dispatches

The Conversation

  Robin and I are on a walk. We have gone to look for new glasses for myself in the University District, about 2 miles from our house. I have my camera. I have been taking a lot of pictures.

"Your eyes are on," Robin says, as I stop yet again to photograph something that has grabbed me as we walk by. Flowers on a tablecloth, through a restaurant window. Vent ducts on a white wall. A moss covered stairway.

I’ve stopped to photograph the view from the bridge over Ravenna Gorge, bare white branches and a footpath.. Click, click, click. But no whirr. "It still sounds like there’s no film in the camera," I say.

"Doug, there’s no film in the camera."

"Walk ahead," I say, and photograph Robin from behind as she crosses the bridge. I snap about twenty frames, at various shutter speeds.

"You know, now you’ll have to sort through a mountain of shots, and it’ll take forever."

"Tell me about it."

"Maybe you should pretend you have film in the camera. Then you’d have less work."

The Thrill is Gone

I’m inundated with images I can’t judge without opening each and every one on a computer. I’ve batched renamed them in a scheme that is no more informative than the meaningless code the camera assigns. They all require post-exposure processing to look acceptable. Remind me again why digital photography is so appealing?

My abrupt comparison was triggered when I reviewed several boxes of slides that had been bereft and abandoned on my light table since my hasty affair with the new camera began. Here, now, was a real image. On a piece of film, an object I can hold. Complete. No manipulation required. With that delicious texture of grain. I fear I am becoming like one of those cranks who insists the only way to appreciate recorded music is on vinyl.

I am taking off for Venice in 12 days for weeklong visit. It is an overdue exposure of my sensibilities to things European. I am contemplating not taking the digital camera, just the b/w panoramic setup. I add up all the things I need to keep plugged into a wall outlet to manage this artificial image capture mechanism, and I inwardly sag. I think of what will be required of me to edit the work on my return—weeks staring into a monitor—and I feel defeated before I even board the plane.

Twitching

Have you seen it?" Those are our first words to the strangers on the street, but we are completely understood. They have binoculars too. Another car arrives, on this residential West Olympia street, and the driver asks us, "Have you seen it?"

This probably sounds rather cultish, and it is. We are privy to arcane knowledge. The word is out on every birding listserv and rarity report in the country. A rare siberian thrush, called a Redwing, has been sighted in Olympia. There is no previous west coast record for this bird.  Now this oblivious bird is the focus of eager attention by hundreds of birders, some of whom are going to fly in from across the country for a glimpse.

Another birder shows up. "It was in this tree," (pointing to a large deciduous tree in a backyard), "and making regular feeding trips to a holly all morning. I watched it from 7:30 until 10." But he didn't know where the bird was now. All of us had the same idea for finding the bird--look for other birders. All we found were others following the same search strategy.

A man on a bicycle sees us and stops. "They're all over there two blocks," motioning to the west on 4th Ave. In an alley, behind a hair salon, is a crowd of 30 birders, binoculars and scopes aimed upwards into a broad, leafless tree. I spy the Redwing through one of the scopes. The bird is high in the tree, and hard to spot in the branches and against the bright overcast sky. It looks like a smallish Robin with a streaky breast. Some of these people have been staking out the bird for hours. "The edge of the tertials and the coverts are lighter--it means it's an immature," says one of the watchers.

There are dozens of Robins also in the flock, some of which are dribbling into a small holly tree in another backyard. A shout. "There it goes!" Into the holly tree, deep out of sight. "I saw the red in the wings!" exclaims someone.

Civilians walking through the neighborhood look upon this crowd with curiosity and bemusement. Word of this bird broke in birding circles last week. A resident reported, however, that it had been visiting his backyard for two months.

Now I am not big on "twitching", which means organizing one's life around chasing rarities. But this bird was on the way to our weekend getaway on the coast, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity.

Anyone who watches birds with regularity has a life list, an enumeration of all the species of birds they have seen. In the more competitive birding circles, the number on your life list conveys status and serious intent. It assigns you your place on the pecking order. I have what is an even more rarified (read snotty) attitude toward my list--I keep one, but I don't know the precise count. It is large enough, however, to denote accomplishment and relatively high status. Mostly it means I've lived and birded in a lot of places in my life, particularly SE Arizona. But who's counting?

Robin asks me later, "What did seeing that bird mean to you?" My instant response: "It's a life bird." But I'm not a twitcher, OK?

The Place of Technique

One of my workshop attendees sent me an interesting piece by Sean Kernan on the process and role of criticism, at www.seankernan.com/html/articles/criticism.html. It made me think about my own process of growth, and the tension between being a commercial photographer and someone who is trying to push my own boundaries. My success as a commercial shooter is contingent upon replication--I am hired to do the same thing over and over. My economic life is dependent upon regular praise for it. But without my alternate life as an artist, pushing at new ways of seeing, the commercial work would quickly become stale.

This new tool in my life, the digital camera, is not some gateway to vastly expanded creativity. It’s just another camera. I like that I can blaze away and shoot without consuming gobs of film. I hate that the end result is so hard to handle—it’s a thumbnail in a computer program, and it’s a lot of work, that I don’t know how to do very well yet, to make it become a finely crafted object. So my attention lately is riveted by technique. The technical aspects of photography are important only in how they serve the fulfillment of a vision. Those aspects are not to be disregarded, but they are also not to be confused with the meaning of the work.

A Rant

Time for a rant. It’s a blog—ranting is what they’re for. Anyone get as upset as me about the cover on this weekend’s Pacific Northwest Magazine in the Seattle Times? Not the photo—Alan Berner is a magnificent photographer. The entire photo department of the Times is an amazing den of creativity. It’s the production I’m ranting about. There’s no quality control in digital workflow now. This photo is just another of the tons of photos I see daily in print that look like crap, because there’s no one managing the production of the printed image who cares about quality. This photo on the cover--it’s full of digital artifacts from a small jpeg file that’s been blown up too big. The highlights are chalky, the shadows are blocky, there's sharpening halos around the edges. It looks like hell.

In the olden days, back when we all used film, scanning was done by professionals, in specialty businesses called color houses. Pre-press was a dark art. Only specialists knew how to convert a piece of transparent film into a work of art on a printed page that would be appreciated by thousands. The production of photography into print had to pass through a bottleneck, manned by experts, through which emerged quality.

Now, pre-press is thoroughly decentralized, and there is no clear consensus as to whose job it is to prepare an image for publication. Actually, everyone with a hand in the production cycle has the responsibility to maintain quality. And the opportunity to destroy it. Too many times I have been the designated expert on a project regarding color management and digital file quality. And I know nothing. I am the least qualified person in the cycle to have that job description.

I am doing my best to get up to speed so that I can hold up my end of the process. I am shooting only in RAW format so I can learn the basics of tonal control in this new environment. I’m reading the books, and being pretty overwhelmed most of the time. Just as f stops and shutter speeds and focal lengths are an unconscious part of my creative process, I need to be equally fluent in histograms and color gamuts. Wish me luck.

Dreaming

Last night I had my first dream with my digital camera. (Don’t look at me strange. I take pictures in my dreams all the time.) I guess this means I’ve integrated it into my life now, or my subconsious is making a mighty effort to do so. The dream had something to do with photographing a stormy sky, and I recall looking at the sky images on the LCD and deciding if I had captured the entire light range or not. The sky turned into 20 or so tornados, and I went to seek shelter in the sub-sub-sub basement of a residence where I found a group of very nice but boring Catholics also waiting out the storm, but the basement had a wall of windows, which wouldn’t be  good during a tornado now would it, so I hid out in the stairway until it blew over.

Speaking of stories, I don’t think I told how I decided to convert to digital after being so firmly in the film camp. About three weeks ago I had a magazine assignment, for which I promised the editor that she’d have film on Monday. It was Thanksgiving weekend, and the lab was closed for four days. No film until Monday, she wouldn't get it until Tuesday. That was my tipping point. I went across the street and bought a digital camera, my Canon 20D.

What's this?

What’s this? Unavoidable digital artifacts? Using an analog-designed lens on a CMOS sensor? Pixel bleeding (I thought CMOS was immune to that)? Correctable chromatic abberation? Anyone got a clue? FYI, I’m shooting primarily with a 28mm-135mm IS, or a 17mm-35mm.

I’m accustomed to the distortions inherent in using film. I like most of them, generally. I like the texture of grain, and the way highlights can diffuse. I use multiple techniques to degrade image quality all time—filters, breathing on the front of the lens—but I’d prefer to be in control of it. Here is a whole new order of distortion that is, well, ugly. In shots where I have a light source in the image, I often see red and blue fringing around the edge. It may be that now I have to invest in lenses designed for digital too.

As I understand it, this is a result of the difference between how a sensor and how film responds to light. Film can detect light striking it from any angle. In a wide angle lens, the angle can be quite oblique on the edges. Digital is sensitive to light only when it strikes perpendicular to the plane of the sensor. Which requires a different optical design. I had hoped that the smaller sensor, seeing only the center section of the lens coverage, would save me from this problem, but I suspect this is not the case. And that I’m about to overhaul my entire lens collection too.

Cool or What?

Wow. Do we have a cool library, or what?

Actually, my feelings about the new Rem Koolhaus-designed Seattle library are more mixed. It is a work of architecural extremes. Some bits are marvelous and witty. Some are butt-ugly. The colors are intense (red staircases, yellow escalators, puke-green mens room) except where they’re not (steel gray expanses, black ceilings, industrial railings). I don’t think I’d want to work there. It has a post-modern remoteness in the open spaces that is off-putting, the opposite of the cozy libraries where I spent my youth.

So the pile of unprocessed RAW images in the Inbox approaches a thousand, and I’m building a small library of textbooks to navigate these unknown waters. Real World Digital Photography by Eismann, Duggan and Grey has been my primary source, and I’m starting on Bruce Fraser’s Real World Camera Raw. It’s just that my eyes glaze over after about an hour and a half of reading one of these, and I need to go off for a bike ride to get my head clear. And pay attention to making a living on the side.

The Comparison

Fuji NPH

RAW file from Canon 20D

detail film

detail digital

I had a corporate portrait job the other day, which I shot on color negative, medium format, like I have all the previous board members. It was the perfect opportunity for a side-by-side comparison. The conclusion—I like the digital version better. The color balance is better, the image is tack sharp, it looks great. The negative shown here is from a lousy, oversharpened scan from Prolab, and there’s more information in the negative than there is here, but the sharpness is certainly comparable. And given that, in addition to prints, I’ve been delivering this job in the past by scanning the negatives, the digital beats film hands down.

I think I’m turning into one of those photographers I’ve always made fun of in the past—a zealous digital convert.

The Print

Today I need to make a print for a portrait I was commissioned to make. It is a relief to dive into the darkroom and work with technology no more advanced than the mid-20th century. This I know how to do. The enlarger I use is the one I grew up on. It was my dad’s Omega DII and is probably 60 years old. It needs no firmware upgrade. I put in a cold light head about 15 years ago, and an electronic timer about the same time, so I suppose it’s version 2.0. I use a laser alignment tool to check the lens plane, probably the most advanced electronic in the room except for the CD player. The physical act of making a print is deeply familiar to me. I place negative in a path of light. I handle a 16"x20" piece of sensitized paper and put it in the easel. The timer beeps every second for almost a minute, then I expose again, burning in only the left side and the boy's pants. I slip the print into the developer and rock occasionally for three minutes. Different solutions then bath the image, alkaline to acid, a silver solvent to fix it, a lot of water to wash it, a toner to archivally seal it. The process is slow. Tomorrow I will finish making the print, then it will dry on a rack for a day or more, then I will flatten it in a press. In the end I hold something tangible, beautiful and handmade.