dispatches

On travel photography

  I have had a full day, which has not been made easier by the state of my back, which went out in a spectacular fashion yesterday. I blame it on my week in front of a computer, after a week of near constant motion on the dance floor. About once a decade I throw my back out in this way, and I stagger, semi-erect until I can get myself to a chiropractor, who wasn’t of much help as it was in such spasm. Today it was enough better, and I have been walking a lot to limber it up, that he was able to make some impressive sounding crunches when he adjusted me. I am greatly relieved, and I might be able to stand upright now for my talk tonight.

I am speaking tonight at Wide World Books about travel photography, and I’m just now gathering images to illustrate what I want to talk about. I’m avoiding a "greatest hits" show, instead, I'm showing examples of situations where I see a photo coming together, I shoot through it, and past it to the other side. Somewhere in the interval is the shot. In these talks I stress using photography to get yourself closer to your experience, rather than have it be a barrier to where you are. I use the camera frequently to get into conversations with locals, and out of that interaction a great shot may, or may not, happen. I show how I use a camera to slow myself down and really look at where I am. I find ways in thich the world around me is put together that are different from home, and I delight in the photographic excuse to peruse and examine. For technical matters, I stress keeping it simple. One camera and lens. No stumble-fumbling with equipment you aren’t fully fluent with, no scanning your six lenses to see which is the one you want. You want to be travelling and in the moment, not lost in an equipment manual or a menu selection on an LCD screen.

I don’t believe in hiding my camera in my bag until I feel safe and comfortable enough to pull it out, then stashing it shamefully lest anyone think I’m a tourist. I know I’m not going to fool anyone. My attitude is: Hey, I’m a tourist. I’m wearing a camera. If it’s a dodgy neighborhood, sure, I’ll keep it out of sight, but otherwise, I am what I am. Sometimes I’m wearing two cameras. Someone who starts a conversation with me is going to be pretty sure where it’s going to go. And I always get their email address so I can send them a copy.

This will be my first time (believe it or not) that I’m presenting images with a digital projector. I’ve gone back and forth with the store about the technical stuff, but I’m never confident that it will really work. I’ve seen it go wrong too many times. I’m bringing a backup technology: a slide projector.

Back

An uneventful flight home (the only kind I ever want to have), a sloppy, public kiss and hug with the wife at the curb, a checked bag that might or might not arrive tomorrow, a suspicious cat, a pile of mail. In the pile there was a Getty royalty statement that, along with the $2 spot web and $60 brochure usages, included one overseas sale that I thought had gone out of style since the late 90's bubble, in the low five figures. I'll see only 30% of that, alas. The shot is a closeup of sofa cushions that I shot one day, 7 years ago, when we were couch shopping. Remember, take that camera everywhere. You never know.

A dance coda

After a week of sitting in front of a monitor (mornings on the motel Stairmaster notwithstanding), my body felt like the rusty scarecrow on the dance floor. This monthly dance was far out in the country, in a parish hall, and I had driven most of the way on empty roads with my brights on. There were only a dozen of us at the first line-up, but within 20 minutes the hall had a hundred people dancing on the worn, sometimes sticky wooden floor.

"This is the peak dance for us in Maine," someone said. "all the hot dancers are here." It's the state’s version of the Greenfield, Mass dance. People travel for this one, and I recognized several faces from other dances. There was a larger sprinkle of community people though, and the calling was less complex than at an urban dance. We had a contingent of "puppies" too, a group ranging between tweens and twenties, that danced in the new wild way in a clump. 

My waltz partner was an eleven year old, Payge, who was one of the better dancers in the puppies. She had a habit of, during the balances, jumping up half her height. "My sister’s over there," she said. "Our parents usually drop us off, though sometimes my dad dances." She told me she likes to sketch the dancers, and later, absorbing my box of photos, she would study intently any shot that showed feet in motion.

I left halfway through the final set. The hall windows glowed orange, and were coated with condensation. It was a brilliant, clear night, and I welcomed the cool air on my face. My car thermometer registered four below zero.

More photos from the evening are on my Flickr site.

Look, it's me.

The cookie lady

I’ve been breakfasting every morning at the Brass Compass, the type of café that is the center of the social life of a town. It feels like an antidote to the glut of art galleries and upscale clothing stores that clog these coastal villages. The place is always nearly full by 7:30 in the morning, and the waitresses have that efficiency of decades of practice.

Midweek I took photos of the plate of fresh cookies on the counter, and one shot of the woman who had baked them. I made a print and dropped it off the next day. "She’ll love this," my witress said. "She’s not in now, I’ll be sure she gets it."

Today I came in, camera around my shoulder as always. "You’re the guy who took Linda’s picture!" Everyone knew who I was now. Linda, the cook came out, "That was a lovely gift, thank you.!" On the way out, she was transferring a new batch of oatmeal cookies from the baking sheet. "These are my favorites," she said. "I really like what I do." "That is the best gift of all in life, isn’t it? I feel the same way."

This exchange is making me want to think about travelling with a small photo printer now.

Geekweek Thursday

I was concerned that the workshop was drifting into a seminar on the aesthetic meaning of hue and saturation. Yesterday alleviated that concern, and since then we’ve rocket-propelled into deep geek mode. Yesterday the light came on for me in two areas of Photoshop that had been deep mysteries before: Blending Modes and Alpha Channels. The Channels Palette had always thwarted my mastery before, partly because it is easy to get lost there. I practiced again and again how to add to selections and invert masks and combine multiple alpha channels into masks. Cool stuff.

Here is today’s cool tip, on sharpening. One of the artifacts of sharpening is its effect on highlights and shadows. There’s a simple way to control that. First, proper Sharpening hygiene requires that it occur on its own layer set to Luminosity mode. Double-clicking on a layer gets you into that scary box, the Layer Style. At the bottom is the "Blend If" dialog. You can cut off the sharpening at, say below 40 and above 240, and separate the other halves of the sliders (Alt-drag) to make a transition zone of 20 or so. Look at an image at 400% when you do this, and see how those blasted out highlights get corraled back to where they belong, but the sharpening of the image is retained.

I hate my Treo

OK, I’ve had three weeks to get used to my Treo 650. I bought a book on how to use it, something on the line of "Treo for Dummies" or some such. I’ve been trying to fall in love with this phone cum organizer cum everything-and-the-kitchen sink. But the chemistry just isn’t there. I’m about to file for divorce, and take up again with the last one, the Motorola flip phone. At least I knew the extent of its problems. There’s something to be said for familiarity.

Here’s the basic problem. It’s a Swiss Army knife of a device, and therefore it’s not real good at anything. As a phone it’s awkward to use. It’s heavier than any cell phone I’ve owned in the last decade. You can’t hear very well holding it up to your ear, and with a corded earpod thing it’s even more awkward answering the thing as you scramble to fit the earpiece over your ear and say, "Excuse me, wait, I’m getting my earpiece on," and you give up and just hold it into your ear with your thumb. I refuse to become one of those bluetooth pod people, with a receiver permanently embedded in an ear. I just won’t.

The qwerty keyboard is tiny and awkward to use in general, and as a phonepad it’s impossible, but it takes a couple of steps to get a touchscreen keypad up. And then you’re never really secure in your aim, as there’s no feedback that your aim was true except by looking at the number that shows up that you hope you dialed right.

I compared my signal reception with someone in the workshop who also has Verizon. His phone gets a signal. Mine doesn’t. It frequently doesn’t get a signal. It beeps all the time to tell me that it isn’t getting one. That is very annoying.

As a PDA organizer, it’s even more frustrating. I know I can probably customize the various buttons and such, but I haven’t actually gone and done so, so accessing the calendar is a long series of pushing buttons. Any other PDA has one button. Bang, you're there. Accessing a phone number in my contact list requires using that damn keyboard to get to approximately the right place in the alphabet and still a hefty scrolldown to the number you want. It’s so much easier in any other phone.

The most annoying aspect is how the screen and keyboard locks up or goes blank, as a power-saving feature, after way too short a time. On my old phone, I could always glance at the back to see what time it was or how strong a signal I had. No such luck with the Treo. I gotta wake it up, then push the center button to get it all the way woken up, and then 20 seconds later it will all go black again and I start over. To do anything.

Anyone want to make an offer? It’s getting thrown back in the Ebay pool as soon as I get home.

What is gray?

Perception and subjectivity is the grand theme of this week. Here’s a little exercise. We were all assigned to produce a neutral, zone five gray square, with hue-sat and color balance adjustments. Not gray by the numbers, but what felt and looked gray to us. Then we backed up and looked at all the monitors.

No gray square matched anyone else’s. We all have our particular, internal version of that ephemeral and fugitive substance, neutral gray.

Whither the tripod?

Paul over at Musings has been ranting lately about handheld cameras versus tripods. He’s against handholding on principle, but then he is swayed by the digital Leica M8 (aren’t we all—I think about that camera, and then I think about how many weeks in Europe I could spend the money on instead). I used to compose on a tripod for the majority of my shots. I was tripod fluent, imagining where it should be and how high, splaying the legs creatively on the most uneven of surfaces. I have traipsed across countries and continents with it hanging from my belt at all times. However, ever since I started doing most of my shooting with a 24-105 IS, the tripod is practically gathering dust.

On this trip, I have made about two thousand exposures. I have used the tripod for three of those exposures, at a dance when I wanted blurry dancers at a one second exposure from a balcony, It wasn’t that great a shot—the handhelds from the same spot were much better.

My tripod is one of those new, super lightweight Gitzos that have the cool feature of snapping out all the legs with a single twirl. It’s so much easier to carry and use than my previous three Gitzo tripods. Alas, I have never used a tripod less frequently.

The image stabilization on the new Canon lenses is so good, I still don’t believe what I can do with it. At lunch today, I was showing it off, and so I zoomed in on the menu and squeezed off a perfectly sharp 1/8th second exposure. "What about a quarter second?" someone challenged. I did not lean my elbows against the table, mind you, but I was practicing good slow-shutter technique—elbows against the body, rest the camera and the lens barrel on two hands, don’t hold too tight, breath out slowly while squeezing the shutter. That quarter of a second went by awfully slowly. The photo was tack sharp.

Geekspeak day 2

It is interesting that for a workshop in black and white printmaking, we have talked about color for two days. On one hand it makes sense—black and white are colors—and John is big on paying attention to the source color for black and white conversion and how one handles hue and saturation issues. But it has not been altogether, or even primarily, geekspeak. John Paul Caponigro has practically a spiritual atunement to color and its meaning, and much of the talk of the day has been in this vein. His work is evidently about that quest, imbued with a pursuit for deep meaning in near-blank seascapes and skyscapes. It is no wonder that he speaks of Rothko (one of my artistic heros) and his mystical pursuit of redemption in color field painting.

I am of two minds on this workshop. On the one hand, it mirrors my own sympathies about the deeper meaning of camerawork and attentiveness. But I really want to know about contrast masking and selections. I want tools and techniques. This workshop is not absent of that, of course, as John has made his reputation on being one of the pre-eminent Photoshop and printmaking gurus in the business. It is awfully full of "deeper meaning" however. I am waiting to see how this turns out. So far so good, but I’m still waiting for that firehose of information to be aimed my way.

Nonetheless, here is the tip of the day: To add to your list, here is yet another way to make a conversion from color to black and white. Make two adjustment layers: first a Hue-Sat layer, then a Channel Mixer layer (with monochrome checked). The Hue-Saturation layer needs to be beneath the Channel Mixer layer. Open up the Hue-Sat layer. You have a black and white image, but, by moving the Hue slider, you will change the way the colors get interpreted in black and white. Want control over discrete colors? Choose a color on the drop down list. You can adjust just the reds, or the blues or the yellows, and determine exactly how they will be expressed in monochrome. It is useful to have a color copy of the image on the desktop so that you can see which colors in the black and white you’re wanting to alter.

Start of geekspeak week

There are six of us in John Paul Caponigro’s farmhouse/studio, several miles deep in the Maine countryside. It’s that workshop mode of a temporary bond being formed, and John is good at being the midwife. He makes sure we all get equal attention on the intros, and stresses the importance of good wine and food at night, away from the computers, in the coming week. The sex ratio is almost balanced, surprisingly: two women with lush Louisiana accents, a man with a Virginia drawl, two New Englanders and me. Two of us are pros.

I have permission to share what I’m learning. Here is today’s tip. Civilians may stop here.

The real way to soft proof: Set up your image and a duplicate, side by side. Turn on soft proofing (Ctrl-Y) for one. The gamut warning setting? It’s worse than useless. A better way? On the soft-proofed image, open up a hue-sat box. Slide the saturation slider to the right. The colors that don’t change are the ones that are out of gamut. What do you do about them? Not much. Count on your rendering intent (perceptual or relative colormetric, see which one looks better) to bring them into line. The shifts that you see on your soft-proofed version? Make it look like the original one with a combination of saturation changes (first globally, then on individual colors), then by a contrast curve. Everything is contingent on how the print proof looks, but this will get you 80% of the way there.