Let's Set The Record Straight

I realize this post will probably offend, but it needs writing nonetheless.

Recently, in an online photography forum, I ran across a thread asking if Photoshopped images should be considered in a different class from non-Photoshopped images. To be fair, the person who originated the thread was asking if obviously manipulated images should be posted to a photography gallery. But as the thread evolved people began to ask and answer the broader question. It was some of those answers that were more than a little upsetting.

In any discussion such as this one, or when discussing film vs. digital (which came up in this thread), someone invariably invokes the name of Ansel Adams as the pinnacle of "traditional photography", and as a figurehead for nobility behind the camera. This thread was no different, and indeed his spirit was summoned. Repeatedly. And, if I might say, incorrectly.

Ansel Adams was a huge innovator in his own right, and championed many ideas that at the time were pooh-poohed as vulgar, shocking, useless, or otherwise unacceptable. A good case in point: When Adams started out, view cameras and box cameras were the only show in town. Adams gravited toward the view camera because of the motions it offered, but to the best of my knowledge he never shut out any form of camera or format for the negative. When Agfa began producing cameras to hold their 35mm movie film so people could use it to take still shots, Adams picked one up early on. Various people gave him a hard time about it, but he persisted and took some remarkable photographs using that "pedestrian" gear.

This was far from an isolated incident. It was a pattern throughout his career. He was one of the field testers for Polaroid's products, and was a personal friend of Edwin Land. He also tested Kodak's first color film products, though he admitted the strength of his work lay in black and white. And he was a big proponent of image manipulation.

I'll say that again just so people are clear: He was a big proponent of image manipulation. This is made abundantly clear in his numerous writings. In his book, "Examples - The Making of 40 Photographs" he goes so far as to show his initial contact print from his negatives, his test prints, and his final print along with the dodge and burn notes for several of his photographs. Contrast adjustment? Yes. Dodging and burning? Yes. Tonal range compression and expansion? YES. (And you thought HDR was new... nope.) If it could be done in the darkroom, it was fair game.

So what about digital vs. film? Unfortunately Adams didn't live long enough to see digital hit mainstream, but in the introduction to "The Camera" (I think... my copy went wandering when I loaned it out a few years ago) he clearly stated that he was excited by the prospect of digital cameras and digital photography. I don't think he ever referred to it as digital imagery as so many film proponents do. Digital photography.

So please, stop invoking the name of Adams unless you really want his opinion. He made it pretty clear over and over and over.

"I have been immensely pleased with many creative explorations I have seen; they are evidence of great imagination and the awareness of enduring qualities of art. I often observe that the more "far-out" any work appears at first, the more exciting and valid it may prove to be."

-- Ansel Adams - "Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs"

I began to write a response to the thread in the forum, but in the end I erased my reply and moved on. Enough passionate photographers for one day. One more wasn't going to change anyone's opinion or do any more to provide an answer to the original question. As a friend of mine put it, "Opinions are like assholes. Everyone's got one." I'm no different.

- Tom

Anti Bokeh

Bokeh (derived from Japanese, a noun boke ぼけ, meaning "blurred or fuzzy") is a photographic term referring to the appearance of out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens using a shallow depth of field.^[1] Different lens bokeh produces different aesthetic qualities in out-of-focus backgrounds, which are often used to reduce distractions and emphasize the primary subject.

Wikipedia

Almost everyone who has put a camera in manual mode, or who has used a manual-only camera, has played with depth of field. A shallow depth of field produces the bokeh effect described above. A wide depth of field brings more of the frame into acceptable focus.

But there are limits to what you can do with an aperture ring. Close down too much, and diffraction at the aperture starts to work against you, blurring out the picture. So what do you do with a shot that has a lot of range to cover?

One solution is to use a large format camera with motions and take advantage of the Scheimpflug Principle. I won't go into the details here, but the upshot is that you can tilt your plane of best focus by tilting the lens or film holder. If, say, you're photographing a field of flowers stretching from your feet out to infinity, it would be impossible to bring the entire field into sharp focus using the aperture ring alone. But you could tilt your lens and shift your plane of best focus until it coincided with the field of flowers. The entire field would be in focus, but everything above it or below it would begin to go out of focus. This is partially the reason why photographers like Adams and Weston were able to get incredibly sharp sweeping landscape shots, and it's the reason why many landscape photographers continue to use large format cameras to this day. (Including me!)

But what if you need everything above and below that field of flowers to be in focus as well? You can still stop down, and broaden your depth of field somewhat above and below. But again, there are limits. Eventually diffraction begins to work against you, and you start to fuzz out the overall image. Where can you go from here?

Back in 2000, I ran across GRAFICA Obscura, a web site written by Paul Haeberli of SGI. It described a method of taking a stack of images shot at different focus distances, and selecting only the sharpest bits of each image in order to combine them into a single, sharpest image. Paul used an edge-finding filter to build his layer masks, a technique that worked, but not perfectly well. I made some attempts to use his technique, but I ran into a number of problems and no real successes.

Skip forward to 2008 when I swapped out my Nikon Coolpix 5600 camera for a Canon A650 IS. One of the reasons I chose the A650 was that it could run CHDK, a scripting language that can run on top of the Canon firmware in many of their compact cameras. I was interested in running CHDK for several reasons, one of which was a bracketing script that was far more flexible than the bracketing available in the Canon firmware. Among other things, it let you bracket your focus.

All of this would've put me in no better position than I was already in with Paul Haeberli's technique, but times change. At some point in those intervening years, Alan Hadley wrote a package called CombineZM that automates and improves on the technique Paul Haeberli described. The combination of CHDK's bracketing script and CombineZM's ability to stack the images yields a tool to get infinite depth of field out of a scene.

Anti-Bokeh

It's not for every photographer, and certainly not for every situation. But it's one more tool to add to the tool belt. And now that that tool is there, it's something to think on when heading out into the field.

Tom

The Photo Competition

Last year I found out that one of the local galleries hosts an annual black and white photography competition. This year I decided to enter. It's been one of those "learning experiences" we're told to appreciate. Phrased a different way: it's been painful.

Rules for photo competitions always look straightforward until you actually try to submit something. This one has an up-front screening process to weed out what makes it into the gallery. "Unmounted prints or slides". They're actually pretty explicit on this part of the requirements, and even bother to mention that submitted materials will not be returned. Three 8.5x11 prints and $45 in submission fees later, and I'm in.

Why three? I wanted to include at least one aerial, at least one traditional landscape, and at least one macro. Besides, I figured they'd can at least two of my shots, leaving only one to be printed large, matted, framed, etc.

Lesson #1 - If you submit it, you may have to print it.

Yep, all three pictures made it through the screening. So how to prepare the gallery prints? 18x24 is the maximum size called out in the rules. But are these maximum linear dimensions, or is it a square inch kind of thing? I punted on this question this year by submitting images that cropped well to that ratio, but some of my more printable pictures have 2:1 or even 3:1 aspect ratios. If it's a linear dimension limit, a 3:1 print would come out at 8x24. Historically, for this photo competition, every square inch counts and the larger the prints typically the more favorable the judging. Printing 8x24 would put any 3:1 panoramas behind the larger, more traditional aspect ratio prints. In the end I wound up printing 17x24 for one, and 18x24 for the other two. I'll wait 'till next year to submit panoramas. Printing for the three photos came out to $60.

Lesson #2 - Framing takes time.

Our submissions were due early in October, and we were supposed to have word whether our shots made it in by November 1st. Only none of us heard until closer to November 16th. Framed prints were due on December 1st, so that only left two weeks to print, mat, and frame the shots. I called the local frame shop, and they said there was a two week lead time on framing. Since I didn't have prints in-hand, that meant I had to find another way to get the framing done. In the end I wound up using an online framing supplier and bought Nielsen metal frames and mats cut to size. The supplier wouldn't ship glass through the mail, so I got acrylic.

When the package arrived I got busy. It wasn't until I'd started on my second print that I realized they'd cut all three mats to 17x24. With one week to go and no time to get replacement mats, I called the local frame shop to see if I could get them to at least make mats on a same-day basis. Lucky for me they were happy to do so. But because so many other people were getting prints framed for this competition, they were running low on certain supplies, like acid free mat boards. I got 6 ply mats instead of 4 ply, but they look nice.

Lesson #3 - Humidity is a bear

By the time I got the other two prints framed another fact of life in Hawai`i was staring me in the face: humidity. When I worked at the frame shop in Pennsylvania, any time we were doing archival framing we hung the prints in the mat using what's called a "linen hinge". Two pieces of acid free linen tape held the print at the upper two corners, and the print was allowed to drape across the mat aperture. This worked great, and when done properly would last for a hundred years or more. I did the same thing with my prints. Only with the huge humidity changes we get here, the print had expanded and buckled against the mat.

Times have changed, and now there are archival methods of dry mounting prints to acid free backer board. Next time I'll dry mount the prints and avoid the humidity issue.

Lesson #4 - Acrylic is fun for science projects

I had reservations about using acrylic. We did occasionally use it on super-huge prints when I worked at the frame shop, but for everything else we used glass. Getting glass clean can be entertainment itself, but conscientious application of Windex with a lint-free wipe usually got the job done. Still, we kept pieces of black velvet around to use as lint collectors once the glass was clean. On a bad day, it could take ten minutes or more to get a piece of glass ready. I heard there's a frame shop in Boston that bought up the cleanroom equipment from a chip manufacturer that closed its doors. That is a brilliant idea. If I ever go into the framing business myself, I'll follow their lead. The additional cost in HEPA filters is worth it.

Acrylic is a whole 'nuther ball game. It collects static charge the way kittens collect "Awwwww!"s. As soon as it's clean, something wants to stick to it. The very act of wiping dust off charges it even more. No matter what you do, the stuff is dirty. It's a pain. I did finally get the acrylic mostly clean, but it's not what I'd call a spotless job. Next year? Glass.

Lesson #5 - You have to show up

The framed prints are due in the gallery Monday the 1st. I've known this for over a month. They've been sitting in my office at work, ready to go. I could've handed them in Friday last week, but didn't. I wanted one more chance to see them before saying goodbye.

I've been scheduled to work at our remote facility, starting Monday the 1st. I've known this for a week. But somehow the two ideas didn't connect. Not until 2:30am Monday morning, anyway. I went from sleepy to bolt-upright awake in less than a minute, and even broke out in a sweat along the way. I still hadn't made caption cards, I still hadn't printed out the pricing cards. And they were in my office, not at home and certainly not in the gallery. I wouldn't get back into town until the gallery had closed. DOH!

I spent the next two hours printing cards, re-hanging the other two prints that were now suffering from humidity shifts, loading them into my wife's trunk, and trying to come up with a way to ask her to take my prints to the gallery. Now I'm going to go to work at our remote facility on about four hours of sleep. Next year? I'll plan to be in town when the pictures are due.

Lesson #6 - I know I'd do it again

Despite all the pain and anguish, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I just hope all three prints sell. After everything I went through, I don't want a single one coming home with me.

-- Tom