dispatches

Beware the upgrade rush

Adobe announces that Photoshop CS3 will not be supported in Snow Leopard. Whether that means the upgrade will break Photoshop is unclear, though probably not. I still output my prints via CS3, so I'm not going there (printing is broken in CS4, at least for me). There are reports that the latest Leopard upgrade, 10.5.8, is causing problems with video compression, apparently because of an incompatibility with Quicktime (which is notoriously prone to breaking on upgrades).

Before you get in line tomorrow to get the Snow Leopard upgrade, be sure you have nothing mission critical on your system. It's why I'm still on Tiger on my main workstation. I have so many legacy peripherals and apps that I'm terrified of it all crumbling if I switch. It all works now, and I'd like to keep it that way, thank you very much.

Addendum: From David Pogue's NYT column, I found this link to a list of apps and their current status regarding whether they work or not under Snow Leopard.

The latest video

The Thursday Dance from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Seattle's Thursday contra dance at the Lake City Community Center. Jennifer Youngman calls, music by Ryan McKasson, Marni Rachmiel, Dave Bartley and Russell Smumsky.

I've been trying to figure out what to do with this footage for some time. It's from a contra dance last June where I tried using my HV-30 on a homemade steadicam. That part didn't work so well, and I also shot in aperture priority, which means my shutter speed frequently dropped below the frame rate. Fine if you want that effect, but it looks funky no matter what. Nonetheless, I decided to try the full Blair Witch treatment with this sequence.

At the outset I intended a very different piece. I have some great, steady shots done on a tripod, which turned out to have little feeling and no place in this sequence. Where I thought I was going and where I ended up turned out to be very different places. Kind of like my whole career path, come to think of it.

Photo ponderings in today's NYT

A couple of photo related articles in todays New York Times. “Faked Photographs: Look, and Then Look Again” reiterates a point made again and again, that manipulation of photography started not with Photoshop, but shortly after Daguerre. The accompanying photo, Robert Capa's “Falling Soldier,” is not the most effective illustration of the argument as it serves as an example of misstatement, not manipulation. Look through the slideshow for some great historical examples.

And on the editorial page, a generous unpacking of a phenomenon we've all pondered, the cross-cultural impulse to mark a momentous touristic moment with a photographic portrait, and the frequent need to rope in a stranger to be the documentarian. That it is high tourist season in New York must be the reason for this sentiment: “It feels, some days, as though the whole purpose of our species is to create a perfect simulacrum of the life we lead even as we’re leading it.”

Frederick Sommer, 33 years later

Ketchum, Idaho, 1976

A Facebook friend request led me into my journals from 33 years ago, to what I wrote down during what seems to have been the pivotal photographic workshop of my life. Charlie Weatherby's notes on the same workshop are on the Frederick Sommer site, here.

Ordinarily, I seal these journals far from my prying eyes, as I hate to see what a mess I was when I was 20. It seems I mostly wrote about loneliness and sexual frustration, and whoever I had a crush on at the moment. However, when Frederick Sommer came to the Sun Valley Center for the Arts to teach a workshop, I took notes. It's the only time during my 8 months there that I did so. Something in my dense, self-involved 20 year old brain knew this was worth my full attention.

Not that I understood very much at the time. I've written about him before, here and here, but Frederick Sommer is one of the more difficult 20th century artists to understand. A good overview is available on Compass Rose. His rigorous, logical aesthetic is highly distilled drink, and I still don't understand most of what he was about. But some of my notes from 1976 give a hint to what was making an impression on me at the time. I wouldn't vow that these are exact quotes; it's how I made sense of it at the time.

On the logic of words and imagery: “there are things that can only be said, and things that can only be shown.”

“Aesthetics is the validation of what we perceive.”

“Structural order is stronger than logic. There is more than can be talked about.”

“The structure of images has a natural complexity. There is no insignificant thing in a photograph. It has to be there. Honor that order. Accept what one sees.”

“Photography deals with a totality of conditions. We read visual pictures in totality.”

“Buddhism is an aesthetic system—don't kill. To kill is to put an end to a perceptive system.”

“A work that functions: logical position continues, but temporal meaning changes.”

“A print is adequate when the weights function.”

“Manipulation is for the sake of cohesion, for linkages and order.”

“Nature is a system with an enormous sense of relatedness and cohesion.”

“Religious logic, metaphysics, philosophy are thinking about how our thoughts operate. They are complementary to display. “

“Display is to literally touch the experience. To feel and realize the experience directly.”

“The photograph is the sense of display, the interrelationships of things as seen, and how the conjunction of these things exist as a constellation.”

“The photograph is the most non-metaphysical way of display. It is immediate.”

“There is the occupier and there is the structure of an image. The occupier is the subject matter, the content. The structure must be stable regardless of the occupier. The system collapses when there is too much preference for what you photograph. You must see what you have, not what you have done.”

“When we have done something interesting, we are just the bystander. We should condition ourselves so that we can truly be the bystander when we are being. Nothing that is witnessed will be forgotten by your system. Anything that touches your attention span is a catalyst.”

More than half a lifetime later, I'm still working it out. 

A wedding video

Caryn & Rhetick's Wedding Weekend from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

A video documentary of Caryn & Rhetick and their wedding in British Columbia's Pemberton Valley.   This was fun to do. As with every video project, I learned to make do with what I had, and mourned what I wish I had done but didn't. Most of this I shot on the Canon 5D, though I had a second camera (a Canon HV-30) that rolled through the ceremony. It was also my first field test of the Beachtek audio splitter for the 5D, which worked like a charm, but made the camera that much more unwieldy. With control of audio it means I now have to monitor audio--one more thing to keep on top of. Someday it will become fluid and unconscious.

If you're having bandwidth issues, the YouTube version seems to be easier to view.

Today at the Fill

More on Flickr.

That didn't take long

Nine days after the fire at Montlake Fill, the birding mecca down the hill from my house, green shoots have emerged. I can't wait to see what's going to happen after the first rain.

Flickr set here.

Workflow

I seem to be having conversations lately about processing workflow: on jobs, at block parties--I wouldn't be surprised to be chatting with someone about workflow on a bus soon. Here is how I handle my daily torrent of images. This is a platform neutral approach.

I shoot only in RAW. I wouldn't know how to handle a jpg capture. I'm not a good enough photographer to have my exposure, color balance and dynamic range pitch perfect on every exposure. RAW gives me a ton of wiggle room. I process my pictures to match what I saw, or imagined, at the time.

I capture on CF cards (my newest ones are 8 gb), and I do my best to keep my cards clean and formatted. It's bothersome to have yesterday's shoot show up in today's ingest. The hands down best app (program) for ingest and initial review is Photo Mechanic. It fires up when you insert a card, and downloads the images into a dated folder (I keep a folder on the desktop labeled INBOX where these go). While the ingest is proceeding, I view the images full screen, and I do my initial edit. Unlike some photographers, I delete what I don't like, mostly the technically awful and out of focus stuff. Shots that I go, “hmm, that's odd,” I keep. It might be a harbinger of a future style I don't know I'm doing yet. Shots that I go “wow” get an instant star rating. That the first look.

Before I do anything else, I rename the images, with a date and sequence code (e.g., 20090806_001). I also add my metadata template with my credit, copyright and contact info. Then in big gulps I'll caption gangs of images that are of the same thing (a simple caption, usually the location--”University of Chicago,” or “Garden”). Some photographers will need/want more detail in this field. All this is done in Photo Mechanic. I used to do these tasks in Bridge, but PM is ten times faster.

I close out Photo Mechanic and fire up Bridge and aim it at the new folder. Once the thumbnails are loaded (watch the progress at the lower left), I select all and right click and apply a preset of RAW processing settings to the batch. I created this recipe in the Adobe Raw Converter, and saved it as Default. These settings (the ones different than the ACR defaults) are:

Color Temp: 5400
Tint: +4
Exposure: -.55
Black: 8
Clarity: +5

Defringe: Highlight edges
Lens Vignetting: +25

The camera bodies that I've calibrated using the DNG Profile Editor will have a camera profile automatically attached at this point.

I then open up batches of similar images (right-click, Open in Camera Raw), and do the next level of Raw corrections. I work on the first image (usually starting with color balance, and working down the list under the Exposure tab), then sync the rest of the images to it. A handy shortcut is to select the set of images, and click Synchronize while holding down the Option key. This will sync the set to the last setting under the Synchronize menu, and saves the step of opening up that dialog.

After I've corrected the images, I will look at them in Bridge, one at a time. This is now where I rate the work, and star the ones that I think are the best of the day. I am stingy with my star ratings. The best shots, maybe 5%, get a one star rating. If there are a lot of similars in that batch, I might do a second sort and give one or two of them two stars. There is no need for more degrees of sorting than that. I'll make my pick for the Daily Photo, and then I'm done for the day. More later on how I catalog and archive the work.

Montlake burn

Last Wednesday, on the hottest day in Seattle history, the Montlake Fill caught fire. My first view of the burn area was on Saturday, and I went again this morning. Photos on Flickr.

The fire was quickly controlled, and there will be no lasting damage. It'll ultimately be good for the landscape, though it burned a future Garry Oak grove (the seedlings were in PVC pipes) and through the heart of the Hooded Ladies Tresses Orchid population. The birds don't appear to mind at all (the fire occurred past nesting season), and the finches are having a field day gleaning the seeds on the bare ground.

I'm quite taken with the look of the landscape there now, and it's going to be fascinating to watch the changes take place over the next couple of years. I think I've got a photo project on my hands.