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The 9 to 5 Life of an International Playboy
And now a word from your sponsors.
This message was brought to you by Lightroom, Perl, Aquamacs Emacs, and Cyberduck.
“The other day, I saw a bear. A great big bear, a way out there. . .”
Driving back to East Glacier one day, we decided to count the different kinds of (larger) animals we saw on our trip: mule deer, prairie dogs, black bears, mountain goats, brook trout, magpies, ravens, goldfinch, pronghorn, elk, bison, pelicans, marmots, chipmunks (two kinds), squirrels (tree and ground), bunnies, hummingbirds, coyote, cows, camels, llamas, horses, osprey, golden eagles, robins, blue jays, geese, ducks, mosquitos, doggies, hawk, dragonflies, grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, bees, and hippies.
Here are photographs of some of these animals.
“Jeff, we demand pictures! You’ve been back for two weeks. How long can it take?”
Alright. Alright. But you’re only going to get a rough timeline.
It’s taking me longer than I had hoped, but you can expect to see photographs and details about our Western swing soon. . . .
I picked up twenty sheets of developed 4×5″ film from the lab today. Although I made hundreds of photographs with my digital camera, these were certainly the most enjoyable to produce and also the ones that filled me with the most trepidation. I’m pleased to report that the results were rather good. Not 100% what I would like . . . but then again I’m a perfectionist who is getting spoiled by the quick (and virtuous) feedback cycle afforded by digital capture and editing.
I really only used my large format camera about a dozen times on the trip, since I bracket most of my exposures, making an extra photograph with a different amount of light reaching the film. The goal is to have a better chance at getting the “right” exposure. On those dozen occasions, the responses from the people around me ran the gamut from indifference to excited interest. I talked to a few people while composing the scene with my head under the focusing cloth; disembodied voices asking me about how my camera works. There were also several people who thought that because I was incapable of seeing them, I also couldn’t hear their conversations about me.
I think my favorite conversation was with a British fellow about my age in Yellowstone.
“That’s some serious gear.” Most people’s first realization that something is up occurs when I unfold the camera as it sits on the tripod. “Are you a professional?”
“No. I’m just a guy with a very expensive hobby; but I’m having a lot of fun.”
Over the next minutes, I attached my wide-angle lens to the camera, set up a photograph of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, focused the camera, took a few meter readings, set the exposure time and aperture, and switched closed the shutter. At that point almost everything is done. I just had to insert the film holder and trip the shutter.
“WOW! That’s some serious gear!” Something about the Quickload film holder touched a geeky, gadget-loving part in my onlooker. I put a sheet of film in the holder, waited for the wind to subside a bit, and tripped the cable release.
“That’s it?” While I find something immensely charming in the mechanical sound of the shutter winding down the fraction of a second that it’s open, most people think it’s anticlimactic, as though fireworks should shoot out from the camera. But then again, I suppose we’re accustomed to thinking that if someone spends fifteen minutes getting a camera ready, the result should be a poster-sized print that magically appears.
The funny thing is, my mom had the same reaction. She wanted to see how my view camera works, so we collaboratively made the image you see above. And I have to admit, it was a bit disappointing that I had to make her wait three weeks to see the result.
But I talked to several very nice people, and a few even took me up on the offer to pop under the focusing hood and see the image on the ground glass. That reaction is the one that makes me the happiest. It usually goes something like this: “It’s dark under here. . . . WHOA! That’s amazing.”
Anyway, enough accentuating the positive. Let’s talk about mistakes.
Fourteen: My ability to get the “correct” exposure sucks (to put it bluntly). As I mentioned, I have been taking a second exposure, usually 1/2 stop brighter, in an effort to get it right. The darker images — which use the exposure values suggested by my meter — are usually 1/2 to one-and-a-half stops underexposed. So I’m going to change my exposure compensation and start bracketing in whole stops. (And eventually I’m going to get an instant film holder to check the images in the field and finally be able to show onlookers something tangible.)
Fifteen: I forgot the filter compensation factor for my polarizing filter. I guessed two stops at maximum effect and seem to have gotten it about right.
Sixteen: Camera shake is quite visible in a 20 square-inch image. Evidently, I need to wait for the camera to settle after the wind stops blowing and after I pull the dark slide on the film. A couple of the image were a bit blurry and not because of focus.
(And for the curious, I’m working on my “ghetto film scanner,” since I still don’t have a scanner that accepts 4×5. The images lack quite a bit of resolution, dynamic range, and color fidelity. But by adding an opaque mask around my film on the light table, I’ve at least managed to get rid of some of the annoying fringing at the edges of the images. I still must use Photoshop to crop the image, correct the perspective, and “fix” the color; and I don’t feel right using it for anything other than showing off here.
I made a couple photographs of my pathetic setup. Yes, it’s made with two hanging file folders taped together which are held flat by whatever I happen to be reading. (Right now that’s the excellent Devil in the White City.)
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Like a copy stand but not as functional
Yesterday (day #6 of our trip) we left Colorado and headed north to Wyoming. On the way we went over Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain NP.
The image above is just a small section of a large panorama that Photoshop stitched together from forty-four different photographs. (I love the “Photomerge” function!) The full size image is 24,000 pixels wide; but the one linked above is just 3,000. Enjoy!
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Some of the films I have loved (Click for larger…)
I have nothing against film. I like film. I’ve been using it since I started photographing around 1990, when I appropriated my mom’s Pentax-mount Ricoh just before our trip to Yellowstone. (After getting my first real job I bought into the Nikon system and have never looked back.) My large format camera uses film, since I don’t have $6,500 to $22,000 to buy a digital scanning back. (It cracks me up when people ask me whether I use digital with it.)
But now I’m done using film for my small-format, day-to-day photography.
On our last few trips (to the Midwest, to DC, and to London) I’ve borrowed Lisa’s digital point-and-shoot camera a lot. I’ve also used it for almost all of my headstone photographs, too. Along the way — while I was still using my much loved Nikon F3-HP and FM-10N cameras — I started to notice two things:
Finally, after years of waiting for cameras in the middle of the price range to catch up with film, I bought myself a digital SLR. I feel a twinge of dishonesty when I refer to my camera as “mid-range;” it is by far the most expensive piece of photographic equipment I have ever bought. (And I’m not happy with the fact that, as digital technology improves, it’s necessary to buy a new camera to take advantage of it, rather than just buying a new kind of film. Oh well.)
Price notwithstanding, I am so very happy with it. Those Nikon engineers make wonderful cameras that are a joy to use.
But I have reservations. I’ve had hard drives crash and lost files, but I had the originals; so I just lost time. With my new camera, there’s no slide, no negative, no artifact. I’m working on this problem that many have solved so many different ways.
In the meantime, I promise pictures.
I haven’t done much with my perhaps overly ambitious project to examine contemporary Indian art photography. Last year on a short trip to the time-warp Iowa, I collected some notes on the many photographs I found on the web. And I did manage to make it to Harvard last month to attend a lecture with Sabeena Gadihoke and Homai Vyarawalla. Not exactly contemporary photography, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Unfortunately, I missed the earlier lecture with Ram Rahman and Sunil Gupta. They’re both very provocative and accomplished photographers still doing work. The few photographs from Rahman that I’ve seen concern cinema imagery and the influence of film on Indian visual culture. (Hint: It’s huge.) On a related note, I rather like Pushpamala N, and her quasi-cinematic work.
Sunil Gupta really intrigues me. Sotheby’s describes him as “an artist, curator, writer, and cultural activist [who] has made a significant contribution to contemporary art practice and discourse around the globe. Through his work he challenges stereotypes and questions beliefs, by exploring issues of race, gender, and sexuality, and related issues of access, place, and identity.” Like a number of other Indian photographers, such as Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, his work examines (in part) what it’s like to be an Indian in diaspora.
So I was quite happy to see a TateShots video show up in my iTunes podcast playlist earlier this week:
In the short video, Gupta discusses the context for a couple of images currently on display in the Tate Modern’s Street and Studio exhibit.
They were taken in 2007 and they are part of an ongoing series called Mr Malhotra’s Party and the name of the series comes from what gay nights in Delhi are referred to, which are held in commercial bars and clubs, but because it’s illegal there, they are deemed as private parties.
Part of the underlying motivation is to show to people, especially in Delhi itself, that gay people are very ordinary looking, and part of just the social scene, part of the family structures that people live in. . . .
But what I like about India is that the street is like a theatre. So as you can see, tons of stuff happens around. So although the main subject and I are fixed and static, there is all this business, like it’s changing every second, what’s happening around the person. It’s like, it’s very lively. So I’m quite drawn to something that’s quite solid-looking, you know, compositionally.
Spring is officially over, but I’m continuing to make mistakes with my large format camera. Not a lot of mistakes. Not major mistakes, just little mistakes. But I’m really glad that I’ve been learning close to home so that I can make changes before our big trip. (Next Monday we start a four week jaunt around the West, starting in Denver and making a sweeping northward arc before turning around in Portland, Oregon.)
I’m at the point now where many of my mistakes could be solved — or at least ameliorated — through the judicious use of instant film for proofing. Sadly, Polaroid is discontinuing instant film by the end of the summer. The silver lining is that Fujifilm makes instant pull-apart film. The yet-more bad news, though, is that I would have to buy another $125 film holder. (Photography as a hobby is akin to heroin use — or golf; you always have the opportunity to buy something more.)
Nevertheless, I have good news to share. Last weekend I took my camera with me to Winchester and made a couple of exposures before viewing the juried show at the Griffin. (More on that later.) One of my photographs was unpleasantly dark; but the one that I spent about fifteen minutes setting up turned out quite nicely, if just a tad underexposed. It was quite gratifying to be able to use all of the features of a view camera to make an image I couldn’t really do with my SLR.
As for mistakes and lessons learned. . .
Eight: Those little numbers on the lens and the incident light-meter matter. I think the reason that one of my photographs was so underexposed was that I didn’t exercise sufficient care in setting the f/stop. It’s also possible that the shutter on my lens needs a 1/3 - 1/2 stop correction factor. But there’s not a lot of distance on these lenses between correctly set and wildly wrong. I must exercise more caution.
Plus the off-camera meter specifies exposure down to 1/10 of a stop. f/45 plus 0.7 is not equivalent to f/64. If using a large format camera has taught me anything, it’s that you pay dearly for the smallest bit of laziness.
Nine: Always take another exposure reading before tripping the shutter. Light changes slightly even on a mostly sunny day.
Ten: Focusing is pretty tricky, even though the ground glass is enormous (four-by-five inches, fer-goodness-sake). You see, I’m what you might call very nearsighted. So I wear glasses, but when I look at things very close to my nose while wearing my glasses, everything is blurry. What to do?
Fancy-pants photographers buy expensive loupes with rubber edges so they can place them right on the ground glass. I use an inexpensive plastic magnifying glass. It has two magnification levels, seems to do the job very well, and doesn’t take up much space in my bag.
Eleven: It gets pretty hot under the focusing cloth. Wear cool clothes on a hot day . . . or at least ones that won’t show how much you sweat.
Twelve: Use that graduated neutral-density filter to equalize sky and foreground exposure. I mean, I own a pair of them; I might as well avail myself of their awesomeness. (It’s been too long since I’ve been on top of my game.)
Thirteen: My film scanner doesn’t support 4×5 film after all. To “scan” the picture below, I had to take a photograph of it with my digital camera. It’s not a great likeness. How ghetto.
I was talking with someone the other day about photography and terrorism plots. I’ve written about this before. And now that I’m using a large format camera, it seems even more ridiculous that someone in plain-view with a camera should be worthy of suspicion.
Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.”
It’s still spring — even though it was 96ºF outside today and 92º in the house — and I’m still making mistakes. If you missed it, you can still read about the first batch of mistakes I made with my newish 4×5 large format camera.
The first go-round assumed that I was doing things right to get light onto the film. An assumption that I wasn’t immediately able to test.
Mistake Five: Have a post-exposure plan. After I made some test black-and-white exposures in March, I didn’t consider what I would do with the film after tripping the shutter and putting the dark slide back into the film holder. (The dark slide is the thing that blocks light from striking the film while it’s in the holder and which is pulled out before tripping the shutter.) I don’t have any developing equipment. Nor do I have a lightproof box to hold the film until I can get it to the lab. So I still have a film holder loaded with two sheets of exposed film. Hmm. . . .
The B&W sheets are just for practice, since I plan on doing most of my work in color. Fortunately, I have a Fuji QuickLoad holder, which really simplifies things for certain color films. QuickLoad wraps the film in an envelope that does double duty as the dark slide and a convenient light-tight container before and after exposure. (”Naked” B&W film is about five times cheaper per sheet, though.)
So I took a few sheets of Fuji Velvia 100F QuickLoad film with me when we went to Marblehead on Memorial Day. On Saturday I took the three sheets of film to Newtonville Camera and dropped them off with the same peace of mind that I would 35mm film.
Six: Be sure to set the ISO dial correctly on the handheld lightmeter. Large format cameras don’t have a TTL exposure meter. (Actually, large format cameras don’t have much of anything that other “modern” cameras do.) So you have to use some kind of off-camera meter. I use a Sekonic incident/reflective meter, but I forgot to set the film dial to ISO 100 when I switched from shooting Tri-X film, which is ISO 320. (The bigger the ISO number the more sensitive the film and the less light that it needs for a “correct” exposure.)
When I returned home from Newtonville today with my newly developed film, I discovered — as you might expect — that all three of my exposures were about one-and-a-half stops underexposed:
Seven: If you don’t read the camera manual, you won’t know that the camera has a front swing mechanism. I didn’t read the manual.
Here’s a follow-up to my dispatch from January about Hany Farid’s presentation at Electronic Imaging on detecting digital manipulation of images. Dr. Farid has written an article on digital forensics in this month’s issue of Scientific American.
(Thanks to Steve on Image Processing for the link.)
A few months ago I mentioned some research by Hultgren and Hertl about the quality of images from mobile devices, in which they discovered that mobile devices with small image sensors tend to perform very poorly in the circumstances where they are most used: indoors on close-up scenes. Camera-shake, image fuzziness, and large amounts of noise due to the low-light environment were among the top complaints.
It seems that Kodak may have an answer to the “low-light problem” by changing the sensor design in a subtle way. Remember that most digital cameras use a red-green-blue-green (RGBG) color filter array (CFA) over the sensor as a fundamental part of image formation. This “Bayer pattern” (named after another Kodak researcher) looks like this:

Kodak’s novel approach (used in their new TRUESENSE CMOS technology) adds clear gaps in the CFA pattern to increase the overall level of illumination striking the sensor:

There are some trade-offs in terms of color resolution, but the results are pretty impressive. Plus, Kodak is initially targetting the technology for small image sensors where resolution was never very good to begin with and the images stand to improve.
It’s been a while since I posted any of my own photographs here — photos without headstones, that is. But today I installed Adobe Lightroom on the ‘ole PC, imported all of the old photos that I haven’t looked at in a while, and came across these composite photos from 2003.
I was going through a phase of making montages, inspired by a small series that Lisa made when we went to Sequoia National Park the year before. (I swear I didn’t know at the time that James Balog and David Hockney were doing this, too.) In early 2003, we still lived closer to Boston; and the old, rusty Central Artery was coming down as the Big Dig moved the highway underground. So I decided to spend an afternoon focusing on the old and new. (This was also the outing where I got detained by The Man.)
At the time, I was exploring the concept that photographs mediate experience in a completely artificial way, that they frame the world and construct experience, and that they’re essentially untrue. So I was purposefully not making my edges match or worrying too much about color constancy when I stitched them back together. Pointing out the unnaturalness of photographs was my goal. Moreover, the Artery always struck me as ugly, and I always felt disoriented when I was on or near it; I was trying to get that feeling across, too. Maybe it works, maybe it’s too “unpicturesque” or self-conscious — I’ll let you decide.
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Central Artery Montage - Boston, MA (Click for larger . . .)
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Central Artery Montage - Boston, MA (Click for larger . . .)
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Central Artery Montage - Boston, MA (Click for larger . . .)
A while back, I bought myself a new camera. Then about a month later, I figured out how to attach the lens to the lensboard. So, for a while I had a camera without a lens. Things were improving after adding the lens, but I still had no idea how to put film into it. Obviously it involved the “film holders” I bought. Clearly, I had a lot to learn.
Today, I embarked on my “Spring of 100 Mistakes” as I teach myself the practical techniques related to large format photography. We’ll see if I actually make it to 100 mistakes, or perhaps I’ll blow right past. My goal is to have a pretty solid intuition for how to operate my camera before taking it on our month-long summer trip through the American Rockies.
(Short side-story: I first started photographing in the summer of 1990 when we moved to Wyoming. On part of the six-hour drive from Casper to Yellowstone, I read the whole manual for the family’s mostly abandoned Sears KSX-P camera. By the time I got there, I was shooting Kodachrome slides without fear, just like everybody else. That was a great little camera with a Pentax K-series mount. I’ve been telling myself that I should sell it; I haven’t used it since buying my two Nikon rigs a couple years after graduating college, but there’s still a soft, squishy place in me for the camera. Anyway, I like the historical echo of going back to Yellowstone with a new camera and working without a net again.)
So here are the first few mistakes:
One: When loading film in complete darkness — a nonnegotiable requirement — know how to determine which side has the emulsion. The film is right side up when the notched corner is the upper-right-hand one.
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The right way (Click for larger)
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The wrong way (Click for larger)
Not a mistake I made, but still a helpful hint: The dark-slide, which blocks light from hitting the film until you pull it, has an “exposed” side and an “unexposed” side. Before turning off the lights, know which is which. The handle of the “exposed” side feels different.
Two: Know how to load the film before you get into the pitch black laundry room darkroom. There’s a flap on the end of film holder — it’s on the opposite end from the dark-slide handle — and it flips open for loading. You slide the film into this end and then flip it closed after loading. Load gently without actually touching the film. You figure that one out.
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Open the film door after pulling the dark slide (Click for larger)
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Loading the film (Click for larger)
Three: Have everything between the camera and the ground tightened down as much as possible before loading the film holder into the camera. Unlike 35mm cameras, you load the film at the last moment by pulling the spring-loaded ground-glass away from the camera and sliding the film holder between it and the bellows. If something isn’t tightened down, the scene that you photograph will look different than the one you composed. In my case, I locked down all of the tilt, shift and swing knobs and the tripod pan, tilt and swivel controls, but I hadn’t adequately tightened the quick-release plate onto the camera before mounting it to the tripod, so the whole camera turned quite a bit while I loaded the film.
Four: Know your film’s ISO speed in the field. There’s no ISO dial to set, just a number that you enter into your handheld lightmeter. I couldn’t even remember what kind of black and white film I had: T-Max 100 or Tri-X, which I thought was 400. I split the difference and said 200 ISO, which was close to the real value of 320 but not perfect.
Now I just have to figure out how to develop the film that I exposed today. . . .