Whenever I look through the waist-level viewfinder on my Mamiya 645 medium format SLR, I have this immense feeling of depth. Almost as if the image was 3D.

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?

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!

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.

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!

Heya and welcome, it's geeky soapbox time again and I'll talk about one of my latest pet peeves: CFLs and photography. Sit back, relax, break out the popcorn and let's start ... NOW.

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.

Did you follow any of the Everest Trek coverage on The Rest of Everest and on Tips From the Top Floor?

Jon, Monika and I are doing it again!

Be a part of our next Himalayan adventure! Hop on over to the announcement.

Want to say hi, have a drink and a bite to eat? There will be a meet-and-greet the night before the Toronto workshop, and it's OPEN FOR EVERYONE, not just for workshop participants.

So you won't be on the workshop but want to say hi?

Thursday, Sep/23, 6pm, Wimpy's Diner, 225 Church Street, Toronto

Again, this is open for anyone, so I guess I'll see you there!

My friend Andrés is a wonderful illustrator, he is the one who designed the TFTTF logo five years ago and his children's books are just beautiful.

One of them is called "tweet" and not only does he have it online on his site, he also asked me to read it, so he could include the audio track with the online version. What an honor!

You can find the book at http://anhdres.com/books/tweet/, just click the audio player at the top and whenever you hear the page turn sound, click the "next" button above the book. Manual sync FTW!

PS: while you're there, check out his other online books Desire and Banana and Orange

The 2010 Everest Trek is still vividly in my mind, and I'm getting ready to work on the videos. Going through the footage to put together the intro brought so many memories back that I'm really looking forward to diving in. Could still use a little help with the editing, but for now I should be fine to start releasing the first episodes some time during October.

Workshop planning for next year is already happening, you should start to get excited NOW!

I have already received a lot of questions ("Where will next year's workshops be held?", "Any new topics?", "Are you going to do the San Francisco Street Safari again?", ...).

Everything will be revealed in good time (you could sign up for the newsletter in the meanwhile), and all I can tell you right now is that there will be a new workshop dealing with fire and night photography (yey, finally a workshop that fits my sleeping habits!), another workshop will be held in the Himalayas, and you can expect a few good old friends in the mix.

Reservations for a lot of the workshops will be opened during December.

The 2010 workshop season is almost over, and I look at the workshop overview page (which doesn't even feature all the workshops of this year anymore, as I already removed the ones from the first half of this year) - I look at the page and have this great feeling that's a mix of satisfaction, and restlessness, because 2011 needs ideas (luckily there are plenty), planning and working on.

But first on to the rest of the workshops for this year: Northeim Licht (light workshop in Germany) is up this week, Toronto Urban (street and city photography) is up next week, then it's Monis Motivklingel (I'll be a guest) and last but not least Absolut Analog (analog photography in Braunschweig, home of Rollei and Voigtländer).

And then once I finished crashing after that, it's down to diving into a lot of writing for PocketChris, because I want to release three paid apps for the holidays. But that's a different story and will be told in a different post.

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?

Sooner or later I'll need a communications department. Or I will need to make sure things don't all happen at the same time...

Oh well, here is the list of things happening right now or coming up:

PocketChris released! The interactive photography book for your iPhone is out. » PocketChris.com » Background information and future planning

Analog and Polaroid Workshops Monika and I have announced more analog workshops in Germany. » See details here

Photo Day Let's take over the TWiT Cottage again and bring you another Photo Day » more

Pre-Workshop Meeting in San Francisco Meet Chris for a drink in downtown San Francisco on Jul/22 » more

Chris at Joe McNally's workshop On Jul/15 Chris will attend a lighting workshop with Joe McNally at Dobbs Ferry, NY » more

Statistisch gesehen besitzt jeder Mensch heute mindestens eine Digitalkamera. Da liegt die Hürde für die Teilnahme an einem Fotoworkshop einigermaßen niedrig.

Auf der analogen Seite liegt die Sache schon ganz anders. Viele von euch, die sich die analoge Fotografie einmal etwas näher ansehen wollen, haben keine analoge Kamera. Oder ihr habt vielleicht eine Kamera geerbt und wisst nicht, ob die für den Workshop passt. Oder ihr findet euch nicht im riesigen (und erstaunlich günstigen) Gebraucht-Dschungel auf eBay zurecht.

Kurz: es gibt unzählige Gründe, warum jemand trotz Interesse nicht am Analogworkshop teilnimmt. Und das finden wir schade, denn die analoge Fotografie ist nach wie vor ein sehr mächtiger und guter Weg, mit der Fotografie im allgemeinen Tuchfühlung aufzunehmen, und die universellen Basics zu lernen, ohne sich in der digitalen Technik zu verheddern. Mal ganz abgesehen vom haptischen Erlebnis und dem befriedigenden "KALUNK" einer schönen Mittelformatkamera...

Dass die Hürde für viele von euch unnötig hoch liegt, spüren wir. Darum haben gibt es ab jetzt unseren Kamera-Pool, um es jedem auch ohne eigene Kamera zu ermöglichen, die Welt der Fotografie mit Film auf unseren Workshops zu erkunden.

Wir leihen euch für den Workshop eine Kamera. Selbstverständlich im Preis des Workshops inbegriffen.

Im Kamera-Pool finden sich unter anderem so Zuckerstücke wie: Minolta X-700 (Kleinbild), Mamiya 645 (Mittelformat 6x4,5), Zeiss-Ikon Tenax (24x24mm-Format), Yashicamat 124G (Mittelformat 6x6), Cosina Hi-Lite HDL (Kleinbild), Diana (Mittelformat/Kleinbild Sprockethole), Nikon FE2 (Kleinbild), Voigtländer Bessa (Mittelformat 6x9), Kodak Brownie 620 Box (Mittelformat 6x9) und Zeiss Ikon Tengor Box (Mittelformat 6x9).

Und auch im Polaroid-Bereich ist die Sammlung mittlerweile ganz anständig gewachsen. Da finden sich einige Polaroid SX-70, diverse Polaroid-Land-Kameras (600er-Film), ein Polaroid-Back für die Nikon FE2 (Trennfilm), um nur einige zu nennen.

Und wer dann nach dem Workshop selbst zuschlagen möchte, der bekommt von uns natürlich die richtigen Tipps für die eigene Kamera-Jagd bei eBay, bei Gebrauchthändlern oder auf Flohmärkten.

Dieses Jahr bieten wir noch zwei Analogworkshops an: Absolut Analog Polaroid-Edition (11.-12.9.2010) und Absolut Analog (Standard-Edition, 8.-10.10.2010)

Dann haut mal rein!

Every now and then I run into a song that I *have* to listen to over and over again without getting sick of it. Strasbourg / St. Denis is one of those. My music taste could probably be described as eclectic, and this kind of jazz definitely has a place in my heart, and I'd love to play the bass on this song with a good band one day.

So without further ado here is Roy Hargrove (this is only an audio track, but YouTube was the only place I could find it in an embeddable form)

By the way, I bought the entire album without listening to any of the other tracks, just based on this one song.