William Porter Photography

Don't say "Don't Say Cheese"

2010-07-21T20:39:00.001-07:00

Seems another photographer—a woman in the UK—laid claim to this name a while ago, although she still hasn't done THING ONE with it.

Doesn't seem to be a single phrase in the English language that hasn't already been grabbed for use on the web.

Introducing an outstanding wedding photographer in Tampa Bay: Booray Perry!

2010-07-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty active in several online communities of photographers, getting help from others from time to time, and offering help from my own experience whenever I am able. Sometimes I get to know other photographers pretty well from exchanges online and I do often look behind the "avatar" at people's work. There are more than a couple really good photographers out there.

Sometimes I even get a chance to talk personally with somebody whose work I like very much. That happened today with Tampa Bay wedding photographer Booray Perry. I won't say a thing about the wonderful name; you can find out for yourself on his website:

http://boorayperry.com/

Booray's a real live wire. He used to be a radio disk jockey here in the Dallas area and I can testify that his personality comes through loud and clear, not just over the phone but also in his photos and on his very entertaining blog. Today I found his post on the creative challenge of photographing the bride's shoes, which I both sympathized with and smiled at. Anyway, we had both been involved in a recent thread about wedding albums on photo.net, and we ended up chatting together about photography, business, and families. Like me, Booray thinks of himself as not just a wedding photographer but as a family photographer. I admire his work. If you are looking for a wedding photographer in Tampa Bay (or for that matter, someone to shoot your son's bar mitzvah, whatever), by all means browse the impressive online galleries over at his website.

Reading a photograph: Patricia Dalzell's "Benita at Home..."

2010-07-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

Excellent post over at The Online Photographer. The subjects of the post are, first, a photo by Patricia Dalzell, and second, a reading of that photo by another photographer, Ken Tanaka. I disagree with Ken Tanaka's reading but am grateful to him for it; and I don't feel bound to accept or be too influenced by Patricia Dalzell's explanation of the photo's background, but I'm grateful for that, too. I won't reproduce the photo or the critique; you can and should bop over to TOP and see them both for yourself. It's worth the click.

What I want to do is say a few things about criticism and the meaning of art. This is a pool I used to wade in pretty frequently in my days as an academic.

Superficiality is a virtue

A good critic in any art must be thoughtful but must first be observant, and to be truly observant, you must be disciplined, restrained, patient, humble. Or to put it differently, a good critic SHOULD be superficial, should be devoted to the surface, at least for a start. The problem with the way most folks look at photos (or poems, or movies, or whatever) is not that they are superficial, it's that they are dismissive, they're in a hurry. They FAIL to look even at the surface carefully. For most people, almost nothing is harder to see than what is right beneath their noses.

Thomas Aquinas, speaking in the Quodlibetales of the interpretation of scripture, said, Sensus spiritualis semper fundatur super litteralem, et procedit ex eo ("The spiritual meaning is always based on the literal meaning and proceeds from it"). In other words, look carefully at the literal level, the surface. Work hard to see the obvious and try to remain content with it as long as possible. Only then will you earn the right to step into the sanctum sanctorum of the deeper or less obvious meaning.

Ken Tanaka's reading, like a lot of readings done in the last, oh, half century or so, demonstrates a willingness to get to the sanctum sanctorum too quickly, too carelessly. It is, in short, an overreading. He says he's worried about the woman doing violence to him but in fact he does violence to her and to the photograph.

Don't expect too many answers

You can't ask too many questions about what's NOT in the photograph. Or rather, you can ask them, but it's not fair to expect those questions to be answered. You can't start trying to figure out where the woman's husband is, for example. I think it's silly to ask what the woman is holding in the hand that's in the pocket (a gun? a knife?). She has her hand in her pocket, that's all, and we have no reason nor any right to assume she's holding anything at all. Women get to put their hands in their pockets. Now, you are certainly allowed to notice the hand in the pocket. You can even sense that it's meaningful in some way—but you can't quite put your finger on what that way is. I would add, as a portrait photographer myself, that hands are a big problem in portrait sessions, especially in full-length shots like this one of Patricia Dalzell's. I've often heard it said that actors like to smoke when acting because it gives them something to do with their hands.

Sometimes the photo does reveal a lot about its context and then you may be obliged to take it into consideration. A photo of a political leader is almost inevitably political. Cartier-Bresson's famous photo of the woman who has been "outed" as a former concentration camp guard is also rich with meaningful context, which we know quite a bit about in part because Cartier-Bresson made a short documentary giving more of the incident for critics to chew on. My insistence on the importance of the surface is not meant to justify ignorance of WWII. We bring what we know to our experience of any work of art or craft. A photo of someone else's dead dog may be touching. A photo of our own dead dog may bring us to tears. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum, as much as the esthetes would like it to.

But an awful lot of art lives in a chamber which, if not a vacuum, at least has a pretty thin atmosphere. Patricia Dalzell says that she tries to make her photos "timeless", by which I take it she means first of all, "not easily dated." I strive for the same thing, so I can see a kindred spirit's work in this photograph. When was the photograph taken? Could have been almost any time in the twentieth century, I think. This is what I would call a private work. The subject is not a famous person and her story is not known. It's quite wrong to make up a story of our own and foist it on the photo, just because we feel the urge to do so.

What do photos mean?

If we can't ask what the woman ate for breakfast, where she's going after the photo session is finished, or whether her raised eyebrow is in fact a sign of latent anger or hostility, then what does the photo "mean"?

This is the central, perennial question of criticism in all the arts, and the best answer has never changed: the photo (or poem, or painting, or sonata) means what it says, just that and nothing else. It isn't a package that can be unwrapped to reveal the gift of meaning hidden inside. The package is the gift, the photo means what it is. No paraphrase or description can replace it.

Criticism isn't the record of art's meanings, not for a minute. Criticism is simply talk about art and it should always take us back to the work and help us see it (or hear it) more attentively. Moreover, all critics should realize that, while the work endures, all criticism is ephemeral. In the mid-twentieth century, we had a critical renaissance in which a lot of very smart people thought—and even dared to say aloud—that criticism had replaced art. Silly, silly, silly.

Anyway, a lot of criticism can be useful even when it's very wrong. Criticism that puts bad, inappropriate or distracting thoughts into your head that you have trouble removing, well, that's just bad. But some criticism is wrong but provocatively so. It provokes us to look harder at the work if only to see if the critic is right or wrong, or at some point perhaps in order to find evidence of the critic's wrongness. That's okay. Criticism is talk about art. And strong art can survive bad criticism. Shakespeare's plays have, and while of course it isn't a masterpiece in the league of King Lear, this portrait by Patricia Dalzell will survive a little misreading, too.

Traveling light: The post-mortem

2010-07-15T00:56:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back from my excellent vacation adventure, mostly but not exclusively in Yellowstone National Park. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post titled "Traveling Light," in which I revealed that I had—with some hesitancy—decided to leave my Pentax DSLR bodies and my excellent lenses at home, and instead to entrust my vacation photos completely to a couple of relatively inexpensive compact, fixed-lens cameras.

And that's what I did. My pro gear stayed home and the compact cameras traveled. Now that I've had a chance to review the photos, select my favorites and post them online, what do I think about this experiment? Was it a success or a failure?

Wildlife: Panasonic FZ35

We saw lots of wildlife on this trip, mostly in Yellowstone, but also in Custer State Park in South Dakota and elsewhere. We saw grizzly bears (but no black bears, I think), gray wolves, lots of bison, coyotes, elk, white-tailed deer, pronghorns, marmots, otters, not to mention lots of birds, including an osprey, a couple of bald eagles, a couple of sandhill cranes, what was probably a downy woodpecker, and a very colorful bird that we think was a western tanager. I'm justing rattling off the species I can remember easily.

I'm fairly satisfied with the pics I got with the FZ35, in most cases. This pic of a buffalo lying in the grass was taken in the middle of the FZ35's zoom range (around 200mm equivalent), which is usually a "sweet spot" for lenses:

There's a fair bit of detail here, acceptable noise (the shot was taken at ISO 80, the lowest setting), and good color. I'm confident it will print well.

This shot of the engineers building in Mammoth Hot Springs is slightly less satisfactory:

Fortunately I captured this as a raw file. The unprocessed original is somewhat "soft", but I think the final result turned out okay, after I boosted the blacks, the contrast and especially the "clarity" in Lightroom 3. Still, I can't shake the feeling that this shot would have been sharper if I'd taken it with my Pentax K20D and, oh, the Pentax 70mm prime.

The FZ35 shined when I was able to get fairly close to my subject, and when the light was good. We were not more than 25ft from these otters as they played near the banks of Trout Lake in Yellowstone:

I'm happy with that shot and don't think it would have been better if I'd had better equipment. There was a serious photographer there at the same time, shooting with a film SLR. Apparently he's quite devoted to the otters. I'd like to see some of his photos. But I'm happy enough with this.

The grizzly bears and wolves were far less cooperative than the otters. This shot of a mother grizzly with her three cubs was taken in the early morning, at Alum Creek in the Hayden Valley. I was using the FZ35 with the 1.7x teleconverter attached, and with the camera mounted on a tripod for additional stability. The FZ35's in-camera image stabilization is actually quite good, but when you are shooting at an effective focal length of over 800mm, well, image stabilization can only do so much.

This grizzly was probably a quarter mile away from us at the time. I tried to remember, when attaching the converter, to switch into the FZ35's shutter priority mode so I could keep the shutter speed over 1/500th sec. This wasn't quite as fast as the old rule of thumb requires (that would be 1/800th sec) but I let the camera's image stabilization do some work and I think the results were okay. At this distance, the limitations of the resolution of the lens become apparent. Teleconverters get you a longer reach but you pay for it in light lost (about a stop) and image clarity. But getting closer wasn't an option; we were restrained by the ranger, and if the ranger hadn't been there, I would have been restrained by my wife; and if my wife hadn't been there, I would have had to rely on my own disinclination to risk being mauled by a grizzly. So this is the shot I got.

Could I have gotten this shot with my DSLR gear? I doubt it but I'm not sure. If I shot with my K20D and the Tamron 70-300 ED Di Macro, and if I was using the Tamron 1.4x teleconverter as well, I'd have an effective focal length available of something over 600mm. Now the difference between 600mm and 800mm in this situation is less than you might think. It's possible that the DSLR's much better performance at higher ISOs would become a factor here. The shot above was taken at ISO 200, which on the FZ35 is a fairly noisy sensitivity level. If I had shot this at ISO 400 or even 800 on my K20D, I am pretty sure it would be less noisy and more fine detail would have been preserved. The field of view would have been narrower (that is, the bears would have seemed "smaller" in the frame) but the greater resolution of the DSLR might have permitted me to crop and get something close to what I got with the FZ35. I just don't know. What I am pretty sure of, however, is that what I could have gotten with my DSLR gear would not have been better.

(I hasten to emphasize that I'm comparing the FZ35's performance and capabilities with my personal DSLR lens options, not with what a pro photographer could do with a $6000 lens.)

The noisiness of the FZ35 at anything over ISO 100 became an even more serious problem when, on another day, we spent a long time one afternoon watching these bears chew on a bison carcass on the bank of Soda Butte Creek, in the Lamar Valley.

We were a fair bit closer to the bears this time—not more than a couple of hundred yards, I think, if that—but it was a drizzly overcast afternoon, in other words, the light sucked. In order to keep the shutter fast, I had no choice but to boost the ISO to 400, and that meant losing detail. The other problem here was that I wasn't using the tripod. Instead, for some reason, I grabbed the monopod instead.

But I think the images are quite satisfactory, as vacation photos. I got a gray wolf, too. She (the ranger told us it was a female) was hanging around in the neighborhood, probably hoping to get to the carcass if the bears abandoned it. Didn't happen.

I'm glad I had that reach.

The bottom line is that the FZ35 basically performed as well as I expected it to, which was pretty well. These photos aren't going to end up in National Geographic, but I'll be happy making prints of them for a vacation album.

I should add a note about the Panasonic 1.7x conversion lens. Dealing with it—putting it on and taking it off—involves a certain amount of hassle, akin to the hassle involved in changing lenses on a DSLR. Except that at no time do the camera's innards get exposed to the air and its hazards (dust, pollen, moisture, etc.).

Landscapes and people: Panasonic LX3

Going into the vacation, I knew that, within its limited zoom range, the LX3 was a superior camera, indeed, within its limited zoom range and its even more limited range of satisfactory sensitivity (ISO 80-100), the LX3 is a very good camera, compared to just about anything. That Leica f/2.0-2.8 24-60mm (effective) lens is a real winner. And I understand that the LX3 has a slightly larger sensor than the FZ35. Anyway, from a technical perspective, the best shots I took on this vacation were taken with the LX3.

I was a little vague even at the time about which of the falls this was. I think this is a shot of the Lower Falls, as seen from above.

I did the black and white conversion in Adobe Lightroom 3. But the raw file from the LX3 gave me everything I needed to work with to make a decent conversion. I used the LX3's 16:9 aspect ratio a lot, and usually cropped those photos to my personal favorite 2:1 aspect ratio for web display and printing.

I had a neutral density filter for the LX3 and tried it when shooting a couple of other falls. I didn't use it here because I did not want to blur the water. I really like the sharp definition in the water at the top of the falls.

This shot of my wife and daughter along the path down from Trout Lake is very different from the waterfall shot:

The LX3 gave me the wide-angle I needed here and the fast aperture; this shot was taken at f/2.4 and ISO 100. Color rendition is good and the shot is nicely detailed.

But my favorite use for the LX3 is landscapes. Here is one of my favorites:

These last two were taken not in Yellowstone but in Rocky Mountain National Park, where we camped for two nights on our way north from Dallas. This is the Moraine after a rain (and hail) storm.

The image's vibrance was goosed a little in Lightroom 3, but those colors are basically the colors that I saw.

The last picture is perhaps my favorite of the vacation and it illustrates the LX3's adaptability. I had to make a midnight run to the comfort station one night at Rocky. While I was out of the tent, I noticed that the Moraine—which our campground looked down upon from the north—was full of fog and the moon was shining above it. Everybody else in the campground was sound asleep, so as quietly as I could, I hauled the tripod out of the van, put the LX3 into manual mode, took a couple test exposures, and then captured this:

You can click that image for a larger version. Yes, it's a tad noisy, but hey, this is a six second exposure on a compact camera! I shot at ISO 400. In retrospect I wish I'd shot at ISO 200 and done a 12 second exposure. Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with this shot. The Moraine at Rocky Mountain National Park, like the Eiffel Tower and Mount Rushmore, has been photographed millions of times and most of the photos look like all the others. It's nice to have a chance to take a shot that looks a bit different.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that the experiment was generally a success.

One of my main motives for leaving the DSLR gear at home was that I didn't want to have to lug a variety of lenses around. That worked out well. Even though I was carrying two cameras with me in the car most of the time, both were small. And although I did have to fiddle with the FZ35's teleconversion lens occasionally, in general, I was able to grab a camera and go to shoot.

The other main goal was to take photos that were not worse than those I'd have taken with my DSLR kit. That's not a high standard, of course, but it was a realistic one. And I'd say that standard was fairly well met.

Our next family vacation takes us to another national park, Big Bend, in southwest Texas. I could change my mind in the next few months but right now I expect I'll be carrying the same two cameras I took with me to Yellowstone.

Don't Say Cheese

2010-07-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with a number of changes here. I've fiddled with the look over the last couple of months. Blogger gives me more control than I'm taking advantage of, but I like to keep things clean, and I also want to keep things simple for myself.

And now I'm playing with a new name: "Don't say cheese." I don't tell my subjects to say cheese. I don't even ask them to smile. Instead, I try to get them to smile without being asked. It gives better results.

And I try not to take cheesy photos, which in itself makes me something of a stand-out in the wedding photography biz.

On the downside: If you didn't know that it was the title of a photography blog, would "Don't say cheese" make you think of photography? Maybe, but I doubt it. Without a context, it sounds more like advice you would give to someone who was taking a quiz about French food.

So enjoy the new name while it lasts. Maybe it will stick. Maybe it won't.

If you have the FZ35, do you really need a 1.7x teleconverter, too?

2010-06-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the Panasonic FZ35 has a 18x zoom range that extends from 27mm to 486mm in conventional 35mm film or 36x24 digital ("full frame") terms. That's some serious zoom action.

So, if you can reach 486mm (effective) with the FZ35 on its own, do you really need the 1.7x teleconverter? After all, you can always just shoot at full zoom and crop, to make the subject appear bigger in the frame.

Well, the short answer is that the teleconverter is indeed useful.

Here is a photo of a car across the street. This was taken at full zoom extension (486mm equivalent) and cropped. What you are seeing here is actually a screen shot from Adobe Lightroom 3.

Now here is essentially the same shot, taken with the Panasonic DMW-LT55 1.7x teleconverter attached.

As you can see, the field of view is about the same in the two photos, that is, the car is about the same size in each photo. And the two images look just about identical in other ways, at least at this size. So are they in fact identical? Is the one taken without the teleconverter as good as the one take with the teleconverter?

No, it's not.

The one taken with the teleconverter actually has more pixels, more data. This means several good things. It will be possible to print the second shot somewhat larger than the first. The second shot will be more amenable to certain post-processing maneuvers, such as noise reduction and sharpening, because there is more data to work with.

Here's an enlargement of the license plate from the first shot (the one taken without the teleconverter). The enlargement ratio here is 3:1.

And here is an enlargement from the second photo (the one taken with the help of the teleconverter). The enlargement ratio here is only 2:1. In other words, I didn't have to work the pixels as hard this time to get the same size on screen.

The difference doesn't seem dramatic at first glance, but look again. Look at the Nissan badge above the plate, or the State of Texas symbol in the middle of the plate, or the word "MAXIMA" at the bottom. In the second image, everything is a little sharper, a little smoother and less pixelated.

*

Here they are again, a little smaller. I'm simulating the effect of printing here. You should be able to see that the second image is sharper and simply "better" than the first one. If you can't see the difference, well, you might be running into the limitations imposed by your computer's display.

*

The bottom line here is, the 1.7x teleconverter is actually useful. Say I have the good fortune not only to see a wolf in Yellowstone but actually to be able to set up my tripod and take a photo of one. From what I've read, it's almost certain that the wolf is going to be a long way in the distance. I can take the shot with or without the teleconverter. But if I use the teleconverter, I'll collect more data. The image of the wolf will be comprised of more pixels, which means the wolf will be higher resolution. And that's good.

A final point. There's a practical limit to the advantage of the teleconverter, and I'm working very close to that limit. The limit is set by two things: the quality (acuity or sharpness) of the lens; and the effective focal length at which you are working when the teleconverter is attached.

The quality of the lens that channels light to the camera's sensor determines how efficiently and effectively the available pixels are used. The number of pixels captured isn't the only thing that matters, in fact, it's not even the most important thing. A really good lens on a 10 megapixel camera will produce better photos than a mediocre lens on a 14 megapixel camera. Returning to the FZ35 and the teleconverter, the FZ35's built-in Leica lens is rather good, and the Panasonic teleconverter is not bad. But at full zoom extension, the FZ35 plus teleconverter seems to have reached its maximum resolving power, that is, more pixels in the sensor wouldn't matter because the lens is already starting to lose detail. A lens is an analog device, of course, it doesn't have pixels. But you can't just keep giving the lens more and more pixels and expect the lens to record finer and finer detail.

The other practical limit here is imposed by the focal length. With the 1.7x teleconverter attached, the FZ35, at full zoom extension, is shooting at a focal length equivalent to 826mm. Most serious photographers never own a lens with an effective focal length greater than 500mm, and many never even reach that. Now, when you are shooting at 500mm, 600mm, 800mm, even the tiniest vibration or instability in the camera can affect the sharpness of the image that is captured. The photos above were not taken with the camera on a tripod; I simply used a monopod. If I do use the teleconverter in Yellowstone, I will have the camera on a tripod, and I will use a 2 second shutter delay so I can get my hands off the camera before the picture is actually taken. At this extreme focal length, the merest touch can wreck a photo.

Nevertheless, while the teleconverter is pushing the FZ35 to its extreme limits, it's not exceeding those limits and if you really need extra telephoto reach, it's better to have the 1.7x lens than to do without and simply crop. Q.E.D.

Traveling light

2010-06-23T22:32:00.000-07:00

Well, we're off on vacation pretty soon. Most of our time will be spent at Yellowstone National Park. I've never been. Everybody says it's a photographer's paradise, because it's beautiful everywhere you look, and because it has just about everything you could ask for in the way of natural beauty: mountains, prairies, geysers, waterfalls, rivers, lakes, ponds, forests, not to mention wildlife in the form of bears (two kinds), wolves, wolverines, badgers, beavers, bison, coyotes, eagles, osprey, hawks, falcons, ravens, bluebirds, and on and on. I've been doing my homework, reading both of the excellent books about photography at Yellowstone that I could find at Amazon (Lange's, and Verderber's), and getting advice from other photographers, mostly online, about where to go and what to look for. You gotta do your homework!

Well, with all this great stuff waiting for me to point a camera at it, you might think that I'd be bringing my best camera and best lenses. But you'd be wrong.

I've taken my Pentax gear with me to Rocky Mountain National Park, to the Grand Canyon, to Big Bend, to Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, and elsewhere. And yes, it does a terrific job. If somebody were paying me to go to Yellowstone and take photos, I guess I'd take my Pentax gear.

But I've decided this time to go light. I'm leaving the DSLRs and all the lenses at home, and I'm taking just a couple of Panasonic fixed-lens cameras. I hasten to add, a couple of very good fixed-lens cameras.

For landscapes

For landscapes, I'll rely on the old Panasonic LX3, which still seems to me the very best digital compact camera ever. With its outstanding ultra-wide (24mm equivalent) Leica lens, it's a perfect camera for landscapes, like this shot of the spillway at White Rock Lake in Dallas:

The LX3 is terrific for macro (close-up) photography, as well.

I have a circular polarizing filter (for shooting the geysers) and a neutral density filter (possibly for shooting waterfalls) for use with the LX3, so I think I'm in good shape.

In the past, if I was shooting a landscape with a Pentax DSLR, I have relied mainly on the Sigma 10-20 ultrawide zoom, an outstanding lens. It's the only lens I took with me to the bottom of the Grand Canyon last Christmas. In 35mm equivalence, its range is 15mm to 30mm, so it gives me a considerably wider angle of view than the LX3's 24mm. But the LX3 has twice the reach at the other end (it goes to 60mm). In short, the LX3 is right in the range where I take most of my photographs. If it were a bit better in low light, I could shoot a wedding with the LX3, something I would never try with the Sigma 10-20! If I weren't going to use the LX3 at Yellowstone, I'd have to take the Sigma 10-20 AND at least one, probably two of my prime lenses, perhaps the Sigma 28 and the Sigma 40. More likely, for Yellowstone (since it's not the Grand Canyon), I'd leave the 10-20 at home and take the Pentax 21 and the Pentax 40. Those are both small lenses. Still, that would be three to four times heavier than the LX3 and bulkier by about the same factor.

But if I had a Pentax DSLR body and the 21 and 40mm primes, I would still lack a couple of things the LX3 offers: outstanding macro capability, and the ability to shoot high-def video!

For wildlife

The harder, much harder, part of the problem is what to take to shoot wildlife. I'm a portrait photographer, a wedding photographer, and the fine lenses that I have are all in the wide to normal to weak telephoto range. My only long lens is a Tamron 70-300, which is a decent consumer lens, but, well, not in the league of the stuff I take to a wedding.

The reason I have the Tamron 70-300 is that it's very affordable. Really high-quality telephoto lenses like the Pentax DA* 300 or the Sigma 150-500 ("Bigma") are not.

At first, I thought I'd just stick with what I had already, the LX3, and, well, just look at the wildlife through binoculars. But I decided that was crazy. But I didn't want to bring a DSLR and the 70-300, either. If I am going to go light, I'm going to go light.

So I decided to get a second compact camera with a good telephoto zoom.

I first tried the Pentax X90. I don't really want to talk about it. Pentax's DSLRs are terrific, really top notch. Its compact cameras, alas, not so much.

After a little more research, it became clear that Panasonic has ruled the compact camera category, or at least been a major competitor and innovator in that field, for years. So I tried the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7. The image quality was pretty good, and the zoom had a pretty good reach, too (300mm equivalent). Here's a pic of a coot:

The detail in the coot's feathers is actually better than it looks in this web-ready image. The ZS7 is compact and has GPS built-in, although I probably would not use the GPS feature in Yellowstone because we'll be camping and I'm going to be worried about battery use. The ZS7 seems like a really nice camera for a lot of photographers, and I've seen some wonderful photos taken with it. But for me, it had a couple serious weaknesses. First, it doesn't support raw capture. (The LX3 does, by the way.) I am not yet sure whether I'll shoot raw in Yellowstone or not but I want to have the option. Second, the ZS7's 300mm (equivalent) reach is just not going to be long enough to photograph a wolf or a baby bison. A final problem with the ZS7, for me personally anyway, is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn't support add-ons in any way. Mainly that means that I can't use it with filters.

So the ZS7 went back, too. And now I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ35, which is what I'll be taking with me to Yellowstone. Its zoom range is from 27mm to an awesome 486mm (equivalent). With the Panasonic LT55 telephoto conversion lens attached, the FZ35 can actually reach over 800mm (equivalent)! And did I mention that it cost $300—a small fraction of what I'd have to spend to get a better, longer lens for my Pentax DSLR body.

Unlike the Pentax X90, the Panasonic FZ35 produces photos that I think are really pretty good. And unlike the Panasonic ZS7, the FZ35 also supports raw capture, and it accepts filters. Folks, we have a winner. Well, it's not as compact as the ZS7. But it is very light.

Zoom zoom

How good is the FZ35's zoom? Well, consider this. Here's a shot I took from the east side of White Rock Lake (near my house in Dallas). I'm looking west across the lake toward the old pump house.

Interesting side note: The blur on the left side of the photo was caused by an insect on the lens. You have to keep your lenses clean, even if you have a compact camera!

Now the previous photo is a bit deceptive. The wide-angle view makes even the biker seem farther away than he is. He's probably about 35-40 ft away. But as you can see, the pump house is a long way away. I just tried to calculate the distance using Google Maps, and it's about half a mile across the lake at this point. Imagine that there was a wolf or a baby bison standing on the porch of the pump house. I'd be out of luck, right?

Maybe not. Here's a photo of the pump house taken with the FZ35's zoom extended all the way (486mm equivalent).

And here's a shot with the 1.7x teleconverter attached.

OK, if there were a wolf, say, lying on its side on the porch of the pump house, I'm not saying I'd be able to tell if it was a boy or a girl. But I'm pretty sure I could tell it was a wolf and not a coyote, which is a good start.

Of course, test shots of far-away buildings aren't really very indicative of how the lens will perform if I'm shooting wildlife. Perhaps this is a better example of the FZ35's zoom range. This was taken from the same spot as the previous pic, and the rowers were in the middle of the lake.

And here's an uncropped shot of a scissor-tailed flycatcher that was zipping around where I was taking these other photos.

Compare that to this cropped photo of a scissor-tail that I took down in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge a few years ago:

That was taken with the Tamron 70-300.

Proof is in the prints

So is this a good idea—leaving the really good cameras and lenses at home, and taking a couple of inexpensive "point and shoot" cameras? I think so, but to be honest, I won't really know until I get back and get some images printed. A big weakness of image comparisons on the Internet is that they're limited by the display medium, your monitor. Sometimes you can't really tell how much better one image is than another until you send both to a high-quality printer. I'll back to you at the end of the summer when we're back and I've had a chance to print and review my photos.

And if it does turn out to be a bad idea, I'll just have to go back to Yellowstone and try again.

Redesign underway

2010-06-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

I'm in the process of redesigning everything—my web site, my galleries, and this blog. Rather harder than you might think. For one thing, the web site is designed by moi and coded by moi. (Tip: Don't hire a photographer because you think their web site is cool. There's a better than even chance they bought the template for the web site.) Anyway, I code the web site, but the galleries are hosted at zenfolio.com, and the blog is hosted by Blogger (a Google service). Getting all three to have a consistent look is almost impossible. Very frustrating. Anyway, it's not going to get done now until we get back from vacation in mid-July.

Perspective correction in Lightroom 3!

2010-06-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my prayers are answered. I've been using the Lightroom 3 beta for months, but Lightroom 3 was just officially released, and I was overjoyed to discover that it includes perspective correction tools that weren't there in the beta.

What's perspective correction? Well, here's a photo I took today in downtown Dallas, on the east side.

And here's the same photo, after a little perspective correction on the vertical axis.

Makes a big difference, no?

Here's the photo I was really after. Click to view it full size:

This panorama was actually created in Photoshop Elements 8, and then given final processing in Lightroom 3; so the perspectival correction in the pano was done in Photoshop. But it's nice to know I can now fix single images in Lightroom 3 when I need to.

Panasonic LX3: How wide is wide?

2010-06-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I took a couple pictures at the lake, using the unassisted LX3 at its widest angle (= 24mm in full-frame terms), and then using the Panasonic DMW-LW46 Wide Conversion Lens. Unfortunately, the scene I was photographing didn't have enough distinguishing features in it to show the difference in angles of view clearly. So today I tried again, this time shooting the back of my house.

Here's a shot of our garage, with the LX3 zoomed in as tight as it can go (= 60mm in full-frame terms). Note that in this shot and in the two that follow, I'm standing about 30 ft away from the near corner of the garage.

In full-frame terms, 60mm is a weak telephoto; the "normal" angle of view is around 50mm.

The following shot was taken with the LX3 zoomed out to its widest angle of view (= 24mm in full-frame terms).

And finally, here's the same scene captured using the LW46 Conversion Lens, which takes the LX3 to an effective ultra-wide angle of view of 18mm.

Is the LW46 worth its small price? I certainly think so.

Postscript a week later (6-19-2010): Notwithstanding the enthusiasm I felt for it when I was writing about it above, I decided to return the LW46 wide-angle conversion lens. The lens itself really is quite good and I would not discourage anybody from getting it. However, what I decided for myself was that the lens kind of defeated the point of the LX3, which is to have a small camera with some flexibility. With the conversion lens mounted, the LX3 is no longer pocketable. And once the conversion lens is attached, you can't zoom; you're only able to shoot at the effective 18mm focal length. I've decided that, when I need to go wider than 24mm (effective), I can just take two or three shots and stitch them together. See my next post.

More about the Panasonic LX3

2010-06-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

In my post yesterday I simply shared a few of the photos I've taken with the LX3. I think I should add a little technical info, for anybody who's actually interested in the camera.

Cons

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 has very few cons. Perhaps the main one right now is that the model itself is a year and a half old. There are rumors about a new model (possibly called LX5) being released later this year. I didn't worry about it. There's always something newer and better ready for release next month.

So what are the LX3's disadvantages?

Well, first, the telephoto end of the camera's zoom range doesn't reach very far—a mere 60mm in 35mm equivalence. If you want to take photographs of birds, well, don't buy the LX3. I wish Panasonic sold a companion camera with a zoom that ran from, oh, 70-300 in 35mm terms. But they don't. I'm happy to have the LX3's superior wide-angle performance. And to be honest, given my experience in recent years shooting with prime (fixed focal length) lenses on my Pentax DSLRs, I find the LX3's modest zoom range easy to live with. Any zoom at all is a novelty to me.

A second and clearer disadvantage is that the LX3 produces rather noisy images at ISOs over about 400. You can find examples of this in all of the reviews of the LX3. I personally don't find this much of a real disadvantage, either, not because I like noisy images, but because this criticism can be thrown at any small-sensor camera. If you want to shoot in really low light and get stellar results, you buy a DSLR, and even there, some are better than others. The LX3 does have a built-in flash that works tolerably well, but I have reconciled myself to the fact that the LX3 isn't going to be taking photos in the dark.

Third disadvantage: no viewfinder. As it comes out of the box, the LX3 expects you to frame photos using its LED screen. The screen is big (3"), bright and high-res (460,000 pixels), but when you shoot in bright sun, using the screen can be difficult. A built-in viewfinder should provide a tiny duplicate of the LED screen that you can put your eye up to and see clearly even in bright sun. A built-in viewfinder would display your current camera settings, and would zoom as you zoom. However, a built-in viewfinder would also make the camera bigger; see the Canon G10 or G11. In keeping with the Rangefinder esthetic of the LX3, Panasonic decided to release instead, as an add-on, an external optical viewfinder (EOV). The EOV allows you to frame your photo, somewhat approximately, while you hold the camera to your eye. Holding the camera to your eye is a more stable way to hold the camera; and it also eliminates the problem of viewing the LED in bright sun. The drawback of the EOV is that it doesn't communicate with the camera in any way, so you don't get a TTL (through-the-lens) view before you take your photo. Guidelines on the EOV's viewing screen show you the dimensions of a photo with the 3x2 aspect ratio, which is just one of the three aspect ratios at which the LX3 can shoot. So if you are trying to frame your shot with absolute precision, well, you might want to turn on the display screen. But I've found that it's possible to do a pretty good job framing shots with the EOV. And turning off the LED dramatically reduces battery consumption.

Those are the only significant disadvantages or cons that I can think of.

Pros

The LX3 has too many advantages for me to list them all. Here are a few that matter to me.

Optically outstanding Leica lens, with a wonderful wide-angle reach of 24mm (in 35mm film SLR terms) and a max aperture of f/2 to f/2.8. In a sense, the LX3 is what any serious photographer wants: a terrific lens, with a camera attached.
The LX3 supports raw capture. Actually, this was one of the main things that drew me to the camera, but the more I shoot with it, and considering that I'm using it only for personal photos rather than for work for clients, the more I'm leaning towards shooting jpeg in the camera. Still, I'm happy to know that the raw capability is there if I want it.
The LX3 gives me the ability to control just about everything, indeed, the number of options and controls is a bit bewildering at first, even to someone used to working with a pro DSLR. The LX3 does have the standard PASM exposure modes (program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and full manual). P has a program-shift feature that resembles the K20D's hyper-program feature, so in a way, you don't need A or S at all. What I'm discovering, however, is that the camera is smart enough that I can put it into P mode and just shoot.
The big, high-res LED is even better than the displays on my DSLRs, and I'm still enjoying how good pictures look on the back of the camera.
I can focus manually if I need to.
Amazing close-focus (macro) capability. The LX3 can focus from 1 cm. And here the LX3's small sensor provides an advantage over shooting with my DSLRs and the excellent macro lenses I have: at a given focal distance, smaller sensors yield greater depth of field.
The LX3 has the rare ability to shoot at multiple aspect ratios, while maximizing the use of the sensor and at the same time maintaining the same angle of view on the scene. It took me a while (and a little calculating) to realize how interesting an achievement this is. The LX3 doesn't just crop, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that it crops all three of the basic aspect ratios (4:3, 3:2 and 16:9). As of firmware version 2.1, the LX3 can also take a 1:1 aspect ratio shot.
The LX3 has an internal buffer that can be used to store a couple of photos. This is brilliant. A month or two I grabbed a camera and ran to the lake to photograph a gorgeous rainbow. Jumped out of the car, framed my shot—and then realized that the camera didn't have a card in it. If I'd grabbed the LX3, I would have been able to take the shot anyway.
Build quality. The LX3 is a nice piece of work that feels like a serious, old-fashioned camera. A lot of other cameras sold these days, including some that are expensive and take very good photos, feel like cheap toys by comparison.

There are literally dozens of other little things about the LX3 that I'm discovering and coming to like very much, like the intelligent ISO feature, video capture (which I don't use much but am grateful to have), and voice annotations.

In a nutshell

In short, the LX3 has a terrific lens, is a pleasure to shoot with, and yet is going to keep challenging me, because I know that, if I take a lousy photo with the LX3, I can't blame it on the camera.

The Panasonic LX3: The perfect personal camera (for me)?

2010-06-15T00:47:00.000-07:00

I haven't shot with a fixed-lens, compact camera for about five years. But recently I decided I wanted a camera compact enough to go everywhere with me, comfortably. The only problem was that the camera also had to take truly outstanding pictures. My research and testing led me to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. I've been putting it through its paces lately and I'm impressed with what this little camera can do.

Double-wide

One of the most remarkable of the many remarkable features of the LX3 is that the lens, an optical gem made by Leica, goes wider than just about any other compact camera: to 24mm in 35mm film equivalence. At the telephoto end of the lens's zoom range, it only goes to 60mm, which isn't much of a telephoto at all. In short, this is a camera made to go wide, very wide.

This makes it perfect for working inside.

Or outside, in the wide-open spaces.

I used to think that telephoto reach was what I wanted most from a camera. I've changed my mind. Now I want everything double-wide, and the LX3 delivers.

Up close

The LX3 also lets me get close, really close. It's a good thing that my model here (Beebe the guinea pig) and I are on pretty good terms.

Wide and close can be nice. I was only an inch or two from this flower:

Although sometimes, simply very close is all that's needed. This was taken from less than an inch away:

Raw or jpeg?

I've been a raw evangelist for a while. "Raw" capture is what every digital camera's sensor does. When photographers say they "shoot raw," they mean that they like to save all of the data seen by the sensor, so they can work with it on their computers later. The LX3 supports raw capture, and indeed, that was one of the reasons I bought it. (Most compact cameras do not.)

But I've discovered that the LX3's in-camera conversion of raw data to jpeg format is outstanding, and although it seems like heresy for me to say this, I'm tempted to start shooting jpeg with this camera. I spend too much time processing photos for clients. I'd be happy not to spend so much time processing my own photos. This picture was created by the camera's built-in jpeg procesing engine and it's indistinguishable from the jpeg that I created myself in Adobe Lightroom 3 from the raw file:

The perfect personal camera (for me)

In short, the LX3 seems to be the perfect personal camera, at least for a wide-angle photographer like me. The Panasonic wide-angle conversion lens, available as an add-on for the LX3, takes the camera to an amazing ultra-wide angle focal length of 18mm (in 35mm film camera terms), and I think I'll find a use for that focal length when we go to Yellowstone National Park later this year. In fact, I think I'm going to leave my Pentax DSLRs and all my lenses at home and rely on the LX3. I'm confident it can do the job.

*

Postscript 6-15-2010: For details on what I like most about the LX3, see my next post, here.

What people like, face to face

2010-05-24T22:48:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday (May 23, 2010) I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon sitting in a beautiful garden and talking for most of the day to strangers about a few of my photos. I was there as part of the East Dallas Gardens and Artisans Tour. My wife and I have been going to these art fairs for as long as we can remember, but this was the first time I'd taken part in one myself as an "artist" or exhibiter or (as I would prefer) a craftsman. And it was a treat.

In this post, I simply want to comment on a few of the photos that I was showing that day. If you came by, you will already have heard some of this from me in person.

The Grand Canyon photos

I was quite sure that people would comment on this photo, taken at the start of our hike down into the Grand Canyon last December.

I expected it to get comments in good part because I'd made a large (20" x 30") print and had it beautifully custom framed by Decor Art & Frame on Greenville in Dallas. Frames matter! But I'm proud of the photo. Most of my Grand Canyon photos look like everybody else's. It's hard to take a striking photo of a cliche. But we had the good fortune (as well as the challenge) to be hiking down the Bright Angel Trail last December during a fairly significant snow storm. And this gave me a view of the canyon that, while not unique, isn't very common, either. I was happy to get the Kolb Brothers historic photographic studio into the photo. For the same reason, I've always been fond of this photo, taken five years ago from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, on a day when clouds had settled into the canyon:

If you want good photos of a popular place like the Grand Canyon, one way to increase your chance of success is to keep going back.

White Rock Lake

In my tour display the other day, I also included a couple of my favorite photos of White Rock Lake. I had a couple of the Mockingbird Lane foot bridge. One in the fog, taken with an ultra-wide angle lens:

And another, one of my favorites, taken with a telephoto lens and from a slightly different vantage point, during a rare snowstorm in Dallas (February 11, 2010):

I think it's interesting to compare the photo above, with this photo that was taken just about the same time:

I like this second photo, too. I like having the jogger in the photo, for scale and also for color. Wish that the car was missing, though. And this second photo has too much going on: the tree, the jogger, the car, the snow. The first photo is, well, simpler: it's a picture of a bridge in a snowstorm. There's a tree in it, too, but the tree is way off to the side and not really part of the "subject." I mean, if you are going to photograph a tree, photograph a tree, like this:

Or this, from the Dallas Arboretum:

Of the photos of White Rock Lake in the snow last February, next to the bridge photo (above), this was probably the most popular photo among my visitors:

That's Lake Highlands Drive, just east of the Bath House on the east side of the lake. Actually, I was taking a photo of the Bath House and the lake, and I wasn't happy. Then I realized why: the lake didn't have snow on it. I turned to the left, and got the photo above. Maybe we have a special appreciation for the beauty of snow here in Dallas. We don't see much of it.

People liked the photos of the lake in the fog, too, including this photo of the old boat house near T. & P. Hill:

And this picture of the boats at the Corinthian Sailing Club:

That photo, like the photo of the bridge in the snow, was not "Photoshopped." Fog is a wonderful artistic filter.

My favorites

Perhaps my favorite, of the photos I displayed last Sunday, is this photo that I took several years ago of my dog Abby running in our back yard:

The technique here is simple: pan the camera sideways to follow the movement of the subject. The background inevitably blurs. Here, it produces a very painterly image.

Kids liked the running dog. But this seemed to be the favorite photo of many of my adult visitors:

Many people assumed it was two photos, stitched or "Photoshopped" together. Nope. That's my mother-in-law on the left, and my daughter on the right, and the photo was taken at my dinner table. I looked up from dinner, saw the photo, and snapped the shot. That white, blank wall behind my mother-in-law really is that white, blank and lonely. And behind my background there really is a shelf with dishes, a hallway with a photo, and a bedroom door. But of course what really make the photo is, first, my mother-in-law's expression. She's not actually unhappy. She just doesn't want to expend the effort to smile. And the second key element is my daughter's hat. Yep, that's what she wore to dinner. What can I say? It was a new hat.

What's the lesson here, boys and girls? Keep the camera with you, even at the dinner table. You just never know...

HCB at the MoMA in NYC

2010-04-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

I don't usually say to myself, "Gee, I wish I could go to New York City." I'm more likely to sit back and thank God that I'm here in Texas. But today I'm wishing I could hop a plane to NYC, having just learned about the MoMA's new show featuring the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/henricartierbresson/#/

The link provides a slideshow with a generous sample of images.

HCB (as he so often referred to by photographers) is the Picasso of photography in the first half of the twentieth century—that is, the dominant figure, the genius everybody who knows even a little about photography thinks of first when trying to think of a "great" photographer.

And genius he surely was. Like all of the great photographers I really admire, Cartier-Bresson inspires me to admire his eye and his imagination rather than his technical prowess. I don't ask myself, "What f-stop did he use for this photo?" Instead I ask myself, "How did he manage to put himself in position to photograph this extraordinary moment? How did he see it coming? If he arranged it, how was he able to imagine this image—and how did he manage to make it look so totally spontaneous?"

Occasionally, I put myself in a great spot on purpose, and I'm excited (and a little proud of myself) when I do it. I was proud to have hauled my butt out of bed to photograph the lake in the deep fog, and later, in the middle of the blizzard of February 11 (2010). I had the lake to myself, by and large, and I did get some nice photos as a reward.

But photographing the lake in a snowstorm is relatively easy—and obvious. Just wait for a snowstorm, then go out with a camera. What's amazing about Cartier-Bresson's images is that they almost always involve people. And people are less easily managed than landscapes. Consider this great image:

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Hyères, France, 1932.
Photo linked from the history of photography blog of Jeff Curto, College of DuPage.

I can imagine myself being fascinated by this staircase, if I somehow managed to put myself at the top of it. But to get the cyclist into the photo, well, of course it seems obvious in retrospect, but trust me, it wasn't. And to get the cyclist going in that direction, and to capture the cyclist in exactly that position—that's perfection or pretty close.

Too much of a good thing

2010-04-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

You can have too much of a good thing, and sometimes that good thing is color. I was reminded of this recently when I posted here about my upcoming portrait sessions at the Dallas Arboretum. I included a shot from a previous year, showing a lovely mother and daughter, both red-haired. I felt that the red hair was so striking, it distracted from their faces in a photograph in a way that it wouldn't in real life, and I preferred a duo-tone version of the shot to the color original.

In this post I want to expand on that theme. But this time, I want to talk not about people, who almost always look interesting in black and white, but rather, about flowers and trees. The point I want to make about flowers is that, sometimes, a black and white conversion of photos is actually a more compelling photo.

Color is good, sometimes

Here, for example, is a simple photograph of some flowers at the Dallas Arboretum.

It isn't a great photo, to be sure, but whatever interest it has comes from the combination of color and depth. Converting this image to black and white would kill it.

But consider this photo:

The center of interest here is obviously the great, old tree, which looks like something you might run into if you went on vacation with Frodo the Hobbit. But the power of the tree is diminished by the colors in the photo: by the young, green grass, and the sunny blue sky. The clumps of green grass are particularly problematic. Green really grabs people's attention.

Converted to black and white, the tree really comes into its own:

It is still clear, to anybody who is able to see the details, that it's a bright sunny day. The sky is still bright and only partly cloudy. The young clumps of grass are still popping up from the ground. But the black and white version of the photo emphasizes not just the age of the tree but its gnarled magnificence. The color photo is a nice snapshot of a big old tree. The black and white version is (to my tastes, anyway) a much more striking image.

Taste and interpretation

I'd like to digress for just a second into a couple of points that may strike some as a bit academic.

First, taste. It is true that people's tastes differ. I bring this up because some people simply do not like black and white photos or, for that matter, black and white movies. If you are the sort of person who simply thinks that a black and white photo of flowers is stupid, well, I pity you, because you've shut yourself off from most of the greatest photographs ever taken. But I don't expect I'll be able to persuade you otherwise.

Second, interpretation. You don't have to be terribly clever to make up an interpretation that appears to justify any artistic decision, no matter how wrong-headed. If you didn't like the black and white treatment, you could say that the green grass represents young life, which stands in contrast to the old, dying tree, and that converting to black and white robs the photo of its meaning. But some interpretations are better than others, and some interpretations are just wrong. This photo isn't about the contrast between youth and old age, at least not primarily. It's about the tree by itself. In color, it's a weak picture of a contrast between life and death. In black and white, it's a strong picture of an old tree.

Flowers and color

So perhaps you agree that the tree photo is more impressive in black and white. But surely photos have to be in color, right?

Not always. This is a pretty ordinary snapshot:

I think the main problem with the shot is that the flowers are too colorful. I've tried here to tone them down a bit, and they're still too colorful. You have to visit the Dallas Arboretum and see for yourself: The colors of some of the flowers are so vivid, they're literally almost unbelievable, that is, they don't seem real.

Here is the same photo, converted to black and white:

Conversion to black and white doesn't take an ordinary snapshot and turn it into a masterpiece. It's still an ordinary snapshot, but it's more appealing, subtler, not so loud. With the colors removed, you can see the light. Viewed at a larger size, the subtle shading of the flowers in the bed becomes more pronounced.

Reality vs photography, prose vs poetry

My guess is that about a third of the photos I take are more effective after conversion to black and white, and perhaps another third really need to be in color, with the third in the middle being able to go either way. The third that really need to be in color, are of subjects that simply could not be well photographed back in the days before color photography. The third that really want to be black and white are the subjects that we miss seeing today, because we too often simply fail to think about black and white as an option. It's hard to get black and white film processed anywhere these days, and it's not easy to get good black and white prints made at the usual outlets. And many casual photographers aren't aware there's more to black and white conversion than clicking on the "black and white" button in their software. I know it sounds paradoxical, but I spend at least as much and perhaps more time thinking about color when I do a black and white conversion, than I do if I leave a photo in color the way I shot it. Why? Because in the original photo, red is red, and green is green, and there's no mistaking them. In black and white, however, they may very well be mistaken, and I have to think hard to make sure that adjust the color channels in a way that best represents the contrasts and hues in the shot.

Why does black and white work? Because a photo is not a representation of reality as we really see it, at least not simply. The first fact about any photo is the frame, that is, the photo has a limit, a border, an edge beyond which you, the viewer, are not allowed to see. In reality, there is no limit, no border, no edge. Our peripheral vision is greater than the widest wide-angle lens. And if we want to see more, we simply turn our head a little. The frame of the photo restricts our attention to what is shown, what has been selected by the photographer for attention. In the same way, a black and white conversion, by eliminating color, forces us to view what remains—light, shade, form, texture, depth and focus. I think color photography, because it's more "realistic," tends also to be more prosaic. And black and white photography, when it's done well, because it is more formal and more disciplined, is more poetic.

You miss more than you hit

2010-04-05T16:32:00.000-07:00

In baseball, a batting average of over .300 is considered pretty good. What's it mean? It means that, seven times out of every ten chances, you failed. And that's if you're good.

Now, consider that baseball is pretty easy, compared to photography. After all, in baseball, you know when you're at bat, and you know when the pitch is coming. As a photographer, I have no idea when I'm going to see my next photograph. This is true not just now as I sit at my computer and write, but it's true even when I'm working, even when I have the camera to my eye and I'm "at bat," so to speak, and ready to swing. I can miss photos because I don't have a camera, and I can miss photos because I clicked the shutter half a second too soon or too late. Taking candids of my nephew yesterday after Easter dinner, I missed a number of shots that I think would have been good, because Matthew is a year and a half old, constantly on the move, and not generally willing to hold a cute expression long enough for me to focus and react. I was shooting with flash, and I had to wait a second or two between shots for my batteries to recycle. Them's the breaks.

Who shot Oswald?

This truth—you miss more than you hit—applies even to famous photographers, perhaps especially to famous photographers. I'm reminded of it today by a post today at Mike Johnson's The Online Photographer blog. The post is actually a link to an article by Michael Granberry at the Dallas News. The article was written in 2004, but Mike Johnston thought of it today and decided to repost it. I recommend you read Granberry's article, and visit The Online Photographer, too, because Mike Johnston posts the photos.

Here's the gist. In November, 1963, on the day that President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was being transferred from one jail to another, ace photographers for Dallas's two daily newspapers were on the scene, expecting a routine photo-op. Both of them took dramatic photos of a totally unexpected event: the fatal shooting of Oswald by Dallas weirdo Jack Ruby. Here are the two photos; click for a link to the source page, where you can see the photos enlarged.

Beers' photo on the left, Jackson's, on the right

On the left is Jack Beers' great photo. Beers was the photographer for the Dallas Morning News, and as Oswald was escorted into the garage, Beers was better positioned than his rival from the Dallas Times Herald, Bob Jackson. Beers saw Ruby running forward earlier and reacted faster. In so doing, he got a great shot, showing Ruby with his pistol aimed right at Oswald's heart, in the very act of pulling the trigger. But Jackson, who was slower to react, got an even greater shot, showing Oswald's reaction as he is hit by the bullet, as well as the sheriff's surprise at the shooting. Jackson's photo (on the right above) won the Pulitzer Prize that year. If Jackson's photo hadn't been taken, Beers surely would have won instead.

Them's the breaks.

I was aware of both photos but I had never read this back story and I'm grateful to Mike Johnston for bringing it to my attention. I urge you to read Granberry's entire account over at DallasNews.com, for more about the human angle, in particular.

The moral

The moral of the story is obvious but important. No matter how good you are, or how hard you try, you are going to miss many, many more photographs than you ever take.

I carry a camera with me almost everywhere I go. Yet I miss good photos constantly.

Sometimes I strike out swinging, that is, sometimes I have the camera to my eye and I'm looking in the right direction, but I click the shutter a split-second too early or too late, or even more painfully, I click the shutter at the right instant but the flash didn't fire, or the shot was focused incorrectly. It happens.

But often, I strike out looking, that is, I don't have a camera with me, or I just can't raise it to my eye fast enough. Last fall, while on a bike ride by the lake with my wife, I saw one of the most spectacular sunsets I've ever seen. Uncharacteristically I did not have a camera with me, and there was nothing I could do but stop and admire the remaining couple minutes of the sunset. Another miss that sticks in my mind, is the photo I did not take of a mountain lion crossing the road directly in front of my car. This happened a couple of years ago, at the top of Rocky Mountain National Park. My camera was in my lap, but I was too dumb-struck to grab it and shoot. My wife was with me and saw the mountain lion, too, so I know I didn't imagine it. Apparently we interrupted the mountain lion an instant after it had attacked an elk; we saw the cow elk, agitated and bloodied on the shoulder, running down the road as we continued on our way. We reported the sighting of both animals when we got to a ranger station. The ranger we spoke to had worked in the park for twenty years and never yet seen a mountain lion.

Fortunately, I forget most of my misses pretty quickly and don't lose sleep about them. You have to learn to live with it.

Photographing kites

2010-03-13T23:11:00.000-08:00

My wife and youngest daughter went to the annual Kite Festival in Arlington, Texas, today, with my brother-in-law, his wife and their daughter. Of course, I took a few photos. I don't think I've ever photographed kites flying before. It's harder than it looks.

Think about it. What's the photo here, that is, what will you be trying to include in the frame? The easiest and perhaps safest photo, is one of the kite in the hands of the person who is about to fly it. No problems of scale or perspective here.

But the thing about kites is that they go up into the air. Now, as photographic subjects, kites are more like hot-air balloons than, say, birds. But, again, as photographic subjects, kites differ from hot-air balloons in several ways. For starters, kites are much smaller than balloons. A hot-air balloon in the sky may still be a pretty good-sized target. I was shooting with a Pentax 18-250 zoom lens, but even at 250mm (=357mm full-frame equivalent), it's hard to get a kite to fill the frame, after it's in the air. And worse, it's hard sometimes to guess the size of a kite in the air. A hot-air balloon has a basket with people in it, and you may be able to see the people. So you can tell how big the balloon is and perhaps even how far away it is, just from the size of the basket. Not so easy with a kite. In this picture, the traditional blue kite on the right helps the viewer get a sense of the size of the less-traditional kite on the left.

Another problem with kites, from the photographer's perspective, is that the most interesting thing about the kite is that it is linked to the ground. But the string is hard to see—in the photo above it's barely visible. And it's even harder to show the kite and the ground together. Well, you can do this:

But now both the person and the kite are too small to be recognizable and interesting. You can emphasize the person, and put the kite in the background. But to do this, you probably have to stand behind the person, and people's backs are not so interesting.

And that only works if the kite is low in the air; otherwise, you have to take the following perspective.

I guess that's kind of fun, but, well, remember, the kite is really the thing of interest here and it's nearly invisible. Now that I think of it, the ideal perspective from which to photograph a flying kite, would be from the basket of a hot air balloon floating a little above the kite. Then you could have the kite in the foreground, and the person on the ground in the distance.

I didn't have a hot-air balloon handy. The best I could do was suggest perspective by getting the tops of trees into the photo.

You can't see the strings, but the tree tops establish the connection to earth. I think this was my best shot from the day.

The tree-tops provide perspective, and it was luckily emphasized here by the somewhat narrower depth of field (that is, by the fact that the trees are blurred). It's a bit of luck that you can see the string here (exiting the frame lower right corner). And it also helps that this was one of the more interesting kites in the air today.

Larger images here.

Lake panorama, with cyclists

2010-03-08T14:49:00.000-08:00

Grabbed a couple cameras, a couple lenses (Pentax 40 f/2.4 and Sigma 105 f/2.8) and headed over to the lake to do some experimental photography. I wanted to get a photo of the lake at rest with runners and cyclists appearing to move past the camera lens in a blur, suggesting the passage of time to which the lake is relatively indifferent. OK, perhaps that's jumping to meaning before I've got a form. What I wanted to do was photograph the lake, with some ghosts in it.

By ghosts, I just mean deliberately blurred people. The blur is produced by having a person move through the scene while the camera's shutter stays open longer than usual. For a while I've been intrigued by the "ghosts" in some of the great Eugene Atget's photos of Paris. Atget was forced to use very long shutters in the range of a couple seconds. Although he seems to have shot very early in the morning when there were few people about, occasionally, his photos have a blur in them where a person wandered on the to the scene during the exposure. I'm not sure if Atget liked it or not, but many people since have found it quite an evocative effect; I certainly do. But I wasn't trying to imitate Atget precisely here. If I'd kept my shutter open for 2 whole seconds, my ghosts would have been barely imperceptible. Since my ghosts were going to be riding bikes or jogging, I had to speed the shutter up a little to catch them. Most of these were shot around 1/20th sec. (Other technical info: Apertures in all these shots between f/8 and f/9.5. ISO between 160 and 400.)

Catching ghosts was harder than I thought and I wasn't very successful.

This first shot shows one problem. This father and son, who had parked near where my tripod was standing, had just one moment earlier gotten on their bikes to the left of the tree and begun cycling to the right. I turned the camera at the last second and didn't have time to think hard. As it happens, although I had my shutter set pretty slow—1/20th sec—they were moving so slowly that they didn't blur very much. Still, there is an element of interest in this photo, I think: the beautiful sharp and well-defined tree trunk. I also like the fact that, shooting at an angle like this, the level horizontal line of the far shore is not parallel to the line of the near shore, as it is in all the following shots. This would have been my best shot of the day, if I'd use a slower shutter. Sigh.

In the following photo, I captured several passers-by at once:

I like this photo for that reason, and yet, it doesn't quite click. I am not sure why. Perhaps there are too many ghosts. I also tried a different treatment on this photo. I didn't convert it all the way to black and white; I simply desaturated it about 80%. Notice that you can still see some of the green in the grass on the near bank and red in the building across the lake. The idea here was that, at sundown, things naturally get less saturated. That is true. But I'm not sure the treatment works. Perhaps the treatment doesn't work because the composition isn't perfect. As I said, I'm not sure.

In the next shot, I think the cyclist's posture is almost perfect:

The way he is learning forward emphasizes the impression of movement, which I wanted. I got lucky there. Note that I've cropped that photo to its original aspect ratio (2x3), while most of the others here have been cropped to 1x2, an aspect ratio that emphasizes the horizontal axis of the scene by cutting out a lot of relatively meaningless sky. Sometimes it seems to me that this photo is weakened by the fact that there is simply too much lake in the middle; at other times, I think perhaps the lake (occupying about two-fifths of the vertical space) is balanced by the sky (occupying also about two-fifths of the vertical space) and that this shot is not too bad.

On the effect of cropping, compare this image:

Here I've cropped to 1x2, and the ghost cyclist also has worked out pretty well, indeed, except for his posture, perhaps even better than in the previous photo. I think cutting out some of the sky emphasizes the emptiness of the lake in the middle.

It took me a while to realize that this was a problem. Finally, I lowered my tripod very considerably, so the camera was less than 2 ft off the ground. Because the lake is lower than the grass from which I was shooting, lowering the tripod doesn't change my perspective on the lake much; as you can see in the photo, there's about as much lake as there was before. But it makes the cyclist's head move up on the horizon.

This, I think, is the most successful photo of the group, or rather, the one that is least unsuccessful. I wish the cyclist had been moving a little faster. But this time, I got the top of his head almost to touch the far shore— thus "filling in" the lake. And the fact that this cyclist wasn't at all colorful prompted me to give this a full black and white treatment, which I rather like.

But then again, perhaps the problem with these shots has nothing to do with the cyclists or the amount of empty lake. Maybe the problem was simply that the sunset—which was taking place directly across the lake in all of these photos—was hidden behind a rather boring cloud formation. I just wasn't lucky that day. It always helps to be lucky.

Portraiture at the Dallas Arboretum

2010-03-01T22:28:00.000-08:00

I'll be back at the Dallas Arboretum on Mothers Day weekend in May (May 8-9, 2010) to take portraits for Arboretum guests as part of the annual May Flowers event. It's a fun assignment, and really lets me flex my portraiture muscles, since I typically end up shooting 40-50 portraits in two days. Not sure what fee the Arboretum will set this year but it's been $15 in the past, which is a fraction of my normal fee for a personal portrait session at the Arboretum. And you get a 4"x6" print mailed to you as part of the deal. Can't beat it with a stick, as they say.

It's a lot of fun for me—but it's hard work, too, and a real photographic challenge. Where's the challenge? Well, for starters, the Arboretum asks me to be there when most of their guests are there, which means afternoon. When I shoot personal portraits at the Arboretum, I'm usually out there when they open at 9am and always wish I could get out there earlier. The afternoon light can be harsh. Depending on where they place me, I may have mottled shade and light filtering through tree branches overhead. And depending on where they place me, the light may be coming from the wrong direction. And of course, it changes constantly throughout the afternoon, so I have to stay on top of my exposures.

Still, it's possible to get some really nice photos. Here's one from a couple of years ago that I pulled out almost by random:

During these quick sessions, I try to be less formal. This is easier to do with children than with adults, who invariably want to pose for me.

Another problem that I solve shot by shot is, how close should I get? Or rather, how much of the background should I include in the photo? There is usually some sort of fantastic house built of flowers serving as a background for my sitting area. You might think that I'd want to include it, as I did in the shot above. But as I've done more and more photos there, it seems to me enough to have just a hint of the background, and to focus in on people's faces.

This isn't how I shot this beautiful mother and daughter originally. The original shot includes a lot of background, as in the shot of the little girls above. But I like this crop. This year, I think I'll be shooting tight like this to start with. And call me perverse, but I like even better this treatment of the same photo:

Yes, mother and daughter have beautiful red hair. But, well, it's possible to have too much color. All that color in the clothing, in the flowers in the background, it confuses the issue. The black and white (well, duo-toned) treatment, by muting the colors, removes anything distracting from their faces and the play of light in the photo.

Installing a LumiQuest Softbox III

2010-02-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

The installation info that came with my LumiQuest Softbox III was a bit terse and I am not the most intuitive guy when it comes to putting things together. So I found myself less than 100% sure that I understood how to complete the installation. And I knew I didn't want to make a mistake, since I was going to be applying sticky—and permanent—strips of velcro to something or other.

Fortunately, LumiQuest customer support (in the person of a very helpful lady named Roberta) responded quickly to my email. Actually, Roberta called me back by phone. With her help, I was able to figure out what I needed to do. After getting off the phone, I decided I would take a few photos as I put the Softbox III together and post them here, for the benefit of all mankind.

Velcro, yes, adhesive, maybe?

The Softbox III has four tabs with velcro on the "inside" that fasten to velcro on the outside of your flash unit. LumiQuest provides you with the necessary velcro strips to glue to your flash unit. Or you can buy a non-adhesive cinch strap that apparently does the job just as well.

Should you buy a cinch strap? It's a separate purchase and costs about $5-$10. On the other hand, with the cinch strap, you won't have to glue velcro strips permanently to the head of your flash unit. Aside from the cost, the cinch strap is probably a good idea. I have a pair of 'em on order, but I decided to go ahead and glue the velcro hooks that came with my Softbox III to one of my old Pentax AF-540FGZ flash units.

I'll use the cinch strap when I want to attach the Softbox III to my newer and more expensive Metz 58AF.

The inside connection: attaching the hooks to your flash

If you have a non-adhesive cinch strap, you can skip this section.

Inside the SoftBox III package, I found two items: the softbox itself, and a 6" strip of velcro that had some other, shorter pieces of velcro attached to it. I set the latter aside, as it isn't needed until later.

Here's a picture of the Softbox III opened up, with my 540FGZ flash unit sitting on it for display. Note that I have already removed a piece of velcro from the inside upper tab of the Softbox III and glued it to the back side of my flash. That was step 1.

Next, I removed the velcro strip from the bottom tab of the Softbox and glued it to the front of my flash unit:

If you look closely, you may notice that the Pentax AF-540FGZ has a couple of small screws near the business end on this side of the flash, so I had to place the velcro just slightly lower on this side than I did on the other. If I had noticed the screws earlier, perhaps I would have placed the velcro "hooks" the same distance from the end on both sides, but I don't think it makes a big difference.

Finally, I removed the smaller hook strips from the left and right side tabs of the Softbox III, and glued them to the sides of the flash unit. Notice that the velcro has a "grain," that is, the velcro appears to have rows. I didn't worry about this on the longer sides, because it was obvious how the strips should be placed, but with these short sides, I placed the velcro so that the rows aligned along the flash's long axis:

Attaching the Softbox III to the flash

Once the velcro hooks have been glued to your flash—or, if you have a cinch strap, then after you've attached and tightened the cinch strap—you can attach the Softbox III. Take the top tab, and place its white inner velcro patch to the velcro on the upper side of your flash. Then attach the other tabs of the Softbox III to the other sides of the flash. When I was done, this is what it looked like:

In the picture above, you will also see the 6" velcro strip with the three smaller pieces of velcro attached to it. That's what we'll use next.

Securing the Softbox III from the outside

Roberta from LumiQuest explained that, while the process described above fastens the Softbox III to your flash pretty effectively, some photographers, perhaps holding the Softbox III in their hands and moving it around a bit, reported that the velcro connections tended to become a bit loose over time. So LumiQuest now throws in what I would describe as a "belt" that you can use to keep the connection tighter. LumiQuest calls this 6" extra piece of velcro the "loop".

In the picture below, I've got the Softbox III attached to my flash, and the flash is mounted on a Pentax K20D camera. Below the "LumiQuest Softbox III" logo on the softbox, you can see (well, can see if you enlarge the photo) the words "Made in USA" on the outside top tab.

I removed the longest of the three small velcro strips that were originally attached to the loop. This is a roughly 2 1/2" strip of velcro with adhesive, similar to those we glued earlier on the sides of the flash. But this piece gets glued to the outside of the Softbox III's tab. Here's the placement:

And after sticking that piece on the top, wide tab, I removed the two smaller strips from the 6" loop and glued them to the outside of the right and left tabs. Then I took the 6" loop,centered it carefully above the wide velcro hook, pressed it in place, and then pulled the sides around and fastened them snugly, too. Here's the finished installation:

Notice that the "Made in USA" declaration is now hidden.

This outer belt or loop clearly provides additional security for the connection. Roberta at LumiQuest recommended that I leave everything in place for 24 hours before trying to tear it all apart, that is, before pulling the Softbox III off the flash unit. I presume this is so that the glue attaching the velcro hooks to the flash can set. Of course, I'm not going to be able to remove those velcro hooks.

First shot

Of course, I could not help myself at this point. I had to take a quick picture. Here's a shot of the Pentax K10D that I used to take all of the pictures above. This picture was taken with the K20D, but I decided to remove the flash unit and hold it in my hand, a little off to the side. The Softbox III is about 12" from the camera in the photo.

It ain't gonna win me any prizes, but I'm pleased with this first test. Direct flash from this distance would have produced a very high key, high contrast photo. And using the Softbox III is a lot easier than the alternatives, such as using an umbrella, or trying to bounce. I'm looking forward to using the Softbox III in some upcoming portrait sittings.

Meaning in the background

2010-02-23T07:50:00.000-08:00

Here is a great photo. I can't link to it directly. It's currently the sixth photo on the Wall Street Journal's Photos of the Week page for February 15-19, 2010.

Please click on the thumbnail above to view the photo full size on the WSJ page, then come back. Photo credit: Thierry Roge/Reuters. Remember, you have to scroll down to the sixth photo.

What's special about this photo?

If you simply glanced at the photo, what you saw is a fairly pretty picture of a man carrying a young girl across train tracks in some snow. If you took a second glance at the picture, you may also have noticed emergency personnel in the middle ground, carrying a stretcher. It's not clear if the person on the stretcher is sick, or wounded or dead.

But if you kept looking at the photo for just one more second, you finally found the "punch line", almost but not quite hidden in the background. Look closely and you can just make out the train cars that are lifted unnaturally off the track. And then you realize that the photo shows the aftermath of a terrible train crash.

Photographer Thierry Roge focuses on the man in the foreground with a fairly wide aperture, but without opening the aperture up all the way. The fairly wide aperture leaves the men in the middle ground a little out of focus, and leaves the train cars behind them a little more out of focus. The snow helps, too, by softening the edges of people and things, especially behind the man and girl in front.

Of course, good photographers do this all the time—deliberately blurring the background. But often we blur the background because the stuff in the background is not terribly important, or because we're trying to throw the viewer's attention entirely on the foreground. I try to shoot brides in dressing rooms as wide open as possible for the absolute minimum depth of field, because most of the dressing rooms I've taken photos in were fairly cluttered and uninteresting.

But in Thierry's train-wreck photo, the blurred or not-quite-in focus background is terribly important. He's not hiding it. He just doesn't want you to notice it first. He wants you first to see the man and the little girl. The story of the photo is the human drama. The wrecked trains in the background are only the explanation or back story.

The Napalm Girl

Actually, this technique is one that great news photographers are fond of. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples. One of the most famous is the great, Pulitzer-Prize winning Vietnam War photo by AP Photographer Nick Ut, commonly known as the "Napalm Girl photo." The photo shows a naked little girl (Kim Phuc) running down a street. At first, you only notice the naked girl, and you notice that she's crying. Then you notice the American soldiers, perhaps on the right side of the photo (if it's cropped wide), certainly behind the girl and following her down the road toward the camera. And further behind them all, you see a vague, billowing, terrible cloud of smoke. The smoke—and the fire that must be with it—appears to be a "safe" distance in the background, but the condition of the girl connects her suffering with the fire, which, as we all know, was caused by napalm. Note that your eye is drawn deeper into the photo by the road, just as the Thierry photo of the train crash draws your eye deeper as you follow the train tracks back.

Pictures and stories

One of the reasons that I call photos like these truly "great" is that they are so self-sufficient. They don't need captions. You need a caption, perhaps, to know that the train wreck occurred in Brussels, Belgium. But that's a relatively unimportant detail. Compare Thierry's photo to the other train photo further down on the same page (taken in South Africa), or to the photo of the burning building (in Austin, Texas). You won't be able to guess the story from the photo without reading the caption. That's not a knock against those photos. The photo of the man standing on the front "bumper" of the South African train is a particularly arresting image and a fine photo. But the truth is, most pictures do not tell a story; pictures are very seldom worth a thousand words. So when you get one that does tell a story so completely, it's a sure sign of greatness.

Here's looking at you, kid

2010-02-10T14:38:00.000-08:00

While I am a heckuva good-looking guy, and of course a brilliant photographer, I am, well, let's just say I'm not George Clooney. I remind myself of this when I try to take my own photo, as I do once a year or so. My latest self-portrait effort was motivated by my desire to get a new photo for my Google Buzz profile. Here's what I came up with.

Not too bad, sez me. That's the dimpled hunk I look at in the mirror at least twice a day, when I brush my teeth and (optionally) shave and/or comb my hair. Unfortunately, that isn't me. That's me in a mirror. This is me:

And this chump isn't nearly as good looking. He looks, I dunno, backwards or something. I feel in the first photo like my hair is nicely composed, while in the second photo, it's a bit wispy and mussed. Of course, the second photo = the first photo, except that the image has been flipped horizontally and sharpened.

Perhaps if I took more photos of myself—or had more photos of me taken, preferably by someone with great tact as well as photographic skill—I'd get used to my own mug. But perhaps not. One thing I do know is that it's harder to use on yourself the little tricks we photographers use on our subjects to try to make them look their best. When you have to face the mirror with a camera, well, the camera doesn't lie.

The photographer excludes

2010-01-20T21:15:00.000-08:00

Brief but excellent essay over at Luminous Landscape: "The Photographer Excludes," by Peter Cox.

There's a saying: "The painter includes; the photographer excludes". A painter will include only those elements in a composition which they expressly want. A photographer, on the other hand, must work out how to exclude distracting elements. This is a large part of the challenge in making great images.

I liked Cox's example of how he took a photo that he initially thought was no good and, by cropping it further, turned it into one of his favorites. I learned the importance of cropping decades ago when I was editing my college yearbook. Time after time I turned a bad photo into one that was merely mediocre by cropping tightly. I was less often able by cropping to turn a mediocre photo into a good one.

I wrote about cropping last year ("Crop rotation"). When I shoot a wedding or other event, I tend these days to include a bit more of the scene than I think necessary. I do this for a simple practical - one might even say commercial - reason: I want to make it possible for my clients to crop the photo to whatever print size they prefer.

But I have to confess that I feel guilty about this. We don't have an infinite number of print sizes available to us or anything like, but we do have a variety of sizes and aspect ratios. And it makes sense, at least in terms of artistic principle, that a photo that, say, ought to be presented at a 1:2 aspect ratio, should be so presented and that I should be insistent about it. This photo from my daughter's dance studio, for example, is only interesting at 1:2. At the camera's original 2:3 aspect ratio, the effect of the photo - the chopping and distortion created by the long and wide mirror - is almost completely lost. To print (or display) this at any other aspect ratio would be a mistake.

I wish I had the nerve to tell my brides that a 2:3 photo may be printed at 4"x6" or even 8"x12" (which is one of my pro lab's options) but that it definitely should not be cropped to fit a 5"x7" or 8"x10" frame. If the frame is indeed the essence of the photo - and I believe it is - then monkeying around with the frame ought to be regarded as a no-no, as doing damage to the photo.

Ah, but I make more from an 8"x10" print than I do from a 4"x6". And if the bride's mother wants an 8"x10", I'll do what I can to accommodate.

What's coming here in Big D

2010-01-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

Couple of things for photography lovers to look forward to here in Dallas.

If you're on the email list for AfterImage Gallery in the Dallas Quadrangle (proprietor Ben Breard), you know already that they're pulling some great pieces out of their amazing inventory. I'm planning a trip down there very soon.

And the Dallas Museum, which I don't usually think of as a major venue for photography, is sponsoring this spring an exciting exhibition titled "The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850–1874". Yeah, it's an awkward title but that's the case with a lot of exhibitions. Anyway, for more info, check out the exhibit page on the Dallas Museum web site, here. Exhibit will run February 21 through May 23, 2010.

A study in contrasts

2009-12-16T09:33:00.000-08:00

I don't "make" photographs, I take them, or at least that's how I think of it. I see the photo, I shoot it. The contrasts here tickled me, so I grabbed a camera and a flash and captured the moment. (Click photo to enlarge.)

I call it "Juanita (95), Catherine (14)." Seems subtler than calling it "Old Age and Youth."

This is a rare instance of a photo that I ran through Photoshop. In the original, the blank wall on the left takes up something closer to 60% of the width of the shot, in other words, there's more white space between the nonagenarian and the teenager. I simply removed a small amount of the blank white space in order to make the two halves of the photo more nearly balanced. Does this slight editing - removal of empty space - mean that the resulting photo has been "made" and not "taken"? There's a line somewhere, that separates corrective processing from creative editing. The small change I made here might be close to that line, but I don't think it crosses it.

Have you seen this kitten?

2009-12-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

Our cats are indoor cats. The older cat, Mao, is smart enough to realize this is a good deal for her, but Kiki, the latest addition to our menagerie, has the typical adolescent's curiosity about things that aren't actually good for her, and two days ago, somehow she managed to slip out of the house, probably while I was going out to the deck where I was grilling salmon for dinner. We hunted for her that night inside and out but she ended up spending the night outdoors, and it was a cold night.

The next day, she didn't return in the morning, so I made a flyer to distribute in the neighborhood. I have a number of photos of her, but I picked a photo of her and Catherine. It's a satisfactory photo as a description of Kiki: You can see that she's a black kitten with white on her face and chest. But I chose this photo especially because it has Catherine in it. Most lost animal flyers show only the animal. I thought it would get people's attention to show them that this kitten is dearly loved and missed by a young girl.

I'm happy to report that, late in the second day - twenty-four hours exactly after her disappearance - Kiki responded to Catherine's calls from the back porch, crawled out from under our house where apparently she had spent the night, and let Catherine pick her up and bring her back in. She had no doubt heard me calling her over and over, but she ignored me and responded to Catherine. Well, I'm very relieved to have her back home.

The blog's new web address

2009-12-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to tying this blog more closely to my domain. You can now get here using this address:

http://blog.william-porter.net

You might want to update your bookmark!

Body Double

2009-12-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

When I shoot, even casually, I often carry more than one camera body. When I'm working, I always carry more than one body.

This is a pretty old practice, especially for news and sports photographers, going back at least to the early days of the single-lens reflex camera. If you can find old news or sports photos that include photographers in them, you'll see this. For example, in Hans-Michael Koetzle's terrific book, Photo Icons, volume 2, there's a photo by a great German news photographer Barbara Klemm, showing Leonid Brezhnev (Soviet Communist Party Chair at the time) meeting German Chancellor Willy Brandt in Bonn. The photo mainly shows the principals and their translators and advisors huddled together to negotiate. But in the near background, there's another photographer, shooting the back of Brezhnev's head. He's holding one Nikon with what appears to be a wide lens, and he has two other Nikons hanging around his neck, one of which has a telephoto lens.

I found Klemm's image on the Web. (Google Images never ceases to amaze.) Notice the photographer in the back on the left.

Anyway, carrying two or more bodies is still common, or at least not uncommon. I routinely carry two cameras with me, and sometimes three. This was true when I was working an event in the past, where I'd carry a wide, fast zoom on one camera and a tele, fast mid-range or longer-range zoom on the other. Now that I work mostly with primes, I carry more than one camera even more than I used to, because I would prefer not to change lenses. For example, I might carry the K10D with a Sigma 28 f/1.8 and the K20D with (perhaps) the Pentax 70 f/2.4. This gives me a choice of focal lengths, which is exactly what the old news photographers wanted when they carried more than one body.

Carrying more than one body also means that I'm less likely to be stopped cold by equipment failure. If one camera were to fail - and it has happened - I have the other camera right there, in my hand or at least around my neck, turned on and working. I can't apologize to the couple and the minister and ask them to pause the wedding ceremony for one minute while I get the backup out of my bag!

(This post is a revised version of a reply that originally appeared in the pentaxforums.com discussion site.)

Crop rotation

2009-11-10T21:20:00.000-08:00

Some of the great photographers of the past didn't believe in cropping. I'm pretty sure Cartier-Bresson framed his pictures in the camera's viewfinder and that was the end of that. A lot of photographers today don't believe in cropping. At least, I'm sure that 90% or more of the photos that get posted on personal photo-sharing sites have never been cropped.

To crop, or not to crop?

It's not an easy matter to decide.

On a purely practical level, anybody who sells prints to clients as I do, has to accept the fact that clients have their own ideas about print and frame sizes. The sensors in all of my Pentax cameras have an aspect ratio of 2/3, that is, the short side of the sensor and thus of the resulting image is 2/3 as long as the long side. If I put the photo online with its original aspect ratio, it will print nicely at (say) 4" x 6" or 8" x 12". Unfortunately, a client might want a 5" x 7" print because that's the size frame she's got to fill. If I filled my viewfinder perfectly when I composed the shot, cropping to 5" x 7" might require doing violence to the image, like chopping off the top of somebody's head. When I'm shooting for clients, I make an effort to capture a little more than I think ideal to frame the photo, precisely to provide cropping room to accommodate different aspect ratios.

On the other hand, most images do have a "right" aspect ratio. At least I think that's the case. And unfortunately it's not always 2/3. Especially when I'm shooting for myself, I will crop the picture in post-processing in the way that seems right to me. For a shot of the Grand Canyon, that might mean an aspect ratio of 1/3 or even wider. Occasionally, 1x1 seems right. But the right aspect ratio isn't always obvious, even after I review the photo on my computer.

Catherine studying

Walking down the hall this afternoon, I peeked into Catherine's room and saw her studying, and I could see at a glance that it would make an interesting photo. So I grabbed the camera, came back, and as politely and unobtrusively as possible, I squatted down and took two quick shots. The shot above is what the camera saw, at its native aspect ratio of 2/3.

I rather like the photo just the way I took it. But as I was making the black and white conversion in Adobe Lightroom 3 beta, I began to wonder if all that blank wall on the right side of the photo was good. Or rather, I began to suspect that it was accidental, just wasted space that was there because of my vantage point. So I cropped it out:

That's okay, I said to myself, but for some reason it seems rather boring now, a mere snapshot, when the scene that I was pretty sure I saw had struck me as more interesting. You see, once you actually look at the photo, it's often hard to remember what you were thinking of when you took it. Actually, I quite frequently ask myself, "What the hell was I thinking of when I took this photo?"

Anyway, at this point, I was starting to guess. And I guessed that the problem now was that there was too much of the ceiling in the upper background. So I cropped that out too:

But that was clearly going in the wrong direction. So I went back to the original photo and thought about it for a few seconds more. And a lightbult went off in my head. The blank wall on the right was important to the photo, because it very nicely balances the wall and the curtained window on the left. But there was extraneous stuff above and below the interesting horizontal center area of the photo. So I changed my crop ratio to 1/3, et voila!

That is the picture I saw initially, the picture I meant to take. At least, I think so. It's better than the previous two crops. I think it's an improvement over the original photo, too, but I'm less sure of that. Unfortunately, it's going to be a pain to print and frame!

The right crop for every photo

I do believe that there is a "right" aspect ratio for every photo, and it's not always 2/3. But if the picture needs cropping, the right crop isn't necessarily a nice clean ratio of even numbers like 2/3, 4/6 or 5/7. Still, I stick to the simple ratios, because they print the best. It's part of the compositional challenge.

Orb weaver

2009-11-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

I'm not a macro photographer. I don't know anything about flowers or insects, and while I love flowers, most insects give me the creeps. But after mentioning Thomas Shahan the other day, when a spider built a big web in our front yard stretching between a bush and the small burr oak tree, I couldn't resist and I grabbed the camera.

My first shots weren't too satisfying. Today the spider was still there, so I took another stab at it, this time, with the help of artificial lighting.

Proof once again that light is more important than almost everything. Want to take better photos? Look for better light. And then think about better lenses. The last thing to worry about is your camera.

Lightroom 3

2009-10-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

Adobe has made available a public beta of Lightroom 3 and I've been trying it out. The rendering or processing engine is supposed to be much improved, although I don't see very dramatic differences in my photos. This rainy afternoon photo uses two other new features that I do appreciate: improved noise reduction (had to shoot this at ISO 800) and custom watermarking. After carefully removing noise, I tried a third new feature, adding grain. Might seem crazy to remove the noise, then add grain, but I don't think so. The grain adds a rainy-day effect that is just what I wanted - and which is quite different from the effect of the original noise. And the add-grain sliders give me much control over the amount, size and "roughness" of the grain, where with the noise-removal sliders, I pretty much control only the amount. In this shot, there's a fair amount of small but very rough grain.

From 20091026 rainy day

It's all in the eyes

2009-10-26T12:29:00.000-07:00

Wish I could get to England in the next month. There's an exhibition at King's Place Gallery of the work of Jane Bown. She's the Jane Marple of photography: an unassuming but brilliant portrait photographer who has captured one killer photo after another for the last five decades - everybody from the Beatles to the Queen, including a great shot of Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as wonderful photos of less distinguished subjects, like this shot of a child's shoes.

Feet through Fence, Hampshire, c. 1955

Bown's approach was the one I aspire to: “The best pictures are uninvited, they’re suddenly there in front of you…easy to see, but difficult to catch. Some people take pictures, I find them."

It's not unique for someone who started taking photographs in the 1940s or 1950s to have started with an SLR and a fixed-focal length or "prime" lens. Zoom lenses didn't become widely available until the later 1960s and even then, they generally weren't very good. What's remarkable about Bown is that she stuck with what she had all her life: a simple Olympus SLR and an 85mm f/2.8 lens. Does not seem to have held her back.

To compare great things with (very) small, I want to mention another photographer whose work I just stumbled on, Thomas Shahan. Shahan photographs bugs. Not my favorite subject, but I hasten to admit that I don't have Shahan's extraordinary gift for it. I'm not terribly interested in macro photography. I care little and know even less about bugs and flowers or any of the other minutiae that macro photographers are passionate about. But it's impossible not to be impressed by Shahan's stunning photos. Like Jane Bown and most photographers of people, Shahan focuses on the eyes - but how different those eyes are! Apparently he shoots now with a Pentax K200D. You can find his Flickr site here.

Funny Photos

2009-09-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

Robert Adams has a short chapter in Why People Photograph on humor in photography. He writes, "Visual art that is funny has always been...a rare species." Indeed. There are lots of cute photos, sweet photos, photos that bring a smile to your face. But really funny photos, photos that make you laugh rather than simply smile, these do seem to be pretty rare. Adams gives a great example: Lee Friedlander's 1966 photo showing a fire brigade posing for a graduation-style group photo - in front of a burning house. (You can see it at the Fraenkel Gallery's online show, here.)

Well, National Geographic has just posted the funniest picture I've seen in a long time:

While the couple tried to take a picture of themselves, a squirrel heard the camera beeping and walked over to investigate. Auto-focus was drawn to the squirrel, and that was that. Click the picture to read more about it.

*

Why aren't there more funny photos? If there were a secret to taking funny photos, I'd love to know it, because I bet there's money in it!

It's too easy to say that humor is mostly verbal. There may be a lot of truth to that, but it's not enough. Occasionally the newspaper funnies are actually funny, and sometimes, they can be funny even without words. Berke Breathed's Bill the Cat is funny plain and simple. And the great silent movies of Chaplin and Keaton can be hilarious.

Does humor require narrative? The cheeky squirrel photo is funny at first glance, but even funnier if you think about it for two seconds until you "get it," that is, until you reconstruct in your head what must have happened. There certainly are photos that show the "after" state but imply the "before," so you can infer from them a brief sequence of events. I can't think of a good example off the top of my head but I know they're out there.

Adams mentions incongruity as an element in humor. An arrogant dandy in a three piece suit who slips on a banana is funny. A poor old grandmother who slips and falls is an object of pity. Adams also suggests that it's important that the subject in the photo be aware that they are part of a joke, but I am sure that can't be right all the time. A photo of a cat who falling into the toilet bowl head first will be funny to us, although the cat doesn't know it's part of the joke and if it did, it would not consider the joke funny or, for that matter, in good taste.

*

I suspect the main problem is that real life simply doesn't contain many moments of purely visual humor. Real life is crazy funny but it's not usually funny just to look at. I don't think I'm just not looking hard enough, although if you have to look hard, that pretty much proves my point. The humor in life usually does come from events that have a narrative structure - this person was in that situation expecting this other thing to happen, and then something unexpected happened instead. And these narratives are hard to compress into a single scene. (Note that I'm not denying the possibility of a humorous sequence of photos. But here I'm talking about "normal" photos taken singly.)

I can think very quickly of a hundred funny stories about things that have happened to me, or to me and my wife. But the only one I can think of that would have made a pretty good picture, goes back to when one of our daughters was in middle school in Houston. She was part of a school dance pageant. One of the acts involved a group of very young (first grade?) Mexican-American children dancing in traditional dress - girls wearing big flouncy skirts, boys wearing charro suits and sombreros. Well, it became apparent to the audience fairly early into their number that one boy was having a problem with his pants. His belt was too loose. He hiked his pants up whenever he had a chance but this was difficult because the dancing requires that he frequently hold hands with his partner, a girl, so his pants kept sliding down. By the middle of the number, the audience was laughing openly. Somehow the boy kept his pants on...until the end of the dance. When the final chords were being played, it became clear to the audience that the girls were going to jump into the arms of the boys. The boy had a decision to make. To lift the girl up he was going to have to use both of his hands. He made the right decision: he caught his girl. And his pants finally fell all the way to the floor. That would have made a very funny picture, because I think the viewer would have been able to fill in the rest of this narrative. Still, something a photo cannot do at all is create suspense, and that was one of the most suspenseful things I've ever seen. When the boy caught the girl, the audience erupted in laughter - and leapt to its feet to applaud the gallant young man. The photo would have been funny, but the event as it happened was hilarious.

*

There's not a lot of humor in purely instrumental music, either, by the way.

FlashWave 2 radio triggering system

2009-09-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

Want to take better flash photographs? There are lots of things you can do, but the basic idea for most of them is to get the flash coming from some direction other than the direction of the camera's lens.

The easiest way to do this is to abandon the camera's built-in flash in favor of a removable hot-shoe flash unit (sometimes called a strobe). You can improve things more by learning to bounce the light from the hot-shoe unit. Even better, if you have a camera that supports optical wireless control of remote flash units, you can get the flash units off the camera completely. But controlling remote flash units with optical triggering is not completely reliable and the slave flash units have to be placed where they can see a strong signal from the control flash on the camera. You can't place optically controlled flashes completely out of sight of the controller, like, for example, behind a screen or around a corner. Optical triggering doesn't suck, by any means. If it works in a given situation, it's easy to use and it's basically free, or it is for me, because my Pentax cameras and my Pentax and Metz flash units all support it. But when it doesn't work well--which is a lot of the time--then it's

So most serious flash photographers use radio controlled flash. The idea here is that you attach a small transmitter to the camera, usually by mounting it where you would normally mount a flash unit. And you attach your remote flash units to receivers. When you click the camera's shutter, an electric signal is sent through the hot shoe. This would normally trigger a hot-shoe mounted flash, but when you have a radio transmitter mounted instead of a flash, the transmitter sends out a signal to its receivers, and they in turn trigger the flash units.

I'm working with FlashWave 2 units from G9Chron. They were recommended by some friends on the Pentax Forums list. They are a lot more economically priced than, say, Pocket Wizards, but they are reputed to be very reliable and easy to use. One advantage is that the FlashWave units come with built-in hot shoe adapters. This matters to me because my Pentax and Metz flash units don't have the ports necessary to connect to the FlashWave receivers via cable. And even if they did, hot shoe is much easier. If you're going to go wireless, why not go all the way?

Here's a simple photo that gives a basic idea of what's so neat about radio triggers.

This photo was taken with my Pentax K20D and one (just one) NIKON SB-18 Speedlight, a FlashWave 2 transmitter on the camera and a FlashWave 2 receiver attached to the Speedlight.

Note that the flash is down the hallway and around the corner. It is, in fact, around the corner and about 8 ft to the left. I could not use optical triggering with the flash placed like this: the triggering preflash would not make it to the remote unit.

I would also like to emphasize how neat it is to be able to use a Nikon flash with my Pentax camera. The radio triggering system doesn't care whether the flashes it's triggering are one brand or another, so I can use this little old Nikon flash (which I bought used for a few dollars, to use with my old Nikon N65 film SLR) even though I am not using a Nikon camera. Of course, I can also use my Pentax-compatible Metz 58 AF-1 or my Pentax 540FGZ units, but if triggering is handled by FlashWave 2's radio signalling, then it doesn't matter that these units are Pentax compatible. They're just flashes.

I'm quite pleased with the FlashWave 2. It's been 100% reliable for me. I thought it had failed to fire on me once, for a second or two, until I realized I hadn't turned the receiver on. Duh. The units are well made. Set up was child's play. Transmitter and receivers came with batteries and already set to the same channel. All I had to do was attach the units to the camera and flash units respectively and shoot.

If you're used to shooting flash with your camera's auto-exposure system (called P-TTL on Pentax systems), you'll have to learn how to control the flash output manually. This is easier than it seems. Actually, in this photo, there was nothing to do at all, because the SB-18 is so simple it does not have any controls. When I did an earlier version of this shot with the Metz 58 AF-1, I set it to 1/4 power and that was about right.

If you do check out the FlashWave units, be aware that G9Chon currently sells two products: the FlashWave 2 radio triggers, which have been around for a little while, and a newer product called FW-1B. The FW-1B is not a FlashWave. It's less expensive than the FlashWave 2, but it's also less powerful (so it's designed mainly for use in small studio environments) and it doesn't come with the built-in hot shoe adapters, so with my flash units, at least, I'd need to pay extra to buy adapters separately. I have not tried the FW-1B. But I can certainly recommend the FlashWave 2.

Post scripta.

Couple things I forgot to mention earlier. First, if you know little about off-camera flash photography and would like to learn more, The Place To Go on the Web is http://strobist.com. And once you start getting the hang of it, you might then like to read Joe McNally's latest book, The Hot-Shoe Diaries. This guy's one of my heros.

Pentax K20D high ISO performance

2009-03-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

I don't expect a camera with an APS-C sized sensor to be able to take low-light, high-ISO photos without noise. I don't even expect it from a great camera like the Pentax K20D with a CMOS sensor rather than a CCD. But I'm old enough that I'm still amazed at how good a job high-end non-full-frame cameras like the K20D can do at sensitivity levels higher than ISO 400.

Nikon's newer - and much, much more expensive - full-frame cameras can do even better than the K20D, even at higher ISOs. From what I've read, I gather that ISO 6400 on a Nikon D3 resembles what you get at ISO 1600 on a Pentax K20D - a full two-stop difference. That's nice. But I don't need a Nikon D3 and don't want to pay through the nose for one. If I were a millionaire, I might. If I were shooting magazine covers, I might - although it's even more likely that I'd be shooting medium-format and getting even less noise than the D3.

There's always a compromise. There is no compact full-frame digital camera that shoots without making a sound and returns virtually noiseless photos at, say, ISO 6400. Every camera involves a compromise. You want lower noise? You pay for it by buying a camera with a larger sensor. Compact cameras like my old Canon PowerShot S5 can take truly wonderful photographs, but they're simply not designed to deal with extreme exposure challenges. That's not a liability, it's a compromise. The compact cameras are smaller, quieter, and cost less than either APS-C sized or full-frame digital SLRs. You want even lower noise than you get from a K20D? The Canon 5D (full frame) is still available but getting a bit long in the tooth; the newer Nikon full-frame cameras are nice but really expensive.

I don't want a perfect camera. Well, I want one, but it doesn't exist. So I compromise. What can I afford? And what will do a good enough job for me? To be honest, if I could make just one change to the Pentax K20D and it was either (a) fantastic performance at ISO 6400 or (b) a noiseless shutter, I'd go for (b).

And the K20D's performance at higher ISOs is stunningly good, if you use a reasonable, historical baseline for comparison. Here for example, is a shot taken at ISO 6400, with in-camera noise reduction set to "high".

It's hard to tell from this photo, but trust me, it's not bad at all. If for some reason you were motivated to waste paper on this boring photo, it would produce a nice print at normal print sizes like 4"x6", 5"x7", perhaps even larger. You can click on the picture to view a few photos from the same brief test.

Like most of my tests, the test shots I took this morning of my dining room table don't prove a lot, except that ISO 6400 on the K20D can actually produce a usable image, in the right circumstances. Unfortunately, I do know that the results I've gotten at high ISOs - that is, shooting at sensitivity levels higher than about 800 - is quite variable. I cannot entirely explain the factors that make a difference here, but I've take shots at ISO 1600 that are much noisier than this shot taken at 6400. The amount of light seems to matter, and so does the quality of light. The nature of the objects being photographed matters a lot. Objects with some variation in them seem to show noise less than areas of the photo with little variation, like walls or large shadowy areas. If I do get an irresistible desire to start photographing blank walls in the dark, I'll look into the Nikon D3X. But for now, my K20D meets these challenges satisfactorily. And when the light is decent, which is most of the time, the results I get are, as a practical matter, every bit as good as those I'd get from a full-frame camera.

William Porter Photography's new (old) blog

2009-03-26T07:42:00.000-07:00

I've been blogging for several years (since 2005 at least) and for the last couple of years I've been doing most of my writing at Ulysses at Large. That site was designed originally to be an extension of my interest in software, although I found myself writing there about photography pretty frequently. Well, it seems appropriate to move my photography blogging to its own site. And here it is. Woo-hoo!

I want to say up front that, while I do not expect to post here any more frequently than I used to, this is still intended to be a real blog, that is, something closer to an online diary than an online personal magazine. I think carefully about what I say online - but I want to be able to post things here that are tentative. In other words, I reserve the right to be wrong!