dispatches

"Snap Judgments"

As an elitist media consumer, I am a big fan of NPR's On The Media, a show that never fails to amaze me with their nuanced metaview. Today they devoted 15 minutes to an in-depth look at the ethical and practical issues around political and celebrity portraiture. This is so worth a listen. I have never seen the issues looked at with this degree of complexity. It changed my mind regarding the Jill Greenberg controversy regarding her portrait of John McCain, which is the lead example in the piece.

I initially agreed with Rob Haggart's opinion on the matter (Jill Greenberg Is Not Afraid to Dump All Her Clients At Once). The story goes like this. Jill had an assignment to photograph John McCain for The Atlantic. She loathes the man. After the Atlantic portrait shot, she led him to a second lighting setup, where the strobe lit him only from below, the classic malevolent lighting setup. The modeling lights were rigged in such a way that this wasn't apparent to anyone who didn't know how these things work. “I do the job that's asked of me that day, and what I do beyond that is not really anyone's business,” was her rationalization. She was roundly condemned, rightly, I thought at the time. Now, I'm not so sure.

Here is Bob Garfield's penultimate summary, 10 minutes in. “In photography, this reality thing is hard to pin down. Each of a sitting's dozens or hundreds of shots is a frozen two dimensional representation of a living, moving three dimensional being. A laser sliced instant invisible in real time. It may be a reasonable likeness, it may express some mood or personality, but it is, by definition, out of context, altered by angle, lighting and optics.”

Platon: “It's such a strange artistic process, that it's very difficult to express in words. I mean, you could say, I'm a disturber, or, I'm a professional outsider, and I come in and try to disturb the status quo. To be honest, I'm often surprised that I'm allowed to carry on doing what I do every day. But I haven't been stopped yet, and I'm still waiting to be sent out of the country for bad photographic behaviour. ”

What constitutes the photographic equivalent of“gotcha journalism,” what is creative assertion of a point of view, what about the marketplace demand for an off kilter image to cut through newsstand clutter,  how about naiveté from political subjects? These are great questions. Listen to the piece.

So that's what I'm doing

If you want, you can tag me as the kind of guy who needs to read it in the New York Times to know what to pay attention to, but look at the article in the Sunday Styles on Slow Blogging. Apparently, I'm part of a Thing, and I didn't know it. Slow Blogging is the opposite of the 20-posts-a-day, hyperactive zeitgiest blogs a la Andrew Sullivan. Like the Slows, I tend to write longish pieces about an idea, and I like them composed and cast as well as my writing ability will permit. I don't have three hyperlinks in every sentence, and I certainly don't have those horrible SnapShot popups attached to my links.

I mimic the blogs I like. Every blog in my feed is about ideas, some about photography, some about tech, some about writing and marketing, some about experiences I am unlikely to have (my latest favorite is from a guy stationed at a penguin colony in Antarctica) but they all share a storytelling component and are informative from a personal point of view. Blogs that might have useful information, but are mostly a collection of links to other sources, I soon tire of and I delete them from the feed—John Nack's Adobe blog comes to mind.

The Sunday Magazine this week also has an informative collection of articles around the theme of the new media landscape. Nothing will be big news to anyone professionally invested in the scene, but it helped me imagine what I am likely to be doing in a year or two, namely, being a content provider for lots of media formats I can't even imagine right now. I need to try and understand what is going on around me. However, I am of a generation for whom digital communication is not our first language. I write my blog like a middle aged guy who cares about language and writing. I refuse to Twitter, because it seems so antagonistic to a contemplative sensibility. So overviews like the New York Times (the doorstep edition, not the web version, though I do read it occasionally on my iPhone. It is an unsatisfactory experience.) are terrifically valuable to an outsider like me.  It makes sense given that I am squarely in the center of their demographic.

A little cold water

Dirk Halstead has a review of the video capabilities of the Canon 5D MkII over on Digital Journalist. The issues he identifies are ergonomics and exposure control. You can't hold it steady because of how the controls are set up, so it's pretty much a tripod only video camera. That's largely the case with pro video anyway, so it's not necessarily a deal killer. The biggest drawback that I see is that video is captured with the lens at maximum aperture, with no manual control over your lens setting. You have no control over depth of field--you only get a thin slice of in-focus image. That's great if you want the Hollywood look for close-ups, but it's going to be a serious limitation in the field.

The still capabilities alone would justify the upgrade, but this is no replacement for professional video.

At The Fill intro

While waiting for the wax to dry on my shiny linoleum studio floor, I've been working on my "At The Fill" book. Here is the introduction.

It is birdsong that draws me, and photographs that keep me. Those dense, brushy spots, where the Lincoln's and the Song Sparrows scurry, are a landscape that I have photographically mined for decades. The open grass sprinkled with Queen Anne's Lace, the tall Equisetum under the cottonwoods, the water's edge where the resident Great Blue hides, all are sources for images and targets for bird sightings. Birding and photography are two distinct kinds of focussed nonattention. You gaze into the tree, not looking at anything in particular, but your mind is ready to pounce on a flit of movement, your ears are ready to catagorize the contact chip call, and you have the thrill of connection with your memory of the Ruby Crowned Kinglet and the reality of one gleaning a few feet away. In my photography, I enter almost a trance-like state, open to possibility but not settling on any until I have a visceral sense in my body that here, now, is the right place. Here is the right configuation of complexity and density and layering that speaks to the inner need to organize it within a frame.

Both inclinations (obsessions?) of mine are abundantly sated at this one time garbage dump. The Union Bay Natural Area is a misnomer, as there is nothing natural about this intensively managed piece of accidental heaven in the heart of urban Seattle. We birders refer to the UBNA as Montlake Fill, or simply, “The Fill,” in the same spirit us old timers still call the gravel parking area to the east the “Dime Lot” ($1.75 last time I looked). There are microhabitats and micro landscapes galore in this 50 acres of marsh, grassland and nascent forest, where over 150 bird species have been seen over the years. “Best mud in King County,” is the tagline for the shorebird habitat along the main pond, referring to its propensity to attract stray vagrants during migration. You never know what is going to show up at the Fill.

My photography at the Fill is perhaps the closest thing I have to a meditation practice. If I were more enlightened perhaps I would not need the camera (or the binoculars) to truly see where I am, but I'm not, so the camera is my portal to connection. I begin from that place beneath my awareness. I lose the composing photographer’s eyes, and begin responding to the place from elsewhere in my body. I shoot a lot, but it is anything but random. I feel like I am approaching the photograph that is somewhere in front of me, and I feel it inside my body. A part of me is watching the picture happen, and I’m only half aware of a composition forming. This environment is too dense to structure it consciously no matter what, which is why I like to insert myself deeply into these spots. It is as though the complexity swamps the familiar responses to organizing inside a frame, and I can access a kind of seeing available only to the unconscious. This is where I do my deepest work as a photographer.

I can’t stay submerged in this state for very long. After a few minutes I feel done. Somewhere down there a photograph happened, and it’s captured on the card. I’ll look at it another time. Right now I hear a flock of goldfinches flying over.

Fallow time

If you want to be thoroughly disheartened by the prospects for staying a pro photographer in these times, you could read Vincent LaForet's blog entry on the dismal state of the industry. However, if you tend to be highly anxious, you might want to skip it. My normal tendency is to treat such prognostications as an existential threat, and therefore, panic. Whereupon Robin has to talk me off the ledge, about every other day. It was like that back in 2002-2004, when a lot of my colleagues got out of the business during the slowdown after 9/11.

This time? I'm not freaking out. I seem to be nesting. Or cleaning the nest. I appear to have a great need for order lately.

We're going to be OK through this. Although my income for the year is down about 30%, we have savings. Robin has a counter-cyclical business—everybody's going back to therapy now. We have no debt. I'm cutting back on expenses (no 5D Mark II for me this year, and I might skip Photo Lucida),  I'm eating lunch out less and making my coffee at home.

What I'm doing is stripping and rewaxing the studio floor. It hasn't been done this thoroughly since I moved in, 15 years ago. I'm making order where I can, since the world otherwise has so clearly gone off the rails.

Why you shouldn't post photos on Facebook

Because of what the advertising industry wants to do with them. An example of really twisted ethics here.

Death of the darkroom

“Just think! The filing cabinets could go here, the washing machine could go there and there'd be all this room opened up in your studio!”

Robin is way too upbeat.

I broke down my print drying rack this week, the first volley of the inexorable trajectory of the dismantling of my darkroom. This is a huge moment, and one I am having trouble emotionally incorporating. Never in my lifetime have I have been without access to a darkroom. Even during my transient twenties (I lived in over a dozen states) I managed to finagle access to or build rudimentary darkrooms in basements or bathrooms of rental houses. At age 53, I am contemplating, no, actually dismantling, a significant infrastructure of my professional and artistic life. Of my soul.

This was my dream darkroom. I have two handmade sinks, capable of holding a line of 20”x24” trays.  I have a custom table that holds the print washers. I have two Omega DII enlargers, one of which is my father's the one on which I grew up printing. I have a honking, heavy, huge dry mount press. I have separate light switches for the safelights and the room lights.

On Ebay this equipment worth nearly nothing. The space is going to become (no, it already is) a storage room.

I am having a long, self-indulgent, grief process.

What gives me perspective is Paul Butzi's experience. He has no regrets, as far as I can discern. He avers that digital printmaking is now superior in every respect to a wet process. I haven't his digital printmaking skills, but then, I haven't had a good, multi-day darkroom session in a couple of years, so those archaic skills have grown some serious rust. It is time. When I have a need to learn how to make spectacular prints again, it will be at a computer screen.

Sigh.

I thought it was a busy month

I just finished my archiving for the previous month, whereupon I burn my cr2 files onto DVD, convert everything to dng format, and load those onto the appropriate hard drives and off-site hard drives. The conventional wisdom is, data that you don't have in three places is data that you don't mind losing. In my case, I like the security of having my backups in more than one format, hence my commitment to optical disks.

This was a big shooting month: several out of town assignments, a wedding, a couple magazine jobs, and my daily personal work. I shot a massive 114 gigabytes of images, almost 9000 pictures. Actually, I kept 9000 pictures. I throw out the bad ones, probably one in five, every day when I go over the day's take. I burned 30 dvds to store them all.

When archived as dng, this expands to a 292 gigabyte hit on my storage capacity. For one month.

What's going to happen when I get a 5D MkII, which captures at 21 megapixels?

Dodged that bullet

Remember how I mentioned that Bridge has problems writing metadata? Here is a serious consequence of that bug.

I needed to change the captions on 700 images in a folder. I got the infamous error message, above, and forced quit Bridge. When I opened up the folder again, all my corrections to every image had disappeared. The .xml file to every image appears to have been corrupted. Several hours of work had disappeared.

Pessimism is a useful life strategy. I expect things to go wrong, and so I am obsessive about backing up.  I had a mirror of the folder, pre-crash, in my Daily Backup drive from last night's copy operation. 

PS. I think I've found the fix to this issue. Under Bridge Preferences, go to Advanced, and check the "Use Software Rendering" box. The default setting (unchecked) apparently makes Bridge talk to the hardware to accelerate the rendering, hence the potential conflict. Now I can append metadata with impunity, even when the thumbnails are still loading.

What's new in Photoshop?

This may be the only post today in the blogosphere not about the election.

I've been using Photoshop CS4 for a couple weeks now, and I have opinions. I've processed several thousand images through Bridge and Camera Raw, and prepped a few images for publication through Photoshop itself. I've found bugs and crashed it, and I've also found some new raw adjustment features that I now can't live without.

One of the selling points of the upgrade was a promised faster speed in Bridge. It depends how you parse it as to whether that's true. I took a folder with 700 images and opened it in each version of Bridge. V.3 took 2:43 for the spinning top to settle down. V.4 took one minute for the thumbnails to load, but took an additional 5 minutes for the previews to process and for the spinning icon to go away. Every time you adjust a number of images in Raw, the thumbnails have to be rebuilt, and Bridge is unavailable during that interval. But the preview image does pop up right away, and you don't have that excruciating wait that often occurred in CS3 with a big folder.

Metadata in Bridge is broken. I frequently get “There was an error writing metadata to image xxx” notices. On my laptop (but not the desktop) I cannot write metadata in Bridge at all if I try and apply a metadata template (like my copyright info). I even recreated that template in CS4, but no go. The error message pops up for every single image that fails to write. If you've applied metadata to 700 images, you have 700 error messages. Your only option is to force quit the application.

I haven't delved into the new tools in Photoshop (though I turned off the tabbing option for multiple images, which I found annoying and of no redeeming value). Printing appears to be broken, or I just haven't identified the new secret handshake you always need to learn with a Photoshop upgrade. What happens is that the image as printed comes out a couple stops darker than the monitor display.

Now, what's good about the upgrade? More raw adjustment options. In particular, the adjustment brush. There's an interface that allows you to use a brush to paint in any adjustment available in the basic tab: exposure, brightness, contrast, sat, clarity, sharpness. And Color. What makes this so great? You can brighten up a face in shadow, or use the Color to correct a portion of the image (like when there's daylight on part of a scene that's largely lit by flourescent). It's fast, and intuitive, and now it's an essential part of my workflow. These are alterations I often make in a final file with complicated masks and adjustment layers, but now I just swab it on in my raw processing.

There are so many options in raw processing now that you hardly need Photoshop. Maybe all you need is Lightroom, which I assume has all the same options.