Kontraste im prallsten Licht.
2-Stufen-Push (Alex)
Die Hummel
An dieser Stelle kurz die Anekdote mit der Hummel. Aerodynamiker haben dereinst behauptet, die Hummel könne aus physikalischer Sicht nicht
fliegen. Verhältnis Körpergröße und Gewicht zu Flügelfläche oder so. Die Hummel hat nun mal leider von Aerodynamik so ziemlich überhaupt keine Ahnung und darum schlägt sie einfach mit den Flügeln und … fliegt.Der Pull
Phase zwei - wir nennen sie jetzt einfach mal die Hummel-Phase - ist die mit dem Pull über drei Stufen. Also die Behandlung eines ISO-400-Films als hätte er ISO 50. Ausgeschrieben ist das die 8-fache Menge an Licht, die er eigentlich bekommen soll. In manch einem Online-Forum liest man, dass das nicht geht. Auch die Ausbeute an Entwicklungsrezepten, die man für diesen doch eher ungewöhnlichen Fall online so findet, ist so gering, dass man fast meinen möchte, es ginge tatsächlich nicht.
3-Stufen-Pull (Alex)
Aber wir waren einfach mal ganz Hummel, haben uns nicht verunsichern lassen, und die Ergebnisse sprechen tatsächlich deutlich für sich. In diesem Fall war das ein T-Max 400 in D-76, 1:1, 7min20sek bei 20°C.
Es geht halt doch, und zur Belohnung für den Ungehorsam bekamen die Fotografen dann herrlichste Grauverläufe mit extrem viel Detail und einem Kontrastumfang, der seinesgleichen sucht. Gut gemacht!
Was gelernt
Und auch wir selbst lernen jedes mal noch etwas dazu. In diesem Fall hatte ich (Chris) mir eine sehr kontrastreiche Situation (Innenraum mit Fenster und sonnenbeleuchteter Umgebung außen) geschnappt und eine Belichtungsreihe mit sieben Belichtungen mit je einer Blendenstufe Unterschied gemacht. Was am Ende hinten raus kam, hat selbst mich verblüfft.
Bild 1: 1/1000s, Bild 2: 1/15s
Die Ausarbeitung der Bilder wurde am Ende zwar noch minimal angepasst, aber alleine die Tatsache, dass der Film bei diesem 3-Stufen-Pull locker - und ohne irgendwo Zeichnung zu verlieren - diese sieben Blendenstufen breite Belichtungsspanne einfach so ohne zu murren wegsteckt, hat sogar mich weggehauen. Zieht man noch den gesamten Kontrastumfang der Szene in Betracht, dann wird hier eine Breite an Tonwerten erfasst, die fast unmöglich erscheint. Ich werde ab jetzt garantiert noch öfter Pullen. HDR? Wer braucht das? :)
Der Nachbrenner
Am Abend haben wir dann Phase 3 unseres gerissenen Plans gestartet und unter den Teilnehmern den Pushwettbewerb losgetreten. Zur blauen Stunde und zur tiefen Nacht. Wieviele Blendenstufen verträgt so ein TriX oder T-Max 400 wohl?
TriX 400 @ 1600 (Moni)
TriX 400 @ 1600 (Moni)
Gut, 1600 laufen also. Wie sieht es mit 3200 aus?
TriX 400 @ 3200 (Steffen)
TriX 400 @ 3200 (Steffen)
ISO 3200 wird also schon etwas knackiger, aber hat dadurch natürlich auch eine entsprechende Wirkung, der man sich schlecht entziehen kann.
Wollen wir noch eins drauf legen? ISO 6400 - Herrrrrrrrschaften! Der Push über 4 Stufen - ohne Netz und doppelten Boden! Jetzt nur für Sie in dieser Manege! Trommelwirbel… *drrrrrrrr*
T-Max 400 @ 6400 (Alex)
Och, wer sagt's denn. War doch gar nicht so schlimm. Sogar Graustufen haben wir noch einige. Die Hummel fliegt, und das ganz schön hoch.
Salto mortale
An diesem Punkt könnten wir uns nun eigentlich bequem zurück lehnen und den Workshop zum vollen Erfolg deklarieren. Push und Pull in vielen Extremfällen erfolgreich abgeschlossen, kein einziges Bild des gesamten Workshops kam auch nur annähernd schlecht aus der Suppe und es gab für alle Teilnehmer reichlich Erfolgserlebnisse.
Eiiiiigentlich wäre es also hiermit vorbei… wäre da nicht Jürgen gewesen, der - ganz Hummel - meinte, die 4 Stufen Push seien ja wohl Pillepalle und sich auf die ISO 12800 stürzte. Zwölftausendachthundert. Wohl gemerkt mit einem Film, der eigentlich für ISO 400 gemacht ist.
T-Max 400 @ 12800 (Jürgen)
Und zu solch einem Ergebnis muss man nun wirklich nicht mehr viele Worte verlieren. Vielleicht auch, weil man etwas sprachlos ist. 5 Blendenstufen, ISO 12800. Ausgeschrieben: ein zweiunddreißigstel des Lichts, das dieser Film eigentlich braucht.
Die Teilnehmer haben ihre kreativen Werkzeugkästchen wieder mit neuen Tools versorgt und wissen nun - nein, sie haben mit eigenen Händen und Augen BEGRIFFEN - dass es außerhalb der gängigen Lehrmeinung noch so einiges gibt, was den Rahmen herrlich (und fast schon subversiv) sprengt und dabei noch richtig glücklich macht.
Leute, wir sind mächtig stolz auf euch!
Chris Marquardt und Monika Andrae veranstalten in der Reihe Absolut Analog Fotoworkshops in Deutschland und in Kanada, die sich der analogen Fotografie mit Film widmen und richten sich an alle, vom Anfänger bis zum fortgeschrittenen Analogfotografen.
Weitere Termine 2012:
14.-15.7.2012: Herrlich Hybrid, Analoges in der digitalen Welt
24.-26.8.2012: Large Format analog, Toronto, Kanada (Sprache: Englisch)
3.-4.11.2012: Einsteigerworkshop, Panschen in Tübingen
Canyonlands 2012 - Landscape Photography Adventure Sep 7-9
» Canyonlands 2012 website
How's THAT for a constraint?
I've lately been in an experimental mood. Experimentation is where I usually cast my caution in the wind and do the things I wouldn't usually do.
Over the weekend, Monika and I held an analog photography workshop here in Tübingen, we were sold out and our group was wonderful! We did a lot of shooting and developments and all was good and fine.
One of the things these workshops do with me is they help me get into that experimental mood and this one was no exception. After the workshop was over on Sunday afternoon, I stayed in the studio to catch up on some office work and tidy up the chemicals and other workshop stuff.
I then decided to take my good old Mamiya 645 with me on my way home. Every sane person would've loaded a roll of TMax 3200 or some similarly sensitive material, but as I said, I was in an experimental mood. So I decided to drop in a roll of Fomapan 100.
As its name suggests, Fomapan 100 is an ISO 100 film. Kinda. I've read somewhere that it is even a bit lower in sensitivity. But that doesn't mean I can't try something weird with it, does it? So I took it to the test, exposing it more in the range of ISO 800 and due to the lack of a light meter I had to wing the exposure, trust my gut.
To add insult to injury, I also didn't have a tripod with me, and it was raining.
With an estimated exposure time of 1 second at f/2.8, the lack of a tripod meant that I had to find places to rest the camera on or against while shooting. Speak of a constraint when it comes to choice of perspective.
But the pictures themselves were just one part of the equation. In the end I also remember quite a few voices that claimed that you can't do a 100 to 800 push with Fomapan 100. What they didn't know is that "you can't do that" is a trigger for me. And it usually evokes the exact opposite reaction from me.
Long story short, I'm extremely pleased with the results. The constraints of using the wrong film, leaving the light meter at home, not having a tripod and having to shoot in the rain allowed (or better: forced) me to take pictures that I wouldn't have taken any other way.
You can see all the pictures here.
What is most remarkable: out of a single roll of 15 shots I liked six (!) pictures enough to post them online. That's a keeper ratio of almost 40 percent. With digital I would've NEVER had a ratio that high.
How about you? Does your choice of medium and the constraints that you shoot under change the percentage of pictures that you like?
Dropping the big camera and the viewfinder
Frog Umbrella by Chris Marquardt
It's not the camera, it's the photographer. We all know that. Do we live it? Not always. Which is why I did a deliberate "lesser photographer" thing.
Where I would usually have the iPhone in my pocket as an emergency or backup camera, this time I made a deliberate decision to go out and shoot with nothing but the iPhone. No big medium format camera. No DSLR. Just the iPhone 4s.
Our creativity strives under constraints. Some of the greatest photography has been made with cameras that some of today's photographers wouldn't even touch with a ten-foot-pole. So I went an extra step and instead of using the iPhone's built-in camera app, I used one that most people would call crippled. Its name is NoFinder and it is pretty much what the title of the app says: a camera without a viewfinder.
Now adding that kind of a restriction might initially sound silly, but it has turned out to be surprisingly good for the creative side of things. Not being able to look through a viewfinder helped me concentrate on the actual scene a lot more than if I had looked through a viewfinder. Pointing the camera without a display also left a certain margin of error, but in the end for many shots that lead to interesting and unusual framing choices that I wouldn't have made with a viewfinder.
Most of those accidental choices of frame weren't that exciting, but then there were a few that I found really interesting. And again: I wouldn't have arrived at them any other way.
The last two constraints that I placed myself under turned out to be pretty much the most beneficial ones: my decision to set the app to only take square pictures and to work in black-and-white only.
The lack of a viewfinder initially made it harder for me to judge the angle of view, but after a few shots it became pretty clear how much would be in the picture. As an added benefit I now have a pretty good idea of the field of view that I can get from the iPhone. I didn't really have that angle visualized before.
And in the end that's how Frog Umbrella came into existence. Being able to see the entire scene with my two eyes, I could watch the umbrella kid walking away from the building and while it was doing so, I fired three shots while trying to anticipate the framing.
And the third shot was the charm. That's my kind of picture - everything fits nicely, the frog's eyes are doubled in the building, every element in the photo feels like it belongs exactly where I put it. I'll be happy when I bring home one single picture like this every time I go out shooting. I'm still working on that.
» Frog Umbrella on Flickr (leave a comment)
Changing the Laws of Physics
I just ran across another blog article that asked the question if mobile phones would take over in the long run and overthrow all other cameras because the sensor technology and the fact that you tend to have one with you all the time.
I'm not so sure for a two main reasons.
1. Control. Cameras tend to get better and better, but even the best automated decisions will not necessarily reflect your intentions.
An example: think about a backlit portrait. Without built-in intelligence, the camera's light meter will
tell the camera that there's a lot of light and the image that comes out is likely to be a silhouette of a person. Most cameras nowadays will detect this and compensate for it, resulting in a well-exposed person (and most likely a slightly overexposed background). I guess in most cases that's what the person behind the camera wanted anyway, so it's okay.But how about the times when a photographer intended to produce the silhouette picture but didn't have a way to tell the camera that that's what they wanted?
The way the current mobile phone cameras look, it's very hard for me to believe that they will get to this level of control any time soon.
2. Sensor size. Different sensor sizes result in different depths of field (DOF) and control over DOF is a very important tool for most photographers.
In-focus and out-of-focus areas in a picture are one out of a whole array of essential tools for photographers when it comes to telling a story in a picture. Focus will show or hide things, focus will help you guide the viewer's eyes through a picture.
Smaller sensors make it very hard to control DOF. Everything tends to be in focus. Bigger sensors make it easier to control DOF. A photographer can place focus where it's important. And as things look right now, mobile phone cameras are pretty unlikely to get larger camera sensors.
Even if mobile phone cameras got larger sensors, that would mean that the lenses needed to be bigger and further away from the sensors, adding bulk and size. Very unlikely.
Will newer technologies and computational photography replace the need for bigger sensors in the future?
Who knows, but at this point in time, even the Raytrix and Lytro cameras cannot do their job without a certain level of bulk, and the results are by far not where they'd need to be.
What do you think? Are we going to see DSLRs disappear any time soon?
Do We Still Need Photoshop?
The Hoopla
With Creative Suite 5.5 Adobe is introducing a new subscription pricing model. For many professionals this is a welcome way to spread out the cost for the software over a year instead of having to do the big upfront payment for the software.
Customers can still buy individual products or product suites, but you will now also be able opt for a monthly plan. I will mainly look at what this means for photographers and Photoshop. But just as an example, instead of buying the Design Premium Suite for a retail price of $1899, if you commit for a yearly plan, you'll apparently get it for a "rental fee" of $95 per month or $1140 per year. Mind you, this is not
a payment plan, so you won't own the software at the end of the year. Adobe is offering upgrade pricing for those who paid for a year though.As mentioned, you can still buy the products, but as I understand it, as opposed to being able to upgrade from older versions (I believe you could skip up to two versions), with the new pricing model you can't skip versions anymore to get upgrade pricing.
And this seems to be the biggest rub for a lot of people. Enough of a rub that Adobe went ahead and closed (and apparently even removed) the comments on the blog entry where they announced the change.
International
International pricing of Adobe products has always been one of my pet peeves. In Germany and other European countries, prices for Adobe products are dramatically higher than the US prices, in some cases we Europeans get to pay more than a 100% premium for the same software.
Back in 2007 when I interviewed Adobe product manager John Nack I brought it up, but mainly got an evasive answer.
This might also explain why a lot of people on this side of the pond appear to use pirated versions of Adobe's products.
Skipping A Beat
Over the years a lot of photographers have become Photoshop users. Photoshop isn't the most intuitive product - I usually compare it to a huge toolbox full of tools but without a good instruction manual - but it is very powerful and many photographers have taken the effort to learn its intricacies, to adjust their workflow and to master it to a certain degree.
As I said, I'll mainly look at photographers in this article, but this might also be true for small agencies.
While Lightroom has pretty much taken over when it comes to 98% of my pictures, many photographers have spent years and year refining their Photoshop workflows, they have learned tricks and spent time learning from tutorials. The investment not only on the financial side is huge.
But for monetary reasons many individuals and agencies have also had to adopt a model where they would skip a version or two before they upgrade to a higher version. This possibility is now pretty much gone, so my guess is that the sentiment of many Photoshop users is that they are now expected to pay double or triple the amount they used to pay in the past.
What's Great
Not only is Photoshop a powerful tool, it has also created a massive ecosystem of books, trainings, tutorials, video classes and even entire user organizations.
Aside from that ecosystem, let's have a quick look at what makes Photoshop so great.
The thing that intimidates new users most is also one of Photoshop's greatest strengths. It is a collection of hundreds of powerful image manipulation and design tools and if you know how to use them, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it.
Layers, masks and layer modes let you do everything from complicated composites to things as simple as slapping a layer of text to an image. The mix of vectors and pixel graphics and the resulting flexibility is unsurpassed and I love being able to use smart objects to treat pixel graphics almost like vectors.
Profiles allow for a color-managed workflow in pretty much any color space you like and over the years many specialized tools have found their ways into Photoshop, from handling animations to stitching big panoramas to 3D and perspective work.
The plugin model is another part of that ecosystem, with a ton of add-ons available to do virtually anything you can imagine.
What's Troublesome
But its strengths can also be seen as weaknesses. Photoshop tries to be everything for everyone and its user base is so diverse that it is hard to find a common thread. Illustrators use it, it has its applications in the pre-press processes, it has even medical uses and of course there are the photographers.
Because Photoshop wants to be for everyone, it feels like a big piece of patchwork rather than an integrated application.
What I Use Photoshop For
The uses for Photoshop have become less and less over the last years, especially for photographers. One of the main reasons for that change are products like Lightroom or Aperture.
There are still a few areas where I tend to resort to Photoshop. These include simple illustrations that use layers and masks, adding text to images, more complex cloning operations, adding transparency and stitching images.
That's pretty much it. I do everything else in Lightroom.
So, Do We Need Photoshop?
I can only answer that question for myself, and it's pretty much a resounding no at this time. The few uses that Photoshop still has for me are easily covered in the CS4 version that I still own and there are a lot of great alternatives out there that cover a lot of Photoshop's bases.
What Are The Alternatives?
One of the strongest alternatives on the Mac platform at this point is Pixelmator. In its new 2.0 version it supports layers, layer masks, over 100 file formats, plenty of filters, and even some of Photoshop's "killer features" such as content-aware fill. For €23.99 it's a bargain. Is it a full Photoshop replacement? No, but it covers 95% of what I need as a professional. The one item it doesn't have and that's high on my wish list is 16 bit support, but for most of the things I use it, I can live with that. If that's a must for you, I suggest you have a look at PhotoLine. It's not as pretty, runs on Mac and Windows, and it supports 16 bits and more, for a mere €59.
As a Mac user I can cover most of the remaining 5% with the tools that Mac OS X already has on board and I'd be surprised if Windows didn't have similar things on offer. I use the ColorSync Utility to do color space conversions, which includes converting pictures to CMYK, so they are ready for a printing house. Preview, one of the Mac's most underestimated apps, lets me use any ICC profile to soft proof images. And Image Capture (the second most underestimated OS X app) serves as a great front-end to any scanner.
When I got my MacBook Air with its 128 GB SSD, I went through a long software list to decide what I needed on the road and what I could go without. Lightroom made it onto that list, Final Cut Pro X did, Scrivener too, and even Apple's 4 GB heavyweight XCode development environment.
The one thing that I left off the system was Photoshop.
That was half a year ago. So far I haven't really missed it.
We Need Less, Not More
Haven't been up on my soapbox in a while…
I have taught photography to over a thousand of students, among them many really good photographers who often weren't aware why they were great, but I have also been surprised at times as some of the more professional appearing ones weren't even able to do basic things like setting up custom white balance for a specific light situation.
There is a part of me that loves to see all the nifty photo gadgets that brilliant people come up with, but I've also been watching the development
of the camera landscape with a concerned eye.There are a lot of automated sub-systems in our cameras. Focus, exposure and white balance are the important ones among quite a few.
But the smarter these systems seem to get, the more decisions they take away from the photographer, the more the photographers lose the ability to make the right decisions.
I've seen this over and over again this year during the workshops.
It's not the photographers' fault of course. The philosophy of the camera manufacturers is quite understandable: take as many of the complicated photography stuff as possible and make the decision (and set the setting) for the photographer. This way many of the less technically inclined people out there can pick up a camera and quickly get results, which will make them happy, and as a result they will buy more cameras.
The big issue with this approach is that even though the automatic systems get it right most of the time, the camera will never be able to know the photographer's intention. How can the camera know that I'm not at all interested in exposing for the face, but instead I want to show a silhouette? How should the camera know that I actually want this shot to be bluish cool and unfriendly instead of giving it a caribbean sunset white balance? And how should the camera be able to anticipate that I deliberately want to blow out the sky in this picture?
The philosophy of me as the photography trainer is substantially different from that of the manufacturer: if you want to tell a story (and let's face it, a good story is usually what makes a good photograph), you need to make the tools that help you tell that story do the right things. The tool in this case is your camera. And making it do the right thing means to know how to make it expose, focus and white balance in exactly the way you want.
And that's a skill set that more and more photographers have either lost, or they never had the incentive to learn.
Relying on the automatisms of the camera and getting it right 80% of the time might be good enough for many photographers.
I want those remaining 20% to be under my control too.
Don't fly and scan
It happened again. This time not on purpose, but by accident. After returning from Toronto the other day, I decided to develop some of the pictures I took on the trip. Looking through my stacks of stuff, I ran across an older batch of undeveloped negatives, that should have been developed long time ago, but wasn't. Probably too busy back then.
The problem was that I didn't know what type of film the negatives where. To find out, I took the film cassettes into the dark bag and felt the notches. Each sheet of large format negative film has a characteristic pattern of notches on one side that help you to face the film the right way and identify it in the dark.
The problem was that when I tried to detect the type of film, I was too tired, having not slept in over 30 hours, and I got it wrong.
This is why six sheets of Velvia color slide film ended up in black and white development chemistry. But as we know from my experiment a while ago, it should work in theory.
And it did work. I ended up with black and white negatives and there was even something on them. So I scanned one and you can see the result above.
Any photo accidents you'd like to share? Leave a comment!
Red is the New Black
Black and white film has undergone a lot of changes over the years. One of the bigger changes was making it less blind to certain colors.
Colors by Chris Marquardt
Yes, less blind. If you look around you, different colored objects will appear to you at different brightnesses, and you might be able to imagine how the scene looks in black and white, simply by translating the brightnesses into grey levels.
And that's how many black and white films work these days. They try to create a black and white picture that reflects the perceived brightness levels that you see with your eyes.
But originally, black and white film would translate colors very differently.
Look at the visual spectrum. It starts right beyond infrared, goes through red, orange, yellow, green, blue to violet and then disappears into ultraviolet. Infrared and ultraviolet are black to our eyes, simply because we don't have the right receptors to see these colors.
Now imagine a black and white film that can see an even narrower range, film that can only see part of the colors. And that's exactly what black and white film did in the old days. It was blind on the red side of the spectrum, so whenever it saw red light, it would register that as black. We call that an orthochromatic film. Only some time after the 1950s did black and white film become more sensitive to other colors. A film that sees the entire visible spectrum is called a panchromatic film.
Here's a snap I took of the same scene, but this time with a digital camera:
Compare the two and you will notice that the black and white film is very sensitive on the blue side, but it almost doesn't have any sensitivity on the red side of the spectrum. Blue renders almost identical to yellow, and green is somewhere in the middle grey area. In the early days of black and white photography photographers had to learn how to see in black and white to get to the picture they envisioned, and still today a lot of films have their characteristic look that's at least partially based on how the different wavelengths are rendered on a scale from black to white.
Back in the day, art went so far that during early black and white film productions, the actors had to wear bright and colorful make-up so that a normal looking black and white image could be achieved. Imagine an actor with green lipstick to avoid the lips from going all black on the film. These early film sets must have looked very colorful.
Pictures and their stories
I recently posted a bunch of pictures that I took back in the United States in August.
Here are their stories.
Clicking on pictures opens them in a new window.
Let me start with the one picture that is my favorite of the whole bunch. It's Liliana, the daughter of my friend, photographer and parfumeur Douglas Hopkins and I made several pictures while we spent some time during my stay in Washington D.C.
I try my best to treat children with the same respect and at same eye level as I treat anyone else, and I try to carry that into my photography whenever possible. Lili sat on
a structure in front of the Washington Air and Space museum, and when I noticed what the sun and the wind were doing with her hair, I took a few shots. What came out was one of those in-between pictures, where the posing stops and the real emotion happens.
Lili again, at the museum's gift shop, trying on props. This time I deliberately didn't shoot her at eye level, so I could emphasize the huge gap between the little girl and the pilot's gear, making for quite some contrast and fun. The goofy look on her face helped a lot to make this a humorous picture.
This is one of those street shots where I'm really happy that everything has it's place. The guy in the foreground sits very comfortably in the corner, facing outward, which gives him a bit of a lost feeling, and the fact that he's sitting on the curb holding his face, helps a lot in conveying that feeling. I shot several frames while different people walked past, the guy in the background also touching his face was the final winner.
Meet Peter, his friends and his dog. This one I'm very proud of. At first I walked past them, and the stream of thoughts in my mind went a bit like this: "Awesome, three guys in wheelchairs, with a tiny dog, I totally should take a picture of them. But how would you feel sitting in a wheel chair and some stranger asking to take your picture? But it's such a great scene! But I really don't want to hurt anyone's feelings…" and so on. At that point I had long walked past them, but then luckily the urge to get that picture won, I turned around, approached them, asked if they'd mind me taking a picture of them and they said "Oh sure, absolutely!" and I took about 10 shots of them from various angles.
I tried from their eye level, which I felt was the appropriate thing to do, but the busy background (it was at a street festival) didn't work, so I had to revert back to a standing perspective. A bit of tilt on the lens helped guide the attention to the three - and to the dog, wearing an SF Giants jersey.
I come to the United States every year to hold photo workshops. One of them was the Fire & Night workshop in San Francisco. I always wanted to include night photography in the workshops, and adding fire to the mix turned this into a really exciting one! There were a lot of pictures with lots of detail in the flames and great color contrasts between warm and cold, but in the end this is one of my favorites, even though the flame itself is blown out. I love how it shows the raw power of the flame, its strength to light the entire scene, its heat, and the motion of the fire breather juxtaposed with the other guy waiting.
Last but not least, the Fire & Night workshop also took us out to Treasure Island to take pictures of the San Francisco skyline at night - or rather at the blue hour. That term is misleading though, as it actually describes a window of maybe 10 to 15 minutes. It's the time shortly after sunset, where the sky turns a deep blue. We were really lucky to get the fog behind San Francisco lit by the city lights and glow in a bright orange. The color contrast with the sky turned out very dramatic. Initially I was unhappy about the clouds in the sky, but they turned out to add some great drama to the pictures.
Pimp My Cam
There's nothing wrong with the screen that came with the camera in the first place, but I've recently purchased a used 30-year-old Schneider Kreuznach 65mm f/8, which translates to a prety wide angle. The normal focal length for 4x5 is about 160 millimeters. It's a fun lens to work with, but it's also pretty dark.
In the large format world, such a wide angle means that the distance between the center of the lens and the edges of the screen are much longer than the distance between the center of the lens and the center of the screen. And that longer distance translates into an image on the focusing screen that's much darker at the edges. In addition f/8 as the widest open aperture has its challenges too. I guess everything in photography comes with a price tag.
So I did some research, and I repeatedly ended up being pointed towards Maxwell Precision Optics, a small company that among other things has specialized on focusing screens. Smooth and bright focusing screens. We're talking several stops brighter.
And today, after two weeks in German customs, the new screen finally arrived!
Taking the old screen off the wooden holder was only a matter of removing four screws.
The new screen came well protected in lots of bubble-wrap and wrapped in soft paper.
In addition to the screen I had ordered a protective screen with a grid and medium format markers on it. You don't want to trap dust or fluff between the two layers, or it'll annoy the hell out of you. The brush helped a lot there. It is the awesome fluff-off by Spürsinn, which I also very successfully use to take dust off negatives before scanning.
Finally the first tests - lookin' good!
Composed in almost total darkness:
How do you pimp YOUR camera?
When MEH becomes HOLY COW
Group shot, Berlin LIMITED workshop 2011. Photo: Sean Galbraith
Large format photography has the potential to seriously mess with ones mind. The photographer's mind and that of the audience.
For a photographer it is still the most affordable way to get spectacular resolution. The camera movements allow for compositional freedom beyond anything that is
possible in smaller formats. Due to their simpler and much more symmetrical design, the image quality of the lenses is generally superb. And last but not least, the different workflow and the more thorough approach to each individual photograph generally make for more thought-out pictures.The audience reaction to large format pictures is often a different one than to 35mm photography. Due to the higher resolution, the pictures will typically have more detail, which oddly enough tends to be true even when downsized to web resolutions. The large size of the medium (4x5" and higher) results in a very different look and depth of field. And the typical lack of falling lines tends to give even very busy pictures an amount of structure and a tidy appearance that is hard to achieve with smaller formats.
My typical reaction to the higher resolutions used to be: "meh". My impression was that at the sizes typically used on the web, it wouldn't make any difference if the picture was shot with a DSLR or if it was taken with a large format camera.
After having immersed myself in large format photography for a while now, I had to change my previous "meh" into a "HOWLY COW" though. The amount of perceived detail even at smaller resolutions tends to be spectacular.
I should have known about the detail thing from the video side of things though. A very similar effect happens when you downsize HD video footage (1920 x 1080) to SD resolution (544 × 480). The amount of perceived detail is just a lot higher than with native SD footage.
Here's my audio engineer's look at it: sound recordings are often made at a much higher bit-depth (24 bits) and higher resolution (96 kHz) than the resulting CD will ever have (16 bits / 44.1 kHz). Why? Higher perceived resolution, even at the final down-sampled stage.
My next step is to print one of these pictures at 25x50" to see the ACTUAL detail. Zooming in to tiny portions of an image to see them at a 100% pixel resolution on your screen just isn't the same.
By the way, here's a little detail from the above shot:
Group Shot (detail), Berlin LIMITED workshop 2011. Photo: Sean Galbraith
What's the largest print you've ever made?
Die dunkle Ecke der Monster
Car Train (click to view and comment on flickr)
Man muss analoge Bilder auf die Schatten belichten, die Lichter finden sich dann schon von alleine. Solches hört man immer wieder, und es ist schon ein Stück weit berechtig, speziell wenn man sich im Bereich der "guten" und "normalen" Belichtung befindet.
Die wirklich spannenden Bilder finden sich allerdings oft in den Extremen.
Was, wenn man sich an die Enden heran pirscht, an die Bereiche ganz im dunkeln oder im hellen? Bereiche, die sich an anderen Stellen auch gerne mal "Zone 2" oder "Zone 9" schimpfen. Bereiche, die man als guter Fotograf gefälligst mit einem Reflektor oder einem Blitz aufzuhellen hat?
Dort begibt sich so mancher Fotograf dann in derart unbekanntere Gefilde, dass er sich nicht mehr so ganz auf die Dinge verlassen mag, die er viele Jahre lang gelernt und praktiziert hat.
Ist Schattenzeichnung wirklich so wichtig? Darf man nicht doch diese Ungewissheit ins Bild legen, die dem Betrachter Spielraum zur Erforschung gibt?
Von 15.-17. Juli 2011 halten wir in Braunschweig einen Doppelworkshop gemeinsam mit Spürsinn zu den Themen Fotografie am Ende des Lichts und Entwicklung am Ende des Lichts, in dem wir uns ganz analog und mit viel Spielfreude in die Extreme begeben.
Die dunkle Ecke im Keller, in der sich die Monster verstecken, mag beängstigen...
...spannend ist sie allemal.
Black Forest Large Format
Being confined to the studio with the Plaubel Peco for several months was a good thing as it allowed me to experiment and try out large format photography within a safe environment. But taking the Chamonix out for a first spin felt really really good too!
I took my friends Sean and Michelle for a spin in the Black Forest during their Germany vacation, and Sean brought his foldable Shen-Hao large format camera, which is virtually the same as the Chamonix.
Two guys with large format cameras in the black forest. Imagine the amount of geeking .. and eye-rolling from non-geeks ;)
Black Forest (click to view and comment on flickr)
Photographing large format is a very different way of working, and there are several things that blew my mind when I used the camera in the field and when I returned home and had a look at the pictures. One of the mind benders is the amount of freedom you have with the camera movements, also known as tilt, swing and shift. Perspectively correct pictures automatically become the norm, not the exception. You set the camera up straight, then shift to your heart's content. If the lens has a large enough image circle, that shift can be quite extensive.
And then there's the massive amount of data in these pictures. I scan my negatives on a regular Epson V600 flat bed scanner. Still, my digital files end up at about 100 megapixels and that's far from what would be possible if I cranked up the settings. My little MacBook Air 11" sure takes a bit of time to render the full size Lightroom previews.
If you're not used to this resolution, zooming in has the potential to cause a bit of mental damage to the viewer. And drooling.
By the way, this detail is a crop from a down-sampled 50 megapixel version of the image.
But having all that said, large format is only partially about resolution. I love pictures to tell stories and that doesn't depend on resolution at all. Large format photography gives you the tools to take your time, enjoy the process, set up the pictures while thinking about their details, composing well and then taking a well-metered shot. Usually.
I have just dipped my toe into the large format waters though. There is so much more to learn, and I'm looking forward to diving more into its creative potential.
Black Forest Drama (click to view and comment on flickr)
New Camera In Da House
I've been playing with large format photography for a while. Last year I bought a used German-built Plaubel monorail large format studio camera, I'm in the process of building the Marquardt International Pinhole large format camera, which is by the way moving forward and if you are on the list, you should soon get an update.
I had been missing one important piece in the puzzle: a 4x5 camera with all the required movements that I could use in the field without needing yak and two sherpas to carry it for me.
A few weeks ago I discovered the Chinese manufacturer by the not so Chinese name Chamonix. They are a small company with 8 employees and they build various foldable large format cameras, 4x5" being their smallest one.
It's the model 045N-2, it comes in at about 3 pounds without a lens and this morning one of them arrived here at my studio.
I'm going to spend some time with it to get used to the camera and to experiment. The initial impression is that it's really well built and that it is very functional for a camera of that size.
Stay tuned.
Lightroom-Workshop Teil 2
Der zweite Teil des Lightroom-Workshops auf Undsoversity steht kurz vor der Release!
MixTour Feinkorn v2
When you shoot digital at ISO 100 and the light goes down, you change the ISO to something higher, let's say 800. But what if you shoot analog and you have half your film exposed at ISO 100? One option is to change film, which is a hassle. Another option is to carry a second camera with a higher ISO film. Also a bit of a hassle. My new favorite option is to just change the light meter to a higher ISO and keep shooting with a different sensitivity onto the same film.
"But how do you go about developing that film?" I hear you ask.
I have recently had the pleasure to play with a new developer, called MixTour. It's a product by German company Spürsinn (full disclosure: I am friends with them and we hold analog workshop together). It is actually more than just a developer, it's a four-component DIY kit that you can use to mix any type of developer you like. Fine grain, contrast, push, pull, universal, ... you name it.
MixTour comes with a set of recipes to get you started, and one of them is a universal developer that goes by the name of Feinkorn v2, and dare I say, I've fallen a little in love with it.
Here's what I did: I used Monika's Holga Wide Angle Pinhole camera to shoot of roll of Efke 100. The camera features an f/135 pinhole. Precise exposure? Virtually impossible. Especially in changing light conditions. I measured once, then timed the exposures according to my gut. AND THEY WERE ALL OVER THE PLACE! More precisely they were spread over at least three f-stops, probably closer to four. On one roll of film, next to each other.
Turned out MixTour Feinkorn v2 handled this range of latitude without even blinking. Now I'm looking forward to finding out what other tricks it has up its sleeve.
Six degrees too hot
So I return from that film dev workshop that we held in Braunschweig, home of Rollei and Voigtländer, and I had completely forgotten about that one incident.
Until just now.
Rewind. Imagine a group of photographers experimenting with different developers, fighting about water of the right temperature, stepping on each others' toes (in a nice way of course) and then imagine me standing in the middle of this, thinking
"why don't I develop that roll of Efke 50 in T-Max developer?", then elbowing my way to the basin and mixing the developer.According to the Massive Dev Chart development should have been 6 minutes at 20 degrees Celsius. Turns out amidst all the chaos I ended up with 26 degrees (don't ask), and I didn't notice until it was already in the development tank. Oh well, no harm done, higher temperature can be somewhat evened out by shorter dev time. Didn't have a formula though, and I'm a sucker for strong contrasts, so I went with what my gut told me: "shorten it, but not too much. Maybe down to 5 minutes", which is what I ended up doing.
After the full cycle of developing and fixing the film, I got a bit of a shock when I opened the tank. The film looked like it wasn't fixed. Brownish in nature and the bits that should be transparent didn't look very transparent. Luckily film is pretty much light proof after only a short time of fixing it, so you can always fix some more if you need to. 10 minutes of fixing later the film still didn't look right. It looked pretty much half fixed. Bummer. I asked my favorite film photography expert Michael of Spürsinn on what to do and he finally resorted to bathing the film in undiluted fixer for a minute, just to see if that would do something.
But it didn't.
We rinsed the film, pulled it out of the spiral and lo and behold, it was transparent, just with a pretty strong tint that looked opaque from certain angles. Super weird.
I forgot about the experiment until a few minutes ago, when I began scanning some of the pictures.
Turns out the Efke 50 / T-Max developer combination produces great contrast that still leaves enough room to work on in the (digital or analog) darkroom.
Here's a negative scan straight from the scanner, uncorrected:
And here it is with just a slight black point adjustment and a tiny raise in exposure level:
I love it when the photos are 80% where I want them straight from the camera and they still give me enough headroom to play with. I'll file this film/dev combination under B as in BINGO!
What's your favorite combination?
Lighting the fuse...
To get to finish a project, it's sometimes important to get started with it in the first place, even if you don't have an exact idea about how all the details are going to work out. Or if you're going to be able to finish it at all.
Some call that "jumping off a cliff and building your wings on your way down" (I like that a lot!) and I call it "lighting the fuse". Once it's burning, there's no easy way back, which in turn
puts enough pressure on you to keep working on it.One of those projects has been going on for years. Not always at full speed, but with constant progress.
I'm not at liberty to talk too much about it yet ($%^# NDA), but the lifting of the curtain is not too far in the future now.
In the meanwhile, let me give you this:
www.internationalpinhole.com
Sometimes things move forward faster than expected. As it's just now happening with the Marquardt International Pinhole.
We had a meeting today and one of the outcomes was that we are going to build a run of ten cameras to see how people accept it. This will be a very special camera, not only because it creates beautiful pictures, but because each and every one of them will be a hand-made unique one-of-a-kind item.
I will not go into more detail right now because I simply can't - I know the general direction and I like it, but as you, I will have to wait for the final cameras to know what they will exactly look like.
As soon as they are finished, I will post pictures.
If you are interested in one of the first ten cameras, please send a mail to chris@internationalpinhole.com
Offical website: www.internationalpinhole.com
Workshops 2011: Hashtags und Kurzlinks
Du meldest Dich für einen Workshop an. Und dann?!
Wäre es nicht klasse, wenn Du mit anderen Workshopteilnehmern Kontakt aufnehmen könntest?
Aus Gründen der Privatsphäre verschicke ich normalerweise keine Adresslisten, aber es gibt ja noch andere Wege.
Wenn Du in den Social Media wie z.B. Twitter oder Facebook unterwegs bist, oder wenn Du bloggst, dann sind Hashtags und Kurzlinks eine gute Möglichkeit, mit anderen zu diskutieren.
Hier ist die offizielle Liste der Hashtags und Kurzlinks für die Workshops 2011:
5.-6. Feb, Hannover Spielzeugladen
#hsspielzeugladen1
http://tfttf.com/hannover22011
19.-20. Feb, Absolut Analog I
#absanalog2011a
http://tfttf.com/absolutanalog1
2.-3. Apr, Absolut Analog II
#absanalog2011b
http://tfttf.com/absolutanalog2
8.-10. Jul, Berlin
#hsberlin2011
http://tfttf.com/hsberlin2011
2.-3. Jul, Hannover Spielzeugladen II
#hsspielzeugladen2
http://tfttf.com/hannover72011
27.-30. Jul, Klostergeister
#klostergeister2011
http://tfttf.com/klostergeister2011
2.-4. Sep, Northeim
#lichtnortheim2011
http://tfttf.com/northeimlicht2011
10.-11. Sep, Absolut Analog III
#absanalog2011c
http://tfttf.com/absolutanalog3
2011 Workshop Hash Tags and Short Links
You sign up for a workshop. And then what...?!
Wouldn't it be nice if you could connect with fellow workshop participants to discuss sharing a ride, what to bring, or just to know who else is coming? I usually don't send address lists for privacy reasons, but there's another way.
If you use social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or if you blog, hashtags and short links are a great way to let others find your information.
Here is the offical hashtag and short link list for the 2011 workshops:
Apr/17-May/3, Tibet
#himalayanwkshp2011
http://tfttf.com/tibet2011
May/27-29, Berlin LIMITED
#berlinworkshop2011
http://tfttf.com/berlin2011
Aug/13-14, Washington DC
#dcworkshop2011
http://tfttf.com/dc2011
Aug/19-21, San Francisco, CA
#sfworkshop2011
http://tfttf.com/sf2011
Sep/23-25, Toronto, Canada
#torontoworkshop2011
http://tfttf.com/toronto2011
Forget the large format MIP! Here comes the MMP!
Introducing the Marquardt Mini Pinhole (MMP) f/10 9mm. Who needs large format f/200 pinhole cameras that take sharp-ish pictures at crazy long 2-minute exposure times?! (hint: I do). Making pinhole cameras from matchboxes is not new (I took my inspiration from this video on YouTube) but I wanted to build one of those at least once. Perfect project for a Sunday early afternoon. Building this takes
Due to lack of black tape, I used a light-proof metal-based tape that is normally used to tape pictures into picture frames. Not ideal, as it's reflective, but it should still do the trick. Might end up with some light spills inside the cam though.
I used a matchbox and two rolls of film, an APX to shoot on and a cheap Lucky SHD to dump in order to get the empty film roll. Note to self: next time don't dump all the empty film rolls, so you won't have to sacrifice a film for this.
There's something strangely satisfying in pulling out a perfectly good roll of film during daytime. 1.99 € down the drain. The things you do on a Sunday afternoon...
I cut a hole into the matchbox drawer. This will hold the film in place and provide for an unexposed frame around the picture.
Empty roll of lucky to the right (the exposed film will go into this) and full roll of Agfa APX to the left.
This is how the film will go behind the drawer inside the matchbox.
And this is how it'll look after it is put together.
But first, the matchbox needs a hole for the "lens".
Here's the pinhole. I used the same metal-based tape for this as it sticks nicely. The hole turned out a bit too large, so I can expect nice and short shutter speeds, but probably quite a bit of lack of sharpness. Focal length of the camera is the distance between hole and film plane, in this case 9mm.
Attached the film to the empty spool...
...and put the spool back into the cartridge. That's one of the reasons I used a Lucky SHD film: the film cartridges are easy to pull apart and put back together without tools. The film will be transported by turning the spool on the receiving side and winging it by gut feel. Some of the pics might overlap, some might have bigger space in between them. Oh well.
Using more of the light-tight tape to seal the camera from the rays of the evil day glow ball in the sky.
More sealing
Sealed all around (hopefully). Erm.. let's call the design functional. But then, did I mention it's a disposable cam? It will be destroyed at the end of the process anyway.
The camera needs a shutter now. I cut this out of the adhesive light-proof tape so only the sides stick.
A black strip of paper acts as the shutter. Just pull it up to expose and push it back down to finish exposure. It'll be difficult to time though, my little pinhole calculator tells me that the exposure time at this focal length and aperture is less than a second, so forget about precision. I have decided that I'll be happy if only two or three pictures on the film will come out alright ;)
This is what it looks like with the shutter open. Say CHEESE!
» Insert frantic picture taking activity here «
Removing the film in a changing bag and putting it into a development tank basically means destroying the camera. Bye bye little MMP.
And now (cue drum roll) presenting the first and only pictures that have ever been taken and will ever be taken with the Marquardt Mini Pinhole:
MIP FTW
Ready for the first picture out of the Marquardt International Pinhole? (yep, I have decided to call it the MIP from now on, heh)
» MIP: The Making-Of
» MIP: The first test (video)
Update: The official Marquardt International Pinhole website is now online
Testing the Marquardt International Pinhole
Update: I just posted the first picture out of the MIP
Update 2: The official Marquardt International Pinhole website is now online
Here's the first official test of the homebrew International Pinhole, complete with proper exposure times (I hope), taking reciprocity into account, even including
me freezing off my fingers, as a tough photographer should do (the other choice would be to throw myself on the ground, but that was even colder).» see how this camera was made
Some background info: aperture of the pinhole is f/200, focal length of the camera is 60mm, it accepts international (graflok) backs, which includes 4x5" film cassettes, Polaroid backs, roll film backs and more. To be installed: mechanism to hold the backs in place, soon to come.
Next up: develop and scan the pics. And post if they're any good..
15 feet USB
It's the ideal teaching tool along the lines of PocketChris! Instead of explaining and painting pictures of what happens when you do this or that with your camera, I can now simply take the shot and it'll show up on the monitor for all workshop participants to see.
Learning by seeing what happens. I like it. It's brilliant!
Not my idea though, I saw it first on Joe McNally's workshop in Dobbs Ferry last year.
Taking the 2011 workshops to the next level, step by step.
The International Pinhole
Update: Here is a video shot during the first test and here is the first picture out of this camera.
Building pinhole cameras is easy and fun. All you need is a box, some tape, aluminum foil, a pin, and joy in experimentation.
Unless you're me and your landlord is a cabinet maker. Then creating a pinhole camera might as well turn into trying to make a really awesome one.
Since I've been dabbling in large format photography I had the idea of creating a beautiful pinhole camera that would accept large format film. Not just film though, but also the according large format film cassettes, Polaroid backs and other backs, including 6x9 backs for example. All sorts of formats.
When I ran across a wonderfully made DIY pinhole holder and tripod mount, I knew that this would get me one step further, so I talked to my friend and landlord, and the other day we made a first prototype.
It starts with just some material, cut to the right dimensions. Here is the front wall, the sides and the top and bottom. Once finished, the camera will feature an open back that has the right dimensions to hold large format view camera backs (also known as Graflok backs). It will be able to easily fit a 4x5" film back or even a Polaroid back.
This is how the side walls will interface with the top and bottom pieces. This will guarantee that no light can leak into the camera and that the camera is really stable and robust.
Making progress detailing the parts.
This is the first test to see if our measurements around the international back were right. It's a perfect fit, sliding right into the slot. We still need a mechanism to fix it in place, but we've got a few fun ideas on how to allow backs of different depth, such as a Polaroid back, to fit well and be easy to attach and detach. Easier than on most monorail cameras actually.
Black MDF is great to work with, but it also ends up creating quite a bit of dirt. Here you see the main hole for the "lens" being drilled.
Test fitting of the "lens" - it's a beautiful piece of solid steel that allows to fit several different size holes, zone plates and more.
The outer casing is being fit together. The bottom of the camera features a beautiful and solid steel tripod mount. As you can see, the focal length on this prototype is pretty short, around 55mm. Given the size of the large format negative, this results in a pretty wide angle picture. Future models might feature longer focal lengths, even though the wide angle in conjunction with a pinhole is a lot of fun, because it doesn't know any depth-of-field issues: everything is equally in focus. Maybe we'll even find a way to do a variable focal length model. How does "first international back large format pinhole zoom camera" sound like?
The prototype will be held together with screws. The future models' surface will be undisturbed by screws.
First working model finished! Still looking for a good name for it.
Test fitting a tripod plate and a Polaroid back.
The open prototype...
...with a film cassette on.
The film cassette is a snug fit. The surface of the camera will look quite a bit different once its got the according treatment including sanding and several layers of oil, also the final model won't use screws, so this will look very different once it's in its final stage.Still on the todo list: implement mechanism to fasten different backs to the camera (got a simple idea, more on that at another time), work on surface, make the camera a bit lighter, find a good name for it.
Yes, find a good name for it. "Large format international back pinhole camera" doesn't have enough of a ring yet.
Fujifilm X100: The digital camera I might actually get really excited about
Wait a minute, excited about a digital camera? After all the analog journey you've seen me take?
That journey is still in full swing, and I still have quite a few things to learn in the analog realm. But I'm also a digital photographer, I use the 5D Mark II, I've got the older 5D Mark I as a backup, the Panasonic LX3 is my main point-and-shoot camera and of course there's the iPhone that I use most often simply because I always have it with me.
I have a soft spot for rangefinder cameras. They are smaller than DSLRs, they are quite inconspicuous, they have an optical viewfinder that shows more than the actual picture, so you get lots of context when composing an image, you frame the image by using a bright frame inside the viewfinder, the viewfinder is all the way to the left of the camera, so you can compose without squeezing your nose against the back of the camera and with your left eye unblocked, so you can get even more context of the scene when composing.
All that together makes an ideal street photography setup, as demonstrated by innumerable street photographers over the years.
Epson of all companies tried with a digital rangefinder and stopped the experiment after a while. Leica came out with the M8 and now the M9, but those are not really on the affordable side. Then Leica released the X1 in the rangefinder form factor, using an APS-C size sensor with a fixed focus f/2.8 36mm equivalent lens.
The concept of the X1 appealed to me. The form factor is great, the rangefinder concept in general is pretty much up my alley, but after a short while it started to become apparent that the camera apparently wasn't without its issues. Slow AF, no video feature, no built-in optical viewfinder (you can get an optional one) and the list doesn't seem to stop there.
Then I heard about the upcoming Fujifilm X100. It's supposed to be out in March. It's supposed to cost around 1000€/$1200. And it has gotten me very excited even though I still have to see a single test shot or review.
A few of the things that got me interested:
1. Control: direct access to shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation through wheels. Aperture ring is on the lens where I want it. Manual focus ring is on the lens where I want it. OVF/EVF switch is a real hardware switch. Automatic modes: shutter priority, aperture priority, program, manual. Scene modes: none (Yey, no "baby's first steps" or "fireplace in the log cabin" or "group of three people in front of sunset" scene modes. Thank you thank you thank you!). Dioptre correction for the viewfinder.
2. Viewfinder: Optical. Wait, electronic. Wait, both! The hybrid viewfinder gives you an optical picture that shows more than the actual picture will show, so you get the context. It will give you a bright frame inside the viewfinder so you know where the image ends. Nothing too spectacular so far, cameras had that fifty years ago. But this bright frame and the surrounding information such as aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and quite a bit more comes from a 1.4 megapixel LCD panel and is an overlay to the optical view you have. It's like a fighter jet heads-up display providing you with accurate information but it won't obscure your fast and precise optical view. It could be a dream come true. Nice tidbit #1: the switch on the front of the camera will switch between the hybrid and an electronic viewfinder, so you can also use an electronic picture inside the viewfinder if you prefer. Nice tidbit #2: the bright frame will give you an automatically parallax corrected placement depending on your focus. Someone's been doing some serious thinking here, and I like it.
3. Lens & Sensor: Apparently the first thing Fuji started to work on was the lens in conjunction with the sensor. The sensor is an old friend, I've read that it is the same 12 megapixel APS-C sensor used in the Nikon D90. The lens is a completely new construction. Actually Fuji says they had to start from scratch a few times to incorporate all the wish list items without compromising on image quality. The sensor has received a new micro lens array and the back element of the lens is about the size of the sensor, helping to keep the incidence of incoming light in check. They also say that image quality was always their highest concern. They are clearly competing with Leica here.
4. Build & Design: The camera hits a nerve with me. Its retro design gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling, and if the build quality is as solid as I've been told, I am going to feel right at home with it. I've seen enough plastic cameras lately.
Here are some interesting bonus features in no particular order:
The X100 features a RAW button. My understanding is that it lets you shoot JPG and if you decide to shoot the next picture in RAW mode, that's when you press it. Supposedly it will also be used to do in-camera RAW to JPG processing of individual pictures.
The camera also features a 3-stop ND filter that you can engage. I've had enough sunny days where I wished to have an ND filter, just to be able to open the aperture a bit further or to get a shutter speed a bit longer. Now it's built right into the camera the same way you find it in many professional video cameras. If you don't use it, it's completely removed from the optical path and out of the way.
The shutter button features a nice retro touch that made me smile: it allows you to use a screw-in remote release.
The X100 is also said to feature a 720p24 video mode with stereo sound. Did I mention video is important to me?
The autofocus is supposed to be super fast, the official FAQ states that the shutter lag is extremely short, I actually find it hard to believe that they expect it to be only 0.01 seconds. Of course I so want that to be true!
The shutter is built into the lens, which will allow the X100 to offer high speed flash sync, something photographers love outdoors on sunny days.
If you shoot JPG, the X100 offers you PROVIA, Velvia and ASTIA film simulation modes. I know I know, I'd rather shoot those actual films, have them developed and scan them, but hey, it's Fuji. Adding simulations for the dynamic and color characteristics of some of their signature films into this camera is actually a nice touch.
It will use the pretty standard NP-95 battery which is readily available and not as overpriced as many other camera manufacturer's batteries are.
The X100 features a 49mm filter thread, a fairly standard size that should make it easy to get high quality filters at decent prices.
I could go on and on with this list, there is plenty of official information out there, but I have still to find the one thing that would make me go meh. I find it hard to believe what a prefect match this feature list is for what I wish in a camera this size.
But of course no matter how much a feature list makes me smile, the real test will be in using the camera, spending time with it, and looking at the pictures that it will produce. Until then I will say a little prayer to the photography gods each night before I go to sleep and really hope I will never have to write a disappointed follow-up post to this one. Ever.
Is it March yet?
Put It To The Test.
The other week I got hold of several rolls of Kodak Ektachrome E200.
Expired Kodak Ektachrome. Very very expired.
But I thought I'd have some fun with it. So I shot a roll in the Pentacon Six and went on to develop it.
Wait, Chris. You don't do color development. And Ektachrome is not even a color negative film, it's a color slide film that requires an even different process. What are you up to?
No, I haven't gone crazy, this is my curious side trying to learn more about film. (my motto has actually quite nicely been portrayed by They Might Be Giants in this little song)
And what better could I do than get everything wrong that I possily could...
Let me get a few assumptions out, based on what I have learned about film so far:
- The film is eight years expired. The date on the packaging is 06/2002. We should expect quite a bit of grain, if anything at all. This could be messy.
- The E-6 process is a reversal process, e.g. it makes a negative into a positive. I don't have any reversal chemistry. Only negative chemistry. But I have read that you can process color negative film in black-and-white chemistry. Actually there's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to do it, it's basically based on the same kind of silver halide crystals.
- The main difference between color negative film and color positive (e.g. slide) film is the missing orange mask. Other than that, the negative vs. positive outcome is determined by the process. C-41 is negative, E-6 is positive. So if anything at all, the development should make this into some sort of negative, and the missing orange mask should help with getting better results when scanning.
So far the assumptions.
Wait, one more thing: most black-and-white films have one silver layer. Color films have three layers with filter layers in between. I'm not sure my developer will be able to penetrate all of them, so the outcome is likely to be on the weird side.
On to the development. If you've followed my film developing, you'll know that I'm a fan of stand development. It's pretty safe in most cases, you don't really have to time anything and it has never really let me down, even in experimental situations like when I pushed Efke R100 by three stops.
So it was Rodinal 1:100, 20 degrees Celsius, 60 minutes stand development, 20 seconds of slight agitation at the beginning, 5 seconds of slight agitation at the 30-minute-mark.
When I finally pulled the negatives out of the fixer, they were almost black. So black that I thought the fixer was exhausted and made a new batch. I still watered the film, and when I finally pulled it out, I was surprised to actually see something on the negatives. Not much, but hopefully enough to be scanned.
A first preview round on the scanner revealed my greatest fears: almost no information available. Look at the histogram, it's very very thin.
I'd hate for such a histogram to happen to any of my regular pictures, but in this case I was pretty happy that it was this wide and not thinner. I know my scanner can make something out of that. Nothing great, but something workable. It's going to be far from ideal, but hey, this is what extreme experiments are for: to test the waters of what is possible.
So I'm happy to say that yes, it is possible to get something on eight year old slide film. It is possible to develop said slide film into a black-and-white negative using a black-and-white developer like Rodinal. It is possible to scan the developed film. And it is possible to play with the thin dynamic range in order to get something that works.
Actually the scanner did such a good job, that the resulting histogram didn't look too painful anymore:
What surprised me most is the grain though. I know Ektachrome 200 uses the modern T-crystals, that can also be found in the T-Max black-and-white films, so I was very curious about how the grain would look like, especially on an 8 year old film developed in the wrong chemistry.
Here it is at 100%
Not too shabby if you ask me.
And what have I learned from this? Color film is a not that different from black-and-white film, from now on I won't be paranoid about expired film anymore, and this is proof to methat film is a lot more forgiving than most people think.
I also had a ton of fun while doing this experiment and feeding my curiosity!
Downside Up - Story Of A Picture
Every picture has a story.
This is one of them.
I used to make the distinction between going out to shoot in a conceptual way vs. shooting in a more opportunistic fashion.
The conceptual way would include going out with a vision, already having a very good idea about the result you would return with. The vision would be the guiding goal, the principle that determined the path that needed to be taken to reach that goal.
The opportunistic way would be very situational. The photographer would have the camera with them and just go with the flow, shooting things that presented themselves right at that moment, making the best of what he came across.
I used to make that distinction.
I would find myself more in the second camp, but was slowly moving more and more into the first and more conceptual one. I often replaced vision with location, going to special places and see what I could make out of them, ending up with pictures that had an overarching look and theme. Nothing wrong with that. It's still my preferred way of working. I guess I'm more of a hunter.
And I'd sometimes look up to some of the conceptual photographers, the ones who have that big idea, then scout for the right location, get the right models, props, light, and in the end return with the perfect picture after three days of work. Also nothing wrong with that.
Then I realized that the two are not that different. I noticed that even while I am on my photo hunts, there is always a conceptual phase involved, it is just a lot more compressed.
First I keep my eyes open. I take a lot in. Then I see a subject, and I start thinking about what it is that I want to say with the picture. Not in words, but maybe in terms of a visual story. Sometimes it's just that I want to make something look nice and give it the space, focus, contrast and visual importance in the frame that it deserves.
But then sometimes it's that story that unfolds right in front of your eyes, it ambushes you and you have to react as fast as you can to not miss it. This often happens in street photography.
It also can happen while you're at a car museum, sitting down for a quick rest.
But it still starts with a vision. In case of Downside Up I saw the person walking into the frame from the right. I didn't really have to think, the vision just was there, maybe it's experience, maybe it's one of those lucky coincidences. In front of my inner eye I saw the legs exactly where they are on the picture now. From the speed of the walking person I knew I had about eight seconds to get ready and then take one single shot.
Then I realized that the analog medium format Pentacon Six in my hands was still set to an exposure and focus that suited the Cadillac fins I had shot just minutes before.
And this is the moment I go on autopilot. Seven seconds left. No time to get the meter out and take a reading. Trusting the experience kicking in. Outside is overcast, inside is dimly lit. The rest of the film is exposed to ISO 800. Should work with some adjustment in exposure. Five seconds left. Aperture is set to f/4 and shutter speed is at 1/50s. Definitely too bright to expose the outside, especially with the uniform light gray sky and the snow. Four seconds. Aperture will be okay for this shot, I don't care if the window beams in the front go out of focus, might actually help guide some attention to what's going on between them. Three. Quick guess: two to three stops slower should do. The rest will be caught by the latitude of the film. It's pretty elastic when it comes to exposure. Throwing a lot of trust at the medium. ,kjh Two. Set shutter speed to 1/250s. Raise camera to eyes. Manual focus.
One.
Wait.
Klick.
Hope.
This all happened within a few seconds, without much fuss, and Monika sitting next to me probably didn't even notice what I did. It was all an inner monologue on my side and from her perspective, the only thing that I did was lift the camera to my eye, focus and take a shot out the window.
Being able to turn experience and that quick version of a vision into something that more resembles a reflex is a very lucky thing to happen. What's even more lucky is to be in the right place at the right time. Had I not been sitting down, I wouldn't have seen the reflection. Had I not had the camera in my hands, time wouldn't have permitted to take it out. Had I not had the right focal length for the shot, it wouldn't have worked this way.
Things like this are not something you can force, and and they don't happen often, but when they do, I feel infinitely grateful to have received such a gift.
But at this point the story wasn't over. Upon returning home I developed the film, having almost forgotten about that picture. When I saw it on the negative, the snow part was overexposed. More than I liked. Should've used 1/500s or shorter. But then I also noticed how the legs and the path came out just fine. The scan finally confirmed that there was enough detail in both the highlights and the ground for the picture to work. In fact the exposure was spot on, exposed for the shadows, exactly the way black-and-white film likes to be treated. I had intuitively done the right thing, and that simple fact turned into my personal highlight of the entire trip. Because it means that some of what I learned made its way into that special part of my brain that I can tap into without having to think much. And finding that out makes me very very happy.
The last decision that I had to make about this picture was how to crop it. The Pentacon Six does a 6x6 square crop, which perfectly fit the bill, but the question was if I should leave some of the black around the frame in the shot or if I should crop it tight to only see the picture.
I took a bit of time to play with it, and then it dawned on me that by including an ample amount of black frame, that would turn the picture into something even more graphical, repeating the inner frames of the window.
I got incredibly lucky with this picture.
I got even more lucky if I take into account that this was shot on an ISO100 film, and pushed in development by three entire stops (details here), which should according to some experts have killed a lot of the shadow detail.
I guess it's time to make a few more deposits into that Karma bank.
Weapon Of Choice
Update: There is an audio version of this blog entry available now.
It's not the camera, it's the photographer, dummy!
Or is it?
This is not a blog post about analog vs. digital! I still love to stir when discussions around this boil up, especially as I see myself rooted in both camps. Whoever is trying to pry a wedge in between analog and digital is trying to
pry it right through my middle.And I really don't like to be wedged into two pieces.
Jest aside, I think I have always been something of a wanderer between the worlds. Having spent almost two decades firmly rooted in the analog 35mm world, the step into digital was like a breath of fresh air. Finally the speed I wanted. Fast results. During the early years technically sub par, but catching up to the analog side pretty quickly.
I'm probably going to be beat up for this by a many of the data sheet lovers, but in my book, today's digital photography is fast, clean, reproducible, reliable, sharp, unerring, accurate and precise, whereas analog photography is unprecise, moody, messy, slow, unreliable and error prone.
Despite all this, I have rediscovered the analog world and embraced it wholeheartedly for reasons that I have elaborated many times over the last months, on Tips from the Top Floor, here on this blog, on Twitter and on many of the workshops.
But this post is not about analog vs. digital. Did I mention I don't like building camps? It is about learning new things about photography, about understanding them and in the process about why I'm adapting one of my most important pieces of advice.
In the past you could often hear me say "It's not the camera, it's the photographer!" and in general this still holds true. If you are a real photographer, the camera you use will usually be an afterthought. You will likely be able to adapt your working style with a given tool to get close to your envisioned result.
Shakespeare could certainly write with all sorts of different utensils. But I'm pretty sure even he had a favorite quill or two. Maybe he even used different tools to write different kinds of things? (I know I'm on thin ice here, Shakespeare connoisseurs. Help a brother out in the comments please!)
As a photographer it is your vision that counts and based on what you wish to create, and what circumstances you work under, you will either make your existing tool work as good as possible, or you will choose your weapon based on what you need.
And this is where I admit, my It's the photographer, not the camera! starts to crumble a bit. I adopted it while still being rooted in the 35mm world. I simply hadn't seen enough other things yet.
Now that I have explored both dry and wet photography (e.g. digital and analog), and almost every format from the small 18x18mm to the large 4x5", with over fifteen different cameras with different technologies, dating from 1926 until today, I must admit that the differences between these cameras really do influence my photography.
It starts with something as simple as the aspect ratio . The 3:2 ratio of the DSLR feels very different from the 1:1 ratio that a 6x6 medium format camera delivers. 6x6, 6x7, 6x9, ... they all speak different visual languages and they all reflect back into how you compose images.
Downside Up, 6x6 medium format,
camera: Pentacon six
(click for big)
Some of them will only let you focus by the distance scale on the lens. Auto focus? Pah. Rangefinder? Not really. Just a scale in feet. You do the best guesswork you can, or you measure it out. The result: not really always that well in focus. It slows you down, it makes you take more time to get the picture right. It trains your inner eye, because you have to work that grey matter to visualize what the resulting image might be.
Wrapped Tree, 6x6 medium format,
camera: Voigtländer Bessa
Different film sizes will influence your choice of focal lengths, which in turn will influence the depth of field you get. Another reason to choose the right tool for the right job. Traditional portraiture with a 1/4" sensor might be on the difficult side. Or if your vision requires everything to be in focus, it might be the perfect tool for the job.
Right Fin, 6x6 medium format,
camera: Pentacon six
Then the sound. Some cameras are in your face, with massive mirror slap and a sound that reminds more of a gun than of a camera, some of them are very shy and contained so that you won't even know if that click was the shutter going off. When shooting portraits, this can make a huge difference for the subject. For some people the loud ka-lunk of a Mamiya 645 is exactly what they need, whereas other subjects will appreciate the subtle sound (and size) of a Leica rangefinder (not that I'd have one).
Some cameras are heavy beasts to carry around, look at the Pentax 6x7 for example. Give it a decent lens and a pair of hand grips and the Nikon D700 will look small in comparison. Size will influence how you work with a camera. Sometimes size will dictate how you handle the film you have with you. Monika for example took her Pentax 6x7 to some indoor locations the other day. Due to the lack of high-speed material, and due to her unwillingness to carry a tripod, she decided to shoot Kodak Tri-X at ISO 1600 and attempt a push development, something a lot of people claim cannot be done with good results. I think her results are stunning! (here's an article she wrote in German with some pictures)
Even though my entire analog camera collection together has cost me less than a single full DSLR outfit with a hand full of lenses, I admit that having some fifteen different cameras to work with is probably not the reality most of the readers of this blog find themselves in. So I won't suggest that you go out to build that collection. What I suggest though is that you start building some awareness of what types of photography the camera you have leads itself to and how that in turn influences how you approach photography in general.
It's a journey.
If you have photography friends, why not swap equipment for a weekend to experience what kind of changes working with a different tool might introduce to your way of working. By the way, photo workshops (shameless plug, I know I know) are a great opportunity for that too.
What is your way of keeping things fresh and not get too comfortable in those old worn-out shoes?
Push It!
A day spent with photography is a great day!
We spent the first day of this year in the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, the huge Volkswagen museum right next to the VW factory.
They are very photography friendly there, especially if you're there almost by yourself. January first is not traditionally a day where the Germans go to car museums. So instead of the thousands of visitors that have usually entered the premises by noon, in some of the exhibit houses we were among
the first ten. And the employees even helped us get the best pictures by adjusting the lights and getting out of the way.We made two major decisions upfront: analog only and medium format. The third decision was dictated by availability of film and the fact that most of the photography would take place indoors:
We had no choice but underexpose and push the films. By quite a bit in some cases.
At this point, instead of saying anything to those who keep going on about how much you're going to lose out of an ISO 100 film when pushed by three f-stops using Rodinal, I'd just like to show you some pictures (click goes big):
The other film I had with me was the good old Ilford HP5+, which I used to shoot a lot with back in the 80s but kind of lost track of. I'm glad I gave it a shot the other day, and I'm glad I did a one stop push, the tonal distribution that came out is just wonderfully creamy, and the push development managed to give it a nicely steep-ish gradation curve.
Some of my learnings of the last two days:
a) I'm turning into more and more of a fan of push stand developments using Rodinal. With the right film the results can be wonderful.
b) In order to push Efke 100 by three stops, you'll have to make sure to get the exposure spot on, as you won't have much to play with later on.
c) Spending a weekend with photography, playing and trying out new things and learning lots in the process is FUN FUN FUN!
For those of you who want to give this a go themselves, here is some information on the films and the development:
The first three pictures were shot on Efke 100, underexposed by 3 stops, stand-developed in Rodinal 1:50 (for Sean: that was 12 milliliters for a 120 film) at 20 degrees Celsius for 70 minutes, 30 seconds mild agitation at the beginning, 10 seconds mild agitation 35 minutes into the development. Stand development means that after the first agitation you do not even think of touching the development tank. Hands completely off until it's time to agitate again.
The last three pictures were shot on Ilford HP5+, underexposed by one stop and developed in Rodinal 1:25 (24 milliliters) at 20 degrees Celsius for 8 minutes, 30 seconds initial agitation, then a few light swirls each minute.
All pictures were taken with the Pentacon six and an almost uncoated Biometar 2.8/80mm lens. Exposure metering was done using an iPhone 4 with the free Pocket Light Meter app.
Monika wrote a German blog entry here with more pictures from the same day, that she shot with her Pentax 6x7, which we call "the beast".
Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear from you in the comments!
Going Suuuuuper Wide: The Spinner 360
click for big
Well, when I wrote super wide in the title of this post, I didn't mean it in a regular DSLR 8mm lens sort of way.
This baby covers a field of view of some 400 degrees.
"What? I thought there were only 360?"
Yes, there are, but if you aren't careful (or if you are so inclined), this thing gets you on the same picture twice.
I'm talking about the Lomo Spinner 360. Monika gave me one for Christmas, and I haven't had that much photography fun in ages.
We took it for a spin (erm. sorry, couldn't resist) on Boxing day in the Herrenhäuser Gärten, a park in Hannover.
click for big
Here is how it works: you hold it at its handle, you pull the string and as you let go, the entire camera turns 360 degrees, and sometimes more. It doesn't have a shutter, and it constantly exposes a slit of light onto the film. At its normal rotational speed, this ends up with an exposure time of somewhere between 1/125s and 1/250s.
Unless it's -8 degrees Celsius, then it turns slower. Which in turn (sorry again) results in a longer exposure time. And as the light was already fading and I only had an ISO 100 film in the camera (they recommend 400 for daylight), it turned out to be just perfect :)
click for big
This is a camera to have fun with. It's a camera that doesn't take photography too seriously. It's a camera that explores what's possible in a really playful way.
The Spinner shows the world in a way that we usually don't experience, and it does it in full sprocket hole glory. Yes, you might have noticed that it uses the full width of a 35mm film, including the sprocket holes that are normally only there for the film to be transported.
What this means is that you won't be able to simply drop off your film and get prints made. For now I have used the Spinner only with black and white film that I developed myself. You should be able to tell your local drug store to only develop the film and return it uncut though.
And then it's time to scan. Most flatbed scanners will not allow you to scan everything including the sprocket holes because the film masks they use hide them. You could try simply placing the film directly on the glass, or you could get the DigitaLIZA, which is a contraption that allows you to scan almost the entire negative minus a tiny bit at the outer edges where it holds the film.
Which ever way you get the pictures into the computer, from there you can print them, post them online, blog them, and simply enjoy a new way to look at the world around you.
Update: Just found an article that covers a bit of the history of spinning 360 degree cameras.
Update: Looks like the Lomo Spinner 360 is actually the rebirth of an older camera called the Spinshot 35S that was developed by Rick Corrales in 1991 and had a build run of only 1000 pieces. As opposed to the Lomo Spinner 360, the Spinshot 35S has a viewfinder and a bubble level on the bottom of its handle. It also featured an longer-than-lifetime warranty with the words "Full Spinshot warranty buyer protection for life ... plus reincarnations"
» more information here
Update: I just found some more excellent information about the history of the Spinner 360 and about its inventor Rick Corrales, as posted in a flickr comment by Gimel Vav
Lightroom-Workshop: Gutscheincode gewinnen
Update: Die drei Gewinner sind ermittelt, jeweils einen 15%-Gutschein für den Undsoversity-Lightroom-Workshop haben gewonnen: @_nikolaus, @iMichi16 und @migowa. Allerherzlichsten Glückwunsch! Und allen anderen natürlich herzlichen Dank fürs mit machen.
Mir ist da gerade etwas ins Haus geflattert. Einfach mal so, und weil gerade Weihnachten rum ist, gibt es hier **drei 15-Prozent-Gutscheincodes für den Lightroom-Workshop der Undsoversity** zu gewinnen.
Der Gutschein wird unter den Blog-Kommentaren verlost, die den Satz "Ich fotografiere, weil..." vervollständigen.
Die Verlosung endet heute (28.12.2010) um 21 Uhr mitteleuropäischer Zeit.
Haut rein!
PS: Bitte zum Kommentieren mit Twitter o.ä. einloggen, damit ich die Gewinner dann auch benachrichtigen kann
PPS: Bitte auch gerne weitergeben und retweeten, der Kurzlink zu diesem Post ist http://tfttf.com/15prozent
The Brownie Tree
In September Monika and I made our way to Toronto, Canada, to hold an urban photography workshop. We held it at Sean and Michelle's place, and they were wonderful hosts to us and the entire workshop group.
Before we left, Michelle gave Monika an unbelievably awesome Christmas tree ornament: a Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash, made of glass. Then we had a vision...
In November I managed to track down what seemed to be the last few of these ornaments in stock at a US retailer. When I checked a few weeks later, they were out of stock.
It took them about a week to reach Germany, it took them another three weeks (and a few phone calls) to get through customs. "WHAT is in that package?" - "Ornaments" - "But they look like cameras" - "No, they are ornaments" - "But the boxes say KODAK on them" - "Yes, but they are camera-shaped christmas ornaments" - "Huh?" - "Open one of the boxes, but be careful not to break them, they are made of glass" - "Why would anyone want a camera made of glass?" ...
They finally arrived, ten in total, so together with the one from Michelle, we now have eleven beautiful little brownies hanging off our little Christmas tree.
(By the way, the glass is transparent at the viewfinder, the lens, and the little red window at the back, so you can actually look through them, isn't that awesome?)
Merry Christmas!
And what's your photography-related Christmas decoration?
Finding Vivian Maier. This Project Needs Your Help. Now.
Update: There is a now a short 10-minute video documentary over at Chicago Tonight
Today I received a Tweet from @funkerpucki. It was in German and said something along the lines of check this out together with a link. I get quite a few of those. I'm usually hesitant clicking them, especially if they are shortened and I don't know where they go.
I'm more than glad I clicked the link this time.
This is about Vivian Maier, a street photographer who was discovered in 2007, two years before she died. I can't believe I haven't heard about her until now.
From the few pictures I have seen, this is a sensational discovery. Her sense of space, geometry, timing, situation and her storytelling are
so captivating, it's hard not to fall in love with her photography.
John Maloof and Anthony Rydzon have opened a Kickstarter project to secure the funding for a feature-length documentary and a book about Vivian Maier.
I love her photography and I want to see more of it. I also want to know more about how her work was discovered. This is a wonderful story.
If you follow me, you know that I'm careful about what causes I publicly support, but this is clearly one that should get the funding to continue working.
So why not pop over to Finding Vivian Meier Kickstarter pager and pledge a few dollars?
I just did.
Update:
» Blog about Vivian Maier (with lots of pictures)
» Chicago Magazine about Vivian Maier
» The flickr discussion post that started the whole story
» More Vivian Maier pictures
Milliliters or Dev Ratios?
What I'm a bit more concerned about is that nobody seems to really talk about the amount of developer per film. Are ratios really everything?
Look, different films have different surfaces. 35mm film needs a different amount of developer than a sheet of 4x5 film. The hight of the film in the developing tank determines the amount of liquid you will need to keep it submerged. But then the dilution won't really be that precise, because in one tank you might need 590ml of water to cover a 120 roll of film, and in another tank you'll need 700ml do achieve the same.
If the recipe tells you to use a 1+25 dilution, then in the 590ml tank you would end up with 22.7ml of developer, and in the 700ml tank you'd end up with 27 milliliters.
I understand that there are two rather different types of development. You either give the film more developer than it needs to fully develop, and try to precisely time the development, temperature and so on. Then after the time is up, you stop the development either by using a stop bath or simply by rinsing with water (I prefer the latter) and then fix the film.
The other method is the stand development where you give the film the amount of developer it needs, but not more. This together with the way the film locally exhausts the developer during a stand development (you don't move the development tank during development!) means you won't have to be too concerned about time (about an hour or two) because it's hard to overdevelop.
So here's my question: should we stop using dilutions and rather start working with milliliters per type of film roll?
I got some suggested values for Rodinal developer from this very interesting discussion thread:
135 film: 3 to 3.5ml per roll
120 film: 4ml per roll
220 film: 8 ml per roll
I might be completely off track here, what do you think?
12.5 Hour Film Development? EPIC!
The further I explore this medium, the more doors open for me and let me find new avenues. Right now I'm looking into the intricate details on how to develop black and white film.
Switch. Lucky SHD 100, Rodinal 1+100, 3 degrees Celsius, 12.5 hours
The basics are very easy and mostly the same: you put the film in a light-proof development tank (usually a plastic container), you dilute developer with water, at a certain temperature, you fill the developer into the development tank, you agitate it every now and then for something in the range of five to twenty minutes, then you pour the developer out, rinse with water, fill in fixer for about 5 to 10 minutes, rinse again and you're done.
Now there are a lot of variables, you can use different kinds of developer (you can even develop film in coffee!), the developers work with different dilutions. Then there's the time component. And the amount and frequency of agitation. And the temperature.
Here are the parameters for a pretty normal film development:
Film: Lucky SHD 100 (exposed at ISO 100)
Developer: Spürsinn HCD
Dilution: 1+15
Development time: 7:30 min
Agitation: 30 seconds, then swirl the tank a few times once a minute
Temperature: 20 degrees Celsius
Fixing time: 6 minutes
The results are very predictable, especially if you stick to this very routine and don't change any of the parameters.
Don't move!
Then I started to hear about stand development, which changes several of these parameters. In stand development you often work with thinner developer, e.g. at a higher dilution, the development time is longer, sometimes even an hour or longer. And as the name suggests, you don't agitate the development tank as much, sometimes just in the beginning and then just let it sit do its thing.
Developer gets used up during development, normally you have to mix a fresh batch every time you develop film. Stand development makes use of that fact. During stand development, the developer doesn't move over the film, and so at the places where it touches the film, it gets used up. And once it's used up, it won't develop anymore, or at least not that fast. So it has a self-stopping characteristic, the development will slow down further and further. But it doesn't get used up at the same speed everywhere. It will quickly develop the brighter areas of the film (e.g. those areas where the negative is dark) until it's used up. At the same time the darker areas of the film (e.g. where the negative is brighter) don't use it up as fast, so the developer has more time to go to work there.
The result can be more detail in the shadows and typically less grain.
Mercury II. Lucky SHD 100, Rodinal 1+100, 3 degrees Celsius, 12.5 hours
Did I tell you I love extremes? When I want to find out what a slider in Lightroom does, I don't just move it gradually, I crank it all the way right or left, then ease back. And when I do a stand development, I crank it too.
After reading enough about it, I thought I should give it a try. The hard way. The stand developments that I've done so far were in the 30 minute range, and I couldn't see that much difference from the regular process.
So this time I changed several of the parameters. First I exposed a roll of Lucky SHD 100 at ISO 800. Some say it's impossible to push this relatively cheap film this far. I beg to differ. Second I decided on a much lower temperature by putting it outside on the window sill. During winter. At 3 degrees Celsius. I also used a different developer: Rodinal R09 one-shot (I read somewhere that it works really well for stand development), And last, I thought why not go all the way and left it there over night. For 12.5 hours to be precise.
Let's recap:
Film: Lucky SHD 100 (exposed at ISO 800)
Developer: Rodinal
Dilution: 1+100
Development time: 12.5 hours
Agitation: 30 seconds, then ignore for the rest of the time
Temperature: initially 20 degrees Celsius, cooling down to 3 degrees
Fixing time: 6 minutes
It was an experiment, and certainly not one under controlled conditions. I had changed several parameters at once, and didn't have much experience with stand development other than the few times I used pretty conservative recipes to develop by. All I could have hoped for was to find at least a bit of seomthing on the pictures that wasn't completely overdeveloped.
Down. Lucky SHD 100, Rodinal 1+100, 3 degrees Celsius, 12.5 hours
What came out was pretty much beyond my expecations. Great tones and a quite low level of grain. Very scannable too.
Conclusion
I must say I'm pretty much happy with this! Up to today I was a semi fan of the Lucky film. It has its quirks, and under some lighting conditions I just could never get good results from it. This method has pretty much changed that for me <3
Now all I'll have to find a good way to do such a development during summertime. Might have to get a separate development fridge soon...
Universal Mercury II
Yes, it needs cleaning (damn you, macro lens!). But just take a look at this beauty. When I recently came across this camera, I simply had to get my fingers on one of them.
It's the US-made Universal Mercury II, the only camera I know of that has a rotary shutter. Which explains why the camera has this odd protrusion at its top. This half frame (18x24mm) camera was made in the United States around 1945 and it features a super fast shutter speed of up to 1/1000s.
It squeezes 65 frames out of a regular 35mm film.
And now after having watched this video repeatedly, I'm going to clean it. Promise.
Plaubel Peco Universal II
Here's one of the tiny little things I brought from the Fotobörse Darmstadt. My new preccccccious...
Hm okay, one of them.
It's a German-built Plaubel Peco Universal II, it sports an international back and takes everything that fits within a size of 4x5". I've got it with a set of 4x5" and by 9x12cm cassettes. Now I'm looking for a 120 film back. Happen to have a spare one lying around? Also looking for a Polaroid back.
And yes, large format is a big journey, but it's also really exciting!
Undsoversity-Professor
Ich wollte nur eben kurz zu Protokoll geben, dass ich jetzt ganz offiziell Undsoversity-Professor bin!
Das fing irgendwann letztes Jahr an, und brachte mich im Sommer 2010 nach München. Dort habe ich mit Timo Hetzel für die Undsoversity einen Lightroom-Workshop aufgezeichnet.
Und was dabei entstanden ist, finde ich sehr gelungen. Der Workshop behandelt alle wichtigen Facetten von Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, der meiner Meinung nach am besten gelungenen Software rund um die Verwaltung und Bearbeitung von Fotos.
Der zweistündige Workshop ist als HD Video und in einer iPhone/iPod-Version erhältlich und umfasst alles Wichtige zu den Themen Bildimport, Bildauswahl, Bearbeitung, Schwarzweiß-Umwandlung, Workflow und Export der Fotos.
Dazu gibt es (ab KW47) auch einen Lightroom-Beispielkatalog zum Download, mit dem man das im Video gelernte sofort selbst an den Beispielen ausprobieren kann.
Lightroom selbst kann als 30-Tage-Testversion hier kostenlos heruntergeladen werden.
» zur Undsoversity
The Invisible Camera
It doesn't really matter if with an iPhone, a full frame DSLR or a medium format analog camera, I simply love photography. Capturing that moment and telling that story is what it's all about for me.
Whatever tool works best for the job is the right tool. But at the same time it's always the photographer who takes the picture, the equipment can merely help you with getting that one picture that tells the story and add its flavour, both during the taking of the picture and in its visual representation later on.
But it is clear that there are always two sides involved: you and the camera, the camera and you.
Years ago someone asked me "when are you a photographer?" and I didn't have a good answer back then. I think I have now found it while surfing the web.
User imaphotog posted this on reddit:
I've been taking pictures since I was a little kid. I've been working professionally for five years. And only now is my camera disappearing.
What I mean is that while working, I can see in my mind's eye quite accurately what frames are possible with the given conditions. I can envision composition, perspective, contrast, depth of field, and metering pretty well. I'm pretty sure it's by virtue of hours and hours and hours of practice with 35mm.
Now I don't think about the camera. I just dial in and shoot. Look at the scene, see the images in my head, and grab them. I might snag a glance at histogram every now and then to confirm myself, but no more of the LCD chimping that slowed me down for so long. (except when I shoot film)
Am I crazy?
This is what happens if you spend time doing something instead of just reading about it. Someone said it takes 10 years until you master something. That is 10 years of spending time, not 10 years of taking the camera out an hour on the weekend.
I don't think you're crazy imaphotog. I think you nailed it!
Now.. go out and shoot!
(source: reddit)
Large Format: Anarchy And Restriction
Okay, seasoned pros will smile at me calling 4x5" large format, as it is just the baby of the larger formats in photography. But hey, I have become super excited about it!As you know I am right in the middle of my journey rediscovering film photography in all its glory. I don't believe I am doing this because I'm a hopeless nostalgic, trying to desperately preserve some of the long gone good old times. Far from it! It is actually much more a combination of realizing that next to the obvious weaknesses, analog photography does have a lot of strengths that go far beyond some of the aspects of what digital can do, and that there is something wonderfully refreshing in having to work within a restricted environment.
I grew up shooting 35mm film with a Minolta X700 SLR. The 35mm format (today also known as "full frame") is the format that defined me. The 35mm format speaks a visual language that I understand very well and that I know how to handle. It feels comfortable. Sometimes almost too comfortable.
Then came medium format. 6x4.5cm, 6x6cm, 6x9cm. Later even the in-between 4x3 and 4x4cm film size. Again, a different visual language, supported by having to use a different approach in composition, workflow and by having different depth of field to work with. Initially that felt strange, and it took some time to get used to the new language and find its strengths and weaknesses. And I actually can't claim that I am completely there yet. But I feel I'm getting pretty close, and a certain level of comfort has started to set in. Still far from the too comfortable level
Then two weeks ago I attended a large format photography workshop. Two days of venturing into alien territory. And boy have I seen the light.
If you take a look at your non large-format camera, no matter if digital or analog, if compact or full-frame SLR, even at most of the medium format cameras, you will realize that they all have a clearly defined reference framework. The film plane is parallel to the lens plane, they are both on the same visual axis and the distance between film and lens is usually fixed.
On the one hand those conditions help to get to a defined state, which inevitably makes photography easier accessible to more people, on the other hand photography didn't really start out this way.
There are ways to work around those: you can use a tilt lens to leave the parallel universe (sorry, couldn't resist), moving outside the optical axis can be achieved by a shift lens, and the distance between film and lens can be changed by adding bellows in between. Or macro rings.
Enter large format photography.
The lens and the film plane are situated on two independent boards that are connected by bellows. Tilting, shifting and changing the distance are second nature to a large format camera. Total freedom. And we are not just talking about tilting and shifting the lens, you can also tilt and shift the film. Or both.
To say it in the words of a large format photographer friend: PURE ANARCHY!
But wait. A large format camera is heavy. And the film isn't on a roll, it comes in sheets that individually go into film cassettes. If you use a double-sided cassette, you have two shots per film. But you will have to reverse the cassette to take the second shot.
So doing large format photography is not only anarchy, it also is a lot of restriction. If you want to shoot outside, you will have to carry a heavy beast and a heavy tripod, just to return home with a hand full of pictures.
Restriction combined with the ultimate level of freedom. What a crazy combination! And what a refreshing one at that.
I for my part have caught the virus big time. The Fotobörse Darmstadt, one of Germany's largest trade shows for used photography gear, is less than two weeks away, and at the top of my shopping list is a 4x5" large format camera. Maybe a Toyo, maybe a Cambo, or a Plaubel, a Sinar, or maybe even a Linhof, a Horseman or a Tachihara. Or a folding Graflex.
I have the feeling that this might not be the last time you see me writing about this...
Photo: mikefiction
Youngster vs. Old Lady
Last weekend while on a large format workshop (I'll talk about this another time) I took pictures using my 35mm Minolta X700 with a 35/1.8 lens on it and a roll of Efke 100 film, which I later pushed to ISO 400 in Rodinal R09 one shot developer. I used this 1+50 recipe for development.
(click for bigger size and comments)
Then today I got the package with a Zeiss Ikon Ikonta B (this is what it looks like, here's a review) that I got from eBay. It's a 6x6 medium format camera with a folding front, has a 75mm lens and takes 120 roll film. It also has an uncoupled rangefinder built in, which means you'll focus with the range finder, then take that result and dial it in on the lens. A two step process for focussing with a nice built-in error margin. And it doesn't come with a light meter, so you're down to external metering. All this slows down the process quite a bit, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a different way of working.
To me there is quite a different feeling between the results that come out of those two cameras. The 35mm pictures from last weekend give me an upbeat feeling. Even though they are on the darkish side, they feel very open and inviting to me.
In contrast the pictures I took today almost freak me out. In a good way. Almost a depressive vibe, which is what I was going for when I took them. That and a bit of luck, as it was the first time I used this camera and the first time I developed this specific film in this specific way.
The pictures from both these sessions touch me in different ways, and evoking emotion is one of my main reasons for doing photography. For me a good picture is the one that touches me.
So what makes those two photo sessions have such different results?
Let me try to analyze:
Weather
The weather was almost the same, both times the sky was overcast, but the 35mm pics were all either taken at night, or indoors, so there was definitely a different quality of light by default. Hard to compare from that perspective.
Film
The 35mm pictures were shot on Efke 100 film at ISO 400, then pushed during development. The Ikonta pictures were shot using Rollei Tonal 100 (an orthopanchromatic film) which is also an ISO 100 film, also pushed to 400 during development. Both films are different animals, and I intentionally did not scan both of them to grayscale, but left the color information intact. You can see the Tonal 100 having a slightly warmish tone which I think helps the vintage nature of the camera I used.
Both films also get a bit more grainy due to the push development, but it doesn't show as much in the medium format film due to its much bigger size compared to the 35mm negative.
Format & Lens
6x6 medium format, that's 60x60mm. Compare that to the 24x36mm that a 35mm camera does. 3600 vs. 864 square millimeters.
Let's try to compare: the 35mm camera's normal focal length would be 43mm, the diagonal of the film. The 35mm lens is therefore slightly wide angle. The normal focal length for a 6x6 camera is about 85mm, so the 75mm are also slightly wide, so in that respect they sort of compare.
There is one big difference though: The size of the film has a big influence on depth of field. At the same aperture and distance and comparable focal length, the medium format camera will give you less depth of field, which you can see in the pictures. In order to get the same shallow depth of field with the 35mm camera, you will either have to get closer to the subject, or you have to use a wider open aperture.
Crop
The 35mm format has an aspect ratio of 3:2, the medium format of the Ikonta B is 1:1 - square. The pictures I tend to get out of a square format are often much more closed and less dynamic compared to the more open 3:2 crop. In one of the 35mm images I even used an almost 3:1 ratio.
Composition
The two series are fundamentally different in composition. With the 35mm I used much more close-up action, and the compositions are overall more dynamic. The faucet is dynamic in it's assymetrical nature, the rainy window balances out the light sources, one behind a rainy window and many other blurry ones in the far distance. And the Canadian flag is a very dynamic experiment where I moved the camera while exposing for a second. There is also not much that connects the pictures. (Maybe water could be the connecting element, but then you'd have to soak the Canadian flag, and I like Canada way too much to do that)
In contrast the 6x6 pictures from today are all very static. They all share strong verticals and those verticals are dead center. This is something the 6x6 format makes me do. I can't help it. I didn't notice until I returned home and scanned the pictures. Looking at each individually, I think those three pictures are okay. I believe putting them together in a triptych creates something bigger than the sum of the individual pictures.
Vignetting
All vignetting that you see is a product of the lenses used. The 35mm lens has some vignetting when shot wide open - and all the shots you see are shot wide open. The Ikonta also does vignetting, even stopped down one or two f-stops. In fact, while the 35mm pictures were shot at f1.8, the Ikonta pictures were all shot at f5.6 - that's a difference of over three stops. And the vignette the Ikonta's lens produces at this aperture is just very silky and smooth and vintage feeling.
Conclusion
I'm not sure what to draw from this comparison, but I will take a few personal observations away from it:
- The 35mm format tends to produce more dynamic results, the 6x6 Ikonta ends up with more static pictures
- The vignette produced by the Ikonta looks great. Must. Use. Ikonta. For. Portrait. Session.
- Due to its warm tone, the Tonal 100 film is a good choice for vintage type results. Its orthochromatic nature helps this feeling too
- Both the Efke 100 and the Tonal 100 can easily handle push development to ISO 400. The Efke 100 reacts with a bigger contrast boost than the Tonal 100, which is more soft in that respect
- Working with the 6x6 is much slower (no built-in light meter, two step focusing), and as a result I tend to end up being a bit less experimental than I am with the 35mm
- This is also helped by the fact that a roll of 120 film on a 6x6 camera yields only 12 pictures, the 35mm film allows for 3 times the exposures
- Grey November weather is great for shooting with the Ikonta, it allows me to be lazy with the light metering, because nothing changes much. The 35mm with its built-in meter is more agile in quickly changing conditions
- The depth of field on the 6x6 is much more shallow than on the 35mm, which will help isolate subjects even if they are not very close
- The Zeiss Ikon Ikonta B is a vintage camera with bellows, which makes it much more interesting for passers-by than the much more modern and regular looking Minolta. This can be a great conversation starter, but it can be in your way if you want to inconspicuously take pictures. Street photography with the Ikonta? Probably not.
Do you have any specific camera/film combinations that help you take pictures of certain moods and with certain characteristics?
3D Image Through One Lens
Then one day I started squinting my eyes. Left, right, left, right, .. and I noticed that in fact each eye sees a slightly different picture.
TWO DIFFERENT IMAGES.
THROUGH ONE LENS.
ON A SCREEN.
That's kind of the definition of 3D vision right there. Implemented in a 30 year old camera.
My best guess for an explanation is that instead of being a point, the lens is a surface, and thus light can travel through it in different paths. How the different paths reach the different eyes is a different question.
I see you shake your head in disbelief... let me convince you with this video I just made
Can you explain what's going on here?
There Will Be Fire - 2011 Workshops Taking Shape
It's still a bit longer until the 2011 workshops will be ready for you to register - I'm shooting for late November - but it turns out juggling over 16 dates, with some of them lying a year in the future, is almost as hard as lugging around a Cambo 4x5 view camera all day.I believe I finally got the list of workshops down. For you English spekaers there will be one in Berlin, Germany, one in San Francisco and the Brooklyn Cookin' workshop. And potentially a workshop in Washington D.C. but I still need to confirm some of the dates before I can be more specific. And of course there's this year's workshops to the Himalayas!
The Himalayan Workshop & Trek will be shorter than last year. The duration was one of the biggest factors that kept people from signing up and this is why we changed it this year. Including getting to Kathmandu and back home, you can expect the entire trip to take about three weeks. We are in for a great mixture of sightseeing while crossing parts of Tibet in Jeeps, and a trek around Mount Kailash, the holiest mountain for the Hindus and the Buddhists. Of course complete with some of the greatest Sherpas from Nepal and yaks to help us carry the really heavy stuff.
The workshop in Brooklyn is the one about food photography and cooking, perfect for couples, unless they are both photographers. Or chefs. Chef Mark and I have teamed up again to offer a workshop with strictly limited attendance (five couples max) and double the fun! If your significant other loves to cook, this is your chance to spend a fun workshop weekend together!
The San Francisco workshop used to be all about street photography. This year it will sport a few completely new angles, one of them having to do with fire. I can't say much more at this point, but I suggest you begin dusting off your tripods and get that remote shutter release squeaky clean.
The Washington D.C. workshop is still in the making and I really hope it will happen. It has been requested over and over, so we are looking at a 50/50 split between learning to take great pictures, and post processing the images using Lightroom. This is the workshop where you will learn to squeeze the most out of RAW using state-of-the-art processing and some serious digital magic. If you want to take your digital photography to the next level, this is the workshop!
The Berlin workshop is going to be special in several ways. First our workshop location will be in the heart of Berlin, right at the Friedrichstraße, just a few minutes walking distance from a lot of the historic landmarks, including the Brandenburg Gate. We will have a guide for a custom half-day photography tour, that will be tailor-made to the group's needs and wishes. And last but not least, even though this is one of the most requested workshops, the attendance will be strictly limited to a maximum of seven participants. This will ensure everyone in the group will get the maximum personal attendance and time by yours truly. We are of course also planning for a traditional German meal and some great beer in the evenings!
And last but not least, after having had such a wonderful time in Toronto, it is back on the list for next year! It's still not clear what the workshop will be about, but as I will hold it at photographer Sean Galbraith's place again, and as he is an avid analog photographer, I'm seriously thinking about working a strong analog component into that workshop. It is still far enough out to make those final decisions later. It's all a matter of what makes sense to pack into a three-day workshop. Let me know what you think.
The workshop page is still spotty to say the least, but have a look yourself!
The Post Digital Photography Era
Because I do two shows on photography, and because I'm a very curious person, I keep close tabs on a lot of the things that go on in photography. Every day something new happens, something gets invented, something becomes popular or disappears back into obscurity. Remember the disposable flash bulb? Remember the Kodak Disc? Photography is very much alive. It has always been. Some trends will only be of interest to a select few, some will gain wider interest and some even become so well known, that you see them being used over and over.
An example? HDR became pretty hip pretty fast back when HDR processing software Photomatix was released, especially when used in the form of a way-over-the-top effect. Now, several years later, I see more and more people using it the way it was originally meant to be used: to subtly increase the dynamic range of an image. Another example? The tilt effect (also often mistakenly referred to as the tilt/shift effect) that allows you to make regular scenes look like miniatures is one of those trending examples. It has been around forever, but it only became popular a few years ago. And it already is beginning to look somewhat old and dated.
It's easy to look at these trends as unrelated events, but the sheer amount of interesting things that have popped up over the last few years makes me believe that we are actually at the beginning of a fundamental shift in how the medium of photography is perceived and how it's being used in more creative ways than ever.
The Analog Clean Room
Some of us, myself included, come from a film SLR background where it was crucial to get the best, the slickest and most reproducible results. Good glass and technique helped to make sure you didn't end up with any unwanted vignetting, and it was a sign of quality of your equipment and work if you pictures had the desired level of sharpness and contrast next to a good composition. Cropping was done when enlarging photos, but it was less practical when shooting slide film, unless you used my method of cropping the slides by sticking black electrical tape on them.
The Digital Clean Room
Then all of a sudden digital was there, and even though I gave up a lot of control, my first two mega pixel camera with its tiny sensor, its from today's perspective horrible dynamic range, and the overprocessed JPG images that it produced - JPG was the only choice - even with all that, there was something magical about the instant feedback and the possibility to try as often as I liked to get the desired result. The first DSLR followed a while later and it gave me back control. And perfection. Overexposed? Correct and shoot again. Got the framing wrong? Move the camera, shoot again. White balance off? Fix in post. Almost like a computer game where you have an infinite amount of lives. Died during the boss fight? Try again. And again.
Spray and Pray
There are a lot of situations where the spray and pray approach is the only one that will allow you to get the exact result you want. There are a lot of jobs and situations where digital is the only way to go, and I love to be able to quickly grab the camera, take a 21 mega pixel picture and post it online before an analog photographer can even get the film to the lab.
But if you take a look beyond that, you are bound to realize that for more and more photographers the digital way is becoming less and less satisfying. And I'm not even speaking of the massive backlog of pictures un-dealt with that more and more photographers fight.
Imperfections
Thanks to the fact that Lightroom, Aperture and other photography software allowed us to move the vignetting slider in both directions, a lot of photographers started to add vignettes to their pictures as opposed to removing them. Artificial grain was added to make digital black and white images more moody, more analog looking, and to bring back some of the overall grittiness that the analog world used to have. In fact my hard drive still hosts a high-res scan of a gray medium format slide, that I used to overlay on some of my pictures in Photoshop.
Lenses With Flavor
Now we have Hipstamatic, Camera Bag, The Best Camera, Lo-Mob and more. These are iPhone apps that simulate an analog look, and you find a lot of them on other platforms too.
When it comes to your DSLR, you can buy creative lenses like the Lensbaby, the Subjektiv, the Dreamagon, adapters to use a Holga plastic lens on your Nikon D700, or even stereo lenses, all optical ways to turn your camera into something entirely different. Ever shot with a zone plate instead of a regular lens? How about a pinhole? The sometimes not very predictable results that those lenses give you, make it really exciting to finally look at the pictures on your computer and be delighted with the imperfections that they add to your photography. Without using a single digital filter.
The Music World
In my other life I produce audio, and I can't help noticing big analogies between photography and the field of sound. Audio went digital quite a bit earlier than photography did, and I suspect a bit of a parallel development (pun not intended). Back in the 1980s, when the CD came out and everything in the production world all of a sudden turned digital, a lot of productions started to sport a very clean and almost analytical sound. Drum tracks turned very sterile thanks to clean quantization, removing the flawed human element. And the loss of that often went hand in hand with the loss of emotion. Consequently it didn't take the drum machine manufacturers long to introduce humanizer circuits into their boxes to get some of the feeling back. And the clean and digitally recorded sound ended up being fed through digital algorithms that simulated the warm sounding distortions of analog tubes and tape machines.
Hipstamatic anyone? I'm actually surprised neither Canon nor Nikon have introduced any effective "make it dirty" sliders in their DSLRs yet.
Today with audio,I do the same many other producers do: I add dirt by running my microphone through an amplifier that uses an actual analog tube. I do that because neither have I found an equally good sounding digital version of analog tube distortion, nor am I patient enough to spend the time it takes my computer to make all the intricate calculations to add those fake distortions. This is simply more authentic and faster. Many music producers still (or again) record certain things on actual tape machines, because the punch their productions get through the tape saturation is unparalleled in the digital world. Analog is alive and kicking in the music business.
The Right Tool For The Job
There's a really interesting shift happening in photography too, and I believe it goes beyond being a fad, beyond being a trend that will have disappeared again a year from now. At least for their creative expression, a growing amount of digital photographers is moving (back) into analog photography, and away from the clinically perfect digital world. Why? Maybe because digital photography makes you unhappy? Maybe because it is missing some of the human element? Maybe because it allows you to re-introduce a certain amount of randomness back into your art? Maybe even because photographers are too impatient to spend all the time and effort (and in case of expensive digital filters the money) to re-create a digital version of their beloved Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO1600. Actual Ilford HP5+ pushed to ISO1600 simply does a better job. And a more authentic one at that. And if you still feel like playing, there's always the hybrid approach where you scan your negatives and continue working on them in the digital realm.
We Want Our Flaws Back It Seems
We have all seen a lot of perfect, we have been marinated left and right in crisp, noise-free and predictable digital photography. It almost seems, people want the flaws back. And that clearly shows in a lot of developments (sorry, douldn't resist). Look at all the creative films that you can get today. Some of my favorites are the Rollei Crossbird (a slide film that has been made to work really well in cross processing), the Redbird (a red-scale film that has the color emulsion reversed, resulting in some intense red color cast), and even the Fuji Astia 100F 100F slide film, which produces some pretty intense results when processed in negative film chemistry instead of its intended slide film soup. Cross processing gives you results that are somewhat unexpected, results that you probably wouldn't have achieved (or even tried) in digital, that's how different they can look. But nevertheless results that are much more likely to make you come back and look at these pictures for a second time.
The Trust in Chance
Instead of fully controlling every aspect of their work, more and more photographers deliberately introduce elements into their workflow that are hard to reproduce exactly the same way. Look for instance at some of the instant film materials you can get through the Impossible Project at the moment. Predictable results? Hardly. Or look at double exposures. Taken by different photographers. Did you know you can buy exposed film on eBay to add your own second layer of exposures, then develop it to find out what you've got? What an element of surprise! Some deliberately shoot film that is far beyond its best-before date and take advantage of the interesting characteristics some aging film materials get. Some expose the whole 35mm film, including the sprocket holes, and some even partially remove the lenses from their cameras and tilt them to achieve effects similar to lensbabies and tilt lenses - that's called "freelensing". Or the deliberate manipulation of the medium, as seen in the emulsion lift, where integral instant film is taken apart and the photo emulsion gets transferred onto a different material.
Innumerable interesting and important developments that define a new style and even more important, a new approach to photography that is much more playful and unpredictable than anything else in photography has been for many decades.
Photography goes far beyond the clean and perfect results that our 24 megapixel DSLRs and our impressive L-class lenses will give us. And even if you don't want to take a step into the analog world and instead opt to use Hipstamatic or Camera Bag on your iPhone's digital camera, at least you give the random element some level of chance.
And maybe, after a while, you're ready to spend twenty bucks on eBay for a used old brownie, you load it with a roll of 120 slide film, you shoot some fun pictures, then you drop the film off at the next drug store with the note "please develop this slide film using the C41 negative process" - and after a few days, you'll get to enjoy the prints of your first batch of cross-processed pictures ever.
Why Digital Photography Makes You Unhappy
Yesterday, while waiting for Monika outside a store, I had an epiphany.Rewind. About a week earlier, we had spent three days holding an analog photography workshop and, still being in the spirit of this old and slow medium, just minutes earlier we had talked about the analog photography time we had planned for this weekend.
And then while I was waiting for her outside the store, it hit me right in the face. All the talk about reducing and simplifying, all the thought about limitation and constraint, all the ideas of slowing down and removing choice from the equation, it all of a sudden clicked into place with a massive *THUMP*.
At this point I'll have to rewind even more. It all started with Harvard professor of psychology Dan Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness. About a year ago I watched his TED talk about how external influences don't determine your happiness and how making a choice and sticking to it will make you more happy than having too many choices all the time. And about how we human beings so easily fall into the trap of making the wrong choice to set ourselves up for misery.
Here is the link to the video, if you haven't seen it, I highly (!) recommend you watch it and think about the implications of what Gilbert talks about. In the long run those might as well be the best spent twenty minutes of your life.
» Video: Dan Gilbert, Why Are We Happy?
Finished? What I write in this article will make a lot more sense after watching it. While writing this article, I have watched it again, probably my seventh time, and every time the implications of his research become more clear to me. And I can't help thinking "...now *that* explains..." over and over.
The essence of his talk is very simple, but the implications are huge: up to a certain point choice is good and desirable. But having too much choice makes us unhappy. Yes, this is pretty much at odds with the freedom that we all hold up so high. Which is why if you haven't by now, you need to watch the video. Really really.
An example: if you take into account all the different types of coffee, milk, flavorings and ways to combine them, you could come up with over 16,000 different drinks at Starbucks. And when asked "which would you prefer, sixteen thousand choices or ten?", it's almost a no-brainer to go for the larger number. More is better, right? But if you watch what Gilbert has to say, you will end up at a very different conclusion.
I'm no psychologist, but it seems our level of happiness is inversely related to the amount of choice we have. The more choice, the less happy. Yes, this sounds wrong to our western minds, after all our entire life is all about choice. A gazillion different cereals, toothpastes, detergents, cough medicines, .. something in it for everyone. We are taught all our lives that more is better. But to me, somewhere in a deeply buried part of my mind, all that choice has always felt a bit wrong.
But what does all that have to do with photography?
Whenever I talk about photography and how to get to the next level, sooner or later you will hear me bring up how limitation and constraint can help you discover new creative ways to approach photography and give your creative process a frame. I find myself more and more shooting with one single prime lens. No zoom. Or I restrict myself in some other way, working along an assignment, collecting things, trying to squeeze out the last bit of composition that a single location has to offer before I move on. And whenever I do this, I return home with a deep feeling of satisfaction. A lot more satisfaction than when I haul around seven lenses, a reflector, three filters, two strobes and two camera bodies.
Restriction leads to different results than no restriction. Some might argue that the more possibilities you have in approaching the shot, the better you will be able to capture it. In turn I argue that through limitation you will have to force yourself to approach the shot in different ways, often in ways that you would have never done any other way. Instead of doing things the way you always do, here all of a sudden you can watch creativity in the making.
But it gets better! Adding Gilbert's talk into the mix, it turns out that not only is limitation good to help you focus on the task at hand and find new approaches to old challenges, restricting your choices will also leave you more happy in general. Hey! You've just found happiness!
Digital photography is about choice. Sheer endless choice. When I'm in the mind-set of digital photography, many of my decisions come down to choice. I try to avoid strong contrast to allow for more choice in post processing. I sometimes frame a bit wider, just to be able to make the choice about the final crop later. I shoot black-and-white pictures in color, which gives me the maximum choice in how the individual color channels factor into the final result. I sometimes even shoot several different exposures of the same scene, just to bake them into an HDR and decide on the proper exposure later. When I finally sit in front of my computer and work on the pictures, I'm presented with more choices: contrast, white balance, crop, rotation, filters, black-and-white conversion .. it doesn't stop.
"But wait" I hear you say, "isn't choice what makes digital photography so wonderful?"
Sure. On the one hand you can quickly try out many different things, do several "developments" of the same picture and compare the different versions, maybe one to print, one to put online and two different black-and-white versions, one with higher contrast and one with a slight sepia tone. And then there's Dan Gilbert. Still haven't watched his talk? Here is the link again: link. It hits right where it hurts, and it'll leave you with a ton of food for thought.
I love digital photography for its speed, its surgical precision, its endless ways to get to a specific result, its low-light magic, its super cleanliness and its way of being a wonderful learning tool. I owe a lot to the advent of digital SLRs. But incorporating film photography back into my work, I more and more realize that there was this huge gaping hole that is now slowly being filled.
In the past I have talked about the different motivations that make people shoot analog. I have just added another one and I think it's the biggest one so far.
Whenever I spend time in the analog realm of photography, be it at a workshop or spending a weekend with just one camera and two rolls of film, I am making a choice. A choice for a more conscious approach, a choice to be less casual about what I shoot and how I shoot it, a choice for a type of development as the film has its very own characteristics built-in, a choice that just by the givens of the medium I will have to stick to. Analog photography won't give me as much wiggle room as its binary cousin will.
There is now a new generation of photographers who have never shot a single roll of analog film. I might sound like an old fart, but I think they could massively benefit from spending an entire weekend with one single camera, one fixed focal length and two rolls of film in their pocket.
Got something to say about what I wrote? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
My Beef With CFLs
This one's about compact fluorescents (CFLs) and the completeness and smoothness of their spectrum. Or rather the lack thereof. If you want the short version: CFLs pretty much suck for photographers and videographers. If you want to find out why, read on.
Have a look at this picture:
Illustration: Chris Marquardt (License)
I'm not a color scientist (but I play one on a podcast) - and as a photographer I'm dealing with color reproduction a lot. I love good skin tones in portraits and in general when I'm in photo geek mode (and when I'm not having an artsy phase), I kinda sorta like the colors of things to be faithfully reproduced in my photographs.
Tech information: The spectra in the above picture have been taken with a small hand-held spectroscope that is using a diffraction grating (1000 lines per millimeter) to make the light spectrum visible to the human eye. It's not a precise scientific instrument, but it certainly is good enough to show a qualitative picture of a light spectrum.
It's Not Easy Being Green
Okay, so what are we looking at in the above picture? It is the spectrum of different light sources. Different parts of the spectrum correspond to different wavelengths, and the spectrum of visible light lies in the range of about 400nm (nanometers) to 700nm. White light is a mixture of all sorts of different wavelengths.
If you shine that light source onto Kermit the frog, Kermit will reflect mainly the green parts of the light source's spectrum. That reflection then hits your eye and you see Kermit being green.
If the spectrum of your light source contains a lot of different wavelengths (a complete spectrum), chances are there will also be light in the wavelength of the color of the object you illuminate, which in turn results in the color reproduction being rather accurate.
Are you still with me?
If the spectrum of that light source contains holes (e.g. parts of the spectrum are just not there), and if those holes coincide with the color of the object I'm shining that light at, the object doesn't get a chance to reflect its color.
In terms of Kermit, this means: his shade of green will look different, and the color reproduction is out the window.
Metamerism
The effect of an object changing its color appearance under different light sources is called illuminant metameric failure. Yep, that's a mouth full. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
My super simplified and entirely non-scientific version of it is that especially under fluorescent light with it's typically very incomplete spectrum, you can almost be sure that the color you see is not the actual color. Let that sink in for a minute.
Enter Photography
Scroll back up and look at the spectra again. Notice how smooth daylight and incandescent light are, and notice the gaping holes and sharp lines in the other light sources? The picture doesn't give you any quantitative information, but it says a lot about the quality of light. The peaky-ness of some of the light sources has to do with what gasses they are filled with, or what other medium they use to produce light.
Yellow Vapors
One of the more extreme cases (and one that's not on the above chart) is the very yellow sodium vapor light. Here in Germany we often see these light sources used at zebra crossings. About 90 (!!) percent of the spectrum of those lamps lies at a thin peak around 600nm, which we see as yellow.
(image source)
Next time you're at a zebra crossing, have a look at your blue jeans... good luck trying to see the blue in them.
White Balance
How does your camera handle different color temperature light sources? The mechanism is called white balance and it is mainly the camera's way to shift the spectrum up or down. But guess what happens if the spectrum only has one sharp peak as is the case for sodium pressure lamps?
Errrrrrr rrrrrrright.. you can move that up or down the spectrum as much as you like, you'll NEVER EVER get a good skin tone out of it.
Now back to the fluorescent lights - and the CFLs, aka Compact Fluorescent Lights. They are little fluorescent tubes, made to fit in light bulb sockets. Nothing more and nothing less.
No matter how warm the manufacturers make those CFLs to resemble the color temperature of our good old light bulbs, the spectrum will still be comparatively incomplete. And no matter how hard your camera's white balance tries to shift that perforated spectrum around, it will not change the fact that parts of the spectrum are missing and some colors will just not be rendered as they should.
Back To Daylight
It's actually really really simple: If you want the best color reproduction, your best friend will always be daylight. Although rather warm, incandescent light bulbs are actually a pretty good choice too. Their spectrum might be leaning a lot more towards the red than afternoon daylight, but at least it is pretty complete and can usually be made into something very neutral with either good white balance, or with some of the profiling solutions out there.
As long as the industry doesn't come up with fluorescent light that has a more complete spectrum, you should never expect good color rendition from them.
I'm all for saving energy and being green, but from a photographer's perspective I am really sad that CFLs will sooner or later be everywhere.
And I haven't even started talking about their flicker and what that means for very short shutter speeds and for videographers...
Do you have any fluorescent light photography stories? Tell them in the comments!
Update: I have not covered LEDs yet, simply because I don't have any white LED light sources here, but their mechanism to produce light is similar to fluorescent lights and therefore peaks and holes should be expected.
Update 2: I also didn't cover flash yet, it is difficult enough for me to photograph the spectra of continuous light sources with my little handheld spectroscope at the moment. I'll try soon though.
Update 3: For many more spectra and a much more scientifical discussion about them, please see this excellent resource.
Busy. Productive. Fun.
Ooookay, back from the second big trip this year (the first one was the Everest Trek in April/May) - and what can I say? It was fun, and it was extremely productive. Here are some of the highlights:
First I spent a day at Joe McNally's lighting workshop (watch the video here), and then the Brooklyn Cookin' Workshop with its truly different concept was not only a great learning experience for everyone, I also ended up gaining about two pounds of weight. Oh well. If you want to know what the workshop is like, it inspired participant and professional designer Alan Barnett to write three blog posts about it (read them here, here and here). » Brooklyn Cookin' workshop
San Francisco Street Safari 2010 - 17 photographers and one wonderful city. This is one of my favorite workshops, as we get to go out and spend time among the great people of San Francisco and take pictures of strangers. Watch the video to find out how much fun everyone had. » watch the video in HD
Photo Day 2010 at the TWiT Cottage... - Between the travel and the workshops I had the great chance to drive up to Petaluma once again and take the stage in front of Leo Laporte's cameras to talk with photographers. Photo Day 2010 was great, the guests were awesome and video of the event will be published soon. While you wait, why not watch the Photo Day 2009 videos?
... and the San Francisco Apple Store - I also had the chance to speak at the Apple Store on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. I used the opportunity to talk about some of my work, and as the entire week had the overarching theme of people photography, I chose to present my work from the last two Everest Treks.
And last but not least, on my more elcectic side, I've shot another one-minute-in-the-life-of video. About a big bridge. Watch it here. (Like it? Here are a few more: kite surfers, night ride, shallow dof, tea, more tea and toothbrushes)
Okay, I guess I'll crash for a few days now.
What was the highlight of your last two weeks?
Everest Trek 2010 - We're Back!
Wow, what a journey, what a trip. And we all returned safe and with lots of pictures, not only on our memory cards but most important in our mind. It's often impossible to portray the true scale of things, so taking a scene in instead of shooting a quick snap of it is sometimes the better choice.
I have now started posting some of my photography from the trek here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nubui
A Blast From The Past
Okay, now "past" is a very relative term and given that the last Abbey Adventure workshop has taken place just about half a year ago, you might think that's no time at all - but given the fact that the new workshop season is in full swing already and that I have been spending most of that last half year to get everything ready and up to speed for 2010 (yes, that's twenty-ten), half a year feels like a very long time.
Which makes this video even more fun. It was entirely shot and edited by Ingo, one of the participants, and it just brought back a ton of great memories about a fun workshop group.
Oh, and sorry, there won't be an English language Abbey Adventure this year, and the German one is already sold out, but if you're interested in any of the other workshops, just follow this link.
Ography
Picture: typographica.org
Do photography and typograhy have more in common than the "ography"?
I remember back in high school I used to doodle my own fonts on checkered paper instead of paying attention to the math lessons. And not just individual letters, I drew entire alphabets. Numbers and special characters and all. Many of them were quite similar, rather geometric, and I distinctively remember trying to make them look well balanced and getting the distance between the individual letters right.
This all came back when I ran across an article on typographica.org titled Making Geometric Type Work.
I knew almost nothing about typography back in high school, and it was years later that I started to read up on the subject. However, what I did know was what I liked. And I tried to figure out why I liked things.
Typography is everywhere. Look around you, the world would be quite a different place if you removed all the written words from it.
Typography is about design as much as it is about helping to convey messages. If you talk to type designers, you'll hear them use words like balance, width, joins, alignment, spacing - the exact same terms that we photographers use in the context of image composition.
And yes, it isn't that much of a difference - actually learning about typography and other visual media will inevitably influence the way you compose your pictures. Mind you, not always in a conscious way. I often catch myself almost accidentally having applied some of these principles when I revisit my images later.
Having made these principles conscious while learning about typography has helped slip them into my subconscious without me even knowing it.
And when I notice the results, it makes me smile.
Do you have anything visual that influences your photography? Let me know in the comments.
Who needs a camera profile?
Compare the following two images and then tell me which of the two is more accurate.
Hard to tell, right? Both images are based on the same RAW file from a Canon 5D Mark II, managed in Lightroon, neutrally white-balanced using Lightroom's WB eyedropper on the middle grey patch in the lower of the two rows of grey patches in the color chart on the top. Both files were then exported to JPG with sRGB profile embedded. The only difference is that the top image uses the camera profile that Lightroom assigns to camera images by default ("Adobe Standard"), and the second image is based on a custom-built camera profile based on the ColorChecker card present in the image.
(Note: Lightroom's "Camera Profiles" are not the same as ICC profiles)
The differences between the two images are subtle indeed, the camera and the Adobe Standard profile that gets applied in Lightroom do a remarkably good job, especially with a custom white balance. In fact I'd happily use this outcome for all sorts of professional projects (and have actually done so in the past) - as long as the spectrum under which those pictures have been shot is at least somewhat daylight-ish. With daylight-ish I mean an as full as possible spectrum, one that you'd get outside in the shade at 3pm on a summer's day. Not one that you'd get from a yellow sodium light at the side of the road.
So the question is: why would anyone want to use a camera profile if the output is as good as it is?
Let's first take a look at what profiling does. Consider the color chart in the image below.
In the lower half it shows four rows of color swatches, and all of these are very precisely manufactured to be of a very specific color. Whenever you take a picture, there is an analog process involved where photons hit light-sensitive cells that accumulate a charge based on the amount of photons, and are then read by circuits and converted to numbers. These numbers are then read by software, magically converted into other numbers and finally interpreted as colors and translated into brightness levels of individual red, green and blue pixels on a screen. Or converted into various amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink and squirted onto paper. It seems like a miracle that in the end we get to see our pictures at all.
But I guess you get the idea, it's a very complex process with quite a few areas of variability, and in order to make sure that we get consistent results, a profiling process can be of great value.
So back to the color swatches. The manufacturer knows pretty much exactly what color values the individual swatches have. If you shoot a picture, it's very likely that your camera and the attached software don't interpret the colors exactly the same way. Blue tones might be a bit more violet than you saw them, greens might be a bit less vivid and reds might be slightly over-pronounced. In an every-day snapshot type of situation this is no biggie, in the analog world, this is even the norm, because every film you choose will have different color and contrast characteristics, but we're in the digital world here and what if you want to get just that little bit more accurate?
Here's where the profiling software comes in. It looks at the picture, finds the swatches (that have been shot with your specific camera under specific light conditions and therefore look slightly different than expected) and it can easily tell that the blue in your picture is different from what it should be and the green is too bright and the red is too dark and so forth. Based on this information the software builds a profile, which in fact is just a lookup-table with mappings from wrong to right color.
All in all this used to be a tedious process that required a great deal of care, expensive software and hardware, and could only be afforded by the professionals who had to get color exactly right, for example in areas like product photography.
Enter ColorChecker Passport by x-rite. After reading up on it and receiving a few recommendations I've finally spent the 100 bucks for this little gadget, and I must say I pretty much instantly fell in love with it.
The chart comes in its little rugged plastic case, so the delicate color swatches are well protected, and it can be swiveled so you can set it down and it will stand by itself.
And if you are a Lightroom user, the process couldn't be easier. In fact this solution is built around Lightroom and RAW and it won't make much sense on its own.
All you have to do is install the software (make sure you download the latest version from their website) which adds an export plugin to Lightroom. Then during your photo session (which ideally takes place under consistent light conditions) you shoot a well-exposed reference picture of the ColorChecker chart and that's all you need to think of during shooting.
After importing your pictures into Lightroom find the one with the ColorChecker, and export it using the ColorChecker export preset. Within less than a minute the software will analyze the picture, find the ColorChecker automatically, create a new profile and prompt you to restart Lightroom to make it aware of the new profile.
Now all you do is switch to the develop mode, select the newly created profile from the Camera Calibration section and you're mostly set. For more accuracy you can also white-balance based on the grey swatches in the upper chart, the bottom middle one is neutral, the ones to the right create warmer tones, the ones to the left make the image slightly cooler.
Still sounds difficult, but after working with it for 5 minutes it was second nature.
This is the first camera profiling solution that I can envision using regularly because it's not only fast, it also almost seamlessly integrates into my existing Lightroom-based workflow.
Move your mouse over this picture to see the differences the profile can make:
Is the difference so big that I'll from now on use it everywhere I go? Absolutely not. It's great to get that extra bit of accuracy where it's needed, and it's definitely quick and simple enough for me to use, so it'll be more than just a paperweight (believe me, I have too many gadgets that I don't really use because they are either too complicated or because they don't add enough value to my photography). It'll clearly help me get better colors in some situations where the light spectrum is difficult, but on the other hand there are many light situations that I don't want to correct for, many of them for creative reasons, so that's where I will happily leave it in the camera bag or at home. And this is true for both my personal projects as well as customer projects.
Is it as accurate as the bigger and much more expensive systems? Probably not. I've never had the need to work with one of those, and with the type of photography I do, I doubt that I ever will. But under light sources with an uneven spectrum (fluorescents for example) it's clearly more accurate than just using the good old white balance and it renders very pleasing colors. It's a logical next step that is lightweight enough in its approach.
Is it for everyone? No. It only makes sense if your workflow is RAW + Lightroom. There it integrates nicely and takes a lot of pain out of the camera profiling process.
Will you be a better photographer if you use the ColorChecker Passport? Let me ask you this: Has buying that new lens made you a better photographer? How about that new camera body you got for yourself last Christmas?
In short: nope.
Photography is still about capturing wonderful moments, telling stories with your pictures and making an emotional impact.
And I would even go further and argue that getting more accurate and neutral colors in your pictures can do both, help the story and the emotion or be completely in the way of telling the story that you want to tell.
Try to imagine the following images perfectly color balanced - I bet you most of them would lose their impact right away.
A BUNCH OF LINKS
Yeah, it's all in caps. Because I can :)
A BUNCH OF LINKS is the newest project. Actually it's not a big project, it came to me one night and didn't let go of me until I had it finished. Call it a newsletter or a monthly email or my personal digest of photo-related stuff that I stumbled across over the last weeks.
Because that's exactly what it is: I spend an awful lot of time trying to stay on top of news, blogs, press releases, web sites. Most of them circling around photography, visual stuff, technology. And out of that comes a ton of links. About once a month I grab the best of those links, somewhere between 5 and 10 to keep it at a manageable size and wrap them up nicely in the A BUNCH OF LINKS newsletter and send that out to you.
And anything goes. Sometimes tech, sometimes art, sometimes just a great picture I ran across, sometimes videos, sometimes even totally silly stuff. My criteria are simple:
1. If I don't like it, it won't make the newsletter
2. There is no 2.
The monthly frequency isn't fully established yet, let's see where this goes. But I promise you can always easily and quickly unsubscribe.
» To subscribe, go to the home page
Are things completely out of whack?
I just got an unhappy (or even upset) email from a fan. I won't user her real name here, so let's call her "Liz". She was complaining about the amount of promotion vs. content on my show. I assume she meant Tips from the Top Floor.
"It takes 30 to 40 minutes to download and listen to your podcast and read your website. Unfortunately for me, I have found that about 75% of your content is advertising for donations and workshops and less than 25% provides information about photography... therefore, I waste a lot of time to get little content. Also, I hear the same promotions over and over about your workshops when I am sure that I am not going to them. I try to skip through them on my ipod, but usually, I just lose interest and shut it off. Even though I have learned from you, I am coming close to cancelling your podcast."
Getting feedback like this always slightly gets to me. On the one hand it's great to hear from the audience, and this kind of feedback is worth more than any "great job" type of mail (please keep those coming too though, as my ego likes them ;)) because it almost always comes from a person who is passionate about what I do and who has the guts to speak up and voice their opinion.
I hear you, Liz, and believe me, I don't like promoting stuff on my shows. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and one reason I do is that I get more than enough advertising on the old media. If I listen to podcasts I want them to be clutter-free too, unless the clutter is a part of the show that I like.
There is one exception where I truly love talking about things: An example would be the Everest Trek. Things that I am personally involved in, things that are a part of me, things that I'm very very (very!!) proud of.
Then there are sponsors. Apart from the current Squarespace campaign I haven't had a sponsor worth mentioning in almost a year. I'm not sure how you get to 75%, I can only assume that's what it felt like to you as opposed to that's the actual amount of time you've measured. I am über super cautious in who I allow on the show as a sponsor. The only way I believe I can make this work for both sides is to only advertise things that are of interest to my audience. Only then will it be perceived as being more of a value than a burden. Believe me, I have been offered quite a few campaigns in the past year, and I have turned down almost all of them because of this very reason: they just weren't relevant to my audience.
And let's be honest, being self-employed and spending well over 20 hours a week (probably much closer to 30 actually) producing free content in various forms doesn't really pay the bills, so I don't always have choice in that matter.
But let's get back to Liz and her email:
"Regarding your last blog about "geeks," what does that have to do with photography? My career was in Information Technology and I get a lot of content about IT from many sources. Why would I want your opinion about who is a geek? I want to learn about photography from you!!!"
In the header of this blog it used to read "This is the place where I post my thoughts on photography" but I'm not only about photography. I'm a geek, I'm a musician (I'm actually in the middle of producing a CD for a local band), I'm a podcaster, and I've chosen this place to be my personal blog where I talk about anything that interests me, anything that comes to mind and that I think it worth sharing with you: my soapbox. Tips from the Top Floor is the photography place and the photography posts here usually get linked from there.
To better reflect this, I have now changed the copy in the header of this blog to "This is the place where I post my thoughts. Usually on photography."
And this is where I open this discussion up to you, the readership. Do you think this blog should be exclusively about photography? And has my show content really gone down the drain in favor of promoting stuff?
Let me hear your thoughts in the comments!
Abbey I
Just returned from a four-day workshop that I held at the Inzigkofen Abbey together with Boris. This abbey is one of my most favorite places. I've spent a lot of time there over the last 15 years, having been a participant on their annual jazz workshop for over 12 times. So it was a really special treat for me to finally hold a workshop there myself.
The team at the abbey has been great, the meals were awesome as usual and we had a wonderful workshop group with really fun participants (click the image above).
Pictures taken at the workshop should start popping up on Flickr over the next few days tagged kgw09. See all pictures on flickr tagged kgw09.
Next month I will hold another workshop at the abbey, and that one will be in English and with participants from the United States, the UK and from Switzerland. Want to add another nationality to the list? There are still openings at the Abbey Adventure!
Tilt/Shift 1/3 - The miniature effect
What are your first thoughts when you hear the words "tilt" and "shift" in one sentence? Let me guess. It must be something along the lines of "making big things look like miniatures" and yes, that's one of the effects that you can achieve using a tilt/shift lens. Actually all you need is the tilt, the shift part is more helpful when it comes to messing with perspective.
I've got my opinion about this effect and it's very similar to my opinion about tonemapped HDR images with all the sliders in Photomatix cranked up all the way to the right: I'm not a big fan of them. I believe these types of effects tend to get old very fast, and whatever effect you use, it will only work great if it helps you realize your artistic vision and tell the story that you want to tell with an image. If your picture can't tell a story, or if it lacks interest in terms of its composition, the majority of viewers will probably still go "oooh" and "aaaaah" but the image will get boring very soon.
Okay, enough with the soapbox. You've got to know the enemy in order to be able to fight it, so here's your first lesson: what tilt is all about.
Guess what, these lenses actually weren't designed to achieve that miniature effect at all. In fact it all started very early, when large format cameras came along. Using bellows and all, they had everything they needed to move the lens out of the optical axis (shift) or to change its angle in relation to the film plane (tilt).
But why would I want to do that if not for a cool looking miniature effect?
Let's look at tilt first, as it's the visually much more interesting effect. If you look at the focal plane, e.g. the part of an image that is in focus, it typically is parallel to the lens and parallel to the sensor. Now tilt the lens and you're changing a few things. Most notably you tilt the focal plane. Tilting the lens forward effectively tilts the focal plane forward with it (see the Scheimpflug Principle for a more detailled explanation).
A normal parallel lens produces the out-of-focus areas of an image behind and in front of the focal plane. If you tilt the focal plane forward, you also tilt the out-of-focus areas with it. These are now above and below the focal plane. And guess who loves this? Yes, landscape photographers do. It will allow them to tilt the focal plane in a way that coincides with the landscape, and as the out-of-focus parts are above and below the landscape, they virtually disappear. Everything all of sudden is in focus front to back from very close to very far, and without the need to stop down to an aperture of F64 (which in turn creates other issues). Bliss!
Of course you can use this for evil too. Or more precisely in an opposite fashion to achieve a certain effect, the "miniature effect". More about that in a soon-to-come post on this blog.
What's your opinion about the miniature effect? Do you hate it? Do you love it? Do you fake it? Let me know in the comments!
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear
(click image for bigger version, click here to see the final version)
"Aaah, there's certainly some Photoshopping in this picture, right?" - if I got a penny every time I heard that...
Image manipulation. What a dirty little word. For many people this word implies fraud and deceit. It implies that the photographer isn't saying the truth with their photography. That they lie to the viewer by making something out of a picture that wasn't there. In many people's eyes it also means that nowadays you don't have to take good pictures anymore. Photoshop will fix it for you. Right?
They couldn't be more wrong. Or as my friend Robin Preston, a great illustrator and photographer, usually puts it: You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
Let me get on my soapbox and then together let's have a quick look at the different techniques that are used every day in order to "manipulate" photography.
1. RAW conversion. Most serious photographers use the RAW format these days. It has more dynamic range, and it allows for much more subtlety during post processing. A RAW file is like a negative. You have to develop or convert it. And this conversion process is the point in the workflow where the photographer can and should make decisions on things like white balance, contrasts, saturation. A first step in the manipulation of images. "But I only shoot JPG, so my pictures are untainted!" Well, not quite. At the point where you look at the JPG on your memory card, your camera has already made a whole big bunch of decisions for you. It has determined the white balance, it has played with the contrasts and color saturation, it has sharpened the image and compared to the RAW file, your camera has thrown away about 90% of the image data in order to compress it to a smaller size.
In short: relying on JPG, or rather on your camera to do the post processing for you is synonymous to handing off the image development decisions to someone else, in this case the computer that's built into your camera. Not unlikely to what usually happened to the films that you handed off to the corner drug store for development.
Did analog photographers do this? Hell yeah! Developing film, enlarging the image, choosing chemicals, temperatures, durations, types of film, types of paper, ... that all had an influence on how the images came out.
2. Straightening. Yes, I'm guilty of straightening at least one out of ten of my images during post processing. It just happens that I don't hold the camera exactly straight sometimes. It has become better since I've started using a grid screen in my camera's viewfinder, but I still don't always get it right. Why do I straighten? Because I don't like that horizontal line of a building right next to the left side of the frame of my image to be one degree off and shout at the viewer "HEY! LOOK! The photographer had a little accident here!". Skewed water surfaces are even more prone to cause some level of discomfort with the viewer. Even half a degree off and the image will start waving a little red flag. And I usually want my viewers to feel comfortable when they look at my photography.
Did analog photographers straighten images? You better believe it! It's one of the easiest things to do actually. Just slightly rotate the photo paper before you expose it.
3. Contrasts. If you've ever shot in the RAW format, you will know that these images have the tendency to look more flat and less contrasty than JPG images. This is on purpose. In the RAW mode, the camera will produce images that are specifically made to be post processed. And this includes the contrasts. Contrast is extremely important. Photography is not an absolute art but has a lot to do with how contrasts relate to each other. So managing the contrasts in your image becomes an integral part of the process.
Did analog photographers manage contrasts? You betcha! Ansel Adams' Zone System is all about contrast management. Choice of film, paper, chemicals, temperatures, durations, ... all of that will influence contrasts.
4. Brightness distribution. Brightening parts of an image and darkening others? Bring out your pitchforks!! Or.. wait. Back in the analog darkroom we did the same thing. Burn and dodge. During the exposure of the photo paper that usually took several seconds to minutes, we would allow for more light to fall on those areas that we wanted to darken down (it's a negative process) and we would temporarily block light from those areas of the picture that we wanted to brighten up. Ansel Adams did a lot of that too. In fact most of the time that he spent taking (or making?) a picture was in the darkroom, managing brightness/darkness distribution (let's call that contrasts) making use of his Zone System.
5. Local contrast enhancements. If you apply a large radius unsharp mask filter (USM) to your image, you will effectively increase the local contrast. Smaller structures will appear more contrasty. You have control over this by varying the radius and amount you set for your unsharp mask. Now this MUST be cheating! Right?
Well, not exactly. At least there is nothing specifically digital about it. It's a technique which again derives from the analog world. It has been used to enhance contrasts and perceived image sharpness long before we had computers with Photoshop.
So what's the verdict? Are digital photographers cheaters? Is it wrong to adjust an image digitally? Let me hear your opinion in the comments!
Back to the Himalayas
We're going back to the Himalayas next spring. To be precise, we are going to see Kathmandu, Lhasa, the north side Everest Base Camp, and the east side of Mt. Everest.We are not doing this alone, we will take a group of 15 photographers. The last trek has been an unforgettable adventure for me. This was my first time in Asia and I have returned with an enormous amount of new impressions and pictures. And I can't wait for the next trek to start!
I also wish I had taken the picture in this post. Well, I haven't, she has. You can't have everything, can you?
Let's analyze it.
For me this is a great example of a glimpse into the every-day life of a different culture. My eyes first get drawn in to the brighter areas of the picture, and to the places where contrasts are. I then start to explore and take in the scene and the meaning of what I'm seeing. A woman bending down, apparently busy washing something. Took me a few seconds to realize that she's actually washing a carpet. With a bowl of water. On the ground.
And all of a sudden there is this colorful story that starts to emerge in my mind. Why is she washing a carpet? Doesn't she have a vacuum cleaner? Most likely not. Vacuum cleaners are expensive where she lives. Electricity is either sparse or at least not reliable at all. Can't she put the carpet into her washing machine? Oh wait, same issues.
At the same time these thoughts are going through my mind, I keep exploring the image, I notice the beautiful reflections in the foreground, I realize that the ground behind the carpet is dry, so it wasn't rain that got the ground wet, it all comes from the carpet cleaning. Does she do that every week? Every month? Is the carpet something of value for them and is that why she carefully cleans it? Or was it just necessary because it had become too dirty?
And then there are the very formal image criteria. Subject? Check. (The woman). Placement? Off center. Leaves space for the great reflections. And gives the lines in the pavement the function to lead your eyes back up to the subject. Foreground/background separation? Works nicely.
Have you ever washed a carpet? How do you go about analyzing images? Do you spend time to think about them? Let us know in the comments!
Bands and Weddings
On the weekend, Monika and I shot a wedding. We usually don't do that for clients, but this one was different, as friends of ours got married. But what does it take to shoot a wedding? I actually get that question a lot. Most of the time the question comes in an email and it is phrased more like "What equipment do you recommend for shooting a wedding?"[insert sound of alarm bell here] Wrong question. Entirely wrong question. If someone cooks a great meal for you, you don't compliment them on their pots and pans, now, do you? You don't need to know what word processing software (or what notepad and pen) your favorite authors use to write their books. You don't ask a painter what brushes they create their art with.
You enjoy the meal, the book, the painting for what it is.
Why is that so different in photography? "Wow, that's a big camera. You must take great pictures with it" is actually an insult. It de-values our creative side.
But don't worry, you're not alone, and if you are new to photography, it's very easy to fall for what the industry tells us. Which basically is this: Buy new gear from us and your pictures will be so much better.Wrong, industry. Dead wrong! Some of the best pictures I've seen have been taken with (by today's standards) inferior equipment. A picture is maybe (if at all) 10 percent about the technical quality, about the image sharpness, about the lack of chromatic aberrations, about resolution and about the number of megapixels. 90 percent of the image is YOU. It's your eye, your sense of composition, your sense of placing things in the frame so they play with each other in a way that helps you bring out that image you had in your head before you pressed the shutter button. It's about timing too, actually one could argue that it might even be mostly about timing. Even in landscape photography, where the clouds have that tendency to not wait in that beautiful spot until you're finished setting everything up for the picture.
So I'm not blaming you for asking the equipment question. I'm blaming the industry. Heck, even I have fallen for it, buying things that I didn't need and that didn't benefit my photography at all. I'm just glad I haven't spent $150 on a white balance device yet. And probably never will. The good old grey card ($5.95), a sheet of white paper ($0.01), or even the good old Pringles lid (unfortunately they stopped making the opaque ones, but some yoghurt lids will do the trick too) are all it takes. Everything else is Voodoo unless you get paid big $$$ for a job and need to impress your customer, or unless you really need 100% color accuracy in product photography, for print, or in high profile fashion stuff. I don't need that accuracy. Our eyes aren't scientific measurement devices. They are much more easily influenced by the light conditions surrounding us, which is why you should try to edit your images in consistent surrounding light conditions, but I digress.How did I get here? Oh, I know, we talked about how the industry makes us buy more and more stuff, and how we forget that photography is actually about learning to see, about anticipating how the viewer will look at our picture, what will make them explore our photograph in which way and how we can guide their eye to what we deem important in a picture.
Photography is about telling stories. Stories that have arches, tensions, reliefs, and in the end it's about one of the most basic things: it's about evoking emotion! If I look a picture and it moves me in one way or the other, I couldn't care less about the technical side of things.
When was the last time you've bought something for your photography that didn't help you at all? Let us know in the comments what that was.
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