the lithium press

Triple the Fun

2011-06-18T00:49:00.000-06:00

I've rebooted Wrist Watcher and have also just thrown up a third sort-of arts blog, hypnogaze. My stab at purposive blogging. And I'll keep TLP ticking along with miscellanea.

But I really don't post all that much. I just started in a challenging new position at work, which is slowing me down on all fronts, and anyway, blogging is no serious hobby for me. All three blogs will only amount to a trickle. I hate to crosspost, but I'm wondering: syndicate them to Tumblr?

Boredom Defended

2011-06-07T15:49:00.001-06:00

NY Times film critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott recently published an apology for slow and thoughtful film: "In Defense of the Slow and the Boring." The disappointing thing is that they are not having to defend thoughtful cinema from viewers, who of course express their opinions with their dollars, but from other cultural and film critics. But this is less a catty fight than a discussion of whether film should even be permitted serious aspirations beyond popular entertainment. Unsurprisingly, they think it should.

On the other hand, says Scott, "I certainly don’t think fun should be banished from the screen, or that popular entertainment is essentially antithetical to art. And while I derive great pleasure from some movies that might be described as slow or tedious, I also find food for thought in fast, slick, whimsical entertainments." But the makers of films themselves seems to promote a kind of anti-art bias which at heart is, he suggests, "a defense of the corporate status quo." That is, even film makers are slow to argue that film is, or even should be, an art form rather than commercial entertainment.

I'm a little sad at the fact that I personally am loosing my capacity to experience films purely as entertainment. Art cinema may indeed be "cultural vegetables," but dang it, I like culture, and vegetables, too. I don't think thoughtful films are necessarily enculturating, but they are by definition thoughtful. And "thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you."

Invisible Art

2011-05-26T10:00:00.003-06:00

Cooper-Hewitt just awarded type designer Matthew Carter a National Design Award for lifetime achievement in the typographic arts. You know his work very well. You've seen it countless times. You're looking at it right now. He is the designer of the ubiquitous Microsoft system fonts Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. I usually prefer Trebuchet for TLP, but in honor of Mr. Carter, today we're sporting Georgia.

Georgia and Verdana (Tahoma is very similar to the latter) are notable as being designed specifically for high-legibility on computer screens. Both are very extensively hand-hinted, meaning that the characters are carefully encoded with rasterization data for screen display. They are easy on the eyes and legible at very small point sizes. That's why countless Web pages have Georgia or Verdana set as their default fonts. You and I unknowingly drink in Carter's invisible art every day.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Carter's landmark fonts is that they have achieved a ubiquity and acceptance that very few fonts do, but are seen by designers as appropriate for screen-only use. Ikea caused a big dustup in 2009 when they adopted Verdana as their print catalog typeface, wanting to unify their Web and print look. Critics dubbed it Verdanagate, both miffed and bemused that so savvy a design company would willfully disregard good design, in some attempt to appeal to pedestrian comfort. It's like a worldclass print design firm decorating their offices in American Colonial because that's what most Americans have in their living rooms.

Ikea blew it off. Said a spokesflunky, "I think it’s mainly experts who have expressed their views, people who are interested in fonts. I don’t think the broad public is that interested. . . . [Verdana is] a simple, cost-effective font." Lame, Ikea. You did a Gap. Just own it. You know very well that good design isn't some when-convenient option. It's a way of life. You live the aesthetic life or you don't.

Form and Content

2011-05-25T18:24:00.003-06:00

I'm off next week to the national AAUP conference, at which Paper Age oldsters stagger around like Jack Nicholson in "About Schmidt," trying to work through the life-negating death of print publishing that (inexplicably) they never saw coming. Last year everyone suffered through session after session of bad news, then went looking for a bar to get proper drunk in. Academic publishing is suffering more than trade, in some respects, because its main customers, academic libraries, are defecting from paper books at an even faster rate than retail consumers.

Five years ago academic libraries were willing to pay $120 each for your arcane little monographs. Sell even 1000 copies at that price and you are still making money. Now libraries only want your publications if they come in huge, discounted ebook packages from vendors like Elsevier, where you may earn as little as a few dollars a title. No wonder the publishers' long faces.

The iPad is not helping things. It provides such a great reading experience that, not only do libraries not want to buy paper, soon nobody will want to read it. Publishing is just starting to reinvent its content for tablets, and already the results are astonishing. Obviously graphic-rich publications (glossy mags) benefit hugely, but more surprising is that even longform, text-heavy publications can, too.

John Biggs just discussed this with respect to the New Yorker. Talk about graphically spare. It's the anti-Wired. But even so, the iPad version is a substantial improvement over the paper.

There are no graphical tricks, not too many multimedia events, and when there are, they’re great (one poetry reading by Sherman Alexie in the latest issue was amazing). And even the ads are unobtrusive and, dare I say it, beautiful in full living color. Everything about the iPad version is the same, yet strikingly different. This isn’t some rush-job given to a bunch of magazine designers who slap a little video in the corner of a horribly laid-out page. This is a full rethinking of the title and changes entirely how we consume long-form writing.
This leap to tablets is not just a design issue for publishers. It demands new forms of writing from authors. We'll start seeing more and more books like Al Gore's Our Choice, that simply "does things that no paper book ever could" (gushes Gizmodo). Designers like Craig Mod are completely rethinking what books without pages, designed for the "infinite content plane" of the iPad, should look like. On a multimedia device without any fixed content plane, or even the necessity of static content, do the monomedia codices of the Paper Age even make sense?

Reading habits change over time, always have, but the shift we are experiencing right now may be without parallel in its abruptness and rapidity. While the evidence is not unambiguous, I think longform has been in decline for some time, in part because the internet makes longform reading less necessary, or in many cases unnecessary, for informational purposes. (Thanks for that, Google.) Certainly monographs are dying a slow death in academic publishing.

But writers have a bigger problem to worry about. They will increasingly, by themselves or collaboratively, be forced to become more than monomedia writers of words. The supplantation of books by multimedia tablets is already creating a new demand for rich content, even beyond the current demands of the internet. If hoary old standards like the New Yorker get that fact, this reality will very soon impose itself on even the most fusty Paper Age relics.

As print publishing dies, print writing will die with it. Words will still be words, and sentences sentences, but content will necessarily follow form. And the form of tablet publication is already so fantastic that even the internet looks dull and quaint beside it. Tablets must be recognized as new medium, and they are utterly irresistible.

Why I Hate the Silver Screen

2011-05-23T19:12:00.000-06:00

I don't know why it's taken me so long to come to this conclusion, but I don't like going to movies. Not at all. Now, I love movies, really, really love 'em. Or maybe, better said, I love "film." I love compelling visual narratives that make more sense of life than really exists in live. Great film has shaped my worldview much more than books have. That's how I'm wired. I'm a sensualist.

But movie theaters are a terrible place to see films, or movies. First, I don't know how to have a thoughtful and meditative encounter with a film when I'm sharing it with a couple hundred strangers. It's like reading a book with someone looking over my shoulder. But more basically, I just find theater speakers too loud and the screens too big. I have terrible, fussy eyes. I visually cannot take the whole movie screen in, and I find frenetic action on-screen, especially, to be visually and physically fatiguing. I've never wanted a 50" TV with 200w of surround sound at home. My little computer monitor and headphones are optimal, for me.

Worst of all are 3D movies. They are dim, the colors cold, the contrast low, the glasses uncomfortable, and they give me a headache. And 3D adds nothing to a movie's immersiveness. It's a gimmick to which you, in any case, quickly become habituated. I could go on, but Ebert has already given 3D a good and proper thrashing.

Now, as if I needed another reason to give up on movie theaters, I read today that many theaters are not bothering to change from their 3D to 2D lenses when showing the latter. The result is all the downsides of 3D (up to 85% darker, flat colors, plain ugly) even with 2D. The problem, apparently, is that the Sony 4k digital projectors that many theaters use are extremely tamper-resistant, making the lenses a pain to change. A small misstep and the projector can lock you out, causing logistical nightmares. Since the 3D lenses are of course absolutely necessary for 3D movies, some managers are saying, just leave 'em on.

So if you go to a 2D movie and it seems maddeningly dim, complain and ask for your money back. Hopefully a lot of other people will do the same. Customer contempt really should not be tolerated.

Radically Purposive Blogging

2011-05-19T19:16:00.000-06:00

I have not been blogging much lately, and it really has not been for lack of time. After a dissertation-imposed hiatus, I'm ready to get back to it. But the only blogging that really holds my sustained attention is blogging my hobbies and interests, and I find a general personal blog like Lithium Press to be a very poor vehicle for that. Fweem's project blogs have inspired me to rethink all this.

And in fact, I have started two other blogs in the past, but never did anything with them. One was on music, but I posted once and abandoned it entirely for TLP. The other was on wristwatches, which I seriously blogged for a month and then forsook. I went through a bit of a horological obsession in 2008, and like most of my obsessions, it cooled and I moved on. I remind myself too much of John Laroche, of Susan Orlean's "Orchid Fever"/Kaufman's Adaptation:

Laroche grew up in Miami. He says he was a weird kid. This is not hard to believe. When he wanted a pet, he bought a little turtle, then bought ten little turtles, then tried to breed them, then started selling turtles to other kids, then decided his life wasn't worth living unless he acquired one of every species of rare turtle, including a three-hundred-pound exotic tortoise from the Galapagos Islands. Suddenly, another passion seized him. He became immersed in late-Ice Age fossils. Then he dropped turtles and Ice Age fossils and became obsessed with lapidary, and then after a while he dropped lapidary and got into collecting and resilvering old mirrors. His passions boil up quickly and end abruptly, like tornadoes. Usually, the end is accompanied by a dramatic pronouncement. When he was in his teens, he went through a tropical-fish phase, and he had sixty fishtanks in his house. He even went skin-diving for the fish himself. Then the end came. He didn't merely lose interest in collecting fish: he renounced it, as if he had kicked a habit. He declared that he would stop collecting fish forever. He also declared that he would never set foot in the ocean again. That was fifteen years ago. He lives a few miles from the Atlantic, but he has not gone near it since.
This may drive the people around me a bit crazy, and it's not easy for me either. I'd be more than happy to find that One True Thing that captivates me endlessly and forever. But that's not how I'm wired. At least my interests are somewhat cyclic. I'll take that.

So, wristwatches. I'll save how I got started into horology for a post on Wrist Watcher. Definitely one of my more hot-and-cold interests. But just eight posts on that blog, in November of 2008, has drawn 482 page views. Most of those (almost 300) have come since February of this year. I have no explanation. I have half a mind to start blogging horology again, for a change of pace, and because finding some consistent readers might be nice for a change.

The fact is, I follow a number of good topical blogs that are mostly dormant, but when updated, are of really great quality and always interesting. Like Muse-ings, Ed's Corner, and even a commercial blog, Small House Style. I actually like that the post count for all three is low, but the quality is high. And the posts are always on the blog's designated topic. No filtering required.

I think Lithium Press needs to be either shuttered or repurposed, and one or more topical blogs need to grow in its place. Ed Brandwein of Ed's Corner has even just turned a big chunk of his blog into an ebook that I'm going buy. (Need it in pdf, Ed!) I want a piece of that action—a blog or two (or why not dozen?) that would make sense as a book. Radically purposive blogging.

First Thoughts on iPad + Ebooks

2011-04-28T14:38:00.001-06:00

Work bought me a new 64gb iPad 2 (wi-fi only). Not really a bonus for finishing my dissertation, but it feels that way. Impressions? Like everyone says, it's just a big iPhone. If you are used to the iPhone/iTouch, it won't wow you. But it will still fill you with a slow, fizzy elation, if only from the undeniable fact that you are holding the future of reading in your hands.

This fact really hit me when I downloaded a copy of Wired magazine for the iPad. It incorporates innovative navigation and formatting, audio, video, and other rich content in a seamless and compelling way. You read a book review and then just hit a button to download a chapter from the book. A film review will have a stills gallery and trailer, etc. It sounds (duh) like the Web, but the tablet format and touch navigation make it much more compelling experience. It really is comparable to reading a book, but a super-book.

It's way beyond the Kindle. When Tani the Kindle User first saw my iPad, she had zero interest. Ten seconds into browsing Wired, she said, "Oh, I have to get one of these." The future of glossies, clearly, will be on color tablets.

The future of ebooks more generally will be on both color and e-ink tablets, it seems. E-ink readers will soon be cheap as chips, though already, even the Nook Color is just $250. And now that I am actually using a tablet, I confess that my love of analog books is a bit diminished. The ergonomics of tablet reading are great, I'm used to reading on screen (anymore, who isn't?), and the convenience is surprisingly compelling. It's increasing the amount of discretionary reading I do, which I would never have expected. (That may just be Shiny New Toy Syndrome. Time will tell.)

Yet another surprise: I'm seriously reconsidering the future of my physical book collection. I have a whole wall of my large study taken up with books I never read. Many I have never read once. I have hundreds more at work, in boxes, on other bookshelves, etc. A certain subset I own as a collector, and that segment I expect both to keep and to grow. But all those crumbling Baen and Del Rey paperbacks? As physical objects they give me little pleasure, and space is at a premium. Why keep them? Nostalgic commitment to print, even among print lovers, is evaporating before our eyes.

This is why we are using a very, very precious empty staff position
at my institute to hire a digital publishing specialist. We're rapidly
reaching the tipping point where if your publications are not pushed to
portable devices, you are severely limiting your readership. I've been asked to take a point position on the hire. This should be interesting.

Out with a Whimper

2011-04-27T01:30:00.000-06:00

Somehow I thought the completion of my PhD program would end with more fanfare. Meh. So it ends.

Dear __________, Congratulations. Your submission, 10195 has cleared all of the necessary checks and will soon be delivered to ProQuest/UMI for publishing. Regards, Mary Elwood

Penguin Group Starts New "Writing Community"

2011-04-26T12:49:00.000-06:00

Just saw this in a NYTimes article.* Writers have been forming collectives themselves for ages, but now a major press is doing it for them. For Penguin, clearly it is intended to be a low-cost bush league. Why spend the money to work through slush piles and coach developing writers when you can get others to do it for you?

*Tip of the day: If you run of out monthly free views for the New York Times, just start up an anonymous session on your Web browser. An anonymous session clears your cookie cache and resets your view counter.

To Reality Check or Not?

2011-04-25T15:12:00.001-06:00

I know Fweem is looking at a PhD program. I also speak at least a few times a year with undergrads looking that direction. Employment prospects for humanities PhDs are dismal, and graduate professors brazenly spout lies about the academic vocation.

But do aspiring grad students really want to know the ugly truth?

Yes, just doing a little more post-PhD reflection . . .

Done

2011-04-04T23:00:00.001-06:00

I passed the oral defense of my dissertation today. That means I'm all but done with my PhD. Afterward, they called me "doctor." They even gave me a little card that says so. Cake was cut, champagne served. It felt surreal. I was exhausted. I just wanted to leave, call my family, and then crash in my hotel. Which is what I did.

I'm forty-three. I've been in school almost my whole life. I've spent about nine years just working (or, ahem, not working) on my dissertation, in some form or another. I don't mind the time so much, but the stress? There are no words. There have been times where I literally felt like I was slipping into cardiac arrest. Today, waiting to go into my orals, was one of them. Really, there are no words.

It took too long, the cost was too high, the grief too great, to celebrate this as an accomplishment. At least right now. I don't want to walk at graduation, and won't. I don't care about the diploma. I'm not happy, or relieved. I'm numb. Numb. I just want to be with my family, and really, really relax, and start to discover what life looks like post-PhD.

Publisher Pays $2 Million to Remain Relevent

2011-03-28T16:40:00.001-06:00

After Amanda Hocking sold one million copies of her ebooks, on her own, she decided to open up her work to traditional publishers, who fought a bidding war. St. Martin's Press "won," with a $2 million contract. NYT reports, "Publishers, weary of hearing about their disposability in an age when writers can self-publish their work on the Internet and sell it on Amazon.com, said they were vindicated by the news."

Vindicated? Er, right. A writer who doesn't need you is willing to let you pay her to work for her. Sure, you're both making money on this, but who works for whom?

The Trivial and the Ephemeral

2011-03-25T17:04:00.000-06:00

While 2000 bands and uncounted hoards have descended on Austin for SXSW 2011, I've had a couple weeks of less exciting but entirely satisfying musical exploration and reflection myself. It started with Loretta Lynn and ended with death metal, so I've covered a bit of ground. There's a lot of great music I haven't heard, and a lot I've heard that I just don't appreciate yet. Seems self-evident, and goes for everyone, but sometimes I just get bored or jaded. Aggressive and open experimentation makes all things new again.

SXSW is about bands, beer, BBQ, and less appealingly, intense navelgazing about the future of music. In a curious keynote, well-spoken has-been Bob Geldof decried the flood of Web music and dished on contemporary American musicians, calling them "smug" and "exhausted," no longer revolutionary or relevant. Critic Greg Kot rightly says Geldof is just not plugged into socially-conscious music, which is of course being made. "Perhaps the deeper issue is not that no one is making that type of music, but that much of it is being lost amid what SXSW executive Roland Swenson called 'the trivial and the ephemeral' culture that is clogging media. The great life-affirming and potentially life-changing revolutionary music that Geldof seeks is being made. But without discerning voices to champion it, who will hear it? Certainly Geldof could use a little help in finding it."

Precisely. Democratization of means of production and broken filters. That's really what bedevils Geldof. He can almost see it, but not quite. He says of social and economic inequality, "What’s music got to say about it? I don’t hear it. Maybe I can’t hear it. Maybe this hyper democracy of the Web simply gives an illusion of talent. You can download a studio. Download any instrument. You can pick up any instrument for nothing. You can make, cut and paste to create fab artwork to make your CD. Everybody has got the means to say anything they want, but nobody has anything to say. We need to talk about it."

"Nobody has anything to say"? Does he only listen to Top 40? So it seems, and top pop is indisputably formulaic and vapid. Jay Frank of futurehit.dna documents at morbid length how totally one-dimensional pop music is. Summed up in numbers, the top 100 songs "account for approximately 36% of all new music track sales. . . . The #1 subject matter in the Top 100 selling songs were variations of 'I want to take you back to my place so we can have sex' songs, accounting for 21% of the top titles. . . . The more traditional subject matter along the same line is the 'I love you' song, which was the 2nd most popular at 17%. These songs just edged out the 'Out Of Love' songs, which accounted for 16% of the titles."

Party songs do well, too, says Frank. Even really bad ones, if they follow the basic pop formula faithfully and can get lucky and go viral. You don't need talent or a label, though ambitious middle-class parents are a big plus. 14-year old Rebecca Black's parents paid $2000 to ARK Music Factory to make a video of her DIY single, "Friday." They posted it on YouTube February 10th, and to date it's attracted over 44 million hits. They quickly put the single out on iTunes, where it's selling 40,000 copies or so a week. The video is bad, it's being parodied, but the Blacks are printing money from it, and Rebecca's bigger than all of SXSW combined. Says Frank, "If you combined every view of 'Friday' and its parody videos, approximately 62 Million minutes were spent on this song [to date!]. . . . In the meantime, if the approximately 15,000 SxSW attendees watched 12 hours of music a day for all 5 days, that would only add up to 54 Million minutes spent watching music."

Rebecca Black - Friday (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

Feel free to cry, as the labels surely are. They've completely lost control of the system. Or if you're Bob Geldof, go ahead and feel validated, because this is future of pop music. Democratic production is here to stay, and it will mostly produce music like this, because this, and Gaga, and Britney, are at the top of the popular taste bell-curve. But at the same time, it permits an expansion of genres that has me buzzing with adrenaline and anticipation.

But if there will be no more Harper Lees, we may likewise see no more Pink Floyds, green and thoroughly non-commercial artists nurtured by generous and patient label A&R into astonishingly vernacular and catalytic talents. Even money-grubbing tastemakers occasionally have good taste, but the labels are losing all power to promote it. Great books only have great power if everybody reads them. Same with music. Revolutionary music proliferates, but out of the vernacular spotlight, buried under the ephemeral, starved of social power. Geldof's assessment is askew, but sadly, only by a quarter turn.

Nobody Reads My . . .

2011-03-24T14:00:00.001-06:00

From Sticky Comics.

No More Harper Lees

2011-03-18T14:29:00.002-06:00

I was going to comment on Fweem's post on the dismal economics of book publishing, but then it led me to Nathan Bransford's blog, and to this post on self-publishing ebooks, based on this post by author Amanda Hocking. Read at least the Bransford post and comments. This is the future happening before our eyes.

The music industry had no idea that the iPod and iTunes signaled an apocalypse for their business, even if at the same time it was making them money. Publishers probably are not as naive, and would surely kill ebook readers if they could. But they can't, and while publishers are already reeling, they are barely beginning to feel the mighty contraction and redistribution that ebooks will cause to their industry.

Ebook readers turn every work of literature into a blog post, the perceived value of which is zero. Anyone can publish a blog post, and anyone can publish an ebook. Publishers can still provide editing and marketing for the author, and more invaluably, filters for readers. Readers will be willing to pay a certain amount for the benefit of these services. But when publishers are puzzled as to why readers undervalue the very costly business of publishing (my own business), which they love to explain, they need to look at Hocking, shut up, and get to work reinventing themselves around new paradigms.

When one hardworking, mid-grade author like Hocking can sell 450,000 copies of her ebook in one month, without a publisher, the publishers' business paradigm and grasp on the market has just been smashed. It shows that an author can do it all herself and succeed in a big way. Are they scared? Terrified. Hocking says modestly, "[N]o publisher is afraid of me. That's just silly. I'm one girl who wrote a couple books that are selling well. That doesn't scare them - they just want to be a part of it, the same way they want to be a part of any best seller."

If I were a for-profit publisher, I would only be publishing work by authors with established online/ebook audiences. An audience is an audience, and it is the only thing a book needs to succeed. While some authors still believe self-publishing is debasing, that's old thinking, and irrational. I can foresee a day when publishers will be loath to publish anyone who does not already have a digital reader base. Building that base clearly requires quantity, at least moderate quality, and relentless self-promotion. Any shy author with just one great book in them will probably never be heard above the din. I hate the fact that there will be no more Harper Lees, but you read it here first: There will be no more Harper Lees.

On Writing and Suicide Pacts

2011-03-15T16:41:00.002-06:00

I listened to a great episode of Radiolab the other day on the lengths we may go in our quest for motivation. Addicts, creatives, and the mentally ill (mental illness defines all three equally well, probably) seem by far the most likely to go to radical extremes in search of willpower. In one segment, author Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on the fickleness of muses and whether it is possible to "live a creative life without cutting your ear off." In this same Radiolab segment, host Robert Krulwich speaks with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, of "Awakenings" fame. Sacks relates the story of writing his first book. He couldn't push past block, even to start it, and finally, in abject desperation, made a pact with himself to commit suicide if he did not have the book done in ten days. He finished it in nine.

I finished writing my dissertation under a similar cloud, facing professional annihilation. I thought years ago that writing it would be the fun bit of my program. After all, isn't thinking and writing precisely why I was becoming a scholar? As it turns out, there is a grand difference for me between the experience of writing what you want to write, and writing what you have to write. There is more to it than that (I tire of most topics quickly, I don't like my work to be judged, etc.), but this whole experience has has taught me much about myself. It's not only exploded ideas I've long held about myself, but also recast my entire thinking about the nature of both academic and creative activity.

I haven't encountered many truly creative people who are consistently so without great effort, many misfires, and too often, a lot of personal carnage. Most great scholars, the creative community I know best (as far as it is creative), are great because they are compulsive workers with fixed and narrow obsessions. They still have their ears, true, but often amputate from them life beyond work. Up close, it's not all that profound or romantic. Many great scholars are surprisingly dull people, hoarders of arcana more than Renaissance men.

I lack the requisite academic neurosis. I'm a compulsive loafer with obsessions both fickle and many. Unlike many colleagues, I do not have an absolute conviction of the value of my work upon which to draw for motivation, or failing that, at least a bottomless ego to feed or a desire for public praise or a compulsive need to be speak and be heard. Anonymity suits me just fine, and I rarely have something that I just have to say. In fact, I have a half-dozen blog posts written that I have not put up. I write them, I read them over, and then think to myself, "Honestly, why bother shouting into the void?"

So how does one develop a proper writer's ego? I don't know, but I have determined, at the very least, to begin to approach writing as a serious craft. I will always have to write, in my current occupation, and I would rather fall back upon great writing chops than suicide pacts to push me through block. And as an editor, I am constantly working with authors who cannot write well, looking to me for assistance. So, somebody pass me the Strunk and White.

24-bit Audio on iTunes?

2011-02-23T19:01:00.010-07:00

This is so unexpected and implausible that I have a hard time knowing how to parse it. Music industry heavyweight Jimmy Iovine just dropped at an HP news conference that his label (UMG) is working with Apple to introduce 24-bit audio music downloads to iTunes. Standard (Redbook) CD audio and compressed audio formats (mp3, AAC, etc.) are all 16-bit. Heretofore only advanced audio formats like SACD, DVD-Audio, and HD FLAC have supported 24-bit, all of which require special stand-alone players or (usually) upgraded computer hardware and software to play. Current Apple portable players do not even support 24-bit playback, and that limitation is a hardware issue. You'll need a new iPhone. Iovine recognizes this: "we have a long road ahead of us."

Iovine has a twofold interest in this. He's both an industry exec on the content side and a partner with Dr. Dre on the hardware side (Beats Audio), which licenses its branded technology to companies like HP. Selling 24-bit files lets the labels charge more, or a second time, for the advanced format, plus you have to upgrade your hardware to hear it. And you'll want better headphones like, you know, Iovine's own outrageously overpriced Beats by Dr. Dre.

This is clearly just a marketing move, and I can't see how it will get very far, very fast. The biggest practical problem, apart from hardware requirements, is that 24-bit files are huge, on the order of 100mb for a 4.5 minute song. On typical crappy DSL, during peak traffic, you could be a couple hours downloading an album. And your average listener on average equipment won't be able to tell a 24-bit track from an iTunes 256k AAC track, especially with non-acoustic music. If HDtracks pricing holds, 24-bit will cost you $2.50/tr over iTune's current $.99/tr pricing. Not sure there will be many takers. HDtracks is surviving but clearly not thriving, and it is aimed directly at audiophiles who care deeply about audio quality.

At least one recording engineer has already done a takedown of Iovine's idea, saying flatly, "A consumer will never need 24-bit. Ever." I agree. It takes great equipment and ears to hear the difference. This is not a consumer format. And the bigger issue, as he notes, is in the mastering. Iovine and Co. have sucked every bit of dynamic range out of modern pop recordings during mastering to make them "louder," and the main advantage of 24-bit is, yes, more dynamic range that would certainly not be used. I've blogged in the past that good mastering is almost everything, and CD-quality audio is plenty good, even for my picky ears.

The Beats Audio team have taken the 24-bit concept to the other major labels and retailers, perhaps suggesting they can claw back traditional sales revenue from the growing subscription market, where the likes of Spotify will be unable to compete because the new file sizes will push up streaming time and costs.
As much as I hope this really does take off, it's just marketing. Mp3s are plenty good enough for mobile listening, even if not for critical listening. CD-quality lossless, which can already play on any player, would be entirely adequate for almost any purpose, but that would hardly be what all marketers are looking for—the Next New Hot Thing.

Six Degrees of Alt Country

2011-02-19T20:53:00.002-07:00

I went out to dinner with Tani last night and ended up dissecting for her my conflicted and selective love of country music. It's complicated. There is country music I simply don't like (most of it), and that's not a problem. There is country music I simply love (mostly alt country), and that's no problem either. Then there is country music I like, but am embarrassed to like. That's a post all its own.

Lady Antebellum won the record of the year Grammy for their latest album, which is a perfect example a country music I simply don't like. It's just power pop with fiddle and fictionalized southern sentiment. But I'm also sympathetic to the Philadelphia Weekly's Caralyn Green (um, minus the bit about Ryan Adams), speaking of Lady A's first album:

I love country music. Neko Case is my goddess. Gillian Welch is my savior. Ryan Adams is my lust-object for life, and Uncle Tupelo is second only to Wilco.

But Billboard Hot Country chart-toppers/crossover poppers Lady Antebellum? I dunno. It's possible they border a little too country even for me.

country

That statement's begging for a kick in the head. What we mean is we're down with banjos and fiddles and yearning hearts and vowels that twang, but not with Lady Antebellum's brand of CMT, all-American, Wal-Mart country, and all the Jesus-speak, Old South nostalgia and professed sincerity that accompany the genre. We're distancing ourselves from the folks who drive pickup trucks without irony. And on many levels, that's just elitist bullshit (though I certainly question Lady Antebellum's Civil War allusions and sentiment that "home is where the heart is, just south of the Mason-Dixon Line"). . . .
True enough. If Neko Case is country, I'm a country fan. But if Lady A is country, I'm really, definitely not. Is this a question of elitism? Well, a little. Lady A is radio music for casual listeners, and I rarely like that kind of music regardless of genre. But I enjoy Brad Paisley and Justin Moore and can't wait for Aaron Lewis's new album to come out. That's all country-country, of a certain stripe, but it's also for me a guilty pleasure. Not because I feel some sort of antipathy to rural or heartland culture—I'm a country boy myself, after all—but because it's so overtly sentimental. I shouldn't enjoy having country-country flip my sappy switch, but I do. So there.

Oh yeah, the six degrees. I've posted before about my fascination with the small world phenomenon, that we are all linked together in social networks that are shockingly small. I was just going to post about my very short list of non-mainstream musicians whom I think are truly unique talents. It's not a formal list, but five immediately pop to the top.

Neko Case is number one, and it turns out that she is closely linked to two other of the anointed, Nick Cave (toured with him) and Andrew Bird (recorded with him). And Cave and Bird are definitely not alt country. Six degrees, clearly. Any connection between Neko and Fleet Foxes? Meh, shared a ticket at the Newport Folk Festival. And with Devendra Banhart? Not that I can find. Ah well, my faith in both six degrees and the cosmic connectedness of alt country is nevertheless unshaken.

Looking Back from the Future of Music (Zune edition)

2011-02-17T00:39:00.000-07:00

We've had a Microsoft Zune Pass subscription for over a year. Zune Marketplace is one of the biggest subscription services out there, with about 11 million songs. For $15/mo. you get unlimited "rented" downloads on up to three Zune-compatible devices, and streaming on any PC, plus 10 free tracks/mo. to keep forever. The file quality is great, with 192 kbit/s WMA for streaming and 320 kbit/s MP3s for purchase. The selection is basically comprehensive for the major labels and decent-to-good for indies.

The Zune Marketplace collection is big enough to scratch most itches, and allows you to dig pretty deep with even narrower interests. Here is a selection test I did a while back: There are thirty-five recordings known to me of Rachmaninoff's Vespers, my favorite choral work. Many have been issued on tiny, obscure labels and/or are out of print as CDs. But at least twenty-one of these are available on Zune Marketplace. If you like Gaga or Cee-Lo Green, Zune of course easily has you covered. But even if your tastes are more esoteric, like mine, you are well served. It goes a long way towards putting a universal library of music in your pocket.

The Zune software is great, much better than iTunes. Tani has had a Zune HD for quite a while and has loved it. I just got myself one, finally, and it is the bomb. Best Player Ever, especially at current prices. Great build, great sound, and the best interface on any player. The only thing slightly lacking is its wi-fi performance, but if this were the last music player I ever owned, I'd be just fine. I'd been waiting for the rumored Zune HD2 to come out, but am skeptical now that it ever will. The Zune brand, I just read today, is probably on its way out, at least under that name. The Zune staff has already been reassigned. Future Zune players will either disappear entirely or live on in a different form (as phones or, maybe, portable gaming devices).

And that's the future of portable music players, it seems. Convergence. Nobody wants to own two or three devices (phone, mp3 player, portable gaming device, whatever) when one will do. And everybody already has a phone. Sadly, premium music players are on their way out, as greater segmentation and adoption in the multifunction phone market effectively replaces them. I totally buy the rumors of an iPhone mini.

But subscription music services, and their fantastic value, will keep growing. And what a value. The three of us in our family have played 31,469 tracks on Zune in the past 14 months. If my math is right, that means each play has cost us $0.015, a penny and a half. Even my most-played CD has cost me many times that per play. At retail cost ($15), that means a 1000 tracks would have to be played from a CD to equal the value. Only free would be better. Like Pandora. And in fact, I think the girls would be pretty happy if all they had was Pandora. You can see where this is going . . .

And book publishers still want to charge me $15 to read one of their ebooks once?

Esperanza

2011-02-15T03:33:00.000-07:00

It's 3:00AM. I've been burning it long and low for weeks trying to finish my dissertation before my program ejects me, which it has threatened, nay, promised to do in April. But tomorrow, after years of work, I submit.

But that's not what has me excited today. More that two years ago I posted on Esperanza Spalding, a very talented bassist and a jazz prodigy. She's on my short list of genius überartists who will always inspire me, but will never be popular. Past a certain point, creativity usually becomes prohibitive of popularity. It's transgressive and challenging, and that's not the stuff of entertainment.

But if any of my überartists is going to win hearts and fans, it would be Esperanza. She really works hard to cross over to non-jazz people, and has kilowatt charisma. And tonight she really broke out big, winning the Grammy for Best New Artist (NYT). (New? After three albums?) Apparently this was a bit of a surprise, "the first jazz musician to receive the award in decades, if not ever." She beat out Justin Bieber and was not riding the wave of a hit album.

People just love her, as a person and as a musician. And sometimes the great, banal beast of the Recording Academy just rolls over and gives a great artist her due. Esperanza, congrats.

Looking Back from the Future of Music (I)

2011-02-10T13:25:00.003-07:00

Several months ago I clicked on a featured YouTube video because the screenie showed the headstock of an electric bass. I play (a very little bit) the electric bass and I'm always looking for cool bass videos. This wasn't a bass video, really, but it turned out to be a music video I really liked.

I have no idea who Stephanie Strand is, but looking at her other videos, I'd says she's a 20-something just out of college, in no way a professional musician, but a very talented amateur. She also won the genetic lottery and has a contralto voice that is sweet enough for pop but smokey enough for blues. Her music is just hooky and angular enough to sound fresh while being utterly familiar. She recorded this with GarageTunes, which she admits she's just figuring out (hence the funky drums), and did everything herself with a couple hundred bucks of amateur gear. And it sounds better than a great many studio (over-)produced tracks.

216,534 views of Strand's video to date, and strong comments. I liked one in particular: "You are extremely talented. In another era, recording companies would be rushing to exploit your talent and appeal. You may not be a well schooled musician, but nothing about your performance seems amateurish. To my ears your voice is a striking blend of Karen Carpenter, Billie Holiday, and the French actress/singer Jeanne Moreau."

"In another era . . ." Well, perhaps. But more likely she would never have been discovered by a label. No one but friends and family, or some locals at open mic night, would ever have heard her. She'd never have recorded and been heard by over 200,000 people in just one year. She'd probably never have made a cent on this song or any other. Now she gets Google ad revenue, and she's put Gutters & Drains out as a single on iTunes and Zune. I liked the song enough that originally I ripped the audio stream into an mp3. But now I've bought it off Zune, and I've clicked on her ads to support her. Maybe she's only made a quarter from me at the end of the day, but that's 100% more than she would have made from me just a decade ago.

And that's the future of music. Talented, anonymous people recording songs in their bedrooms, and finding hundreds of thousands of fans. Tell me again why we need the record labels?

As it turns out, even online music stores are tipping into a steep decline. Read this. People aren't even bothering to steal music any more. Now read this. DashGo is an indie music label. A year ago they were getting $25 from iTunes sales for every $1 from YouTube ad revenue. In twelve months that gap has closed to just 2:1. "Every day a few thousand people buy our content on iTunes. Every day on YouTube a few million people stream our songs."

If the music labels thought the death of overpriced CDs sucked, they ain't seen nothin' yet. The paradigms of music distribution are being totally smashed. "It appears if something’s not free, it gets no traction," says Lefsetz. "Used to be it was free on the radio. Then it was free on TV. Now it’s free online. And so ubiquitous that there’s no incentive to buy. . . . YouTube is free. Monetization is being figured out along the way. Maybe we need to admit music is free and work from there."

The World Seen through a Glass of Scotch

2010-12-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

As I've often said, I love Kodachrome. Kodak pulled the plug on it about 18 months ago, but today the last roll is being processed at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, KA.

Kodachrome was not just another film. It was for about 50 years the principal way that the world was described in color. As one photographer recently put it, "Study any color photo book from this era. Almost invariably you'll see the Kodachrome æsthetic: rich warm tones and relatively subdued greens, with deep shadows as an artifact of the slight underexposure required to get decent color saturation. As long as you kept the highlights under control, you'd reliably get that nice palette: lovely blue skies, subtle cool greens, and burnished warm colors with impact out of proportion to their size in the frame. To me it sometimes seemed like looking at the world through a glass of Scotch. For folks my age, learning color photography meant learning to see the world like K64 did."

Christmas Stocking [Payson 19/52]

2010-12-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

Bandstand [Payson 18/52]

2010-12-16T00:46:00.001-07:00

My photo Forgotten Shoes just hit 400 views on Flickr. What a trip. Anyway, another photo from my Gakkenflex. What's a Gakkenflex? That's another post I've been meaning to write . . .

Audio Bliss for a Ten-Spot

2010-12-13T23:49:00.002-07:00

I'm an audio quality fetishist, to the degree a poor man can be. And for broke audiophiles, it's a great time to be alive. I've had a post-in-progress queued up for a while now on cheap audio bliss, but can't seem to finish it. I was going to talk about audio file formats and bitrates, players, headphones, etc. It can be a bit complicated.

But right now I'm listening to some Sting through $10 worth of gear, and it sounds superb. Really, truly superb. I have a whole pile of audio gear at my elbow, including a tube amp, $200 headphones, a hand-wired DAC, etc. But right now, to my ears, this sounds as good as any of it. And this rig is both cheap and dead simple:

One used Sony Discman portable CD player ($3 from a thrift store) and one pair Koss KSC75 headphones ($5 on closeout).

The Discman I picked up is a D-191 that is probably about 10 years old. It's beat up and has almost no features, not even a pause button, but it sounds much better than another Discman I own that is loaded with (mostly useless) features. There was a whole pile of players at the thrift store priced for couch change, and any random Sony in working order will sound good to terrific.

Koss KSC75 headphones are legendary cheap-fi darlings. Amazon sells them for $14. They are clip-ons, but a lot of headbands from other cheap headphones work fine (I use the bands from these $2 throwaways). The KSC75's are light years beyond anything else south of $80. Koss PortaPros are also very much liked, and cost just a bit more (with headband), but I have not heard them.

Of course, you also need CDs. And they're a big part of the bliss equation here. CDs contain much more audio information than mp3s, and a simple, quality CD player can resolve that detail very impressively. Sony figured out how to do that many years ago, and in fact made their best, and most expensive, portable CD players back in the '90s.

Quality mp3s on any current-model ipod, with the same headphones, sound a solid 80% as good as what I'm hearing right now. Lossless audio files might sound 95% as good. But this old silver disc and my salvaged $3 Discman still owns them.

Art Nouveau Tree [Payson 17/52]

2010-12-08T23:40:00.000-07:00

Untitled [Payson 16/52]

2010-11-30T00:58:00.001-07:00

Moon over Walgreens [Payson 15/52]

2010-11-22T22:31:00.001-07:00

I love this photo. I grabbed it out of my car window while waiting for a green light. The caption on the sign was serendipity. I didn't even notice it when I shot it.

And Forgotten Shoes just passed 300 views on Flikr. What a trip.

Photo Contest Photo Contested

2010-11-17T13:41:00.000-07:00

I'd actually love to judge a photo contest, but I don't have thick enough skin. And you need it, because while there is no disputing matters of taste, everyone will dispute your taste. There are no good or bad photos, it seems, just good or bad judges.

I think anyone who is foolish enough to host a photo contest gets what they deserve, and the British Journal of Photography was given both barrels this past week for the winning image they selected for the single image category of their International Photography Award:

Man asleep on the Golden Mile, Durban, South Africa, by Michelle Sank

There are dozens of negative comments posted in response to the original BJP announcement and their subsequent defense of their choice. Their basic defense is that this image "defies simple photographic convention" and challenges the viewer. In saying that it "defies simple photographic convention," what they actually mean (I think) is that it's technically unimpressive and ambiguous. That is certainly the critical consensus.

Being unconventional might or might be a virtue for the judges. Commentators and bloggers have effectively said it is in fact very conventional, a conventionally unsuccessful photo. A prizewinning photograph, they say, especially outside of a body of work, has to provide its own context to be intelligible. It does that both by choice of subject and its technical execution. And ambiguity is not necessarily polyvalence or depth. A photo that can communicate anything communicates nothing. The original announcement called this a striking "image of poverty," but that was later revised because there is nothing to indicate that the subject is a poor person (the photographer indicated otherwise). The subsequent defense, by one of the judges, makes this lack of clarity about the subject a virtue. He says, it "challenged my assumptions about photography." Critics say it certainly challenges assumptions about good photography, if we were to all agree this is good.

Much of this furor is just a collision between artworld and realworld. The judge's comments make this plain enough. But few photographers are interested in artworld photography and its frequent eschewal of traditional photographic values. And after all, this photo was given a photography award by a photography magazine, not an art award by an art magazine. No sane editor could present this to a body of photography enthusiasts and expect a positive response. I don't think it succeeds even as art. I expect the panel of judges were photographers trying to select something that looked like artworld art, not artworlders who happened to settle upon this photograph.

Though maybe this is just another referendum on the futility of photo contests. As one commenter says, "This is why photography contests, in general, are quite stupid. . . . On the one hand you get judges who get their jollies from picking bland and impenetrable pictures and on the other, literalist morons (see this comment thread) who can understand postcard shots but not much more. In the end, no one comes out ahead."

Stop [Payson 14/52]

2010-11-14T19:50:00.000-07:00

Ten Great Recordings (Pt. 2)

2010-11-10T20:49:00.001-07:00

I'm listening right now to a 1959 recording of bassist Oscar Pettiford, Vienna Blues. It sounds more pristine than probably 99% of the pop and rock recorded and released this year. When I first started listening to jazz, I found it incredible that music recorded in the 50s could sound better than most music released today. The 50s and 60s were a gilded age for recording, a combination of great studios, great engineers, great taste, and surprisingly great technology. So at least one reissue from that age of legend needs to be included here.

Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1992 Mastersound Gold CD) [SBM CK64403] - This 1959 recording is the #1 jazz album of all time. It was recorded at the famous Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York, a former church with the best recording acoustics of any studio, ever. It's been issued in an endless stream of editions, but this release is the first to fix a pitch issue that affected side one. The primary 3-track tape machine that they used to record it was running slightly fast during the side-one session. This Mastersound Gold CD was the first edition that used an alternate, correct-speed side-one master (the "safety" master), which had been lost since before 1984. It is expensive and rare, but the most recent 2009 Legacy edition, easily found, is also very good. This 2009 reissue is based on a 1997 remaster, which used an original vintage deck for the transfer, and has been much praised. It's warmer, more analogue, and has less stereo separation, and also less bite. But I personally think 1992 Gold release is the best there is. It sounds like you're right in the session.

Dayna Kurtz, Another Black Feather (2006) - A new discovery, this is a great album of eclectic Americana from a brilliant but obscure artist. A reviewer of an earlier Kurtz album lamented, "there's no logical reason why singer-songwriter Dayna Kurtz is not a full-blown star." It seems like the smaller the label and more obscure the artist, the better the sound quality of the album. Forget the majors; support the indies.

Nirvana, Nevermind (1991) - My blog's name comes from a Nirvana lyric, but I have to mention them in this list due to the great production of their records. Nevermind was produced by Butch Vig, mixed by Andy Wallace, and mastered by Howie Weinberg. Weinberg did the mastering all by himself. Given a free hand, he could do, and did do, superlative work. Instrument separation is superb, the guitars crunch, the bass has grunt, the drums hit hard. This is what rock should sound like. Nirvana's next (and last) studio album, In Utero (1993), was produced by enfant terrible producer Steve Albini, whose records are always technical gems. Rounding out a trifecta of recording excellence, Nirvana's MTV Unplugged (1994) is as beautiful and shiny as really depressing music can be. When "Polly" starts, you feel just like you're sitting with Curt, Krist and Dave right there on stage.

ZZ Top, Tres Hombres (1973) [2006 remaster] - ZZ Top's back catalog has been rereleased in really excellent remasters. This is no small thing, since most rock remasters are worse than the original issues, due to loudness war compression aggression. But the vinyl remaster of Tres Hombres was done By Steve Hoffman and the CD remaster by Bob Ludwig. These are two of the best mastering engineers in the business. The vinyl is said to be a bit more dynamic than the CD, but the CD/digital version is still very good. This great reissue is partly an act of penance, since all previous CD issues are based on an early digital remaster that was really heinous. "La Grange" has never sounded better or boogied harder.

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Mojo (2010) - This is Petty's first Heartbreakers album in eight years, and was worth the wait. I'd singled this out for inclusion here based the fact that it's been released in CD and vinyl, naturally, but also in downloadable 24/48 hi-res audio format. The CD is, sadly, a victim of loudness war compression, but the vinyl and hi-res digital are pristine. One of the reasons for this, it turns out, is that the tracks were recorded live in the Heartbreakers' rehearsal space. No studio slicing and dicing. Live recording rules.

Bonus: Sam Cooke at the Copa (1964) [2003 remaster] - A reviewer in The Absolute Sound (Oct/Nov 2003, 139-40) said this may be the most realistic recording of the human voice he had ever heard. Restored by Steve Rosenthal and mastered by the great Bob Ludwig. The SACD in 5.1 surround is said to be astonishing, but even the standard CD/digital release is very good. This was recorded before I was born, but I put on my 'phones and I'm right there. Reminds me of an anecdote. A passerby at an audio show asked a rep how much a certain turntable was. "$25,000." "Wow, that seems a bit expensive for a record player." An audiophile standing nearby replies, "But that's really cheap for a time machine."

Ten Great Recordings (Pt. 1)

2010-11-09T10:41:00.001-07:00

Right now I'm listening to a live CD by Patricia Barber, Companion (1999). My hair is standing on end. This is an audiophile recording, captured with 32 mics by a very talented sound engineer, Jim Anderson. Even on my decent-but-modest headphone rig, it sounds like I'm sitting right at the stage. I can occasionally hear a glass clink behind me in the audience. It's completely immersive.

Every time I listen to a recording like this, I wonder why most recordings, on a technical level, fail to sound even half as good. Live recordings often sound much better than studio recordings, benefiting from less slicing, dicing and production. So there is that. I've already discussed the loudness war. The producer's tastes and engineers' competence also have much to do with it. And sometimes magic just happens. Usually it doesn't.

I treasure like rare and shiny seashells albums that transcend the disappointing average. I wish I liked classical music more, because recording standards for classical are generally very high. But I couldn't recommend a single classical recording. Jazz recordings likewise are often engineered to very high standards, and I like jazz. Pop and rock are very hit or miss, mostly miss. Metal is a complete write-off.

Part of the problem is that very dense music, like rock or metal, fills up too much sonic space to permit rich dynamics. Jazz, folk, and even country breathes in a way heavier music just cannot. So the following selection of sonically great albums is necessarily skewed to "light" music. I also avoid rare stuff (MFSL, Japanese SHM-CD releases, etc.). Most of these are easily found on Zune, my preferred music service, or of course iTunes.

Melody Gardot, Worrisome Heart (2008) - This first album by breakout jazz artist Melody Gardot is not only beautifully recorded and mastered, it's simply beautiful. One of my favorite albums, period. Her 2009 sophomore offering, My One And Only Thrill, is also excellent in all respects, but not quite as intimate, using full orchestration.

Jenny Lewis, Acid Tongue (2008) - This second album from Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis is another personal all-time favorite. The album would be brilliant no matter how badly produced, but the recording and mastering may be the best you will ever hear on a rock album. When the chorus comes in on the title track, I guarantee you will get chills. The stereo mastering is almost binaural. It sounds like you're standing right in the studio with them.

Rebecca Pidgeon, Retrospective (2003) - This "Best of" compilation was issued by Chesky as a Hybrid SACD, meaning it has both CD and SACD layers. It is an audiophile disc and tracks from it are found are various audiophile sampler CDs. I find the disc a little uneven, but the best tracks ("Spanish Harlem," "Auld Lang Syne") are a delight. All of Pidgeon's recordings are very well engineered.

Brad Paisley, Time Well Wasted (2005) - This has been praised as one of Paisley's best albums, with especially strong songwriting. I wanted to include at least one country album here, and the recording and production work on Time Well Wasted is quite good. The instrumental break "Time Warp," for example, is dense but shows great instrument separation and placement, and sparkling dynamics. I think country music is typically less abused in mastering that pop and rock, where producers just want it LOUD LOUD LOUD.

Andrew Bird - Noble Beast (Deluxe Edition) (2009) - Andrew Bird is one of the most talented musicians that almost no one has ever heard of. One reviewer described him as a "hyper-literate singer/songwriter, genre-bending violin player, and peerless whistler." I saw him first on Austin City Limits and he blew me away. This a great album and well produced.

Just Too Loud

2010-11-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

Much contemporary recorded music sounds absolutely awful, and it has nothing to do with the music itself. The recording industry has been waging amongst itself a loudness war. You may have noticed that of you play an older CD next to a newer CD, the older CD is much quieter. You have to turn up the volume, sometimes quite a lot, to hear it. Louder is not better; it's the sound of war.

All recorded music has a fixed dynamic range, the volume difference between the loudest and the softest sounds. The reason new CDs sound louder is because they are mastered very "hot." All sounds are pushed to be as loud as possible by compressing the dynamic range, even to the pointing of clipping or distorting it. This is sometimes called "brickwalling" since it turns the sound wave into a solid brick of noise.

When everything is made loud, the music sounds flat and harsh, and it's extremely fatiguing to listen to. I suffered from this auditory fatigue for years, listening to newer music, but had no idea what I was experiencing. I just knew there was music I liked that I couldn't stand to listen to for long at all. When I was first made aware of the loudness war, it floored me. Record labels are purposely mastering their music to be unlistenable. For the love heaven, why?

The theory behind all this is that the songs that "jump out" at the listener when they come on the radio, or Pandora, or in iTunes samples, will be the ones they like the most and buy. This is driven purely by marketing. The labels could care less about the music. They have always pushed loudness, but older technologies were prohibitive. With vinyl records, the needle will jump out of the groove if it's mastered too hot. This is one reason why contemporary albums that are released in both vinyl and digital formats sound much better on vinyl. The vinyl is mastered, necessarily, with a lot more dynamic range.

Fortunately, the loudness war has gotten increasing negative press in recent years [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and Greg Milner's excellent book Perfecting Sound Forever has a great chapter on it. Rank and file fans are slowly becoming aware of it. There was quite an uproar in 2008 when Metallica's Death Magnetic was released. The CD version was mastered insanely hot, but the version used for Guitar Hero was an alternative master (or pre-master) that was much less dynamically compressed. The difference is easy to see and hear, and almost 22,000 fans petitioned for a remaster of the CD. The producers defended their work, refusing to remaster, and most fans probably just ended up torrenting a copy of the Guitar Hero version.

For all this, I don't know that things are changing that much. Most listeners could care less how bad something sounds. Blasted out of crappy computer speakers or throwaway earbuds, everything sounds tinny and clipped anyway. I can still listen to some brickwalled music in small doses, but I'm attracted far more to music that is well recorded and mastered. This has actually shaped my tastes. More on good recordings next post.

Train Graffiti #2 [Payson 13/52]

2010-11-06T20:14:00.000-06:00

Shoe Fetishists

2010-11-05T00:38:00.000-06:00

When I took the picture below of some kid's shoes at a playground, I knew it was a good photo, though I didn't even bother getting off my bike to shoot it. It was just a little found gem, no effort required. After I posted it in August, it was noticed by a group admin on Flickr and invited into a Lost Shoes pool. It was my first pool invite and I was flattered.

But tonight that same photo has just passed 200 views, meaning, over 200 people have seen the thumb and pulled up the full-size image for viewing. It's like having 200 people bump into one of your blog posts and actually bother to read it. This is huge, for me. My next most viewed photo has just 24 views. So I confess, I'm really feeling the love.

Sometimes You Get What You Pay For

2010-11-03T18:25:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned the other week, I've dug around a time or two in the camera bin at the local goodwill looking for toy cameras. Most of the bin cameras are point-and-shoots dating from the 80s and 90s. Most probably don't work (there's no way of knowing) and are only fit for recycling. But some of them, for what they are, were the best of their kind in their day. I bought one such and ran a roll through it.

Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 80

I had almost this exact camera years ago. Many of the early photos of my daughter were shot with it, so I picked this specimen up partly out of nostalgia. As you see, I paid $3 for it. The battery to run it cost twice that. Most of these cameras run on CR123A or CR2 batteries. Add in film and they were not cheap to run, but they were very advanced cameras. Multi-element glass lens, excellent autofocus and metering, auto DX (ISO) sensing, auto film advance (auto everything, in fact), and a very smart clamshell design. It would have been at least $200 new. These were produced right up until just ten years ago or less. Digital killed this little guy before his time.

Everything works on it, but the lens suffers from some kind of horrific flare. This is not normal. I'm guessing one of the internal lens elements has come loose. The photos still come out decent, if you can ignore the flare. But you can't. In most photos, it's just awful.

Sometimes cheap or defective cameras produce photos that are so bad they're good, but that's not the case here. I just got what I paid for. Junk. It's headed back to recycling.

The Resistance

2010-11-01T17:12:00.001-06:00

Jeffery Goldberg's account of the new TSA security pat-down procedures had me gasping with laughter one minute and sputtering with indignation the next. The TSA has introduced more invasive pat-downs for people opting out of their irradiating, genital-imaging full-body scans, primarily, it seems, to induce them to submit to the scanning. All of which, as Goldberg shows elsewhere, is pointless "security theater." You have to give it up for Goldberg. Bluffing your way through TSA security with a fake boarding pass, wearing a Bin Laden t-shirt, just to show how pointless this grossly expensive and personally humiliating system is? Gonzo, man.

Ditch Witch [Payson 12/52]

2010-10-31T20:04:00.003-06:00

Something for Halloween. Sort of.

Added by invitation to the Flickr Ditch Witch group on Nov. 9, 2010.

Drama Queen

2010-10-30T18:30:00.001-06:00

Out of 234 posts here to date, only 7 are tagged "humor." I'm not humor challenged, I don't think, though I'm not really a comedy fan either. I find stand-up painful and most sit-coms unwatchable (30 Rock is a glorious exception). I usually like my humor dark, subversive and smart. Then again, Steve Carrell had me in tears during some scenes of Get Smart, and I like Will Smith even in his (many) really bad movies. Maybe my funnybone is just selective.

Or maybe I just feel a bit cheap reblogging "funny videos," which often feel like spam. Probably because they are just spam when they miss, and most funny videos sent to me do miss. I don't want become a humor spammer myself.

Well, I'll take my chances with this one. It's smart and even British. It still may be a cheap reblog, but how can it miss?

A Dose of Bliss

2010-10-29T21:56:00.001-06:00

Bombs from Yemeni terrorists, a looming election catastrophe, Pontiac headed for the guillotine . . . it's all a bit much. Digging around for some soothing music, I ended up listening to some trip hop from more than a decade ago, which in musical terms makes it pretty long in the tooth. But the 90s was bumper season for electronic chill-out music of all sorts. The British made some of the best of it, certainly due to their massive club scene. Trip hop itself is (or was) entirely a British thing.

I find trip hop blissful and dreamy. Some people find it gloomy. Meh, maybe a bit. Make up your own mind. Portishead is probably the best known trip hop artist in the States. Most people have heard at least Glory Box and Sour Times at some point. This live performance completely nails it and has perfect sound. (Long live YouTube!) Massive Attack is, well, massive in Europe, but I only bumped into them last year. "Black Milk" off of Mezzanine features vocals by Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins.

Statins

2010-10-27T14:57:00.000-06:00

I went to see my "doctor" (Jay the nurse) the other day to get a prescription renewed (sleeping pills). He has long been hassling me for a copy of my lipid profiles. I get them done every couple years through my job. So I brought them in. My total cholesterol was a bit high at 237. The Mayo Clinic rates 240 as too high; other groups say 200; but in any case, it's not exactly freakout high. But he tut-tutted. "Let's see, you're 42? Well, it's time to get you started on statins." As if it's just what you do at 42.

Jay the nurse is an idiot, always has been, but I go to him because he just gives me my damn prescriptions without major hassles. This, however, really irked me. I'm 42 and in otherwise good health, and he wants to put me on a liver-altering drug with ambiguous benefits, numerous side-effects, and unguessable long-term negative consequences, for the rest of my life.

"No, thanks. I'll lose some more weight." "Won't do any good," he says absently, not looking up. Jay really is an idiot. "No," I say flatly, "I won't take statins." Now he looks up. Awkward pause. "Ok," he says. "Uh, can I listen to your heart?"

He says I have a murmur, previously unnoticed by anyone, oddly enough. Maybe he didn't factor in the anger-fueled adrenaline pumping into it. I'm trying to be worried about that murmur, but I've never noticed it on thirty-mile bike rides or pressing 80-pound dumbbells. I don't feel like I'm about to drop dead. And I'm not taking statins.

Statins lower "bad cholesterol" (LDL), produced in the liver, by altering liver function. They are also anti-inflammatory and do many other things, intended and unintended. There is a string of theories going back to the 50s that high cholesterol causes arteriosclerosis, or heart disease. The theory, which has gone through several incarnations, is clearly not based entirely on science. It's always been a facile answer to a complex question. There is a society of researchers that oppose it entirely [1], and the ever-lucid Gary Taubes explains the basic grounds for skepticism. [2]

But this "lipid hypothesis" gained so much traction that Big Pharma saw enormous profit potential. Statins lower LDL cholesterol, indisputably, and are now the second most commonly prescribed medicine behind psychiatric meds. As a bazillion-dollar profit center, they have been marketed to doctors with unparalleled vigor. And clearly this marketing has been successful. They were first approved for the treatment of heart attack victims with advanced heart disease. Now they are prescribed to healthy 40-somethings. It's been seriously proposed that they be sold with hamburgers, as a sort of antidote to fast food. [3] They'll start putting them in our drinking water any day now.

I'm not giving medical advice here, but am advocating self-education. Google around and you'll see that, whatever Big Pharma may say, statins carry serous risks that are gradually being exposed, including an increased risk of diabetes [4, 4a], testosterone suppression [5], and long-known problems like muscle myopathy, memory loss and other neural issues, liver toxicity (of course), and various bowel and flu-like symptoms. I like this real-world perspective from an Amazon commentator:

Compounded with the downsides, the actual benefits are ambiguous. Studies of benefits have been tainted by money, and surveys of studies reveal that while statins may help elderly patients with advanced coronary heart disease (CHD), there is no evidence that all the statins being given to the rest of us, even to people at high risk for CHD, actually reduce mortality at all. [7, 8, 9] And even when helpful, it may be due to statins' anti-inflammatory benefits (like aspirin) rather than its impact on lipids. [10]

Statins are big money for Big Pharma, which spends billions on "physician education" (marketing); in fact, twice as much as it does on research, "US$61,000 in promotion per physician during 2004" ($57.5 billion total). [11] Remember who is educating your physician and make an informed choice for yourself. Heart disease rates are still insanely high, in spite of us gobbling up statins. I think I'll take my chances with an old-school remedy: diet and exercise.

Toy Cameras

2010-10-24T18:23:00.000-06:00

I've had a bit of fun lately with toy cameras, which really are cameras but not usually toys. "Toy camera" is a term of art for simple cameras with a plastic body and lens. Most are cheap and look at least a bit toy-like, but as cult objects some can in fact be quite expensive. Most are film, either 35mm or medium format, though the category of digital toy cameras is becoming better defined and is growing. Google will teach you all you want to know, but see here and here and here. This one was $2 from a goodwill shop and is clearly a toy toy camera.

Still trying to the work up the courage to use this in public.

Toy cameras are very simple point-and-click affairs. They have a fixed focus and no exposure controls. That means you just load them up with fast film, stand back at least four feet or so from a well-lit subject, and trip the shutter. The picture turns out or it doesn't. Amazingly, it usually does. Though it will probably look like it was taken with a toy camera.

Which is the half the fun. Pictures from toy cameras are lo-fi and wonderfully flawed. Poor contrast, softness, distortion, light leaks, and all manner of random weirdness. Some photos are just bad and others are so bad they're good. Just depends on the camera and many unguessable variables. You never really know what you'll get, which is the other half of the fun. It's so cool that they make iPhone apps to simulate it. But accept no substitutes. Using film is part of the experience. Since every shot costs you money, it feels a bit like playing the slots. You only find out how much you lost or won when you pick up your prints from the printer.

Enthusiasts scour second-hand shops for toy cameras. The odd thing is that you will be sorting though a bin of $5 cameras, looking for one that came free with a magazine subscription or with a Malibu Barbie, and tossing aside film point-and-shoots that cost a couple hundred bucks just twenty years ago. I recently pulled one of those out of a bin, too, and will blog the results later. Some of those eighties p&s cameras were engineering marvels. But I find that toy cameras, cameras that take bad pictures by design, are just more interesting.

Train Graffiti #1 [Payson 11/52]

2010-10-23T00:10:00.000-06:00

An Argument for the Obvious

2010-10-22T14:58:00.000-06:00

David Pogue of the Times, who I do not much enjoy, nevertheless made an argument for the obvious that is worth reblogging. In fact, everyone should reblog this until software designers get a clue. From Pogue's review of the new Office 2011 for Mac:

The Mac suite now includes the Ribbon, a horizontal toolbar that’s built into Office for Windows. What I don’t get is this: Last time I checked, computer screens were all wider than they are tall. The last thing you’d want to do is to eat up that limited *vertical* screen space with interface clutter like the Ribbon. Don’t we really want those controls off to the *side,* like as with the Formatting Palette in the previous Mac Office?
In my previous post I mentioned that most computer LCDs now adhere to a squished 16:9 format, mimicking wide-screen TVs. Lots of width, little height. You have to spend big to get a taller 16:10 monitor, $500 or more, and the squarish 4:3 monitors of old are long gone. If you actually use your computer monitor for reading, as more than a few people do, you want a tall screen rather than a wide one. Optimal line width for reading is constrained (traditionally, 66 characters is considered the ideal). Our brains cannot effectively parse long lines. You can't just stretch Word docs or web pages across your massive 1920 screen. If you want more text on screen, you can only go taller. And all computer workers want to read more and scroll less.

Software design has ignored these facts, constantly cramming more and more into the tops and bottoms of our screens. Software and system controls needs to be designed vertically for modern superwide desktops. In this respect, the palette in the previous version of Office for Mac was obvious and brilliant. I've always wished it would find it's way onto the PC. Microsoft has now homogenized the platforms on that account, but in entirely the wrong direction. Oh well. One less reason to feel Mac envy.

Dizzy

2010-10-21T23:43:00.006-06:00

Google gave a graphic shout out to Dizzy Gillespie today on what would have been his 95th birthday (he died in 1993).

I just really discovered jazz about a year ago. After going to a number of concerts and digging into some recordings, I decided it was time to really figure it out. This music that is so compelling but so hard to appreciate. So I watched the Ken Burns documentary (yes, all of it), picked up a couple great books, and started digging into some best-album lists to see which recordings jazz enthusiasts put at the top.

One thing you quickly see is that jazz, from our perspective now, had a brief golden age that produced the preponderance of the top 100 albums. The magic years were from about 1950-65, with it peaking in the late fifties. This music can generally be termed modern jazz, and the varieties developed in the 40s and 50s continue, for all its evolution, to still define jazz today.

The first incarnation of modern jazz was bebop, which changed jazz from dance music (swing) to musicians music. The two main innovators of bebop were Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. It's because of bebop that jazz today is one of two academic musical genres (the other being classical). It's hard stuff. Hard to listen to and very hard to play. It was created by virtuosos who could not repress themselves, even when people often reacted to their music with shock and dislike. But Gillespie played his music his way his whole life, becoming enormously influential. He is certainly one of the five most important musicians in the history of jazz. The man deserves some respectful thought occasionally, and today was a day for it.

Here's something sweet and cool from Diz.

Dizzy Gillespie Quintet - Tin Tin Deo

True Colors

2010-10-21T00:34:00.000-06:00

Anyone who uses a computer ten or more hours a day, like I do, appreciates two things above all else: a good chair and a good monitor. Chairs are easy. Just sell a kidney and buy yourself a Leap. Trust me.

Monitors are harder. Most people just want big and bright, and they want it cheap. The market has responded with a flood of 21.5" to 24" 1920x1080 ("full HD") LCDs. You can buy them any day of the week starting at $170 or less.

But LCD technology is not monolithic. All LCD monitors use the same basic technology, called TFT, but there are various subtypes. At work I use a 5 year-old Dell 2405FPW 24" LCD that has a PVA panel. When introduced, it was probably about $1200.

PVA technology is still used on some high-end monitors. Rather than the now-prevalent 1920x1080 (16:9 ratio), it is sized at 1920x1200 (16:10 ratio). This extra height makes two-page reading much more enjoyable. My old Dell also displays color at full 8-bit color depth (16,777,216 colors).

But all of the big, cheap LCD monitors you see today are based on TN panels. They are at most only 1920x1080, which is fine for movies but lousy for on-screen reading. I personally use my monitor more for reading than movies, but "Great for Reading!" is apparently an unconvincing marketing point.

TN panels are bright and fast, as well as cheap, but they achieve this by compromise: they only display 6-bit color (262,144 colors). They then "simulate" the full 8-bit color gamut with various dithering techniques, which compared side-by-side with true 8-bit color are immediately seen as unconvincing. They also have little stand adjustability, poor viewing angles, uneven backlighting, poor blacks, color casting, clouding and other problems. My cheap Acer monitor at home has all these problems at once.

The best monitors today use IPS panels. All IPS monitors are 8-bit true color (or higher) and have wide viewing angles. They also tend to have much better backlighting and, well, better everything. IPS monitors used to be much more expensive than TN, starting around $500. New IPS technology (e-IPS) has brought down the cost of entry-level IPS monitors dramatically, starting under $250. You still get more when you pay more (wider gamut, better performance, 1920x1200 or higher), but reviews of entry-level models have been positive.

In a post the other week I included a flower photo I made with a Canon EOS-1Ds MkII. It looked wonderful on my 8-bit work monitor, with perfect detail and great color. On my craptastic 6-bit monitor at home, though, the colors were smeared and garish, and some fine details obliterated.

Photographers spend big on great monitors. It's vital to both the
enjoyment of photography and the production of great photos. I'll never settle again for a cheap TN monitor. True color is a must.

Chamber of Commerce [Payson 10/52]

2010-10-19T23:29:00.000-06:00

The New Gap Logo

2010-10-15T17:48:00.005-06:00

So Gap has . . . well, had a new logo. For about a week. In case you missed it in the news:

Public flogging has rarely been so entertaining. The new logo appeared on Oct. 4, and the instantaneous and universal mockery of it probably had the designers cleaning out their desks that same day. It would take a dissertation to map the full dimensions of the response.

The site craplogo.me went up straight away, turning whatever text you like into a version of the new logo. A faux Twitter account was created for the logo to explain itself ("The blue square is a scratch-n-sniff"). Eloquent descriptions of its utter failure flooded design and advertising sites. "[It's like] that awkward cap-sleeved tee with the rhinestone letters you find while thrift shopping that’s neither vintage nor new, but definitely not cool.” [1] An interview with the new logo probed its feelings: "The only way to deal with the pain is comfort eating. Pretty soon I'll be type set in Helvetica Neue Black." [2] Deconstructions of the public outcry are appearing. [3] Vanity Fair posted an obit: "The logo passed after a brief and ignominious battle with stage IV banality." [4]

I agree that the design totally blows. With the typeface they chose (Helvetica 75 Bold), placed next to a blue superset window, it reminds me of the the startup screen for Windows XP. I've lost many hours staring at that screen, and I hate it. Anyway, there is nothing interesting about the new logo. It looks undesigned. The blog iso50 has a thread with over 300 user-submitted designs. Subtracting a few that are intended purely as comic, almost every one is better than the new logo. And these were just tossed out.

What went wrong? The amount spent on the redesign was probably staggering. Perhaps millions. That was certainly the heart of the problem. There was no room in this for individual creativity and genius. It was thoroughly a committee product. And some senior decider, a non-designer, was probably really fond of that Windows XP logo. Probably Gap NA president Marka Hansen. [5] I guarantee that person still has their job. The suits never take the fall.

The passion of the public outcry shows what ownership the public feels for corporate branding. We are a consumer society. We co-opt corporate identity as our own identity. If I wear Gap chinos, that logo is my logo, too. And the chino-wearing public has spoken: Hands off my logo.

Blahg Post

2010-10-14T00:35:00.003-06:00

I have the blogging blahs. Mostly due to mental fatigue, and otherwise due to the futility of trying to blog anything that at least 1,436 other bloggers, at that very moment, are not also blogging. There is nothing new under the sun, just endless recombinations.

So I'm just going to blog a few other blogs that I wish were mine. They deal with photography. Naturally. But otherwise, their virtue lies in their narrow topical focus. The essence of art is relentless topicality. Too tired to say much, but here's a half-dozen.

1. 5b4 - A blog on photobooks by a connoisseur's connoisseur. Brilliant books, most of them way off the beaten path, and exceptionally well reviewed.

2. Shorpy - This site posts a new hi-res scan of a historic photographic plate daily. I time-trip on it every single day, and the photography is usually technically impressive. Very impressive. We've now mastered color, but otherwise you quickly learn from Shorpy that still photography reached its technical crescendo a full century ago.

3. tokyo camera style - Nothing but photos of (mostly classic) film cameras that the blogger spots on the streets of Japan. The Japanese love their cameras. I'm staggered by the classics and exotica this guy finds everywhere in common use. Anyone for, say, a pristine Polaroid press camera?

4. Unhappy Hipsters - Another blog that proves every possible subject already has a blog dedicated to it. This one is a subversive critique of the contempory (well, 80 year-old) fetish for the minimalist aesthetic. I'm personally smitten with both minimalism and hipsterism, so this site leaves me rolling. See this post for a keen commentary on it from a photographer's perspective.

5. Prison Photography - This site is as titled: a blog about the photography of prisons. But its purpose, otherwise, is to shine a bright light on the need for prison and sentencing reform. A sustained visual meditation on the socially invisible practice of incarceration.

6. The Photography Post - A live feed aggregator for over 100 of the very smartest photography sites on the Web. Two of the preceding sites (5b4 and Prison Photography) are covered. I've only sampled a few others there so far, but they have been similarly impressive. This is a note to self: go and browse with high intent. An impressive resource.

Digger [Payson 9/52]

2010-10-09T11:39:00.000-06:00

Test Driving a $10,000 Camera

2010-10-05T22:09:00.004-06:00

My job in times past has sometimes involved document photography, for which we've used various high-end commercial and professional cameras. I've never used this gear myself. I'm a project supervisor, not a technician. We no longer do this kind of work ourselves, but a pile of our old gear is temporarily parked in my office. Looking at it the other day, I realized I've never pulled any of it out for a test drive. And since it's the nicest equipment I'll probably ever touch, it suddenly seemed irresistible to take it for a spin while I had the chance.

The best digital camera we have is a Canon EOS-1Ds MkII. The 1Ds is Canon's flagship model, though the MkII version is a generation old. Its dinky 2" LCD tells its age, but it's still a thoroughbred and built for serious combat. With a beefy Canon 28-70mm f/2.8L lens on it, it weighs almost six pounds. I was really starting to notice the weight after just 30min. But I would expect it to contain a bit of metal. The camera cost $8000 new and the lens about $1200. Just the filter on the front cost more than the last compact camera I purchased.

So what's it like using a $10,000 camera? Not so simple. It took me 15min just to figure out how to run it. Three screens, lots of buttons, a single dial (no knobs), and menuing that is completely unlike other Canon DSLRs. I shamefully had to consult the manual.

But shooting with it was a lot of fun. The first time I held it up to my eye was a revelation. The viewfinder is the biggest and brightest of any Canon. Compared to a Rebel-class viewfinder, this baby is IMAX. And then I pushed the shutter, and jumped with surprise. The shutter response is crisp and instantaneous, and sounds amazing. If this were a car, that shutter sound would be the throaty snarl of a Ferrari V12.

The 1Ds MkII has a 16mp full-frame sensor, which means that unlike most DSLRs, there is no crop factor for 35mm lenses. This also demands more of the lens. I was surprised to find that even with this premium L-series lens there was vignetting in the corners when shot wide open at 28mm. The filter may be a bit to blame, though this is a known problem with this lens on this camera. The 1Ds simply demands more of the lens than the film cameras it was originally designed for.

One big upside of a full-frame camera is you have a shallow depth of field that both gives you more creative options and imparts what has come to be regarded as "that pro look" (since compacts can't do it). This lens allows close focus to about 1.5ft, at all focal lengths, which for a non-macro lens is very good. It lets you do this (random desk shot, sorry):

This lens produces fantastic color and contrast, especially for a zoom. I am not a flower photographer, but flowers were what I had to photograph nearby. And I have to admit, the light was perfect and the results beguiled me. My only disappointment is how easy it was to get commercial-quality images with such a great camera and lens. Even just 10 years ago pros were sweating at their craft with fussy Hasselblads and Fuji Velvia slide film to produce work that, in technical terms, was inferior to what a rank amateur like me could get 20 minutes after picking up this camera for the first time.

Pipes [Payson 8/52]

2010-10-02T01:40:00.000-06:00

Please Do Not Feed [Payson 7/52]

2010-09-26T15:33:00.000-06:00

Kindle in the House

2010-09-23T22:58:00.013-06:00

In an interesting turnabout, Tani has become the new technophile in our house. First she bought a new Zune HD, then a very swish new computer, and this past week she got herself a Kindle. As for me, I mostly listen to an old hand-me-down ipod nano, my computer is an ugly beige retro-tower from the 90s, and I'm buying and reading more old-fashioned tree-based books than I have for years.

And honestly, I don't want a Kindle. No interest at all. First, I'm no longer willing to pay just to read something. I read on the internet for free constantly. I read books at my university for free constantly. So I've become unwilling to pay for words just to read them. Words are so plentiful and cheap that I can no longer see in them any economic value. And in fact, there is almost nothing I could possibly purchase on the Kindle that I could not get for free by other means. I see Kindle book purchases as the buying of a convenience, and for a mere convenience, the price per unit is far too high.

My second issue with the Kindle is that I read from a screen continuously. I spend more time "interacting" with words on a screen than I do with human beings by a ratio of probably 10 to 1. That's a conservative guess, and I'm really not joking. And I regard it as a sterile and numbing activity, an activity demanded by necessity. If I could sustain employment and feed my interests through purely analog means, that would be my strong preference. But books are just too inefficient to fill most informational needs. I'm surrounded by several hundred books in my office all day every day, and rarely is one taken off the shelf. Internet resources have long surpassed their academic utility, and that makes me very sad.

My need for analog is one reason why I've been buying paper books lately. No surprise, mostly I buy and read books of photography or on photography. As I've written (here, here, here), the printing of photographic images has reached such a peak of high art that it can now approximate a photographic print. Viewing such books is an intensely aesthetic experience and, by extension, owning them feels like collecting art. It is collecting art, but very often at pulp paperback prices. I still don't know how, economically, one can buy a $50 coffee-table book, new in shrinkwrap, for $5. But it thrills me.

Most surprising to me is that I now find my experience of reading an analog book much more immersive than I ever remember it being. Maybe I've just forgotten, or maybe I'm at a different place in life. It's not just that I lose myself more completely in the book. I swear I feel a more intense connection to the content, the characters, the ideas than I do when reading on screen. Books and LCDs convey information equally well, but I find I have a relationship with print that I do not have with pixels.

Maybe I am just an analog man, but I think there is something more universal to it. There is an impressive revival in vinyl record sales, now at their highest point in 20 years. Even tape cassettes are coming back. Film photography is not only surviving, but is rebounding in some segments. Kodak even just released a new film emulsion. This is not being driven by oldsters, but youngsters, who are rediscovering the joy of analog. The limits of analog are seen as creative constraints and lovable idiosyncrasies. Analog's defects, often inherent in its materiality, also make it personable, something capable of being loved.

Producer and artist Brian Eno touched on the reason for this in an article some years ago in Wired. He is speaking specifically of artistic tools, but the principles here are more general:

With tools, we crave intimacy. This appetite for emotional resonance explains why users - when given a choice - prefer deep rapport over endless options. You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits it keeps becoming something else. . . .

This is the revenge of traditional media. Even the "weaknesses" or the limits of these tools become part of the vocabulary of culture. I'm thinking of such stuff as Marshall guitar amps and black-and-white film - what was once thought most undesirable about these tools became their cherished trademark.

Since so much of our experience is mediated in some way or another, we have deep sensitivities to the signatures of different media. Artists play with these sensitivities, digesting the new and shifting the old. In the end, the characteristic forms of a tool's or medium's distortion, of its weakness and limitations, become sources of emotional meaning and intimacy.

Although designers continue to dream of "transparency" - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with "personality." A personality is something with which you can have a relationship. Which is why people return to pencils, violins, and the same three guitar chords.

Pepper Run

2010-09-21T03:02:00.003-06:00

The trunk of our car. This is how dissertations get written. Well, being Mormon, how mine is getting written. Everyone else uses gallons of coffee. The pillow and blanket? For crashing on the floor of my office when the caffeine doesn't work.

Who would want to do this?

[Revision of a much less coherent post written at 3:00AM. Sorry about that.]

American Mutton [Payson 6/52]

2010-09-18T01:08:00.000-06:00

I saw this sheep randomly grazing lawns on Main St. in Elberta (pop. 278) as I was driving through last week. The whole town is a little American Gothic. The wandering lambmower honestly didn't look too out of place. It may in fact be employed by the city to trim the verge. I did mention this was Elberta.

Aspen Stand [Payson 5/52]

2010-09-11T10:29:00.001-06:00

Tani and I drove to the top of the scenic byway above our house one evening last week, just for some high mountain air. We rarely do it. The sun was very low, setting on the aspens. We talked about retirement.

6x6 Chromes

2010-09-08T00:55:00.001-06:00

Film has of course been almost entirely replaced by digital. I own a half-dozen 35mm film cameras and have doubted I will ever use them again. For a while I thought it would be fun to set up a wet darkroom to develop and print b&w film. But although developing film is easy, darkroom printing is a difficult and mysterious art. Lifetimes are spent mastering the craft. And every experiment costs you money. This is why most people who still shoot film scan it and print digitally. Easier, cheaper, and generally better results. And even a shoot-to-scan workflow makes little sense, unless you are going after a certain film look, since it's a major expense and hassle. Sheesh, just shoot digital and be done.

But lately I've been looking at film from another perspective, valuing a different outcome. Most film uses a negative emulsion (whence, "negatives"), with reversed colors and tones. They are "unreversed" when enlarged and made into prints. Most film is negative film because it's easy to shoot (wide exposure tolerances) and easy/cheap to print.

But there is also positive, or transparency film. Transparencies are also sometimes called slides or chromes (from Kodachrome). These are not normally made to print but to project or scan. Set on a lightbox, they kind of look like luminous little prints but differ from prints in two respects. The resolution of the image is much, much higher, with very dense and fine detail. And also, because the image is projected with transmitted light (through the back) rather than using reflected light (like a print), colors and tones are much more vivid and the light in the picture looks luscious and syrupy. A lot of photographers regard chromes, even apart from the images they reproduce, as art objects.

6x6 chrome of a 35mm chrome

Some artists have taken transparencies to the next level by producing huge, even life-size transparencies, which they mount on light boxes for display. The first and most famous "luminist" is Jeff Wall, who started doing it in the late 70s. At the time it must have blown viewers away, and still they are very impressive. But today we're probably a little jaded to the beauty of transparencies because we're very used to viewing transmitted-light images. That's what computer monitors produce, even if at a fraction the resolution of chromes.

From left: 4x5, 8x10, 35mm (upper right), 6x12cm (?) (lower right)

Most people my age (40+) have probably seen 35mm film slides and I doubt it took your breath away. Too small. But I've seen large format 8"x10" transparencies, and they are stunning. Unfortunately, they take a giant view camera to expose and each exposure will cost you about $20 in film and developing. 4"x5" transparencies are also pretty impressive, but still cost about $6-7 a shot.

But medium format 6x6cm film isn't so bad, about $1.80 a shot. I could almost afford that, and I think the transparencies are just large enough to enjoy even without a magnifying loupe. 6x6 film is about 3.6x larger than 35mm. Still a bit smallish, but far less squinting required.

6x6 chromes

As I said, I have a number of 35mm cameras, but also one medium format, a Mamiya C3. It's a massive twin lens reflex (TLR) camera that my dad gave me. All TLRs are substantial, but this one's a real brick. If you drop it, don't worry about the camera, but look out for your toes. I've never used it, but I'm sure dad paid quite a lot for it, back in the day. I think it will need a service before it is ready for action, but it will certainly shoot 6x6 chromes just fine.

But $100 for the service, $30 for a cheapo light meter, then film and developing. Yeah, that first roll won't be cheap.

Towers [Payson 4/52]

2010-09-05T01:19:00.001-06:00

Coming home just as the sun was dropping behind West Mountain, I dove off the highway and cast about for anything worth shooting. I tried for the water treatment plant, but no good angles. So I turned around and started working some industrial towers. Geneva Rock and Concrete, I think. Three minutes of light left. Any light. Some quick clicks.

When I got them into PhotoShop, I thought I had nothing. Then I went a bit medieval on contrast and tone curves and hues, noise layer added to fight banding, and, surprisingly, out came something I liked. The weather towers at center, up on West Mountain, really cannot be seen in the straight photo, but in silhouette they are pronounced and important to the picture. So in it goes at week 4.

The White Stripes

2010-09-01T16:52:00.006-06:00

Most music criticism employs an absurd amount of comparison. So band X is "picking up the Minutemen math-punk thread" but with "screaming MC5 guitars," but can also sound "like a Krautrock Soft Machine" or even "Devendra Banhart piloting Little Feat." (From an actual review.) I'm not going to pretend I'll avoid this. That would be a practical impossibility, because comparison is vital to description. But I want here to start with a band that, for me, is a rock reference point so pure it almost abolishes prior art.

I first heard the White Stripes about five years ago, four albums into their career. I was just getting back into rock after a hiatus. I'd never gotten past the death of grunge or seriously listened to any rock post-Soundgarden. And being old, I didn't have friends exposing me to anything new. I don't recall how I even came across the White Stripes, but I put on their first album, and when it started into "Jimmy the Exploder," I felt like I was just hearing rock 'n roll for the first time. But that sounds quaint. Let me rephrase: It slagged my brain and I've never recovered.

The White Stripes - Jimmy the Exploder

The first two White Stripes albums (The White Stripes and De Stijl) sound like some impossibly successful sound lab experiment to reduce rock to its purest essence. Not in the sense of purely formulaic—it's actually really quirky—but pure in its effects. Those albums communicate to me the raw electricity that rock should communicate. The first one is certainly the purest, and Jack White apparently thinks as much, too: "I still feel we've never topped our first album. It's the most raw, the most powerful, and the most Detroit-sounding record we've made." Subsequent albums are good, but on the whole, decreasingly good. The problem is you can't get purer than pure.

The White Stripes is a two-piece drum and guitar duo, Jack and Meg White. (Apparently once married, though they deny it.) Meg pounds out time on her large tom with ferocious concentration, and Jack lays down raw guitar and vocals over the top. Jack White's influences are Dylan, the Stones, punk, country, and who knows what else, but he's first of all a blues-rock guitarist. Quoth Jack, "I wouldn't trust anyone who didn't love Led Zeppelin." But he's also a devotee of original Delta and Detroit blues, especially Son House, whom he covers with "Death Letter" (on De Stijl), the most electrifying blues track I've ever heard.

I think Jack White is a musical genius. That means at his best there is none better, but also that he is highly restless and erratic. His more recent ensemble experiments with the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather are not especially good. The Raconteurs made a lot of sense, really. Combine Jack White with the superb Greenhornes and you should have jam on toast. But the sum is clearly not equal to its parts.

The White Stripes are often called "garage rock" because of their raw, lo-fi sound, and they became the engine of a garage rock revival centered on Detroit. But I'd call them primal rock, what rock sounds like when it's all talent and instinct and energy, and no production. A lot of rock bands go for that sound, of course, but few succeed. There is no formula here, just eccentric genius. That rare spark was brilliantly visualized by an equally eccentric genius, French director Michel Gondry, who directed the video for "Hardest Button to Button." Best. Video. Ever. (Though you may need Dramamine.)

Bonus content: The Making of.

No Dead Tree Edition for OED3

2010-08-30T17:36:00.001-06:00

I was told by a colleague that OUP is pulling the plug on print dictionaries, but this will even include their flagship, the Oxford English Dictionary. “The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year." So OED3 will probably not appear in print. Unless it is shown that iPads and Kindles cause brain cancer and print books make an unexpected comeback.

But Simon Winchester, renowned specialist on professors and madmen (great book), thinks that unlikely, and calls the online-only edition "prescient":

Music

2010-08-29T11:53:00.003-06:00

I find myself challenged by the very nature of music. I think most people, especially past a certain age, are only casual music listeners. Radio people. Me, I rarely listen to the radio, because most music does nothing for me. In fact, I actively dislike most music. But when I hear music I really like, my brain spasms with a flood of endorphins. Like mainlining pure pleasure. It's literally a religious experience, and I don't know why. That this happens with such wide varieties and genres of music deepens the mystery.

I don't know exactly what makes good music good, but some genres I understand better than others. With mainstream country music, it's the sentimental lyrics and simple sing-a-long melodies. It's done strictly to a formula and the formula works. In fact, as Steve Leftridge has brilliantly argued, it's exactly the same successful formula as classic rock. Alt Country (at least the hard-edged Bloodshot kind) does the same thing, but replaces the sentimentality with punk attitude.

Jazz is all about constant motion, waves of chromatic tones over a highly syncopated rhythm, with an emphasis on free-flowing melody rather than chordal harmony. An instrumental soloist usually leads instead of a vocalist. It's the antithesis of post-40s popular music, which is why most of us can only enjoy it in certain moods and small doses. We're just not acculturated to it.

Classical music is just archaic. I can understand why people don't like it (archaic), but I really don't know why some people do. But there is a profile. Most classical music fans either have played an orchestral instrument, have a lot money, are stereophiles, or are old. Or all of those things.

Rock is simple on paper. Strong backbeat, 4/4 time, drum 'n bass 'n guitar(s), a basic verse/chorus structure, vocals and harmony, and lots of youthful and/or counter-cultural attitude. I mostly listen to rock, so I'm a rock fan, but most rock I hate. Especially when it conforms to the classic rock formula. With some exceptions, the more "rock" it is, the less I like it. Why is that?

The fact is, unlike jazz or country, straight genre rock exhausts the formula very quickly. This is why most rock does not fit the classical rock mold in one way or another, which broadens the scope of the term's meaning until it's almost meaningless. Rock is some kind of consensual genre that no formula can actually define. If I say, "I like rock," that could mean I like REM or Limp Bizkit or the Beatles or AC/DC. All superstar bands, but few rock fans like them all equally, or even like them at all. Whereas few jazz fans love Miles but hate Coltrane.

The fact is, rock music in the round is a highly varied and complex musical form. There is a bewildering number of subgenres, that some artists are quite happy to skip across, and it's always both self-referencing and appropriating influences from the outside. It's a connoisseur's music every bit as much as jazz. For these reasons rock is always surprising me, usually when I've all but given up on it, but finding rock I really like is an incredible challenge. Thirty seconds on Flikr and I can find photographs that thrill me. But I can spend hours reading on Pitchfork and surfing Zune, and still come up with zilch.

This ramble is actually a preamble (pre-ramble?) to some music posts I'm going to start doing, highlighting some bands, or genres, or subgenres, or whatever, that have caught my fancy. Not reviews so much as notices and appreciations. For some reason, I find music criticism the most worthless kind of criticism. I can read a couple movie reviews and know with fair accuracy if I will like a certain movie. But I can read several album reviews and have no idea if I will like an artist or album at all.

I guess (as they say) writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but blogs are read, not heard. Sorry. Right now, it's either that, or all photography all the time.

Forgotten Shoes [Payson 3/52]

2010-08-28T09:45:00.003-06:00

There are some ABCs painted on the a bike path next to a playground by my house. I was riding by and saw these shoes left carefully in the hollow of the A, no children anywhere in sight. It struck me as a wonderful bit of found art (click!) representing childhood's little misunderstood dramas. The drama occurred with the owner's mother when she went home shoeless. But for her this was the most visually appropriate place to leave her shoes, while she ran in the grass or played in the creek. She could not have been more correct.

Addendum: This photo was invited to be added to the Flickr group Lost shoes (baby or children). My first invitation! And I think the very existence of this group proves my theory that if you can imagine it, there is a group for it on Flickr.

Neurotypical Envy

2010-08-25T21:39:00.005-06:00

(Warning, this an unusually personal post . . .)

I heard a feature on NPR driving home the other day about an autistic woman named Lisa Daxer, who blogs at Reports from a Resident Alien. She discusses both in the NPR story and extensively on her blog the differences between neurotypicals and people with autism and similar handicaps. She describes her autistic self as having "a weird brain." A neurotypical (her own great term) is "anyone who doesn't have a weird brain, someone in the middle of the neurological bell curve." Her atypicality is multiplex, but most challenging is her lack of social ability. She doesn't understand other people. Her brain is just wired differently. This isn't a lack of "social skills," something the study of Dale Carnegie and Miss Manners can correct. It's a lack of neurological capacity.

I really appreciated this young woman's honesty and advocacy. I'm not autistic, but I'm certainly not a neurotypical. I suffer from social anxiety and other neuroses that have defined my life, but which I've only come to recognize as neuroses quite late. Better late than never, but I'm still stunned that it took forty years for me to recognize that my challenging personality structure was something other than just a result of moral or religious failing.

Social anxiety, for me, is not shyness or social ineptness. I can be charming, if I need to, can even light up a party, if I need to. I just feel little need to. I'm not antisocial; I'm nonsocial.

But at the root of it, in fact, is anxiety. I find conversation to be full of potential conflict, embarrassment and shame, none of which I process well. I find social expectations a burden. Most conversations, sometimes even with people very close to me, seem like a walk through a minefield. I also handle stress poorly but project it regrettably well, which is (or I imagine it to be) a drain on those close to me, which in turn prompts me to withdraw when a neurotypical would be looking for social comfort. And when other people are stressed, well, I withdraw then, too.

Even casual social interactions are challenging. I'd rather take a fork in the eye than spend two hours making polite conversation at some work or church function. It seems like meaningless suffering.

Neurotypicals find conversation and socialization as natural as breathing. As Lisa Daxer says, "By default, they socialize. You have to actually interfere to stop neurotypicals from socializing." I find that incredible. I'll continue to challenge my anxiety, but I very much doubt I will ever have the neurotypical experience of compulsive and effortless socialization.

And I admit to being a bit jealous of that. Neurotypicals have super magical powers of sociability that are completely invisible to them, even though that sociability enables them to have a plurality of healthy relationships and take social risks that are personally and economically empowering. Their sociability defines their lives as much as my lack of it defines mine. They just have no idea.

But of course, my lack is only revealed by their abundance in numbers. If the bell curve were shaped differently, I'd be the neurotypical and they'd be struggling with the burden of hypersociality. O cruel averages.

Weegee the Famous

2010-08-23T00:18:00.002-06:00

The girls are in New York City right now, so naturally I am thinking about Weegee, the most famous crime photographer of all time (wikipedia). He worked the New York crime beat in the 30s and 40s, publishing in 1945 his first book, Naked City, which became the basis for a famous noir murder mystery film of the same name. Afterward he went to work himself in Hollywood, as a photographer, actor, and inspiration for all future stereotypes of cigar-chomping news photographers.

Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Their First Murder (October 9, 1941)

A few gems on Weegee: The NY Times published this great little article on him in 2008. Fantastic five-minute read. A kind soul has also put up an mp3 of Weegee himself talking about his work from a 1958 record called, Famous Photographers Tell How. A number of books on Weegee have been published, mostly of his photography, but a few recent works also have great essays on the photographer himself. Two not-to-be-missed titles are Weegee's World (1997) and Unknown Weegee (2006)

Finally, here is a feature on Weegee that was published in the April 12, 1937, issue of Life Magazine (as always, click to enlarge). The trunk murder lead is typical of Life at this early date, under managing editor John Billings, who personally did all photo selection and layout, and who wanted his magazine to really grab readers. He was not averse to (for the time) rather racy and shocking content. But I'll post more about Life another day.

Mosaic [Payson 2/52]

2010-08-21T09:56:00.000-06:00

Artworld vs. Realworld

2010-08-18T00:04:00.007-06:00

Lately I've done a little reading on art theory and art criticism as it relates to modern photography. Perhaps the best book I've read so far is Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art. I've been fascinated to find that most contemporary art photography is, as one recent blogger summarized it, "theoretically-driven conceptual photography." I'm speaking here of that contemporary photography favored by galleries, museums and academics. In other words, the artworld. In fact, to distinguish it from other forms of non-commercial or artistic photography, I'm going to label it simply artworld photography.

As artworld photography goes, this is straightforward. No, really.

Artworld photography is a genre of photography most people never see, even in photography magazines, and when they do get dragged into a gallery to look at it, they have no idea why it's on display. Great swaths of it are driven by postmodern theory, which challenges traditional ideas of authorship and meaning a variety of ways. The net product is photography that, counterintuitively, "relies most heavily on words, whether to explain or obfuscate its meaning." It's photo-illustration, or visual performance, illustrating various artistically fashionable political or theoretical ideas. It is a theoretical exercise rather than the aesthetic or documentary exercise most people assume photographs to be.

Part of a gallery series by Thomas Struth. This is more challenging artworld fare, but typical. It is not visually interesting in any obvious way and its meaning is esoteric. Artworld art.

For these reasons, it seems few artworld photographers succeed as artworld photographers on the visual strength of their photographs alone. They invariably offer up explanatory narratives for their work that are heavy in theory and couched in the lingo of artworld in order to impart artistic meaning to their work. Or more precisely, using Arthur Danto's terms, to legitimate their work as a candidate for artistic appreciation. In fact, I expect it would be very difficult to break into the artworld with your photographs if you could not explain their value in artworld terms. Or at the very least, you must attract critics and curators (like Szarkowski) who do that for you.

Realworld photography is basically everything else. It's primarily committed to what artworlders would call a "straight" aesthetic, but it's realworld because it is democratic. You don't have to belong to a guild just to have an opinion on a photograph, as in artworld. There, first you need a certain status or credentials; then you must demonstrate an informed understanding of the photograph; then you have the right to an opinion. In realworld, you just like the damn picture or not. Democratic.

"Funeral - St. Helena, South Carolina " (1955), from Robert Frank's book, The Americans. Realworld art.

Sure, it goes deeper than that. In realworld we have our guilds or, better, clubs. You can become a connoisseur or a collector or blogger or a film fetishist and, very often, you are a photographer yourself. There is a history of the art you learn and become a part of yourself. There are of course cultural, political and historical frameworks for critical judgments. It can be as challenging as anything in artworld. But in realworld a great photograph can just be a great photograph, without having to be overtly transgressive, political, or encoded with a theoretical narrative.

Most photographers are, in fact, realworld photographers. They revere the masters of the "straight" aesthetic that became dominant about a century ago and they still work in strong dialogue with that aesthetic. They take seriously the unique qualities and genius of the medium. They regard photography as an artistic end, not as an artistic means. I'm definitely a realword partisan.

Now, I do confess, I enjoy at least some artworld photography. My biggest objection to much of it is that it is esoteric and pretentiously didactic. I find myself working hard to extract meanings that do not interest me. But I find more compelling that generous portion of photography that straddles the lines. I enjoy the democratic work of someone like Platon, whose portraits are definitely realworld, even fashion, but still is tapped for gallery shows. I guess he gets it all.

Cold Storage [Payson 1/52]

2010-08-14T21:55:00.001-06:00

A popular self-challenge among Flikrers is a 52 week project, where you post a photo a week on a certain theme, or with no theme at all, for a year. I'm going to do it for the town where I live, Payson, UT. Not because it's interesting, but it's what I have to work with. I'm starting with our newest building. It doubles as the rec center.

Motorhommage #1

2010-08-13T23:19:00.011-06:00

There is something both noble and absurd about motorhomes. In functional man-terms, they are part castle, part conveyance, though most don't serve either function well. At all. My intuition is that the main reason for their existence is to serve as symbols. Land yachts, proof of material prosperity, retirement aspirations, justification for the job you hate, or that second job, the promise of more "quality time" with the kids, the promise of relaxation and felicity and adventure and freedom, and also, or maybe primarily, phallic compensation. Just to get started.

But forget the semiotics. I find motorhomes fascinating visually. See, I love great industrial design. It moves me as art. Now motorhomes are rarely great industrial design, but they are grandiose design, and even if they don't quite move me as art, I'm convinced they are somehow fitting objects for artful photography. They contain ironic and improbable beauty. So I'm going to start pointing my camera at some.

My first subject, spotted on the way home from work today, sat behind a motel parking lot (click images to embiggen).

I snuck up on it, from the side opposite that pictured, not sure if it was inhabited. Junk piled against the windshield and a broken side window. Truck parked next to it full of junk. Looks empty. I step up and take a photo. Then the pit bull guarding it comes out from underneath.

Hmmm, matching colors. Maybe the dog is a factory option.

Wasn't expecting that. But he seemed nice and calm, and was tied up. I took a few more photos of the motorhome. Then a few close-ups of the Deluxe Option Pit Bull. Then he suddenly remembered his breeding, gave a Cerberus snarl, lunged at me, and I ran off squealing like a little girl.

Obituary for Photojournalism

2010-08-12T00:11:00.001-06:00

I know, I should be done with this topic, but I can't leave it alone because it makes me so sad. Anyway, photojournalism heavyweight Neill Burgess, former head of Magnum and World Press Photo, has called photojournalism's death-date as August 1, 2010.

We’ve been through major recessions; times when the advertising dollar shrank, massive lay-offs and editorial budgets tightened, but still there was a commitment to the photojournalist and what he or she produced. Even as the millennium dawned I was telling people that there was more photojournalism around now than in the 1950’s and 60’s, it’s just spread amongst more magazines. That was probably true then. Not so now.
He mostly rants, but lays out some evidence, which confirms his case but points, at the same time, to the new direction the profession-formerly-known-as-photojournalism is going. "There are some things which look very like photojournalism, but scratch the surface and you’ll find they were produced with the aid of a grant, were commissioned by an NGO, or that they were a self-financed project, a book extract, or a preview of an exhibition."

Well, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, but maybe we give it a different name. As someone not put out of work by traditional photojournalism's death, I'm less angry than Burgess, and frankly just happy to see documentary photography continue in any form and be financed by any means. One commenter pointed, in fact, to new creator-owned initiatives like VII The Magazine and Latitude Magazine. I think in Burgess's terms, this is not a sign of life, but it is a sign of afterlife.

Anyway, I'll sit shiva with him. And as a gesture of respect for the dead, and for my own enjoyment, I just ordered myself a copy of Great Photographic Essays from Life.

The Real Revolution: Addendum

2010-07-30T11:45:00.002-06:00

I just came across a recent book on the history of photographic printing, Richard Benson's The Printed Picture (2008). It was produced in conjunction with an exhibit at MoMA in New York and reads something like an exhibition catalog. It covers the history of photographic processes and print reproduction briefly and in a non-technical way. It's thin on detail but good for a quick 10,000-foot view.

It was interesting to see how high quality printing of images has been possible for a long time through processes like photogravure and collotype. These are expensive and comparatively fussy processes that have been mostly supplanted (or entirely for collotype) by offset printing, even for high quality reproduction. And with good reason. Quality offset printing is really superb.

The main issue for most publications is, of course, cost. Producing great printing for $100 art books is one thing, but doing it for a $2 magazine is another. Two mass-market publications often praised for their printing quality are Arizona Highways and National Geographic. Arizona Highways prints at 175 lpi using standard offset color. It looks good for a $2 magazine, certainly, though what is a little surprising is that almost any well-produced magazine today looks equally good next to it.

Benson is unabashedly enthusiastic about offset printing, "my trade and my chief love." "Today," he says, "we are witnessing the peak of the process's development. . . . I think it will be around for quite a while yet." While a $2 offset-printed magazine can look quite good, Aperture and some other art-grade periodicals reveal that a $10 offset color journal can achieve near-photo-print quality.

National Geographic has long used 175 lpi (perhaps higher for some plates) six-color rotogravure rather than offset for its editorial well content. Gravure uses regular square cells etched to different depths, each cell being inked to a different depth to describe tones, rather than using dots of varying sizes like offset. This can produce images that look much more like photographic prints. Gravure was the high standard for photo printing in books and journals from the turn of the century though the 1960s. At its apogee, in the hands of the Swiss and French in the 50s and 60s, "the printing is among the very best ever done."

The superlative flat-plate gravure of these old photo books is long gone. National Geographic's modern web-press gravure process is, comparatively, a poor cousin, but at its best is still as good as you can get in a $2 magazine. This expensive process is only cost effective for them because they print six million copies of every issue. Ten years ago that was almost nine million, and with a shrinking subscriber base, it seems their print quality has dropped a bit, too. Issues from the 1990s used a slightly heavier stock and on average exhibited less streaking, skip dot and dirty scrape. Some people attribute this to a change of printer (Quad/Graphics) about ten years ago.

"Despite its complexity," says Benson,"in the end color printing turned out to be easier to do well than black and white." The reasons for this are bit complex and obscure, but basically, color printing "could be done badly and still look good. Even if the print was too heavy, or too light, or somewhat out of balance, the colors' interrelationships could still hold and the colors could be enticing, even if inaccurate. . . . But in black and white work, errors in weight and scale could remove whole areas of content, and tonal distortions could murder the picture."

Just as print starts to fade and ebooks begin to dominate, I find myself becoming increasingly compelled by fine printing. Fortunately, I believe the most aesthetic books with be the last to disappear. They are more than carriers of information and will long have an audience. And on the art side, printed books have never been more beautiful or inexpensive. Print may be tipping into decline, but in this same anxious moment, there has never been a better age for print book lovers.

Kodachrome Goes to War

2010-07-28T20:37:00.007-06:00

I love vintage photography from the 30s-60s and especially when shot on the lately deceased color film Kodachrome. And when it comes to great looking classic Kodachrome, the greatest single public trove must certainly be the FSA/OWI Color Photographs internet archive of the Library of Congress. It includes 1,600 color transparencies that were taken to document the domestic war effort during World War II. The FSA/OWI Black-and-White Negatives internet archive contains Depression-era photographs from photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. The historical, art historical and aesthetic importance of these b&w photos is tremendous. All of these can be freely downloaded as high-resolution TIFFs.

But today I want to highlight the color archive. The entire collection can be easily browsed and enjoyed on LOC's Flikr photostream in a set titled 1930s-40s in Color. The only downside is that the Flikr images are rather small and the color is not very impressive. The scans are very conservative, unsharpened, and lack the saturation that they really should have. A little tweaking in Photoshop they really come alive. I've downloaded about 30 of the original TIFFs and tried to restore them to somewhat of their full glory. On a good computer screen, this is probably close to what the original transparencies would look like sitting on a light box.

Corpus Christi, August 1942 [click to enlarge]

A generous number of these photos, color corrected and in high resolution, may also be found under the tag 4x5 Kodachromes on the vintage photo site Shorpy. This is a beautiful example:

Kodachrome Goes to War: 1942

I just get lost in the gorgeous reds, yellows and blues of Kodachrome. Skin tones are slightly ruddy and very healthy. I regret that these colors belong to a different era. The supersaturation of so many modern color photos looks almost neon in comparison. Modern color curves are more in the lineage of Fujifilm Velvia transparency film, which stole Kodachrome's crown in the 1990s as color film of choice among landscape, nature and many other genres of (non-portrait) color photography. Our modern eyes now see Kodachrome colors as dated. We want everything to have that modern saturated pop found in nature calendars and lipstick ads.

Flowers dressed up in the colors of Fujifilm Velvia 100F

To a lot of us, Velvia colors look a bit 90s. Of course, now in the Photoshop era you can curve out your colors to look any way you like, and I think this is reintroducing a huge variety of palattes to modern eyes. In Photoshop you can even emulate all the different color films of times past. Many photographers, at least for art photography, develop their own color signature, and a retro twist is far from unusual. A Martin Parr photo always has those Martin Parr colors.

Back to Kodachrome at War. What makes these chromes spectacular, apart from the color, is that most are 4x5 inch transparencies, which are about 16x larger than 35mm film. They hold a lot of detail. The original 150mb scans are about 50 megapixels in size. At just 25% they fill up my 24" monitor. You're not just looking at someone in an old photo. It's like inviting them right into the room.

You're not forgotten, Rosie!

Addendum: There is a published book of the FSA/OWI color photographs: Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-43 (New York: H.N. Abrams, 2004). You can get a used copy on Amazon, though I think it's a bit pricey. But the two essays it contains are really worth reading and point to some other publications about this archive. The photo reproductions are good, but favor FSA photos over OWI. Many of the former are from 35mm slides and really suffer next to reproductions from larger formats. And I can honestly say that these images look more spectacular online than in print. Sorry, print.

Richard Learoyd

2010-07-26T02:25:00.000-06:00

The Summer 2010 issue of Aperture has a feature on British photographer Richard Learoyd. Learoyd produces compelling images, mainly simple portraits, using a very primitive and unique method of image making. The word camera means "room" in Latin, and the original prephotographic cameras were camera obscuras, rooms or smaller chambered devices that projected an outside image onto a wall or screen, from which tracings were often made. Learoyd captures his images directly onto Ilfochrome photographic paper using one of these room-sized camera obscuras. Since there is no intermediary negative, and the prints are made with a 1:1 camera, each portrait is a one-off and life-sized or larger.

These portraits are studies in simplicity. The subjects are well chosen, people of unconventional beauty, simply posed and perfectly lit against a gray background. But what makes the images really striking are the optical characteristics of the photographic process used. Large cameras inherently have a very shallow depth of field, so in these pictures just the subject's face, with perhaps a hand or arm on the same plane, is sharply focused. And because these are not enlarged from an intermediate negative, this narrow in-focus plane is exceptionally sharp and detailed.

Erika 2007 [click to enlarge]

Unfortunately, small Web reproductions fail to convey the astonishing weight, density, mass, volume and dimensionality that this process produces. The small print reproductions in Aperture are compelling; in life, they must be staggering. You've never portraits like these. Unfortunately, as Peggy Roalf in Aperture notes, "The nature of film photography today generally excludes any sense of the surface from its describable qualities."

Learoyd himself says that he working in the tradition of daguerreotypes, "those nonreproducable photographic objects whose multiplaned surface and miraculous depth of field fascinate me. . . . [Y]ou see the object before the illusion. With my pictures, the illusion is very strong and breaks suddenly, and then only momentarily, which is something I like." The same qualities can been seen especially in modern daguerreotypes by artists like Chuck Close.

Bob Holman by Chuck Close [click to enlarge]

Martin Schoeller works in color film but gets the same aesthetic by likewise using a large (8x10 inch view) camera. These very large film/plate/obscura print formats can reproduce micro-transitions in tone and contrast, i.e., detail, that smaller formats cannot.

Jack Nicholson by Martin Schoeller

Because this acute dimensionality focuses on the eyes and face, the illusion produced is one of intense intimacy. Rarely are we so physically close to a stranger that every blemish on their face becomes a compelling visual subject. And we would never examine a stranger so closely; even if suffered by the subject, it would feel voyeuristic. But says Learoyd, "I think that maybe my search for detail or perfection in my photographs is a desire to illuminate imperfection and humanness. The invitation to scrutinize another, which is undoubtedly in my work, inevitably highlights the loneliness of the soul and the depressing isolation of the human condition. After all, who do we get to look at so closely, so carefully that the pores of their skin and the meniscus of liquid under their eyes are visible? It is the opportunity to look without embarrassment—as we do with our children or lovers."

John Szarkowski: Visionary and Tastemaker

2010-07-23T13:45:00.006-06:00

John Szarkowski was one of the most culturally influential people you've never heard of (NYT obit). He was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 1962 to 1991. In this period, photography went from being a primarily commercial and documentary medium, struggling for artistic status, to its current position as a primary, perhaps even the primary, medium for visual artistic expression.

MoMA was from its beginning the most avant garde institution with respect to establishing photography as an art form, and Szarkowski was First Curator during photography's passage from the fringes of artworld to its center. The exhibits he curated were massively influential, highlighting the works of many little known or broadly disregarded photographers who subsequently and, one might argue, consequently became some of the most respected and influential artists of their day. He introduced to the public many unknown, seminal talents like Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston and Elliott Erwitt, among others.

Just as importantly, he (re)discovered or elevated past masters like Eugene Atget, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Bill Brandt, Dorothea Lange, August Sander, etc. No one has been more influential in creating the canon of photography. So in a recent article in The Guardian, Sean O'Hagan muses (and ultimately affirms), "Was John Szarkowski the most influential person in 20th-century photography?" It can be argued that photography was the invention that most defined the 20th century. This makes Szarkowski a major, if publicly invisible, cultural figure for his time.

Szarkowski had a great eye but was also a superb writer on photography. His numerous book introductions and commentaries are a joy to read and teach much about what makes great photography great. Some have criticized his high tone, but in service of the arts, I’m not put off by some purple prose. And I do not find him so stuffy myself.

Szarkowski published at least two important general collections of photography: The Photographer’s Eye (1964) and Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 1973; reprint, Bulfinch, 1999). Both are classics, and the latter especially. Each photograph is by a different artist and is accompanied by a brief commentary that, all together, constitute a course in photographic history and appreciation. I think the plates in the 1973 edition are very good, and that is the only edition I’ve seen, but the 1999 reissue is said to be even better, using new duotone separations.

Szarkowski was clearly a powerful tastemaker, though he downplayed his influence on the medium and even his perspicuity. "I think anybody who had been moderately competent, reasonably alert to the vitality of what was actually going on in the medium would have done the same thing I did." I think he was a visionary, too, at least with respect to a certain type of photography, namely modernist and formalist "straight" photography. This is why he could define the photographic canon, crown past masters, in the way he did: his sensibilities were entirely congruent with the photographic establishment. He was a straight modernist photographer himself, focusing on cityscapes and later landscapes.

But I'm less sure Szarkowski anticipated or agreed with the widespread incursion into photography of conceptualism and especially post-modernism, really finding its legs starting in the late seventies. Much of contemporary art photography is represented less by photographers striving to produce art than artists appropriating photography as a medium. These artists are frequently not in dialog with their photographic predecessors and often conscientiously transgressive of photography's conventions. Some artists, like Richard Prince, argue that not knowing anything about photography frees them to use it more creatively. Gregory Crewdson brings the values of a film director to his art, so he hires people to capture, process and print his photos as he directs them. He may spend up to $1 million making a single, limited edition photo, using a full film crew, and still makes serious money on every one. (Attempt this at your own financial risk.)

Art collectors go gaga over artists like Crewdson, Prince, Jeff Wall, and Andreas Gursky, who holds the record for the highest priced photo ever sold at auction ($3.3 million). These are artists who cater to the artworld, very successfully, using photos instead of oils and canvas. They are artists first. However, most photographers are photographers first, lovers of the unique history and qualities of the medium, and working in dialogue with it. They are compelled by it, bound to it. If you want to know why, well, read Szarkowski.

Coincidence vs. Inspiration vs. Plagarism vs. Theft

2010-07-21T19:43:00.000-06:00

Earlier this year photographers engaged in another heated round of the unending debate over originality in photography. All the arts are vexed by this in differing degrees, but it causes photographers a special measure of anxiety. The basic problem is that we are all working with the same raw materials, the world as it appears before our lenses, and everyone is drawn to the most striking subjects. There would seem to be, by definition, a very finite number of "most striking subjects." But let's not get into theoretics just now.

The most recent debate centered on the work of two photographers, Sze Tsung Leong and David Burdeny. The LA Times rehearses the details (see also here), but the basics are: Leong finds out Burdeny is selling prints that look a lot like his, but for just $10k each instead of $25k, thus both ripping off his work and undercutting him on price. So Leong cries theft and starts breathing heavy about a lawsuit.

Sze Tsung Leong, 2007

David Burdeny, 2009

Now, if you think these look like cheap tourist snapshots, with burnt-out skies and a Kodak Picture Spot perspective, you'll get no argument from me. Or from Burdeny, who purposely shot from tourist spots. "More often than not I am standing next to someone who is taking the same image. So in a sense I’m taking things where basically, there might as well be a ‘scenic viewpoint’ sign. There are hundreds of copies of pretty much the same viewpoint." He says of this pyramid photo, "It just so happens that that's the only pyramid that you can photograph with a tripod without some very expensive permits."

But it's also a fact that there are a number of these very similar shots shared between Leong's "Horizons" gallery exhibit in NY and Burdeny's later "Sacred and Secular" gallery show in Vancouver. Leong's lawyers are also pointing out (through credit card records) that Burdeny purchased a catalog of Leong's exhibit at the Yossi Milo NY gallery on March 6, 2009, several months before arranging his exhibit at the Kostuik gallery in Vancouver. Also, the owner of the Kostuik gallery had previously tried to persuade Leong to show his work there, but he refused.

I think most people see a direct connection between Burdeny's work and Leong's. Burdeny has admitted everything but that (though naturally, being targeted for a suit tends to curb candor).

It’s not that I want to divert attention away from myself. To imply that I am somehow the first person who has ever made a similar image, even if I was aware of that image—that’s the climate that everybody else works in… People appropriate other people’s images, people are aware of certain people’s work, the knowledge of what people are doing travels at light speed. Everybody draws from each other, and every once in a while, somebody gets singled out.
Some say statements like this, and work like this, go to far. Other photographers are more empathetic, due to the near impossibility of producing truly original work, free of influence from other artists and not repeating their subjects. Some have even pounced on Leong for pot/kettle hypocrisy, noting specific photographers he's "flattered" with imitation, and also suggesting he should not feel singled out, since Burdeny draws on several other photographers (like Elger Esser) just as specifically.

This has also tipped off another round of work-to-work comparisons between other photographers (comparisons with Sebastiao Salgado here and here) just to show this is far from an isolated case. A comparison of Simon Roberts and Peter Bialobrzeski is just as revealing (here and here), and back in 2006 David Bram noted several photographers who were imitating Michael Kenna. These examples could probably be multiplied indefinitely, if anyone had the stomach for it. The superb Geoff Dyer wrote a book a few years ago on the reiteration of subjects in photography. No one is free from influence. As Leong himself has said, "In photography, you see a lot of quotation. Every photograph has traces of past photographers."

There is no question that none of this is illegal. Even blatant photographic plagiarism is not illegal. Photos can be copyrighted, but landmarks cannot. Every photograph of that pyramid is an equally protected creative work in the eyes of the law. Leong is considering a suit for "civil conspiracy to infringe copyright and appropriate his artistic expression." Right. This is not likely to go anywhere legally, but it will probably damage Burdeny's reputation, which is (let's be honest) what justifies most of the price of a fine art photograph.

The Real Revolution, Part 2

2010-07-19T11:24:00.002-06:00

LensWork editor Brooks Jensen is a bit garrulous and imposes a strict editorial vision on his journal. There is a even a certain LensWork aesthetic, which I myself love, but which some believe unduly influences the work of aspiring photographers who are highly motivated to be featured. Brooks Jensen is also opinionated. He's lit some fires with his arguments that art photography is often overpriced, and recently a similarly provocative 2007 editorial (Issue #73) caught my eye.

The real revolution in photography, says Jensen, mostly unnoticed and unremarked, is in the quality of lithographic printing. The development of technologies like computer-to-plate printing and stochastic screening, and other general advances, have pushed print quality up and prices down dramatically in just a couple of decades.

Two measures of print quality are maximum black density (d-max) and the fineness and quality of dot structure. By dot quality, I refer to the fact that traditional halftone printing screens dots in a fixed geometric pattern, like a computer screen, and just varies the size of the dots to produce tone, whereas silver-based films and prints have a fixed dot size (grain) but a pattern that varies in placement and density (darker tones are more dense). This looks more natural to our eyes, and stochastic screening replicates this film quality in lithographic printing.

To demonstrate the revolution in print quality, Jensen evaluated the d-max and dots of (1) a 1968 art photo book of the highest quality for its day (Paul Strand's Tir a'Mhurain); (2) a likewise state-of-the-art 1989 volume, Ansel Adams' Yosemite and the Range of Light; (3) an original art-quality silver print, Wynn Bullock's Child in Forest, 1951; and (4) a test lithograph of that same silver print using excellent but less-than-top-of-the-line current print processes.

Strand's 1968 book has a d-max of 1.79 and was printed at 175 lpi (traditional screening). Jensen says, visually, those reproductions look perhaps 65% as good as the original silver prints. Adams' 1989 book has a d-max of 1.92 and was printed at 300 lpi (traditional screening). It looks perhaps 85% as good as the original prints. The print Child in Forest has a d-max of 2.07 with a fine film grain (=stochastic pattern). Of course it rates 100%.

Finally, the lithograph of the print has a d-max of 2.25 and was printed tritone with a 20-micron stochastic screen. This is close to the standard LensWork duotone printing spec. And if money were no object, the press is capable of twice that resolution, roughly equivalent to a 1000 lpi screen, with even more tones. As it was, compared to the original gelatin silver print:

presence

The result is that "the issue of LensWork you hold in your hands has a finer dot structure and blacker maximum density—in a $10 magazine—than Ansel Adams was able to achieve in his $125 state-of-the-art museum quality monograph less than 20 years ago." That alone is something to shout about. But the ability to reproduce quite inexpensively offset prints that exceed the quality of handcrafted silver prints is, in both historical and aesthetic terms, really staggering.

This is revolutionary for all who love photography, in a good way, but not unambiguously so for photographers. Jensen says one fine art photographer told him that three customers in one year returned prints to him because they did not look as good as the reproductions in his book. And others have admitted to him that they limit the sharpening of the images that they prepare for publication—make them deliberately less-good—so that their prints do not suffer in comparison.

Jensen goes on from there to explore the implications of this for photo print sales and value. That interests me less. And all this is just an explanation of the science behind a wonderful aesthetic experience and minor miracle. Of now being able to open up a $10 magazine and drink in photos almost as beautiful and striking as any that have emerged from a master printmaker's darkroom.

The Real Revolution, Part 1

2010-07-17T13:10:00.005-06:00

LensWork is a fine art photography journal. A very simple publication, it publishes fine art black and white photo essays, typically three per issue, along with a couple of editorial columns, occasional interviews, and, well, little else. I bumped into it in the periodical room of our library several years ago for the first time. I had no interest in b&w photography then, and just browsed it, but one photo essay on Jerusalem really struck me as unique and beautiful. I've thought about it so often since then that I finally went back a few weeks ago to find it again.

Andrew Beckham, The Holy Sepulchre

The portfolio was by Andrew Beckham, titled, "Questions from the Whirlwind: Temples and Monuments" (LensWork 53, Jun-Jul 2003). These were striking photos, not in spite of being in b&w but, it seemed, because of it. I was struck first by their subject matter, but what really impressed me was their richness and contrast. The tonal range was exceptional, with deep, sucking blacks, and the images were dangerously sharp. Like you could cut yourself on them.

Sharpness is much discussed in photography. Razor sharpness is a holy grail. It's one of two reasons why photographers still haul massive 8x10" view cameras to the tops of mountains to take photos. (The other, probably more compelling reason is bragging rights.) I understand why such a premium is placed on sharpness. It is a striking aesthetic quality, largely unique to photography, perceived partly through the optical resolution of detail and partly through strong distinctions in contrast. This is why a high contrast photo may look sharper than a low contrast photo that actually contains more optical detail. Beckham's photos were strikingly sharp on both accounts. In fact, they looked almost as good as darkroom-made gelatin silver prints. In some ways better.

In traditional criticism, a photograph is not a photograph until printed. Traditional film photography was as much about skill in printing as skill in picture taking, and even today, many photographers spend as much time processing their photos in Photoshop as they do taking pictures. A darkroom printed (or Photoshop processed) photo may look much different than the shot photo, and printing is a large part of the artistic process. That's why most reproductions have traditionally been made from the photographer's prints, not from the negatives. (Digital of course has changed all this.) This is also why prints made personally by a master photographer are worth more, even dramatically more, than those made from the same negatives by a different print maker.

A photo is a photographic print and any other reproduction is just a reproduction. Gelatin silver b&w prints have traditionally contained much more visual information than even 300 lpi art press reproductions. (Forget about 96dpi computer screens.) Prints have finer grain, broader and more subtle tonalities, blacker blacks, denser detail, a much greater and easily perceptible sharpness. I asked hypothetically the other day why anyone would pay $8000 for print they could buy in a $10 book. Most of that is just art value, but the rest is a premium paid for the mesmerizing depth and acuity of a master-made photographic print.

When we talk about the digital revolution in photography, usually we refer to digital cameras replacing film. But equally revolutionary, or moreso, is the death of darkroom printmaking and the rise of digital printing. Even people who still shoot film usually scan to digital, postprocess in Photoshop, and make their prints using inkjet printers. For less than $1000 you can buy a 9-ink photo printer that will produce darkroom-quality prints up to 17" wide. For $300 you can get a 13" photo printer that is, if not professional, still very good. These printers are fussy and expensive to run, but compared to a wet darkroom, there's no contest. We just ordered thirteen large art prints for my office building. It took the photographer just an hour a piece to prepare and print them. No contest.

Next: Back to LensWork. If we can get that kind of quality on a desktop inkjet, what can a commercial art press produce?

Penny Stock

2010-07-15T12:14:00.006-06:00

My daughter and I have been discussing careers in photography. I don't know a lot about it, but there is no question that many pro photographers are having a tough time. The economics of photography have changed drastically. Newspapers and news periodicals are in decline, putting a lot of journalists and news photographers out of work. Freelancers are doing decent business, but competition is fierce and the pay has always been low. In the commercial sector, stock photography has always been cheaper than commissioning new work and is being used more heavily than ever.

But the stock photo agencies since about 2000 have made changes to licensing and royalty models that have just sucked the money out of it for pros. Stock sales used to feed pros a constant stream of residuals, but now stock photos are penny stocks. The problem for pros is that the internet enables photo agencies to source stock photography from amateurs or semi-pros, who will cheerfully license their work for next to nothing. It's all gravy to them.

Amateur sourcing started with so-called microstock agencies, who will license photos for as little as a quarter a piece. They quickly became very popular, and microstock services are cheap and easy to start. They sprouted like dandelions. The old blue-chip agencies, like Getty Images and Corbis, quickly found these upstarts taking ever bigger bites out their business, a $2 billion a year business. In 2006, $800 million of that business was going to Getty alone, and they wanted to keep it that way.

So Getty purchased the pioneer microstock agency iStockPhoto, then bought another agency that was itself buying microstock companies. Then Getty got straight into microstock-style acquisitions by directly approaching select users of the social photography site Flikr. Now Getty is taking it to a whole new level, by acquiring entire portfolios from any Flikr user who will tick yes to a few terms of agreement.

A recent editorial from a UK photo mag outlines the massive downsides of this. It's not readily available online, so I'm reproducing it here:

If you’re a Flickr user you may have noticed that stock photo library behemoth Getty Images has just opened up to the entire community what was up to now an exclusive arrangement with a few select members. Yes, you too can now have your pictures considered for inclusion in the files of the mighty Getty, which they’ll then sell for thousands to agencies around the world. All you have to do is wait for the cheques to roll in. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except that, when you look into it in more detail, it isn’t.

With the advent of digital and web publishing and the explosion of small-scale publishers, the economics of selling images has changed. Agencies such as iStockPhoto have sprung up offering lower prices, with many images produced by skilled amateurs. Publishers have turned to Flickr too, going straight to the source and cutting out the middle man. This shift has benefited the many photographers who would never have been able to get into the exclusive Getty club.

Getty’s response has been to take over and snuffle out the competition—it’s aim is make it impossible for anyone to publish any pictures anywhere without paying Getty for the privilege. Having bought iStockPhoto and increased its prices tenfold on all the best work, it has now has turned its eyes on Flickr. This move, in my view, represents the hijacking and commercialisation by a powerful global corporation of what has been until now a hobbyist community website.

What Digital Camera

Flickr users have sold their pictures in this way for years, and many have made thousands of pounds this way. What will happen now (if you tick the box to allow it) is that if someone wants to use your picture they’ll have to go through Getty. They’ll have to pay much more to use it, and Getty will take a whopping 70% cut. You will be prohibited from selling these images yourself, and once in the system it will be very difficult to withdraw them later if you find that the deal is not the pot of gold you expected.

WDC

To me this exemplifies again the new economics of creative work, with the internet providing a vastly greater supply than demand for stock photos, deflating their value. But at the same time, a clever and highly capitalized middleman it finding ways, however objectionable, to retain relevancy and maintain revenues. For photographers, the same trend continues here as in book publishing, music, etc. More and more people get a piece of the pie, but the pieces get smaller and smaller.

One and a Half Benjamins

2010-07-14T15:19:00.006-06:00

I blogged a couple weeks ago about self-publishing through POD services like Blurb. That's great if you want to sell your work on dead trees, but what about self-publishing ebooks? Self-publishing your ebook on Amazon or iBookstore is actually a bit difficult. They are set up to serve commercial publishers, not authors themselves (at least, yet), and formatting your book for ebook distribution require some know-how.

Fastpencil.com provides both print and ebook formatting and publishing services for authors at very reasonable prices. It will publish your ebook to all major platforms for $150, including "Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kindle, iPad, Sony eReaders, and the entire Ingram Network." Then they collect payments and send you the royalty check. On a typical $9.99 ebook, you earn $5.60 per copy. Sell just thirty copies, and you are well into the black. And ebook buyers are currently on a bit of a binge.

All you really need is an irresistible title, like the absurdly popular ebook, Sh*t My Dad Says. Its success is only made more absurd by being based on a lowbrow TV series starring William Shatner. Yes, that William Shatner.

Please, Please Pirate Me!

2010-07-14T07:19:00.003-06:00

In 2002, tech publisher Tim O'Reilly published a controversial essay titled, "Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution." The clunky title does not do justice to its broad vision and insight into the future of publishing, of all media. Time is proving O'Reilly correct, and daring to practice what he preaches, he continues to flourish as a publisher. A recent speaker at AAUP reported that the consistent feedback from ebook users is: if you want our business, we want all our ebooks like O'Reilly ebooks (DRM-free pdfs). A room full of fearful publishers groaned.

I won't summarize all of O'Reilly's article. No point. It's essential reading, so just read it. He breaks down his argument into seven "lessons," but I'll single out just three highlights.

1. O'Reilly's first lesson is, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." There is a massive disparity in supply and demand for all creative work, and as I've noted before, this disparity is growing exponentially for books. This greatly dilutes their economic value. Even if you can get published, the vast majority of books fail to find readers and fail commercially. The flourishing of niche enthusiast communities online and the "long tail" serviced by omnibus sellers like Amazon has certainly been a boon for authors, "But even then, few books survive their first year or two in print. Empty the warehouses and you couldn't give many of them away." Authors and other creators who are not established should be primarily concerned with finding an audience. Once you have an audience, you can find a way to monetize your popularity. But as for the great mass of unknowns . . .

2. "For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say 'may' because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues." With respect to music, for example, another essayist says likewise, yes, you should be worried about piracy, if you are U2. Otherwise, this system of free and easy distribution only works for you. And anyway, the only way to stop it is to stop recording music.

3. I'll say it again. I believe you can always turn popularity into money. If you fail to do so, that is a market or marketing problem. O'Reilly highlights the basic market problem that is feeding "piracy" (a term he rejects for unauthorized online distribution). "The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price." The problem is that the pricing in old distribution models is not transferable to new distribution models. Traditional publishers are aggregators, publicists and printers who used to be necessary to connect content creators with an audience. Some of their services are still very necessary, but to remain economically viable at all will require for many self-reinvention.

The question before us is not whether technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage new technologies to increase the visibility of their work. For publishers, the question is whether they will understand how to perform their role in the new medium before someone else does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so.
As I've noted recently, when it comes to using socially traded content, free is not free. This is an O'Reilly principal (often repeated). People will cheerfully pay for you to give them the content they want, if you can provide it "at a fair price," meaning at lower cost than they can otherwise obtain it. Time and frustration are costly, and convenience, in aggregate, is worth a lot. That's why one of O'Reilly's seven lessons is, "'Free' is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service." The reason why so many paid services fail is less their cost than their poor implementation (limited selection, poor navigability and filtering, etc.) and unreasonable restrictions (limited format and quality choices, platform restrictions, DRM). iTunes has been a wild success compared to other music services because it's not in the music business at all. It's in the convenience business.

For unknown creators, particularly of fungible works like fiction, the great takeway from this is that, yes, the free and easy distribution of your work should be a concern. Not as something to prevent, but to promote, by every means available to you.

"Cost Is Not Value"

2010-07-13T10:58:00.001-06:00

Following up my post yesterday, an article in the NYTimes looks at a recent exhibit on forgeries at the National Gallery in London, and what forgeries and related high art hijinks tell us about how silly the world of high art is and how simple it ought to be. It affects to rise somewhat above "the populist suspicion that much art is really just a scam," but doesn't by much, and pokes a finger in the eye of "dubious connoisseurship." But most people will be nodding their heads.

I have a conflicted relationship with art criticism of all kinds (literary, music, performance, visual, whatever). I am a critic myself, both as a blogger and professionally (academic literary criticism), and see my criticism as part formal exercise and part rationalization of subjective perceptions that are heavily conditioned by culture. I enjoy the critical exercise, but it's a cheap thrill. Opinionated bloviation in serious dress. I don't believe a word I say.

But still I seek out and am influenced by the criticism of others, and there is no question that expert criticism shapes popular aesthetics. When what I like and what others say I should like happen to coincide, I am very satisfied. When they do not, I can find myself a bit vexed, perhaps afraid that, despite my best efforts, I will never graduate from the ranks of the ignorati.

The canard goes, " I don't know art, but I know what I like." Why can't that be sufficient? Over time, I'm relieved to find that increasingly it is becoming enough. I'm becoming cheerfully ignorant and vulgar. I recently came across some simple photographic advice that summarized my emerging non-philosophy of aesthetics: "Look at collections of other people's work, go for the pictures that instantly appeal. If you have to think about an image to like it, then that's not what you are looking for here. This is not meant as an intellectual exercise."

Art is not an intellectual exercise. 'Nuff said.

Art, Accident and Value

2010-07-12T13:05:00.001-06:00

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932

Henri Cartier-Bresson's "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932" is perhaps the most famous image by one of the most famous and influential photographers of all time. But why?

It was made at a time when small cameras with fast film were just coming into broad use and being employed to capture spontaneous and fleeting acts in pedestrian settings, starting a broad photographic trend that would extend to all genres of photography for 50 years. As one critic calls it, it is photography as "spontaneous witness." In this period, freezing people in mid-leap was very popular, technologically possible now for the first time. The famous French amateur Jacques-Henri Lartigue took very many of these leaping photos, getting everyone he knew to leap for him.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Bichonnade Leaping

I was once watching a documentary on photography and a famous photographer detailed the careful composition of Cartier-Bresson's "Gare Saint-Lazare." It was fascinating. How every element was framed with great judgment and then captured with surpassing skill at the perfect moment in the man's leap. Peter Degrassi of MOMA says of it:

I don't think anybody ever made a better one of those pictures than Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in 1932. The leaping man is caught just at the moment before his heel will touch the water. The water is so completely still, it acts like a mirror. And the way the picture is framed; you see his entire silhouette, which is clearer in reflection. Then there are these uncanny details, the sort of home made ladder that he's pushed off against has already made its ripples, and then, there are the bands that would go around a wooden barrel, in the shallow water nearby that anticipate the ripples that are going to happen once his heel hits the water. And then in the background, of all things, is a poster advertising some kind of dance event, with a dancer leaping in more or less the same pose that the man is leaping in.
So what is its value? This image is in copyright and, googling a bit, prints run between $8,000 and $18,000 each. If you are enjoying the totally unauthorized copy here, please buy a print and support the photographic arts. And who could argue that this exceptional expression of human creative genius is not worth the money. Right?

Cartier-Bresson himself said in an interview late in life that, in fact, when he took this through a hole in a wooden fence, he stuck his eye up to it, found the scene somewhat interesting, so then blindly stuck his camera into the hole and fired the shutter. One time. The man leaping was literally blind luck. Reread the above assessment with that in mind. With that datum, is this a work of artistic genius or a happy accident? Is it really worth $8,000 (starting) for a "hardcopy"? And how can you sell prints that are infinitely reproducible for that kind of money? How can you sell prints at all when one can find it everywhere on the internet for free? Or buy an art-quality reproduction in a book for pocket change?

But still these prints sell for high sums at high-rolling Christie's auctions seventy years after being created, one might say, mechanically and with great serendipity. For me this illustrates both how free things can be sold if you create a market (like fine art photography) and how genius and accident can be very difficult to distinguish. I think Cartier-Bresson was great. But millions of photographs have been blindly snapped on impulse, and I expect a surprising subset equal the artistic merit of this photo. What distinguishes this photo from those, in economic value, is much less creative genius than the simple fame of artist and photo.

But is it ever any different?

The Invasion of EVIL Cameras

2010-07-11T13:10:00.008-06:00

Not evil as in Dr. Evil evil, but EVIL as in Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens cameras. Also known as mirrorless or Micro Four Thirds (m4/3) system cameras. Yes, confusing. I'll stick with mirrorless system camera. Here's a picture . . .

Olympus E-PL1

. . . and a short explanation. In the beginning camera makers just converted film SLRs into digital cameras by placing an imaging sensor at the film plane and sticking an LCD on the back for reviewing pictures. These DLSRs largely retained the size and bulk of film SLRs because they use the same mirror and viewfinder systems. Having a traditional viewfinder is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is not necessary at all, and it comes with serious downsides. In addition to the bulk, the mirror blocks the sensor and prevents the use of the LCD for framing pictures, as you can on compacts. Many people prefer LCD framing, especially eyeglass wearers like myself. DSLR makers have tried to find workarounds for this problem, but so far all their solutions have been half-measures. The only way to enable compact-style LCD framing with an SLR is to remove the SLR components, i.e., the reflex mirror and viewfinder. Hence a mirrorless system (meaning, interchangeable lens) camera.

DSLR vs. Mirrorless System Camera

With the mirror removed, you also require less backspace between lens and sensor, which means you can use smaller lenses. All together you end up with a camera about the size of a large compact, but with all the lens-swapping advantages of an SLR. These smaller cameras were first introduced to the mass market by Olympus and Panasonic last year, but they do not use DSLR-sized imaging sensors. Their Micro Four Thirds sensors are about 30-40% smaller than the APS-C-sized sensors used in most DSLRs. (Sony's new NEX-series mirrorless system cameras and a few other models do use APS-C sensors.) Still, the image quality of even these m4/3 sensors is much closer to DSLR quality than to compact quality. They are, for many serious amateurs, viable alternatives to much bulkier DSLRs.

Until now, these mirrorless system cameras have been more expensive than entry-level DSLRs. The early adopter premium. But the new Olympus E-PL1 has come in just over $500 street, which is about where DSLRs start. Not bad at all.

Considering these cameras have only been out a year, and that no models have been introduced by Canon and Nikon, the dominant DSLR makers, it is an astonishing figure that this past month in Japan, 32.5% of all system cameras sold were mirrorless (here). Seven of the top twenty system cameras are mirrorless, all from Panasonic and Olympic. That makes these cameras both watershed designs and commercial successes. This will drive costs down and you'll see a lot of them swinging from tourist shoulders by next summer.

So where is Canon and Nikon? Nikon has just indicated that they may introduce a mirrorless model "anytime" this year or next. Canon has been completely mum. Both have dominant lines of DSLRs that they will not want to cannibalize, and you just can't throw one of these mirrorless systems together. They are not just cameras, after all, but entire systems. There may also be some truth to one reviewer's observation of the new Sonys: "As with Samsung and Panasonic, Sony's background is electronics (rather than cameras), so the incentive to move away from the optically complex DSLR design to one based more around electronic displays makes sense." Canon and Nikon are in the opposite position.

I'm excited for the future of these models because they are poised to replace an all-but-dead segment that a lot of us miss: the pro compact. DSLRs are big, noisy and conspicuous. These mirrorless cameras can almost be palmed, stealthy as a Leica rangefinder, but still produce DSLR-class images. And they are soooo sexy. As soon as they drop below $400, I may just have to trade blood for cash at the local plasma bank for a few months.

Pirates, Part 2

2010-07-10T11:19:00.001-06:00

Mr. Fweem very nicely elaborated on my previous post, from his perspective as both a consumer and creator of creative work. I started to write a long comment to his post, but decided to take it back here. So first, read his post. Then read the article he links to by Tony Woodlief.

I think Woodlief's article illustrates again in a number of ways that this is not primarily (or at least, generally not perceived as) a battle between creators and consumers of creative work, so much as between consumers and the corporations who control and exploit creators' work. Woodlief is not criticizing Joe Henry over wanting outrageous fees for citing one line of one song, but rather "his record label's parent company." Who is not looking after Mr. Henry, but after their bottom-line. That, at least, underlies Woodlief's argument and reflects general public sentiment. To me, the first element of copyright reform is ensuring that copyright protections benefit creators, not corporations that make billions by exploiting artists for their sweat and genius. I use the term exploitation frequently, but not lightly. For the uninitiated, see producer Steve Albini's classic "The Problem with Music" (profanity warning) or, more recently, Tim Quirk's drama with Warner Music over at Too Much Joy.

Everyone is in favor of compensating creators, of course. And when the composer in my original article started contacting traders of his music, saying it was not cool, most of them quickly apologized and took his work down. Of the 400 or so take-down letters sent, just one dumb teenager wanted to argue about it. The question for me and, clearly, many other people is not about supporting creators, but whether both creators and consumers should permit themselves to be victimized by corporate exploitation when they have the ready means to render those corporations irrelevant. The consensus is clearly that we shouldn't, and that this is about both parties.

On the other hand, I don't personally believe that creators have any "right to expect -- and receive -- some kind of remuneration for their creativity." And I say that as a creator. All of us are creators; creative work flows naturally from the act of humans living life. Almost none of it will ever be compensated and only the market can determine what of it has economic value. I think (e.g.) my daughter's hand-drawn Father's Day cards should have the market value of a Picasso, but I doubt the market would ever agree.

No creative act has any inherent monetary value, and the work or lack of work that goes into creative endeavor does not change that fact. Otherwise, explain Jackson Pollock to me. If we create something and no one will pay to enjoy it, that's either a market or marketing failure. It's certainly not a creative failure, though it can feel like that. Many of us choose to distribute our creative work freely because we would rather it be enjoyed by anyone with any interest than restrict it to those (typically very few) with interest enough to pay. The internet gives you more options in both those respects. Go internet.

But I hold all creative acts as being strictly equal, as creative acts. Market value measures only popularity. Someone once asked a famous songwriter what makes a song a classic. He replied, "Repetition." Classics are first and foremost marketing successes. Some also happen to be works of genius, but most are not. And copyright law is not for the fostering of genius, but for the fostering of marketing success. Marketing success may or may not itself foster creative genius, but judging from the quality of most corporate art, I'd say mostly not.

An example of my ideal. Twice in the last month I've gone to see a local band called Gypsy Cab, which is just one genius blues guitarist (Pat) and his drummer (Jesse). Pat is an 18 year-old who plays original electric blues on $200 Squier guitars through one very loud Fender Twin and smokes 98% of the guitarists I have ever heard. I paid to see them and I will again. I'm dying for CD. And a T-Shirt. I'll pay for those, too. And anything else they want to sell me. No corporations need to get involved. I'll just give them my money.

Pirates, Hoarders, Saviors of Culture?

2010-07-09T16:40:00.011-06:00

This post by David Pogue is not interesting for David Pogue (who I rarely find interesting), but for the letter it reproduces, the issue it raises, and some of the 300+ comments it has generated. The fundamental issue it raises concerns those (many, MANY) people who are engaged in scanning and trading print materials in the same way millions do music and movies. The particular subject here is sheet music, but it could be anything ever put into print. I've been involved with this professionally for some time, for example, in creating a digital library for Syriac scholars. For this project we only included out-of-copyright materials, but informally scholars trade copyrighted research materials on a massive scale, just like these music traders. With equal excitement and glee, and a similar lack of compunction.

Academic swapping and hoarding of copyrighted material is called research and is protected in some measure, ostensibly, by fair-use laws. These laws exist to facilitate research and creative work. There is no possible way any scholar could purchase all research materials used. But no scholar was ever sued or even called a pirate for photocopying (now, scanning) an article or monograph, because you can't produce more articles and monographs without doing this. Copyright law was always meant to curb commercial exploitation of another's creative work, not to prevent the use of that work in creating new work, whether artistic or scientific.

Also, I'm not sure copyright law was originally intended to curb the profitless enjoyment of creative work without payment to the copyright holder, who so very often is not even the creator, but rather a commercial exploiter of creators. But I'm no legal scholar and that's another topic.

When a pianist, as in this article, collects all the significant piano music ever published, pops it on a thumbdrive, and gives it away to other pianists, I have a hard time seeing any difference between that pianist and most scholars. Probably, true enough, this is sowing some seeds of destruction, but it also contains the seeds of creation. And I don't know why doing this is fair-use if you work at a university but piracy if you, well, work for a living. But of course, if academics ran the world, we'd replace copyright with open access on day one, or at least some generous implementation of Creative Commons licensing.

I see this as principally an economic problem, as many commenters to this article pointed out. People with more time than money will always trade and hoard, but put all this sheet music in a database and charge $10/mo for access, and much of this activity would stop. The people who did not stop are mostly people who would not buy your stuff anyway (i.e., the teenager in the article). This is just the market's way of saying that prices are too high and selection too limited. If your time is worth anything, this traded music is not free. People spend years collecting this stuff, at a very high effective cost. It's just cheaper than the alternative, and for many rare or out-of-print works, the only alternative. As one commenter observed:

This is actually quite an interesting economic phenomenon. The fact that people illegally acquire content that is copyrighted shows the imperfect market. We, as consumers, don't always find the suppliers we want. As an example, in my town I cannot buy bok choi in the supermarket. I'd have to drive really far away to get it. I don't have the option of "stealing" it in any way that is easier. The internet allows this, though, and it's something classical economics hasn't thought about much: Stealing as a means of overcoming the imperfect market system.

Old Media vs. New Media?

2010-07-07T10:44:00.002-06:00

My favorite columnists are (like ten million other people) David Brooks and Gail Collins of the New York Times. Brooks is the rational and pragmatic me and Collins is my inner cynic. Their Opinionator exchanges are regularly fabulous.

This most recent exchange was on Old Media vs. New Media. Brooks clearly sees himself as the former and, implicitly, Collins is colored as the latter. Old Media is dedicated to "just the facts, ma'am" impartiality and accuracy that (per Brooks) can only be done if there is a certain degree of coziness with the subjects, at least if you are covering a beat. Burn or sour your sources and you will be reduced to punditry, speculating from the outside without any direct access to the most relevant people and facts. Collins sees her journalistic self as a member of "scorn contingent," whose job it is to burn those who deserve to be burned, and damn the consequences. Better perhaps to speak forcefully based on half the facts than with restraint on all of them. Collins is clearly less concerned than Brooks about straying into the territory of advocacy media.

Is this really the divide between old and new media? Does "just the facts" reporting require certain compromises, just to get those facts? Are those compromises unacceptable? Are reporters charged with an advocacy mandate? Should we have a professional "scorn contingent"? Is that the new journalism?

Seeing Red

2010-07-06T15:43:00.011-06:00

I just sent back one compact camera, unhappy with its image quality, and am ordering another, hopefully with better results. I'd been most seriously considering the Canon SD940 IS both for its features, like a 28mm lens and 720p HD movies, as well as its credit-card size. Reading some user reviews, I was put onto the imaging-resource.com Comparometer, which lets you view identical test shots from scores of cameras side-by-side. One must allow for camera sample variation, etc., but if image quality is your concern, it sorts out the winners and losers (or at least your preferences) in a hurry.

I've looked at a lot of test images in the past and had a decent idea of what to expect. Basically, as I've blogged ad nauseum before, the smaller and newer the camera (= more megapixels), the worse the images. Budget compact cameras just cannot compete in image quality with the flagship large-sensor compacts (Canon S90, Panasonic DMC-LX3, etc.), and certainly not with DSLRs and the new m4/3 system cameras. But moving up to those cameras involves much higher cost and/or greater weight and size. I want something pocketable and cheap (<$150) that takes great pictures.

So what does the Comparometer reveal? It generally confirmes the points just mentioned, but also illustrates: (1) managing the massive noise produced by compact camera sensors is all about tradeoffs and (2), all else equal, some cameras just manage to get it very right and others very wrong. Some manufacturers are consistently better than others—I like Canon and Panasonic best—but even so, image quality really varies.

So take Canon and Panasonic. Canon generally does a great job in keeping noise down, but does so by using heavy noise suppression. The down side is that may suppress both noise and image detail, producing smearing. Combined with the reduced dynamic range of compact sensors (and Canon's tendency to overexpose), this can produce plasticy images, especially of things like shiny foliage. All plants tend to look like rubber plants. Canon also favors a very warm look, meaning lots of reds, which can cause the red channel to clip faster than others. This can result in very hot, smeared reds.

Panasonic, on the other hand, prefers slightly cooler colors and sees reds well. They also use a lighter hand with noise suppression but strong sharpening. That can produce a somewhat gritty look up close, especially with flat surfaces (some call it "stippling"), but due to good color management, Panasonic images are also less saturated and plasticy. I prefer Canon's noise management, when not overdone, but Panasonic's color management. I certainly like the way Panasonic sees red, which is more restrained in its rendition.

Below are five image details from five cameras of swatches of colored fabric. I've ordered them from best to worst, in terms of both detail and color rendition. All have been reduced in resolution, so the test is not entirely equal, but I think it works as illustration (click images for full size).

The best image is from a Canon DSLR, so no surprise there. The second best is from an older Canon compact, the PowerShot A2000 IS. Now that was a surprise. It is a bit noisier, but otherwise compares very well with the DSLR's image quality. Third is the Panasonic DMC-ZS1 that I recently bought and reviewed. Later ZS-series cameras continue to look that good. The A2000 preserves a little more detail with less noise, but they are almost a tie. Fourth is my older Canon A590 IS, which preserves decent detail but suffers from too-hot reds. Finally, we have the Canon SD940 IS, which I was looking at purchasing. It suffers from significant detail smearing and blown out reds. And most unfortunately, nothing in Canon's current compact lineup, below its its two top models (the G11 and S90), looks that much better. Two thumbs down.

The Canon A2000 does not have all the features I want in a budget compact. But its image quality looks shockingly good. Great noise management, great detail, and great colors, even the reds. It is a 2008 model, out of production, but refurbished units are available on eBay that fall under my el cheapo price limit. I'm all in.

Canon EOS Rebel T2i

Canon PowerShot A2000 IS

Panasonic DMC-ZS1

Canon PowerShot A590 IS

Canon PowerShot SD940 IS

Panasonic DMC-FH1

2010-07-04T13:32:00.000-06:00

I just received this camera last night and, well, it's going straight back. It is certainly not bad, but just does not work for me.

The Good: It looks like the younger sibling of the ZS1 I just reviewed. In other words, beautiful. But thankfully it has much faster focus and performs very nicely. The lens is very sharp and contrasty, and is a wide 28mm, with 5x optical zoom and image stabilized. I took sharp handhelds with it at 1/8 sec shutter speed, no problem at all. It also has 720p HD video. For a $125 camera, it is very feature rich.

The Bad: The UI is redundant and, for a camera with so few settings, a bit hard to navigate. It has three buttons that get you to basically the same settings. Entirely too much. And as I say, it really has very few settings. It is an automagic point and shoot with almost no manual options. I was not expecting much that way, but the one must-have feature it lacks is any kind of exposure lock or panorama assist. I shoot panoramas all the time, so this was a deal breaker. But in addition, the image quality was just not good enough. Even moreso than the ZS1, it has a tendency to produce blotchy chroma noise in the shadows. Its image noise in general is unaesthetic (and yes, some noise is prettier than other) and its sharpening is set to nuclear. The result is some pixel-level nastiness, even at ISO 80, that I just could not live with.

The Verdict: So back it goes. I wanted to like it, but for just a bit more money I can get a Canon SD940 IS, which is roughly equivalent in specs, but has more manual features, including both exposure lock and panorama assist. Test images in reviews also look very good and noise-free at low ISOs. I've owned a lot of Canons and always liked them. So back to Canon I go.

First Trip to iBooks

2010-07-03T12:08:00.001-06:00

So, I load up iBooks for the first time and find that three of the top ten paid books are by Mormons, two by Stephenie Meyer and one by Glenn Beck (a novel, ghostwritten). I've puzzled on this before. Mormons seem to have a disproportionate presence in politics, popular fiction, and multilevel marketing companies. In all those areas we are consistently an embarrassment. Can someone decode this for me?

Apple is reported to have added 30,000 free titles from Project Gutenberg. Searching for "Gutenberg" will get you to quite a few. But trying Treasure Island out on the iBook reader, it doesn't impress me. There are basically no configuration options. Parts of the copy of I downloaded do not scale to portrait orientation, so you have read it landscape, ten lines at a time. When you change orientation, the iBook reader takes a five full seconds to respond. The book has plates, but again, they only display landscape and are a bit scrambled. Etc., etc. Stanza beats this reader to pieces. Color me unimpressed.

Panasonic DMC-ZS1

2010-07-02T22:31:00.001-06:00

As mentioned the other day, I just purchased a refurbished Panasonic DMC-ZS1 for my daughter, a very sharp young photographer. I bought it for it's exceptionally wide 25-300mm equiv. lens, great image quality (per glowing reviews), and modest price. It also has a very close macro focus distance of just 3cm, and Tasha does love her macro.

The Good: It looks and feels like a high-quality camera. The 2.7in hi-res LCD is excellent, a big upgrade from past cameras. For the first time we own a compact that you can effectively review picture quality on. It has quite good ergonomics and great battery life, and in auto mode it produces consistently great photos. The images look very sharp and have great color. Perhaps more real that real, but to modern eyes, that's just how pictures should look. Chromatic aberration (purple fringing of highlights) is exceptionally well controlled, and overall the photos exhibit less clipping than most little compacts, which gives compact camera images a consistently plasticy look. These images look a bit more more SLR-like, with less harsh transitions between high and low contrast. And, most importantly, Tasha seems to love it.

The Bad: (1) As many people have commented, the top dial is too prominent and in the wrong place. You have to wrap your finger around it to push the shutter, which feels unnatural, and some people have problems with it getting turned inadvertently. (2) The focus is slow, probably a byproduct of that long lens. That's typical of compacts, but I find this camera annoyingly slow. (3) Images look great at screen resolutions and probably in prints, but at a pixel level, noise reduction and sharpening is very obviously too aggressive and cannot be turned off. Also, sometimes low-contrast areas suffer from slight dithering or blotchiness. This is odd, since sample photos I've seen on review sites lack these faults, at least to this extent. So I'm not sure what to think. Perhaps a badly done firmware revision. Again, you would probably never see this in regular viewing, and in all other respects image quality is excellent. But up close it's a bit disappointing.

The Verdict: If you want a wide-angle compact, this camera cannot be beat for the money. In fact, probably nothing else can be had for the money. It suits my daughter's photographic interests perfectly. I wish the pixel-level image quality was better, but as sensor densities continue to increase, that kind of quality will continue to decrease. Really the only place to go is to high-end compacts or DSLRs, for which you will pay triple over this camera, starting. So I give it 8 out of 10.

The Photographer. All images are straight out of camera.

Self-publishing Blurb

2010-07-01T17:27:00.003-06:00

There are at least four threats that academic publishers, mostly in common with traditional publishers, are facing. The first is, naturally, the internet, which allows anyone to publish anything to everyone for free. The second is a decline in academic library purchasing and changing acquisition strategies, described partly in my previous post. The third is open access initiatives and university archival repositories, which are initiatives to make published research publicly accessible and (in cases) keep it under the control of sponsoring bodies. Universities are sick of having to, e.g., pay $10,000 a year to subscribe to a single scientific journal so that students can access the work their own faculty have published in it. They want to quit giving their intellectual property away.

Finally, there is the unstoppable tidal wave of self-publishing. Laura Cerruti of UC Press threw out this terrifying statistic. In 2009, 288,355 titles were published by US publishers, but an additional 764,488 titles were self- or micro-published. From other statistics I could quickly find, this is apparently about a 270% increase over 2008 totals, which had increased 132% over 2007. In 2007 traditional publishers were still publishing most books. In 2009 they were fighting to retain 25% of exploding booklists. UC Press is themselves shifting their resources into assisting (on a contract basis) UC units in self-publishing their research. That's clearly where the action is.

The gamechanger here is the plummeting cost and rising quality of print on demand (POD), which revolves around self-contained printing/binding machines that can produce bound books on a per copy basis very cheaply. The U of U's Marriott Library has one and are rapidly moving to the point where students can use ebooks online and, if they want a print copy to use, just hit a "Buy" link, type in their account code, then walk down to the Espresso POD machine and pick up it up. The library will add books to their own print collection in the same way.

Traditionally POD books are ugly and cheap paperbacks, the product of a fancy copy machine, but there are commercial-grade POD presses that can produce high-quality hardbounds. In fact, many commercial presses are moving to POD-only printing (most everyone will eventually), since it eliminates too-large press runs and warehousing. Third-party services will proxy for individuals wanting this same quality for their personal publications. The cost is shockingly low.

I read an article today on one such service specializing in full-color art and photography books, Blurb. Per unit prices for 7x7 color start at $12.95. They provide tools for online promotion of your title and a bookstore to sell it in. The quality is 100% commercial grade. Of course, editing and design is up to you, but all profits from sales are yours, too. Services like this are why self-publishing is going through the roof, and publishers are very, very worried.

The Ebook Revolution in the Academy

2010-06-30T13:13:00.002-06:00

I just attended the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) conference in Salt Lake City. I've seen the future. Print is declining and, at least in academic publishing, is about to fall off a cliff. University libraries are moving to e-books as quickly as possible, for two main reasons:

1. Ebooks never go out of print, so there is no reason to buy them purely against future need, as has been the case with print titles. Since about half of all library books are never used (really, zero usages, ever), that represents enormous cost savings. For the University of Arizona, for example, buying only titles that researchers actually used would mean saving about $20 million over ten years.

So U of A and most other schools are revamping their acquisitions to be patron driven. For example, in one system, if a library patron wants to use an ebook, they click on a link and it is rented to the library by a vendor. After three or four usages (rentals), the ebook is automatically purchased. Libraries are willing to pay higher than print cost for ebooks if they are actually used, and with the upside that they quit purchasing books that are unused.

But in fact, ebooks are generally much cheaper than print titles, since they are often purchased in large bundles for just 25 or even 10 cents on the dollar of print cost (and needing a fraction of the conservation and storage costs). And with library budgets being slashed, print books are seen increasingly as a nostalgic luxury.

2. Users now expect instant (= digital) access to information. The current generation of students, so-called “digital natives,” have ceased to regard libraries as repositories of information, and are as comfortable reading books digitally as in print. And since digital is more convenient, use of print materials is dropping. Print is therefore both more costly and less used.

Protests that paper books are preferable to ebooks are not borne out by usage rates. At Univ. of Chicago, they have tracked usage rates for titles held in the collection in both paper and digital formats. The print titles average .43 circulations per year, and 3.81 circulations over their lifetime in the collection. The very same titles in electronic format averaged 17 uses per title per year. That’s 34 times the usage rate for digital items over their identical paper counterparts.

Even when digital collections are purchased as large packages, usage of the entire package per year is consistently over 80% (i.e., only 20% of titles are not used at all per year). However, usage of print materials in collections is a fraction of that and falling. Circulation rates of printed books per student have fallen by half in the last 15 years, and are accelerating. Presently, 75% of all library print materials are used just 0-1 times per decade; 47% are never used at all. And again, these printed book usage rates are falling at an accelerating rate.

What many of us who are older utterly fail to appreciate is that the rising generation has no preference at all for print over electronic reading. In fact, just the opposite. We duffers who extol the tangible aesthetics of print over cold and soulless digital are like the ancient scribes who carped that scrolls were far preferable to those newfangled codices (i.e., books). Parchment better than paper. Elegant scribal handwriting over ugly movable type. Really.

As a press director from MIT said, “What is amazing is the generation gap between people who are 30 and people who are 23.” This is why print is dying; younger readers do not like it. The overwhelming and rising demand from students and scholars generally is for e-pubs that are supported on multiple platforms, DRM-free, and available off-line. Think iPads, iPhones and Kindles. If you snooze on this, you lose basically everyone under 30 as your readers. Again, academic ebook sales are growing 300% a year and rising, while print book sales are stagnant or falling.

This is not just terrible news for print book lovers, but much more so for publishers. They were stumbling out of conference sessions to the nearest bars. They, too, have seen the future.

A More Correct Perspective

2010-06-29T12:33:00.000-06:00

I was rereading a series of posts I wrote last July on compact digital cameras. I've just purchased two, in fact, one for my daughter and one for myself. For my daughter I bought a refurbished Panasonic DMC-ZS1, a compact superzoom that produces really fine images for its class and has a very wide 25mm (equiv.) Leica-designed lens. It's not perfect, but for $150 it's a wonder.

I've ordered a Panasonic DMC-FH1 for myself, but it's not here yet. It's very inexpensive, but has a fast 2.8 28-140mm equiv. lens (5x zoom), as well as optical image stabilization. The wide, fast, and quite long lens was important to me, and to get that in a $125 credit-card compact, less than an inch thick, is unexpected. And reviews say the picture quality is excellent. I've always owned Canons in the past, but Canon models with equivalent features start $50 higher. And I'm not sure they have anything on these Panasonics.

In the past, you just could not find a compact at any price with these fast, wide lenses. That they now can be had so inexpensively is real progress. I find long zooms not so useful, but a wide angle lens is indispensable. Not having that has been one of the biggest compromises in using a compact. Paired with a fast 2.8 aperture, which gathers lots of light, and the stabilized lens, you gain both wide angle and four f-stops over older compacts. They are just made for natural-light indoor photography, which I do a lot of when traveling.

Lens tech has advanced, certainly, but still: how can they do this? And at these price points? The problem traditionally is that it takes a lot of highly optically-corrected glass to build a fast, wide zoom lens that does not suffer from gross optical defects. That translates into bulky, expensive cameras. One of the big tricks that manufacturers have pulled off is the correction of optical defects in the camera's image processing software. A great article on this has appeared on dpreview. I expect this wizardry is used in my Panasonics. This permits much more flexibility in lens design, permitting smaller, cheaper (if optically less perfect) lenses.

Dpreview also addresses the question: Is this cheating? Traditionally, lens makers have expended extravagant resources to remove all possible optical defects, and photographers have correspondingly paid for it. But some purists think that is the correct order of things.

Every time somebody does anything with a digital camera that couldn't be done in a film darkroom, people have called 'foul' and make accusations of cheating. However, 20 years after the appearance of Photoshop, it's safe to assume that a degree of post-shoot 'retouching' is the norm, rather than a sneaky exception (and remember that plenty of secrets could hide in the darkrooms of skilled practitioners). At which point, there's a chance that one person's cheating might turn out to be progress for the majority.
Yeah, I'll take that progress.

I'm Back. More or Less.

2010-06-28T14:56:00.000-06:00

When I closed up shop nine months ago, it was mostly out of sheer busyness. I'm not any less busy, but I'd like to meet anyone who is less busy now than they were last year. That's just not the nature of modern life. But I miss my blog, mostly 'cause I like reading what write. It's the only kind of journal I'll ever keep. Evidence of my existence.

I'll continue to mostly blog on my geeky leisure interests, since I am my own primary reader, and I like reading this stuff as well writing it. (Vanity?) I guess I could write political commentary, or haiku, or something Important or Serious, but I have no passion for Important or Serious things, except in occasional and small doses.

Anyway, perhaps the world needs more haiku, but definitely not more political commentary. Hmmm, haiku. Maybe camera haiku.

Closing Up Shop with . . . Helvetica?

2009-09-17T11:57:00.001-06:00

I've decided to stop posting to TLP until 2010. I'm trying to complete my PhD dissertation and simply need the time and energy (and words) for that project. 15 minutes here and there does not seem like a problem, but as all bloggers know, the time really starts adding up. I need fewer distractions. I enjoy this too much. And I'm in really deep water. This was not a hard call.

I'll probably start blogging again in 2010. Maybe here, maybe on Tumblr, maybe not at all. Maybe I'll get serious about my Flickr stream instead. I'll be sure to let all of my readers know. Yes, both of you. Thanks.

So, on to Helvetica. Yes, the font Helvetica, which was made into Helvetica the movie. When fonts can be optioned as movies, you know that we really are living in an age of wonders.

When I first started working in academic publishing a number of years ago, I really became interested in typography. I've even reviewed a book on the history of Syriac typography (very interesting . . . no, really). Typography can mean the art of printing or the art of typeface design. Both are interesting, but as much as a nonartist can be, I'm especially interested in type (fonts) as an aesthetic object, as functional art.

Fonts present a fascinating paradox. We use them and look at them all day long, but they are, unless we stop and think about them, completely invisible to us. They are the ultimate signifiers. No symbol provides a more transparent container for its meaning than the strokes that form a letter.

But a letterform is surprisingly plastic and allows a subtle but broad latitude for expression. Letterforms are evocative artistic objects that shape our response to the messages they are used to convey. They have a cultural power and provoke an aesthetic response that most of us, most (or all) of the time, are completely unaware of. Simple printed letters are the most ubiquitous artforms in our lives.

Today there are tens of thousands of fonts, but a bare handful dominate most typewritten communication. At the top of the heap may be Times New Roman, the default serifed font for Windows. It's ugly and I hate it and Microsoft has flooded the world with it. Blast Microsoft.

Apple, on the other hand, commissioned a stunningly beautiful font, Hoefler Text, with which to begin the era of computer typography. Obama has made it the default font for whitehouse.gov. Only Mac users can see it, though. Blast Microsoft.

Apple adopted Helvetica as their default sans serif font. It was a logical choice. Helvetica has dominated sans serif type usage since it was introduced in 1957. You see it every single day and almost certainly have no idea. As a font, I think it is beautiful, at least in light and medium weights, and very functional for a broad range of titling and short-form uses. Unlike Times, designers use it constantly, even after 50 years. All considered, it is perhaps the single greatest font ever drafted. But Microsoft did not want to pay a licensing fee for it when they introduced Windows, so they produced an ugly knockoff called Arial. No designer uses Arial. Yet again, blast Microsoft.

I recently watched Helvetica the movie and highly recommend it. It is indeed about the font, but much more about typography, its recent history and practice, and its invisible influence on us. It does a great job of communicating the mystery of the art. As an enthusiast, I got small thrill from the interviews with some leading typographers, especially Hermann Zapf.

Zapf's designed a number of fonts, including one in particular that everyone has seen and most people have used, Palatino Linotype.* Palatino is based on Zapf's own calligraphic handwriting. It is one of only five common fonts approved for use in my PhD dissertation, and is the one I am using. So Zapf's letterforms are my constant companions. They're unique and beautiful. I never get tired of them. To meet their creator, after a fashion, was a buzz.

Helvetica the movie may be purchased from iTunes or wherever fine documentaries on typography are sold. Some clips are available here. These include an outtake of the Zapf interview and a priceless few minutes with Erik Spiekermann ("[Fonts] are my friends. Other people look at bottles of wine, or whatever, or girls bottoms. I get kicks out of looking at type. It's a little worrying, I must admit . . .").

* Microsoft originally distributed only a knockoff of Palatino Linotype with Windows, which is called Book Antiqua. Starting with Windows 2000 they have also included the authentic, Zapf-produced version of Palatino. You'll still find Book Antiqua under your font menu, but accept no imitations.

iPod Thoughts

2009-09-16T13:29:00.001-06:00

As every geek knows, Apple refreshed their iPod line last week. Is there anything to get excited about? Not a lot.

The iPod touch got a price cut for the 8gb model ($199), with 32gb ($299) and 64gb ($399) models following. All evidence points to the probability that Apple had planned to include a video camera in the new models, but had to pull it just weeks before launch, due to technical problems. That camera will likely reappear in at least the 32/64gb models in the near future, with little fanfare. Apple is not calling the new models just introduced the third generation (3G), but rather the "iPod touch (Late 2009)" models. That almost screams, "Don't buy me!"

The 32/64gb models also have new processors that make them up to 50% faster than the previous models and the current 8gb model. They also support a new graphics API which, again, the 8gb model does not. So the 8gb model may be relatively cheap now, but it is also relatively slow and will not be able to run some next-gen software. Stay away.

The new iPod nano (5G) differs very little from the previous model. It includes a VGA video camera, but that camera cannot take still photos and does not have autofocus. It's probably a $2 part and does nothing for me. But the new nano does have a slightly larger screen (.2" larger) that is also brighter (TFT), and now gets an FM radio. All that does not add up to much, and most critics see this revision as just a glomming on of gimmicks to extend its lifespan. But it remains a good basic player and I will be getting one this next year.

I won't even comment on the iPod shuffle. It's still lame.

For competition, there are some great new PMPs just out. In the shuffle class, the new Sansa Clip+ now has a microSD slot, making this tiny, brilliant-sounding player almost perfect. Starting at $40 retail, and with an 8gb microSD card being just $15, you can have a great high-capacity player the size of a matchbook for very cheap. I use my Clip constantly.

In the nano class, two new Sony S series Walkmans starting at $110 (NWZ-S544) and $150 (NW-S644) are looking to be much better players. And starting at $80 (NWZ-E443), the entry-level E series remains a real price-performance bargain. Sonys have always had better sound than iPods and support drag-and-drop music transfer, which is my preference. These models are just arriving in the US.

A Sony NWZ-S544 ($110), with some serious external stereo speakers built in and a nifty kickstand. No reviews out yet on how good they sound, but I think they are a great idea. Why didn't someone do this sooner?

Finally, just announced, the new Zune HD is Microsoft's best player yet (and they have all been good). The tough reviewers at Gizmodo even say it is simply "the best touchscreen PMP on the market." 'Nuff said.

But really, while everyone is beating Apple at hardware and value, iTunes overrides every price and performance advantage that the competition can field. I will be getting a nano, not because I especially like the nano itself, but because I need a small player with a screen that works with iTunes. I listen to podcasts on my way to work, and iPods+iTunes are by a huge margin the best solution for podcasts. In fact, for many podcasts, the only solution. They're called podcasts for a reason.

So, for better or worse, I'm still wedded to Apple.

The $3.75 Million Dollar Man (and Friends)

2009-09-15T17:26:00.003-06:00

Democratic legislators are receiving millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the Medical Industrial Complex. Baucus and friends, the "moderate" Blue Dogs who are killing the public option and defending insurance monopolies, are raking it in. Baucus alone has received $3.75 million over six years from the medical industry, one quarter of his total campaign contributions. Tell me again, why are we trusting these employees of Big Medicine to represent our national health care interests? As BusinessWeek observed over a month ago, the health insurers have already won.

Rogues' gallery here.

Max Baucus (Bozo-MT)

Addendum: The Baucus bill is out of committee and proves, as everyone knew, that he is a spineless shill for the insurance industry. The comment of one of his constituents:

As a resident of Montana, I would like to thank Senator Baucus for all his hard work looking out for insurance companies.

With its requirement to carry health insurance, it’s estimated that this bill will bring approximately $700 billion in new business to the health care industry.

And since he fought hard to ensure there is no public option or, worse, a single payer option, we have the Senator to thank for making it harder for the rest of us to get affordable insurance.

All in a day's work in Washington I guess.

— avrds, Montana

$150 Spaceshot

2009-09-14T10:17:00.002-06:00

A group of MIT students set themselves the task of taking remote photographs from space on the cheap and, even more challenging, using off-the-shelf items with no custom hardware hacks or exotic software. The ended up buying a used Canon compact camera off of Amazon and taping it to the inside of a beer cooler. They used chemical handwarmers to keep the electronics from freezing. They also put in a pre-paid cell with GPS and auto-texting so they could track it. They hooked it all to a latex weather balloon and launched it 18 miles into the stratosphere. The total package was less than four pounds, so no FCC license was required.

Total cost was $150 and the results, on the first and only try so far, were spectacular. And anyone with basic technical ability could do the same thing from their own backyard. Project website here and iReport here.

Bento

2009-09-10T11:34:00.002-06:00

I've been in love with Japanese bento boxes from the very first time I saw them. I've looked all over town for a place that might serve them. There were a few false claimants, but no luck so far. Which makes sense. I mean, these are homemade school lunches for Japanese school children, after all. But they are also fantastic food art.

The Times just published a fun article on bentos. Don't miss the slideshow.

Flickrpic: Tomatína 2009

2009-09-09T00:20:00.002-06:00

Now, THAT's a party.