A Couple of News Items

Microsoft has released PhotoSynth, a “revolutionary” software program. It can combine dozens up to thousands of images (maybe much more?) of a particular location or scene, and then create a 3D image of that place. Then you can “go into” the image and move around and zoom into tiny details. Several months ago I saw an online demo of the program and it was frankly baffling. My mind could hardly grasp what I was seeing. The closest thing to it that I can think of is a scene from Blade Runner, that old Harrison Ford/Ridley Scott classic. In one scene, Ford’s character feeds a photograph (it looked like a Polaroid to me) into a machine and then was able to go deeper and deeper into the image, going through doorways and checking out other rooms, chasing down images and scenes in mirrors—seeing details and views that weren’t visible in the original photograph. It was pure fantasy. At the time. PhotoSynth has nearly the same capability. Isn’t that weird?

Also, Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe have had their online/downloadable tutorial Fine Art Printing: From Digital Camera to Print published by Calumet Photo as a DVD. Reichmann is the man behind that great website Luminous Landscape. If you haven’t checked it out, please do so. I’d recommend the DVD based on my experiences with their tutorials. They produce quality goods.

And one more thing. Specs on a new Canon DSLR have been leaked--the 50D, which will supposedly replace the 40D. The 50D will have a 15.1 MP sensor and a high-resolution 3-inch LCD. This is, of course, unofficial, but I'm sure the official story will come out for Photokina. I just wish info had been leaked about the replacement for the 5D. Oh, well.

New Digital Format Announced

Panasonic and Olympus have announced a new digital camera format called Micro Four Thirds. Both companies were early adopters of the original Four Thirds format. The size of the Four Thirds sensor is about halfway between point & shoot sensors and C-DSLR sensors.

The new cameras won't have mirrors and prisms and won't be, strictly speaking, SLRs. It will have the same video preview that point & shoots have now. The big, and signifcant, change is the lenses for the new system will placed at half the distance from the sensor as in current DSLRs and the lenses will be greatly reduced in size. Together this means significantly smaller and lighter cameras with nearly the resolution of full-sized DSLRs. At least, this could be the case. See, there are no cameras, lenses, or anything else at the moment for this new system. This is all on paper, so to speak. Maybe we'll see prototypes at Photokina in September this year, but I suspect that it may be a while before we have anything in hand.

Still, seeing that Leica is partnered with Panasonic for many of their digital cameras, this seems like a perfect opportunity for them. Small compact cameras with small compact lenses is just up their alley. At least it seems to me that they should be jumping all over this. It would be a way to be in on the start of a whole new system and format, and they wouldn't be forced to play catch-up with all the other camera companies like Canon and Nikon. They've always been good at creating and playing on their own terms in their own niche, and this is the best chance they've got to do this again. I hope this works out for them.

Ansel Adams and the Lone Pine Photograph

People love to speculate on whether Ansel Adams would have liked and used Photoshop. At least in a documentary of him I saw, that was made before he died, he talked with some excitement about future electronic technologies and how they might interpret his images. Digital photography and the enormous image manipulation capabilities of Photoshop weren’t available yet and wouldn’t be until 15 years or so after he died. He was seeing and liking the effect digital technology was having on the printing industry. The laser-scanned reproductions of his images were the best he’d ever seen. But he didn’t see or talk about the manipulation and compositing aspects of what was to come. Of course.

The people who think that Ansel would have embraced Photoshop usually point out a certain image of his—Winter Sunrise: Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, 1944. Ansel talked about this image in his book, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. He made the image while in the neighborhood shooting his documentary project of the Japanese Internment Camp, Manzanar, during 1943 and 1944. In this otherwise pristine landscape, the local high school students had put their school’s initials, “LP,” on the hill side in white-washed rocks. “LP” stands for Lone Pine.

Ansel made the image and spent a number of years dealing with it after the fact. In his words, “I ruthlessly removed what I could of the L P from the negative (in the left-hand hill), and have always spotted out any remaining trace in the print.” When I took a workshop from John Sexton in 1987, he related the story that Ansel gave him the job of scraping the LP out of the 8x10 negative with a scalpel, when John was Ansel’s assistant in the 70s. On the face of things, this account isn’t all that different from what digital photographers do every day, cloning out offensive elements from their images to make them a better representative of what they saw and felt. And it’s a good way to control things beyond your control when you shoot.

Whether or not Ansel would have embraced and used Photoshop, no one can say, but I suspect that he, being the equipment junkie that he was, probably would have done so. Below are the version of this image that we usually see now and below that is one from a 1968 book This is the American Earth, written by Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall. This version of Winter Sunrise was made before the removal of the hillside letters (I circled those annoying letters in red, just to make them more annoying) and shows how Ansel once printed it. Please forgive the big crease in the middle of the image. It was reproduced as a double page spread in the book. It is a lower contrast, quieter image and it is cropped differently. Notice how the sky is lighter in tone. Ansel’s printing grew bolder and more dramatic as he got older. He’s a great example of how an artist’s vision and language changes over time.

Hermon Joyner

Winter Sunrise: Lone Pine, 1944 (from Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs)


Winter Sunrise: Lone Pine, 1944 (from This is the American Earth)

Close-up of the "LP" on the hill.

Play with the Plastic

I was feeling a bit stale in my approach to photographing. Maybe it was just the aftermath of a long cold rainy Oregon winter, but I thought I needed a change of pace. Something to shake loose the cobwebs and see things in a new way. Yadda yadda yadda. So I signed up for a workshop. I’ve taken several workshops over the years, and taught quite a few as well, but it’s always nice to get together with other folks with a shared interest/passion and have some fun. You don’t have to have a definite agenda beyond maybe trying something new, learning a new trick or two, or just taking a few pix. So I signed up for an all-day field trip to Sauvie Island.

Sauvie Island is, not surprisingly, an island in the Columbia River northwest of Portland, Oregon. It’s mostly farms, beaches (some clothing optional!), and wildlife refuges. The workshop/fieldtrip, offered by the Newspace Center of Photography in Portland, was led by Susan Bein, a long time Photoshop guru, photographic artist, and genuinely nice person. The first stop on the excursion was the Bybee-Howell farmstead, an old house that is now overseen by the State Parks Department. Susan had brought along a 400-foot roll of plastic intended for use as a painter’s drop cloth. It’s very lightweight, translucent, and tends to drift in the air and billow in the breeze. As we were walking up to the house, she asked if I wanted to use the plastic in some photographs. After all, that’s why she brought it along.

I looked at the plastic, looked at her, and thought, “Are you kidding? That is nothing that I would ever photograph!” But I said, “Uh, no thanks,” and shuffled on. Now remember that I signed up for the workshop for a change of pace, and here I was turning down something that was a definite change of pace, for me anyway. Not a shining moment for yours truly. Well to make a short story long, once we got in the old house and I saw how she was using the plastic, I did take some photos. And I did have a good time doing it. And I even like the images I made.

Moral of the story is: if someone offers you some plastic to play with, take it and have fun with it. You’ll be glad you did. Thanks, Susan.

Below are a couple of shots of the plastic in the old house. Spooky.

The Cutest Digital Camera

Okay, I might have to save up for this one (speaking of eqipment). Komamura Corporation, in Japan, has unveiled a miniature Rolleiflex Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) camera as a digital camera, called the Rolleiflex MiniDigi AF5.0. It works much the same as an old Rollei, except it's 3-inches tall and it is digital, after all. MSRP will be around $399, or so. But isn't it cute?

Does Equipment Matter?

There’s a kind of online debate going on at the moment that will be of interest to photographers. It’s about the importance of equipment. Ken Rockwell wrote an article called, “Your Camera Doesn't Matter,” and the title says it all. Michael Reichmann, the guy behind the excellent site Luminous Landscape, offers a counter-argument called, “Your Camera Does Matter.” Click on the titles to read those articles.

Rockwell offers a ton of clichés and clever one-liners, not to mention redundancies and downright bizarre statements, to support his view that photographs are made inside a photographer’s mind and not in the camera and that the camera is inconsequential to how well a photo turns out. Well, in my experience, the camera and lens and all the dozens of decisions and choices made along the way have a definite effect on any resulting photographs. While it may be true that if you can’t “see” an image in the first place you won’t be able to capture it even with an excellent camera, to pretend that equipment doesn’t matter is just not being realistic. It’s like all the other choices a photographer makes in creating an image, the equipment you choose impacts your images in a very real way.

Reichmann’s point of view is that photography is a craft (not just an art) that uses equipment to produce its images. It’s hard to argue with this statement and matching the equipment to the subject matter is a very important part of being a photographer. After all, you can’t make professional quality architectural photographs with a disposable camera. You can’t make a formal portrait with an old Polaroid camera. That’s why black-and-white landscape photography is almost always done with 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras or more precisely folding field cameras, or at least it used to be. But it seems like Reichmann’s leaving out or downplaying the photographer’s creativity—the mental process that happens in making an image. And frankly it’s true that having the best equipment is no guarantee for getting the best images.

Over the years, I’ve known plenty of photographers with all the latest expensive equipment who can’t make a decent image and I’ve known many who use cameras I wouldn’t even pick up on a dare, but manage to create wonderful images just the same. I believe it’s a matter of matching the photographer’s working methods or personality to the equipment and the subject matter. When these three qualities are aligned with each other, excellent images are the result. But in my experience, better quality equipment can allow a photographer to achieve even greater results. Good equipment makes the job of photographing easier, and it’s just that simple.

It seems like Rockwell and Reichmann are both trying to separate the art from the craft (coming from different directions) and that’s not something you can really do with photography—art and craft in photography are way too entwined. So in a way, they are both right and wrong. Does equipment matter? Of course it does. Does creativity matter? Of course it does. They all matter just as much as any of the other variables that exist in photography. And like I usually say, the art of photography is found in the choices you make in creating a photograph.

West Elm Catalog Copy

I saw the latest catalog from West Elm, a contemporary home furnishings company. They feature a few framed photographs for sale along with beds, sofas, and rugs. The descriptions of the photographs leave me a little baffled, however. In three of the four examples, they include what kind of camera made the image in specific detail.

Here’s an example: “These striking images were captured using a Nikon D70 camera with Nikon 17-80mm lenses.” Ignoring the grammar problems, why would a potential buyer be interested in this level of product detail? Maybe I could see it if the camera and lens used were rare or high-end professional models, but this is not even strictly pro-oriented gear.

Either an image is interesting or it isn’t. Knowing what kind of camera was used won’t make it any more appealing. I don’t know of anyone who has ever bought a photograph because of the equipment used to make it. They might buy one because of who made it, but for the most part people buy photographs because the images are beautiful, interesting, nostalgic, or shocking.