The World Seen through a Glass of Scotch

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]

Bandstand [Payson 18/52]

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 . . .

Art Nouveau Tree [Payson 17/52]

Untitled [Payson 16/52]

Moon over Walgreens [Payson 15/52]

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

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."

Train Graffiti #2 [Payson 13/52]

Shoe Fetishists

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

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.

Ditch Witch [Payson 12/52]

Something for Halloween. Sort of.

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

Toy Cameras

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]

True Colors

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]

Blahg Post

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]

Test Driving a $10,000 Camera

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]

Please Do Not Feed [Payson 7/52]