Hooters. Tits. Boobs. Jugs. Knockers. Garbanzos. Funbags.  That which brings all the boys to the yard.

Ain't she something fellas?

Saturday was the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.  The Mermaid Parade means a lot of girls running around wearing not much more than body paint.  A lot of girls running around in bikinis or less means a lot of crowds and a lot of people with cameras.   The crowds are pretty thick so people rely on flickr and other photo aggregation sites to let them see what they missed.  As the above photograph had the greatest number of hits (by a factor of two over the next most popular photo, which also involved a girl in a swimsuit) it doesn’t take much imagination to determine what they feel they missed out on.  A glance at my most viewed photos on my flickr stream only confirms this.

I’m not proud of this nor am I dismayed.

Hit tracking is one of the tools that people can use to make decisions about the kind of content they’re trying to present to the public.  According to my hit tracking I should go out and take more color photographs of women in bikinis and burlesque performers.  A little investigation shows that I should go further and post photographs of women with no clothing on.  Preferably performing sexual acts.  An even deeper look would tell me that I can dispose with the need to take photos entirely and can simply repost pornography that I found elsewhere on the web.  This would maximize my hits and minimize my effort.  Yes, its a violation of copyright but who bothers with that these days.

Sex grabs eyeballs on the internet.  Its very difficult to get accurate statistics but I would not be surprised if the majority of the traffic on flickr is concentrated on their collection of amateur and pilfered commerical pornography.   Yet if you visit Flickr’s explore page which highlights its most “interesting” photos you’ll notice that there’s narry a nipple.   Instead you’re greeted with a variety of landscapes, portraits, macro shots, still lives, and the occasional travel or documentary photograph.

If flickr spends most of its processing time churning out blowjobs, why don’t they feature them?  Even behind a credit card based age verification system?  Why shouldn’t they cater to their adult users who obviously crave adult content.

Sex might get you a lot of views but it doesn’t sell.  The number of hits a piece of content might attract are also highly misleading as indicators of success.

Getting 1,000 hits on a saucy photograph of a well put together young lady may inflate my ego but it has never done anything for my career as a photographer.  Instead my collection of well tagged and carefully titled and described photographs of dancers and musicians have.  The number of hits on one of my shots of Vangeline Theater at the Howl Festival will never, ever come close to those of my most popular photo of a young lady in a seashell bikini that I took at my first Mermaid Parade but it has appeared in the NY Post, Time Out/NY, and was used by the Howl Festival to promote itself.  Based on sales and outside interest my most successful photographs are of local events and performers.

In terms of flickr’s revenue stream they’re well aware that the majority of the users who are primarily interested in pornography are not interested in becoming paid members.  They will gladly be subjected to ads in order to endlessly shift through content, delivering huge numbers of hits, consuming system resources, but generally not adding content of any value or otherwise meanfully contributing to the flickr community.   The people who do buy memberships are people who use flickr to share their work, help promote their creative endevors, and enhance the community by commening on other’s work, posting to groups, and pulling outside users into the website through search results and social networking.

In the end numbers mean very little unless you put them into context.  5000 views on a photograph is meaningless if it has never generated any interest in the rest of my work.  I’ve provided 4800 units of cheap thrill and perhaps 200 units of loving her outfit.  Similarly seeing someone with a million hits on their flickr account is equally meaningless.  Have those hits resulted in useful contacts?  Has it generated sales?  Does it enhance their networking efforts?  Do they even get a word of appreciation or just a rapidly spinning hit tracker that adds up to nothing?

…and my favorite photograph so far from the Mermaid Parade doesn’t involve any tits.

Looking for Sunshine, 2009 Mermaid Parade.

Its a month dripping with interesting things to do, happenings to attend, people to observe, and fine weather to enjoy.   My personal favorite events to photograph, the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island and the Queer Pride Parade in Manhattan usually fall on the same weekend resulting in complete collapse sunday night as my sunburned flesh gives in to fatigue.   This year they fall on consecutive weekends so at least I’m spared back to back days of street high energy street shooting.

While many older and perhaps more serious photographers scorn it, I enjoy flickr a great deal.  After an event I like to see what other people took away from it.  Even people who consider themselves snappers with point and shoot cameras can often surprise themselves.  Let’s not forget the legions of avid amateurs who have high performance machines tightly gripped in their right hands and a decent amount of proficiency at Photoshop or Lightroom to boot.  Thousands of cameras will converge on the same scene and all go home with gigabytes of dirt cheap memory cards filled to the brim.  Even without a camera nearly everyone has a phone with a built in camera which are surprisingly good for snapshots in bright sunlight.

And they’ll post every single pixel of it into their photostreams.

Cream has a way of rising to the top but when its got a lot of shit in the way it might take days, weeks, months, or years to do so.  I’m being overly judgmental but I think its important for people to realize that when they post things to a public people do want to look at them.  Photographs have many purposes one of which is information.

There’s a term from electronics called “signal to noise” which has crept into common usage.  Quite simply its the ratio of useful stuff to distraction.   When someone comes home from an event and uploads 500 photos to flickr using the bulk tool to label them all “Figment Festival” or whatever event they just went out to which features 400 pictures of people’s backs with no sense of place they’ve just made it very difficult for someone to find out what happened at the festival.   Multiply the 500 photos by the thousand people who brought their camera and you could easily have half a million photos of an event within 12 hours of its occurance.  Even if a thousand people only post 10 photos each that’s an astounding amount of information to sort through. If you’re a performer who wants to contact a photographer who has some photos of their performance, you’re suddenly looking at a Sisyphean task which only grows more onerous as more and more memory cards are unleashed.

This isn’t a matter of aesthetics its a matter of being a good member of a community.  Flickr is a community of users.  Its just not the people on your contact list, its the general public.  Perhaps its just a matter of my most liberal of liberal arts education putting exotic ideas in my head but being part of the community means doing good for that community.  How can you increase the utility of the community?  How can you enlighten, share, teach, communicate, show, and delight?

By not posting a bunch of shit that people have to sift through to find the nuggets of information they value.

I’m not asking for people to judge their photographs on artistic merits before posting.  That’s my personal hangup.  What I am asking is that they realize that they’re not alone.   A little thought and a little bit of typing can easily improve the utility of any community like flickr for the general public.  Simply tell us what it is and be honest.  No one asks for great art, but when they search for something they do want to be given an answer.  Ask yourself, does this photo tell me anything.  What does it say?  Label it as such.  When you ask for an apple, you want an apple, not an egg.  Be sure to extend the same thoughtfulness to others.

As I’m writing this there’s unrest in Iran.  The government has been attempting to shut out foreign journalists to control the flow of information.   Individuals using social networking sites have been able to get around the government blockage and have been telling their stories to the rest of the world.  These are just a bunch of students and young professionals who have the same facebook account you do.  Now they find themselves in the middle of a contested election that has started the largest series of protests since the ousting of the Shah.   Just normal people.  Who want to speak.  And want you to hear.

Photos are important parts of their stories.  Be a little thoughtful and make sure that each channel is clear so the signal can be heard.

Example of dramatic use of wide angle lenses for everyday activities.

Originally I picked up the Russian made Zenitar 16mm lens for my Pentax K100D as a way to get a very wide angle lens without shelling out a great deal of money.   The K100D has a 1.5 crop factor which gets you an approximate 24mm lens.  As I refuse to buy digital only lenses my only other options were the Sigma 20mm which is a dissapointing 30mm with the crop factor or pick up Sigma’s 15mm Fisheye.  The Zenitar is available for $175 through Kiev USA while the Sigma fisheye is $750 through B&H.  There was no question which one I was going to pick up.

After reading a number of reviews I decided that the distortion would be minimized by the crop factor on the lens when used with a digital camera. I also read about a number of quality control issues which lead me to a decision not to purchase a lens through a Russian dealer.  This proved to be an excellent choice on my part as the well known infinity focus problem is not the only issue that can arise from these lenses.   A day after I placed my order a gentleman from Kiev USA called to let me know that the lens would be a few days late in arriving.  They had inspected the lens and discovered that it was missing an element which they needed to pull off another lens.   Without that element the camera would never focus.   That alone was worth the $50 price differential between ordering the lens from the US dealer.

The use of a 24mm lens are fairly straightforward.  Architecture.  Landscapes. Group portraiture.  Environmental portraiture (when you’re planning on a large print so the subject isn’t lost in the details).  Please note that I said environmental and group portraiture as wide angle lenses, rectalinear or not, are extremely unflattering to one’s subject.   Portraits with the Zentiar are at best good for a giggle as the lens will make it look like the subject is bulging out from the center of the frame.  The only setting I’ve seen this used in an acceptable way is with rock and hip hop band portraits.   The Zenitar settles rather easily into the “acceptable” uses but it should be emphasized that it is not a rectralinear lens and there is visible distortion even with the crop factor. The distortion can be minimized through compositional choices as seen below.

Elk View, West Virginia

Here using a portrait format and placing the subject in the outside 1/3rd of the frame minimized the distortion.   Experimentation showed that horizontal lines just above and below the center axis showed the most distortion.   Creating a line that runs the length of the frame and is parallel to the frame’s edge will emphasize the curvature of the lens.  By avoiding straight lines you can usually ignore the fisheye effect.  As the usual use of a wide angle lens, namely landscapes, often involve straight lines this may be unavoidable at times.   If you’re disturbed by this then you should have shelled the bread out for the rectalinear lens and not mucked around with cheap former soviet block optics.   On the other side, if one uses a little care the curvature can  used to emphasize distance or height as with the trees arching upwards in the below photo.

Property Line, West Virginia

I have since sold my Pentax K100D and now only possess a Pentax Super ME which is a little gem of a walking around camera.  As this is a traditional 35mm camera there is no crop factor and the majesty of the fisheye effects comes into blossom.   No  amount of twisting the camera, kneeling in front of your subjects, or pushing an element to the edge of the frame will get around the curvature.  You will need to learn how to roll with it.

Chinatown Parking

There’s really no advice that one can give for how to work with a fisheye lens.  Cropping can remove the worst of the distortion as you mimic the crop factor of the digital sensor but that’s about it.   When using the lens on a full frame sensor or on a film body there are a few little points that one should be aware of.  The main one is fingers.  If you grip the lens around the hood there’s a good chance that your fingers will end up in the frame.  So one should be careful and grip the lens will behind the shade.   The lens is so wide that even wide open at f/2.8 anything further than a meter or two will be in focus.  There’s really no need to focus, just set it at infinity, set the f-stop to a comfortable f/8 and click away.   The lens is not the sharpest on the planet and shooting wide open will be relatively soft.  I have a tendency to develop my film in Rodinal which obscures fine detail through increased grain so I can’t speak to the absolute resolving power of the lens.  Just assume it sucks and don’t worry about it.   If you’re worried about the resolution of fine details you should not be shopping for cheap, novelty lenses.  Go get an 8×10 and stop bothering us.  Demanding performance out of a sub-$300 35mm lens is a waste of everyone’s time.

To wrap up this review, the Zentiar is a fine way for people using a camera with a significant crop factor as in the bottom tier of DSLR’s to get a taste for wide angle photography.   Its a taste and only a taste.   If you want to get serious about landscapes or architectural photography I’d strongly suggest saving money and investing in more expensive equipment.  Landscapes are not a subject for the faint hearted or those on a tight budget.   I will strongly encourage anyone interested in the lens to purchase their lens from a vendor in their country with a return policy.  The quality control on these products is lacking so getting a maladjusted lens is a strong possibility.

Its a fun addition to your lens collection.  Its up to you to decide how much fun is worth.

They may add contact information into the exif data when they edit their images in photoshop but I’ve noticed that this usually does not carry over with an actual watermark on the image itself.  As you’ve seen in my blog and on my flickr stream I typically add the grumpymonk.com URL at the bottom right corner of every photo.   Some professional photographers add a much larger watermark across the bottom and in some cases across the middle of the image itself.  This is especially true of anyone who works with women wearing a limited amount of clothing.

I’ve been posting my work online nearly as long as I’ve been taking photos.  Its been a great way to learn, get feedback, show off, meet other photographers, and watch other people repost your pictures for a variety of reasons without your permission.

Over the past seven or so years I’ve engaged in a variety of practices to prohibit people from copying, reposting, or linking to my photos.   I’ve also engaged in heated debate online regarding proper conduct when reposting or reusing images.  After years of this I’ve stopped using a variety of technological solutions and simply choose to include my copyright information in the exif data in every jpeg I post and stamp the grumpymonk.com URL on the bottom right corner of every image.

My grandfather had a saying, “locks are there to keep an honest man honest”.  A thief, he said, isn’t intimidated by your lock.  If the thief wants something from you, they can most likely take it.  This is true of posting your photos online.  Once that image is displayed on the screen there are any number of ways that someone can make a copy.   I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re better off making it straightforward to let people copy your image.   That way they won’t rip it and most likely crop your watermark off.   I say most likely as there are people out there who will for whatever reason crop your watermark off and either pretend that they took the photo or more commonly in my experience, pretend they are the person in the photo.

If you look at a site like tumblr.com which is a very lightweight blogging tool which most people use to repost thing they find interesting the vast majority of users just want to take your photo and comment on it.   Usually they just think its neat and want to share it with their friends.    Chances are they will also fail to mention where they found it.  Tumblr.com also makes it extremely easy to copy and repost content.  The person reposting your photo may be a 5th or 6th generation copycat and simply has no idea where the image originally came from.  This isn’t the fault of tumblr.com or any other blogging software, its simply how people tend to use the tools they’ve been provided with.

This is why putting your URL on the photo itself is so important.  As irked as you might be that someone has taken your photo out of context and redistributed it at least everyone will be able to know where it came from simply by looking at the image.  If you’re worried about the watermark getting in the way of your photo and distracting attention from your subject create an action in photoshop that creates a border and adds your URL to the border.  It makes it a little easier for people to crop off your information but most of the time they’re going to be too lazy to do so.  Use their slack to your advantage.

I’ve gotten a number of paying jobs off my flickr stream and through google.  Newspapers and magazines do comb through search engines to find material if they don’t want to pay a photographer to cover something.  So if they find your photo on someone else’s website at least they can find you.

Once you post something online you’ve provided the online world with the capability of producing an unlimited number of perfect copies of your work.  I think its important to accept that there will be a loss of control over your content in sharing it online.  Once you accept this and stop trying to cover every eventualilty to prohibit users from downloading your photos you can focus on ways to guide the user to make copies in a way that preserves your ownership of the image.  Instead of making it difficult, make it easy.  Let them take the image you want them to take in the format that you’ve decided upon.

Just remember to put your name on your work.  Its yours.  Might as well let people know.

Speak out at Union Square, 2005

Saturday marked two events on Wall Street.  One was the March On Wall Street and the other was World Pillow Fight Day. I’m somewhat sorry that after shooting the political event I didn’t stick around for the cultural one.  It was a brutally windy day and my cheap $10 East German coat wasn’t up to the task of keeping the chill off.

One of the questions any photographer taking their gear out to a protest is how they’re going to depict what’s going down.  There are a number of elements to consider.  People will dress funny.   There’s a ton of cops. Banners. Signs. Puppets.  There might be arrests especially if the organizers have promised civil disobedience.

The vast majority of people will be very ordinary.  They might have signs.  They might be wearing a t-shirt with a logo on them.  They’re not likely to get into fights with the police.  They’re just there to be there and then they’re going home.   These people are not going to give you an exciting photo.  They’re not exciting.  They’re not trying to fuck things up.  They’re not going to clash with the police.  No broken windows, fire, spray paint, or rude gestures.

Not very interesting.  These are not people who will make a stunning addition to your portfolio.  There’s nothing about them that wants to be on the front page of the paper.  So they’re largely ignored by the press in favor of the, to steal a term from biker culture, 1 percenters.   The 1 percent of the crowd that is out to do something that will look great on the front page of the paper.  Something really stupid.

Vets at Anti-War March, NYC

The majority of photographers out at protests are not working for a wire service or a local paper.  So the economic motivation for getting a front page shot is not present.  For the professionals one does have to ask if they’re doing the public a service by focusing on getting violent images which are much more dynamic but don’t represent an accurate view of what was going on.  The photos of the violence are accurate in themselves but does it give the viewer a better idea of what’s going on?   Does a single 19 year old throwing a brick through a window represent 1000 elderly women who are spending their afternoon walking several miles through a city?

How can you depict the path of a protest with up to half a million people?   These days protests are hardly unified.  The March on Wall Street consisted of people protesting everything from the war in Afghanistan to single payer health care to capitalism in general in addition to the stated purpose of protesting the lack of government support for “main street” as the public is referred to these days.  Its impossible to track the affiliations of any individual unless they helpfully have painted it on their face.

I don’t have a good answer.

It just doesn’t seem fair to thousands of people who just wanted to assemble for the political cause to focus on a few members of the crowd who were intent on making a scene of their own.  Reality is frequently mundane.  One might say its the default setting of the world.  Ordinary, everyday.  People don’t become exciting because they’re carrying a sign. They look very much the same as they do when they’re not carrying a sign around.

As photographers we’re drawn to the nail that’s sticking out.  Some nails are more obvious than others but that doesn’t give you an excuse to ignore the others.   If you can’t find a good portrait in a crowd of ten thousand without zeroing in on the black bloc crowd perhaps you need to learn how to look harder.

Doorbell, California

One of the things that photography allows you to do is discover details from events and objects  that you stuck onto a negative or a harddrive somewhere and haven’t thought about for a while.   Once you open up the negative onto a print or pop your file into photoshop you have a second chance to see a scene for the first time.

The doorbell belongs, or rather belonged to my grandfather.  I took this picture shortly after his death last year as we were staying at his house for the funeral.   Before everything was put into boxes I went through the house and took pictures of details that I remembered.  Paintings. Lamps. Radios. The television.  I should have taken a shot of  the scotch bottles he always kept on top of the refrigerator.

After scanning this negative I got a closer look at the doorbell and noticed that there was a seal (you’ll have to click on the image to see it larger) which read in part, “live better electrically”.

I found this an especially apt sentiment for a chemical engineer who was born in 1915 and did see his profession change the world.  When he was 18 and on his second year at UCLA the Tennessee Valley Authority was formed to economically develop a (still) impoverished area of the country.

My grandfather did believe this was the best of all possible worlds and had a great deal of faith in people.   I’m not sure if he ever noticed the seal, who ever bothers to look at their own doorbell after all but I think he would have seen himself as part of that milieu which would have written things like that.

I come from a far more cynical time even as I  continue to see technology cause radical economic and cultural change.    Perhaps its my own jaded nature but I tend to see innovation driven largely by profit rather than any real desire to improve the world.  Its  difficult to assign any ethical motivation to a drug company that refuses to reduce the price of HIV medication for the third world until India threatens to reverse engineer their patented medications and release their own generic versions.

I was surprised that such a small and previously missed detail would have given me pause.  I’m planning on going through the rest of my negatives and pulling out further objects.   I don’t have any photos of my grandfather that I took myself.  All I can do is show you fragments and talk about them.  The fragments don’t speak for themselves but they speak to me and I hope I can tell you what they say to me.

Dancers, Union Square NYC 2008

I’ve gotten into the habit of wearing a small messenger bag whenever I go out.  I’m very fond of my Timbuk2 bag and its taking on a nice patina from the air pollution, grime, and whatever passes as precipitation in this city.  Known disparingly as the “man purse” in some circles it  has become an essential component of the NYC uniform.  Most people take public transportation and carrying a novel with you ensures that you can retreat into some small semblence of privacy by sticking your nose in a book.

After stuffing your reading material, pens, cell phone, breath mints, snack, or laptop into one’s messenger bag there’s a limited amount of room for a camera.  Most people would find no trouble in shoving a compact digital into their bag but we’re too good for that shit now aren’t we?   We need a camera that’s compact, sturdy enough to stand being jostled constantly, and takes a equally compact, fast lens.

I think most people would agree that 35mm would be the format of choice.  There are 120 folding cameras but you can fit 2  rolls of 35mm into a slightly larger space than a single roll of 120.   72 shots vs. 20-32 shots.  As this is street photography we’re going to have a lot of bad negatives and a few good ones.  Do yourself a favor and give yourself 36 chances to take a good picture.

The next issue is exposure.  I’m generally in favor of full manual control over your exposure but over the years I’ve softened and started to enjoy the pleasure of aperture priority modes.   I prefer aperture priority as your f-stop will most often have far more control over the mood of your shot than the shutter.   Just keep your eye on the shutter speed if you’re shooting a street performer or anyone who will turn into a blur if you’re not careful.

Then there’s autofocus.  I am not a fan of autofocus as I’ve often found it more trouble than its worth.   More expensive lenses and bodies will often have excellent autofocus mechanisms but we’re talking about a carry around camera, not a gargantuan piece of steel and chrome that scares children.  Just learn to twist the lens until you get what you want.

Lastly, let’s talk about a very real concern with a camera that you carry everywhere, cost and durability.   Leicas are immediately recognizable by people who know cameras.   People who know cameras also know what they cost about $5-6k for the body and lens and they maintain their value extremely well.  Very tempting for a thief.  They win hands down on the durability scale but Things Happen.  If you’re going to carry something around constantly and whip it out in a crowd perhaps you’re better off picking something you won’t cry over if its gone.

So we’re generally looking at a 35mm with aperture priority, manual focus, and a slightly wide to normal lens that’s cheap, looks like nothing special, and can take getting smacked into a wall a few times without breaking.

My old favorite was the Pentax ME-Super which is a compact SLR produced by Pentax during the 70′s.   Its primary shooting mode is aperture priority but it does feature a really annoying manual mode.  I prefer to use the compensation dial rather than fool around with the manual  mode which uses buttons to set your shutter speed.   You just set your aperture on the lens and snap away.   They made a million lenses for the k-mount bodies so they’re all available dirt cheap used.

Naturally there’s the Pentax K1000, favorite of students everywhere which lacks the auto-exposure but is equally cheap and easy to obtain.  Its worth noting the early Nikon F series and the Canon AE and FD cameras but they are larger and like the K1000 are manual exposure only.

Next are compact shooters like the Olympus XA and the Minox GL.  These are very small and while they’re still cheap they do have hipster cache these days and their prices on ebay and keh have gone up as a result.   Your best bet is a yard sale if they have such things in your neck of the woods.   I would pick the Olympus XA over the Minox due to the coupled rangefinder.  The Minox uses scale focusing so you must be good at estimating distance (I am not).   On the downside the Olympus sticks you with 100 and 400 ISO only.  So its a fair weather shooter only.   The Pentax ME goes up to 1600 giving you a chance to engage in a little night photography.

Personally I’ve moved past the Pentax ME and taken up with the Voigtlander Bessa R3A as I’m confident I can keep it and won’t break it.  The Pentax does get some use as the lenses are cheaper giving me more options and I have a wonderful russian 16mm fisheye which can produce some interesting images.   The R3A also only goes as wide as 40mm which is fine for me but wide angle shooters will prefer the R4A which features framelines for much wider lenses.

Overall it really depends on your taste, the size of your hands (some might find compact cameras too fiddly for their oversized mitts), and of course, the size of your man purse.

One of my goals for this year was to get into doing portraiture.   I finally have a portable kit (sorta… my main camera is a mamiya RB67 which makes a Hasselblad look like a child’s toy)  and I was running out of excuses not to do it.  When a woman I’ve known for a while needed new publicity photos I jumped on the opportunity.

Lux Alptraum with the NJoy "Eleven"

Naturally when working with strobes outside of a studio the modeling lights are often too dim against the ambient light to give you a good idea of what’s going to happen when you pop the lights.  If you’re going to use film for a shoot, what you get on that negative is god’s little mystery until you pour out the fixer and pull the film off the reel.   Until you’ve had years of experience and can clearly visualize what the results are going to be you’d like to take a little peek under the curtain and make sure what you’d like to get is in fact what’s going to show up on the negative.

Let’s discuss the technical issues with this photo.   You’re taking a picture of someone with an Internet job who never sees the sun.   Pale skin with dark hair.  She’s a former roller derby girl so she’s got muscle and you want to get that across as well.  This is a woman that can knock your ass into the third row while wearing wheels on her feet.  So I want some directional light to give her physique some dimensions.

Then she picks up a chrome toy the size of a little slugger.  So you have the possibility of specular highlights.

I don’t think a light meter is going to cut the mustard here.  You want a Polaroid.  But Fuji Peel apart is $1-2 a pop these days and the subject has to sit there while it develops.  Yeah, she gets a door prize to take home but you need to get out of there soon.

Lux @ Babeland

This is where digital really shines and I see no reason why chimping can’t be a successful part of working with film.    Being able to pop off a few shots, check your exposure, identify any problem shadows or distracting elements and then switch the PC cord over to your main camera is invaluable.   This will immediately identify any issues with your equipment (something isn’t plugged in, a slave isn’t seeing the main flash, etc) and give you more information to work with.   Being able to use a light meter is important but if you can use a histogram that’s even better.

An added benefit is being able to email samples to your subject that day or the next day with minimal effort on your part.   This makes the client happy and gives you more time to get your film developed and scanned or printed.

One of the underlying themes I see go through any past time is shameless masochism.   The typical formula is “real X don’t use a Y, they Z”.   I’m sure you’re familiar with the concepts.

Many of these chestnuts are good practice.

Photographers should be comfortable using a meter.  They should be able to look at a scene and spot any issues that will have consequences as to what shows up on the negative.   If a subject is backlit, if there’s glare off a reflective surface, if your contrast range is immense, or if its simply just too dark to take a shot.   Experience will teach you what these hazards will do to your shot and how to avoid them.   There’s no need to take a test shot when you’re squinting into the sun, you know your subject will be in shadow with a blown out background.  If you can’t move, the usual remedy is fill flash.

Chimping is a great way of making sure your remedy worked.   If you’re adding light to a backlit scene, make sure it balances.  If your contrast range is too great for your media, take a shot and see what its going to look like with the sky blown out or your subject turned into a sillouette.   I see the use of a digital camera in these situations as a great boon, not a crutch.

Naturally this isn’t anything that snapping off a Polaroid couldn’t do just as well.  The trouble is when making sure costs you $2 and takes 30-60 seconds, you’re less inclined to do it.   I find that the $2.30 per 120 roll of Fuji Neopan that I only get 10 shoots off of is expensive enough.  I’m more than happy to use my Canon G9 once, twice, and then a few more just to be sure.

In photography your dynamic range (which is used in other fields such as music, electronics, and meteorology) is referring to luminescence.    This is relative luminescence as we can capture scenes which are very dark (night scenes) to very bright (working with strobes) on the same piece of film.   The dynamic range of your imaging substrate (film, digital backs, etc) describes what contrast ratio you can capture based on the scene and more specifically what element of the scene you choose to meter.

Imagine a black cat sitting on a white crumpled sheet illuminated by bright sunlight.   The cat’s fur has texture, the sheet has texture.   Your eyes can see both the texture of the sheet and the cat at the same time but if you tried taking a picture of the cat you would generally end up with a silouette of a cat and texture in the sheets or you’d capture the texture of the cat but knock the background out to a featureless white tone.

Morgan, floating cat

The purpose of High Dynamic Range techniques are to provide tone in all areas for scenes in which the range of luminescence is longer than the media can support.    While there are a number of techniques used for film (such as using a graduated neutral density filter) for common scenes such as landscapes where the sky is much brighter than the land digital has really allowed things to take off through tone mapping.   This allows a photographer to bracket their exposure by a number of stops to get the “correct” exposure for every area in the scene.  Using a tripod to ensure that each frame is identical except for the exposure the photographer can then combine those images using software.

Photo by David Cornejo (reposted under CC license)

This is an excellent example of the technique.   The scene had strong sunlight coming from above so the walls would have been in shadow.   By exposing for each area of the scene and using some commonly available software the photographer was able to open up the shadows to give us full detail.

I recently took a course at ICP for portrait photography with Ken Collins.   One of the books he suggested was In Praise Of Shadows which was his way of suggesting that we learn to love negative space.   HDR is the antithesis of negative space.

By opening up all areas you exterminate shadows.

One of the things you have to do in photography or any art form is to make choices.   For photography these choices are composition and exposure.   In many real world cases you have to decide what is the most important element in your composition and set your exposure to put that element in the zone you want it to be in.   Unless its an overcast, low contrast day, this will often consign other elements in the scene to the shadows or highlights where they may loose all detail.   HDR says that we don’t need to make that choice and I think that its a good thing.

Cat, Cave Art Space

Here we have lost detail in both the floor and in the curtain in the background.   The cat was the most important element to me so I chose to expose for the cat.   I don’t think the photo is poorer for it.  The floor and curtain were reduced to geometric shapes which we can orient our subject around or in.

Mr. Cat in the loft

Again, we’ve lost most of the tone in the sheet at the bottom of the frame which creates empty space.   This shoots our eye right up to the main subject, the lounging cat.    Negative space is used to direct attention.

Fire Eating, Starshine Burlesque

Without the negative space in this photo we couldn’t trace the arc of the fire eater’s torch.  The empty space allows the viewer to draw the motion.   If the background had detail it would be far too distracting and we would loose the detail of the flame.

Neck Face, Williamsburg

Do we loose anything in the shadows?   In this case would we gain by seeing the brick wall of the building in the background or every detail of the motorcycle in front?   Should we see clouds in the sky at the bottom of the street?   What would we really gain?

In the end we’re limited creatures using tools that don’t measure up to our eyes.  Those limits force us to make choices.   What can I take away from this moment in time?   What’s important?  What can be left behind?  We’re not richer for not having to make those choices.   HDR is an interesting and occasionally pretty technique but I don’t think it helps us in the long run.   Taking everything away from a scene leaves nothing of yourself in it.   What’s the point of taking the photo in the first place if not to let people know what you thought of it?

You point, you point, you shoot, you get a print.  The digital revolution has made it even easier, you point, you shoot, you email your shots to your friend or post it to your blog.  If you want to kick it old school, fire off 36 frames of color negative film, and drop it off at the drug store you can still do that in many places.   For those older than 30 an increasingly affordable line of film scanners has allowed us to drag those wax paper envelopes out of our closets and show the world what kind of poor fashion choices we made during the 80′s.

In any group of soccer moms happy snapping away  Forest and Ashley on the fields every Saturday there will be one or two who desire better composition, more dramatic skies (and why not, a soccer field is FLAT, get some cloud action in there), and cleaner colors.  And why not?  An art degree isn’t required to get bitten by a creative impulse.  Nor do you have to be batshit insane in order to produce art.

One of the key elements in any creative enterprise is craft.  This is the actual nuts and bolts of getting what you want.   For photography this is a matter of learning exposure, some rules of composition, editing, and finally printing.  As a self-taught photographer (who initially tried learning from FAQ’s) I’ll include the books I found most helpful in untangling the knobs and levers on your average camera.

Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual

Since this blog is at least in theory about silver based photography we’ll start off with a book that you can find new or used very easily.  The later editions have replaced some of the older hand drawn diagrams with more professional (and easier to understand) illustrations so you might want to get the 4th edition if you don’t mind paying for a new book.   Horenstein covers the basics needed to shoot,  develop, and print in black and white.   If you’re throwing a digital process in there (scanning your film over printing for example) you can just skip that part of the book.   Even if you prefer to drop off your film at the lab (if you do DON’T LET THEM CUT YOUR NEGATIVES… painful personal experience…) you can benefit from knowing what goes into that process and the first part concerns exposure which everyone needs to know.

Understanding Exposure

If you just picked up a dusty Pentax K1000 out of your dad’s attic or are gazing at the settings dial on your new Canon D50 going from a fully automatic camera to setting your exposure manually can be a frightening prospect.  What’s ISO, what’s meant by “correct exposure”, what’s this reflective meter thing, so my aperture went from f/4 to f/5.6 now what, 18% grey card, why are you waving that strange device around, WTF?  This book gently takes you through the essential concepts of exposure and helps you understand why things work the way they do.   Horenstein’s book covers exposure but after assisting a few B&W classes I’ve found that this is where most people need additional help.  I did.  This is useful for any camera and later editions of the book cover digital photography.

Black and White Photography Magazine

A British publication that is a bit pricy in the US (I pay around $12 an issue at the newstand) but I find very useful.   The magazine features portfolios and a number of monthly columns including one which takes you through the process that two photographers take with the same negative.  This is almost worth picking up the magazine for alone as it covers darkroom technique, scanning, photoshop, and how you can use each tool to solve problematic negatives.   The portfolios are always good and most of the articles are interesting and range from biographies to overviews of equipment or techniques you may or may not have heard of.

The Negative.

This is a biggie.  St. Ansel as he’s sometimes known wrote three books which “should” be on every “serious” photographer’s shelf.   I would agree with this for the same reason that I went out to see the William Eggleston retrospective at the Whitney despite really loathing his work.   Like it or not Adams (and Eggleston) had a major impact on the way we think about photography.   The Negative is his second book and its not for beginners but once you get comfortable with the basics its a great book to dive into.  If you’ve heard about the zone system, this would be drinking from the source.   The zone system is meant for large format photographers but once you grasp the fundamentals you can apply it to roll film as well, especially medium format as you’re more likely to be shooting an entire roll of 8-16 shots in a single lighting situation than all 36 frames of a roll of 35mm.