These two news stories about one possible future of digital cameras look interesting to me:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august31/levoy-opensource-camera-090109.html

I would love to have a programmable camera!

If you like math-related images or geometrical abstraction then you might enjoy the images that the MAA (Mathematics Association of America) compiled on their website:

www.maa.org/FoundMath/FMgallery09.html

www.maa.org/FoundMath/FMgallery08.html

www.maa.org/FoundMath/FMgallery.html

You can even submit some to the editor for the 2009 webpage.

I finally made it to 1000 images in my gallery!

Does anyone know how to find out the number of images of a member in a specific group? For example, how do I find out how many of my images are in the architecture group?

I finished reading two books on composition and design in photography recently which I thought were excellent (and were also highly recommended by some reviewers). They are

• Harald Mante, The photograph: composition and color design, Rocky Nook and Verlag Photographie, 2008 (translated from the German by Thomas C. Campbell, III),
• Torsten Andreas Hoffmann, The art of black and white photography, Rocky Nook, 2008.

Mante's book is about 185 pages and I'm guessing has an average of 3 color photos per page. The production quality of the images is very high in my opinion. Content of Mante's book are as follows. I've tried to illustrate ideas with photos, as Mante does. (Thanks to Mr Marc to figure out how to post other people's ipernity images in my blog. If anyone objects, please let me know and it will be removed. I also used some of my own. There is no intent to compare myself to Mante, who is IMHO a really great photographer. Hopefully the photos at least give the rough idea of his great book.)

1. No picture content without design
   

   metro, 1

   
   
2. The point
   

   sweetgum ball, 7

   barn swallow

   
   The point and disturbing points
   

   point and line, 1

   
   Two and three points
   

   building geometry, 4

   towers, 2

   
   Visual lines and visual shapes
   

   bridge pylons

   
   Clusters of points, detail and pattern
   

   red berries, 2

   
3. The line
   

   streak in the sky, 1

   
   Emergence of and forces acting on a line
   

   fence with green ivy

   
   Horizonal lines in landscape and portrait formats
   

   cemetery reflection

   
   Vertical lines in landscape and portrait formats
   

   Baltimore downtown, 49

   
   Diagonal and oblique lines in landscape and portrait formats
   

   Minneapolis architecture 3

   
   Irregular lines, groups of lines, line contrast, and line division
   

   snow waves

4. The shape
   Rectangle and square as shape and image plane
   
   Circle, triangle and oval as design elements
   
   Variants of shapes, irregular shapes, and contrasts of shapes
   
5. Universal contrasts
   Figure and ground: positive and negative forms
   
   Tonal contrast, light and lighting
   
   Representation of space, the effect of focal lengths
   
6. Color contrasts
   
   The primary and secondary colors, contrasts of hue
   
   Third order colors and quality contrast
   
   Complementary contrast and quality contrast
   
   Cold-warm contrast
   
   Actual color and apparent color, simultaneous contrast
   (the shades of red illustrate "apparent color")
   
   (the light gray window frame against the dark green seems lighter than the light gray against the light blue sky - illustrating "simultaneous contrast")
7. Using the tools
   Color harmony
   
   Static and dynamic composition, colors with distinct and indistinct edges
   (static - lines parallel to edges)
   (dynamic)
   (colors with indistinct edges)
   The imaginary shape: cutoff shapes
   (partial circles, brightness contrast)
   Seeing differently: vertical format
   
   Creative unsharpness
   
   Collecting photographs: the photographic series
   
   Representing time: the photographic sequence
   

Hoffmann's book is about 260 pages and averages about 1 b+w photo per page. As with Mante's book, the production value is excellent. Content of Hoffmann's book:

1. Choosing a good digital camera
2. An essential rule for digital black and white photography: always photograph in RAW mode
3. Drma through the use of filters
4. Overcoming cliched photos
5. Why are modes so important
6. Street photography
7. What does landscape mean in the 21st century?
8. Architectural photography
9. The graphic element in B+W photography
10. The poetry of melancholic moods
11. Abstracts
12. Surreal photography
13. Portraits
14. Man and surroundings
15. Mystic photography
16. Panoramic photography
17. What is pictorial composition
18. The golden ratio and the elementary construction
19. Triangular composition
20. Rhythm - recurring elements
21. Less is more - reduction and emphasis
22. Pictorial guides
23. Balance in a photo
24. Unusual perspectives
25. How to deal with the center of an image
26. Pictorial tension between two elements
27. The image within an image
28. Interesting irritations
29. The play of forms - conscious repetition of pictorial shapes
30. How to compose with blurred movement
31. Black and white from color
32. Partial manipulation with the lasso tool set
33. Retouching
34. Corrections with the distortion filter
35. New B+W conversion with PS CS3

Chapters 1-3 are on Tools and Fundamentals. The rest of the book does not depend significantly on whether you have a digital camera or not. Chapters 4-16 are on Photographic genres and concepts. Chapters 17 - 30 are on Rules of Composition.The remaining chapters are on Photoshop techniques but could probably also be done using GIMP.

Both books are very highly recommended. Matte's book is really a companion to Freeman's book The photographer's eye. However, Hoffmann's book is different and presents you with different compositional ideas.

Camera article from slashdot:

What to Fight Over After Megapixels?
from the just-create-a-new-buzzword dept.
posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday March 16, @13:12 (Graphics)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/16/1613201

This post is on the idea of the "raw" format of a digital camera. As usual, this is written as a way to force myself to learn the subject, not to proclaim my expertise. I hope a few are helped by my explanations but comments on any mistakes are greatly appreciated!

The term "raw" is a catch-all technical term which refers to the (usually proprietary) format some digital cameras capture directly from the sensor. In the case of Nikon cameras, the raw format is called "nef" (which in fact differs depending on the exact model), "cr2" for Canon, and in the case of Leica M8 is called "dng" (short for "digital negative"). Whereas the (older) jpg format captures 8 bits of color "intensity", the raw formats capture at least 12 bits, so this more informative data is is useful for the photographer.

The issue is this: there is no universally accepted solution to the problem of an "open raw" format. In other words, an open standard specification for the raw format accepted by all camera manufacturers. I think this is important because I believe that a photographer should *own* his/her digital image in the same way that she/he owns her/his negative in the situation of film cameras. In reality, for manufacturers such as Canon and Nikon, the format is proprietary (and sometimes important information is even encrypted). If you know this already, then you can stop reading but I was surprised to learn this and the purpose of this post is simply to try to explain some of the issues involved. I come from the open source zealot point-of-view, so please take that into account:-)

The site www.openraw.org advocates open standrds, so that is a good resource. The common digital camera formats are (a) jpg(which is actually several formats, but they are specified by an open non-proprietary format and approved by the ISO), a "lossy" compression format, (b) tiff (which is a collection of formats owned by Adobe, though the current specification is tiff 6.0), (c) dng (which is a special type of tiff format, owned by Adobe, but submitted in 2008 to the ISO). There are many experts on these formats and their uses, including Stuart Nixon, Dave Coffin (author of dcraw), and many others (see the posts to the openraw.org site for some specific names). Not all of them agree that even if dng is accepted by the ISO, it will be the solution to the open raw standard (see the article by Stuart Nixon).

What do you think?

Links:

• open raw: http://openraw.org/
• dcraw: www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw
• dxomark (a site which tests the quality of different raw formats): www.dxomark.com

Graphic and photographic elements

A graphic element is a 2-dimensional form whose outline appears in the image. The basic elements are points (0 dimensional), lines (1 dimensional) and shapes (2 dimensional). The shapes in an image can serve to help the mind perceive the image with less visual effort. For example, a "point" can be illustrated by a smaller element in the photograph which sharply contrasts with its background.

Selective focus, motion blur, lens dynamics, exposure all allow the photographer to lend emphasis to a particular element of a photograph.

Composing with light and color

Contrast is one of the basic aspects of composition. One form of tonal contrast is chiaroscuro (Italian for light/dark), which refers to lighting of dark subjects by shafts of light. The tonal contrast from the shadows and highlights created by such lighting gives mood and atmosphere to a photograph.

The brightness of a photograph is sometimes called the key. High key refers to a bright photograph lower in contrast. Low key refers to a dark photograph which is high in contrast. (At least for black and white images. For color photos, high key might refer to a "washed out" or "underexposed" image, and low key might be "over exposed" with high color contrast.)

Color theory

Key parameters of color are

• hue (the "name" of the color),
• saturation (intensity of hue), and
• brightness (darkness or lightness).

RYB vs RGB

RYB, the "painter's primaries": red, yellow, and blue uesful for describing reflected light.

RGB: red, green, and blue - useful for describing transmitted light.

Note: the red of RYB is not exactly the same as the red of RGB. Likewise, for the corresponding blues.

Intent

What is the intent of a photograph? The intent is the purpose or meaning of the photograph. This question almost presupposes the image conveys pragmatic visual information, ignoring the "fine art" aspect of photography. That is because when we ask for a photographs' meaning, we implicitly ask for how it connects to our minds' sense of the real world.

When composing a photograph, and deliberating on its intent, you must ask how conventional or expected you want your photograph to be. Should it be predictably satisfying or challenging? Unusual photographic compositions of a conventional subject can look to the viewer like a sentence with awkward grammar - a distraction to its intended meaning.
On the other hand, like a emotional song or poem, the photograph of an unconventional subject may fit naturally with an unconventional composition. In this case, the reaction of the unusual composition can mirror the planned reaction of the unconventional subject.

Different intents:

• conventional or challenging,
• planned or reactive,
• documentary or expressive,
• simple or complex,
• clear or ambiguous,
• direct or implied (e.g., pointing to a subject by photographing its shadow or only a small part of it),
• individualistic (in terms of its style) or not (e.g., customized lighting techniques or surrealism or unusual lens selection),
• emphasis on beauty/fashion (this could refer to clothing or architecture or action shots, equally) or not.

Process

It is important to know know in advance what kind of image can be created from a given situation. This of course requires experience and how well you can keep in mind the images you took previously in similar situations that "worked". Process is in some sense the search for order. In other words, the attempt to answer the question, what is the "right" perspective, angle, lighting needed to make a shot of a particular scene "work"? Process involves hunting - the search for situations which can be photographed in a way that the viewer can perceive the intent meaningfully.

	repertoire
	vvv
focal length selection	vvv	ISO setting
aperture	photographer's eye	white balance
DOF	^^^	shutter speed
	^^^
	scene opportunities presenting themselves

Process involves

• dexterity at handling the camera,
• situational awareness for photographic opportunities,
• compositional skills,
• state of mind - finding ways to stay alert and connected to the situation.

Zen (apres de Cartier-Bresson):

• develop "a relationship between the eye and the heart", know the "spirit" of the subject,
• try to reveal the "inner look" of a person,
• "Zen and the Art of Archery" (by Herrigel) applies to photography!

Probably a true Zen practitioner would see it as an abuse to use Zen to improve one's photographic skill. However, the "flow" between ones consciousness and the minds view of reality while photographing has been described by many as "Zen-like".

"If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an 'artless art' growing out of the unconsciousness." - Daistz T. Suzuki

Anticipation

Though unimportant in studio and constructed photography, it is very important in reportage photography to have an accurate sense of what will happen next. One must capture behaviour and action, as well as the way events move across the field of vision. Typical situations in reportage photography:

• a scene presents itself and the photographer must simply wait for the actors to appear,
• a subject has been identified but the photographer must wait for an interesting situation to form to capture a good image.

Exploration

Another aspect of process is the thought and research going into exploration of a situation we want to photograph. Types of exploration:

• the subject is a clearly defined physical object and there istime to move around it to shot from the best perspectiveand with the best lighting,
• the object is very large (say a bridge or a large park) and the photographer must literally explore it to discover its various facets,
• the subject is a localized event, such as a football game or parade, with different temporal and physical aspects that the photographs could capture.

If you think you have the best shot and the best perspective, keep shooting.

Return

This is another aspect of exploration. Ansel Adams often found repeated returns more rewarding than waiting for something (eg, a sunset) to happen at a particular spot.

Construction

A still life is an image constructed by the photographer by objects under his or her control. However, construction also applies to architectural or even some outdoor art or garden photography, where various factors such as customized lighting play a role. Organizing a detailed image with many compositional elements is a complex task requiring concentration and rigor.

Juxtaposition

Suppose you have a photograph with two objects seen nearby each other. As explained in the Gestalt section, our mind has the tendency to assume a relationship between things seen side by side. The viewer therefore bnaturally asks why the photographer choose that perspective and if the juxtaposition was intented or not. Similarly, a sequence of related but distinct photography can provide a unified meaning that is not captured by the individual images. Likewise, inset photos can be used to add content to an otherwise featureless area of a photo.

Post-production

One wants to optimize a photograph - use whatever procedures available to make the compositional design as effective or functional as possible. For example, if a subject does not stand out from its background, perhaps some contrast can be added using computer software to digitally manipulate the image. Knowing what can be done in post-preduction can affect decisions made at the time of the shooting. For example, if you know how to "blend" and "tone map" images into a HDR (high dynamic range) image, you know you should use exposure bracketing to capture several separate images of the same scene but with different exposure settings.


This is the end of the review of this excellent book. I learned a lot from it but probably will forget it soon enough. Hopefully, this blog will serve as a useful reminder. I've left a lot out, including all Freeman's excellent illustrations which exenplify his ideas, so please don't think this is all there is. A highly recommended book.

Notes on composition and design, 1

This is the first in a series of posts which provides a detailed review of M. Freeman's excellent book "The Photographer's Eye". (I saw this recently on a list of the top books on photography, so it is clearly a favorite of a lot of people.) For me, I learn better if I write about the topic, so this blog post is mostly to serve to help me understand the subject of composition. Also, this book is great if you are somewhat scientifically minded - by which I mean you love laws and general principles. I'll try to summarize all I read as best as I can understand them. Please post comments, especially if there is something I'm not explaining well.

The subtitle is "Composition and design" so the book does not address in great detail the highly subjective issue of the emotional impact and subject interest of an image, though some discussion of that is present. The subject matter of a photo is its content. It could be concrete (such as a portrait or a landscape) or abstract (such as concepts or actions). The relationship between the compositional design of the image and its content is very complex. Despite this complexity, the point of view of this book seems to be to approach photography by first giving a good explanation of the composition and design principle.

To begin, the book starts with frame dynamics. Some subjects (such as a landscape) lend themselves to a horizonal rectangular frame, others (such as a full body portrait) to a vertical rectangular frame, while others (such as an abstract) can be presented using a square frame. Your subject to an extent determines the framing.

Design principles: The two most important principles of photographic composition are contrast and balance. Balance is the relationship between contrasting elements. In particular, a photograph of a solid white surface is, by this measure, poorly designed. It would indeed be a very boring photo!

An artist and teacher Johannes Itten who taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920's, used the following terms to describe some of the basic contrasts:

point	line
area	line
plane	volume
area	body
large	small
line	body
high	low
smooth	rough
long	short
hard	soft
broad	narrow
still	moving
thick	thin
light	heavy
light	dark
transparent	opaque
black	white
continuous	intermittent
much or many	little or few
liquid	solid
straight	curved
sweet	sour
pointed	blunt
strong	weak
horizonal	vertical
loud	soft
diagonal	circular

Aside form the composition of a photograph, the elements of the image which interest the viewer is also important. The Freeman book discusses visual principles next.

Visual principles

POI perception principle: The mind builds up its perception of an image from a series of rapid eye movements to the photograph's points of interest.

Gestalt perception principle: The mind leaps to its perception of an image from a recognition of the individual elements in the photograph.

Gestalt laws:

• Proximity: Visual elements in a photograph are grouped together in the mind according to how nearby they are to each other.
• Similarity: Visual elements in a photograph are grouped together in the mind according to their "sameness" to each other.
• Closure: Visual elements which are grouped together are seen to compose an outline shape.
• Simplicity (Occam's razor): The mind tends to prefer simple visual explanations (symmetry, simple shapes, balance).
• Common Fate: Grouped elements with an implied motion are assumed to move together.
• Good Continuation: The mind tends to continue shapes and lines beyond the place where they end.
  
• Separation: The order for a figure in a photograph to be perceived, it must stand out from its background.

Gestalt principles:

• Emergence: Parts of an image that do not contain enough information to explain them suddenly pop out as a result of looking long enough.
• Reification (fallacy): The mind fills in a shapre due to inadequate visual clues (see the Law of Closure above).
• Multistability: When their are insufficient or ambiguous perceptual clues, the mind tends to make elements of the image invert or "pop back and forth". (For example, the alignment of Necker's cube.)
• Invariance: (Less a principle than a property.) When objects can be recognized regardless of orientation, rotation, perspective, scale, lighting, or other factors, then the objects are said to be invariant.

Dynamic tension

Some basic graphical elements are more dynamic than others.

• Diagonals have more energy than horizonal or vertical lines.
• "Rhythm" (periodic patterns) create momentum and activity.
• Eccentric placement of objects induces tension.

Perspective and depth

• Linear perspective (this is what we usually think of as perspective in everyday conversation).
• Diminishing perspective (a special case of linear perspective where similar objects are getting smaller and smaller).
  

  bridge pylons

• Aerial perspective
• Tonal or color perspective (light or warm colors should be "close" and dark or cool colors in the distance).

This ends part 1.

I wanted to post this here since posting it at B+H Photo (a good online store for photo supplies) forces me to transfer all rights, which I didn't like. Unfortunately, I didn't discover that until I'd already written the review, so I'm posting here instead.

I'll probably use this camera from now on to replace the Nikon p5100 as my "carry around"
camera which I leave in my jacket pocket. I also own a Nikon D300, a few other cheaper compacts, and several film cameras.

The FZ28 was selected on the basis of it zoom capability and lots of research (basically reading lots of reviews by others, mostly at amazon.com and dpreview.com). I was frustrated with the P5100 on a few levels

(a) the noise in all but almost perfect shooting, which especially bad in low light settings,

(b) the lack of a significant zoom capability. (I was hoping that with the p5100 being 12M, I could simply crop but the noise was too bad usually to produce good photos.)

Regarding the FZ28, the main advantage is the zoom. It has a 10M sensor and 18x zoom (which I've read can be increased if you reduce the image size via the menu, but I haven't tried this).
The menu features are nice (a manual setting, for example), not significantly better than the Nikon p5100 IMHO. However, the zoom is great. the noise is not as bad as the p5100, and the lens
is very good.

Pros:

(a) Great zoom and good lens,
(b) Nice selection of menus options
(c) small enough to fit in a (large) jacket pocket.

Cons:
(a) It still has noise, just not as much as the p5100. (I base my comparisons with the Nikon D300, which is excellent, IMHO.)
(b) The autofocusing ability could be speedier.
(c) When shooting hand-held at full zoom, picures are often blurry due to slight hand-movement (this is not a defect in the camera, just a point that the buyer should be careful of).
(d) The raw format is so odd that very few software products can handle it, so either be prepared for changing your work-flow or simply ignoring it. (Why camera manufacturers can't decide on a common raw format is beyond me.)
(e) The lens caps makes "off the hip" shooting more awkward.

By unusual fortune, in my late 20's I bought a lithograph of an Eyvind Earle print for about $2000. (This was a little over 20 years ago, so was a lot of money for a newly graduated student.) It's the only "real" art I currently have, in the sense that everything else hanging on my walls is a print (mostly by Kandinsky or Michael Parkes) or a framed poster or one of my own photographs. Of course, then I was even dumber about art than I am now, so my good sense then is a bit surprising to me now. For some reason I just loved this huge frame of a bright red barn with very graphic bare trees with lots and lots of branches.

But these days, my activity on ipernity brought up the thought of Earle's work and who he really is and what else he has done. Then I remembered that when I bought the piece I also got a small cataloge of his other work and so searched for it. I also searched online for something affordable. It seems all his art is still very expensive but I did find an affordable used book he wrote about himself. It's titled Horizon bound on a bicycle. This post describes his life, as I've read it from that book.

Eyvind Earle is a American landscape artist with a strong graphic sense. A life-long nature lover, in his youth he often would take a long bike ride and paint a scene which captured his imagination along the ride. He lived through the Depression of the 1920's, survived an abusive father, and went on to great professional success.

His mother's name was Charlotte Herman, the daughter of Nanny ("Nana") Hafslund and Paul Herman of Monroe, NY. Charlotte was born in Buffalo, NY, but lived in Mornoe at the time of her marriage to Eyvind's father. For his teenage years on, Eyvind referred to his mother by her first name or as Lotte (as opposed to "Mom"). She was a musican and taught piano, mostly through private lessons.

His father's name was Ferdinand Earle, an artist (painter), writer, and ocasional set designer for the Hollywood motion picture industry. Ferdinand married Charlotte in about 1913. They bore a son before Eylind (who was born in Manhattan NY in 1916). Eyvind was very close to his brother, but he died of polio. This happened around the time Eyvind was 8 years old, and he almost died of as well. In fact, his face was partially paralyzed for his life as a result of the sickness.

Charlotte was Ferninand's 4th wife and his marriage to her lasted about 10 or 12 years. When they split up, Ferdinand took young Eyvind with him to Mexico and told him he had to paint a painting or read 50 pages every day. He did both. While in Mexico, they usually painted together, and his father taught him how to mix paints, draw preliminary sketches, etc. Eventually, the moved to France and Eyvind at th age or 14 or 15, tired of his father's abuse, ran away and went all the way back to California to his mother. He continued to paint, landscapes mostly, especially after taking a long bike ride to a beach or mountain vista. In his early 20's he decided to bike across the US, painting along the way. This was in the 1930's. He tried to survive at first on less than 50 cents per day but eventually needed more to eat. He was hit once by a car, but he survived, surprisingly intact (his bike did not fair so well though!). At the end of his trip, after a short stay with relatives, he had several shows in New York Ciy galleries and was hailed univerally by the critics. The Metropolitan Museam of Art even bought one of his works for his permanent collection. He painted and designed Christmas cards for money. (Earle called himself an "Emersonian" though and though spiritual, was not particularly religious in the conventional sense.) Eventually, WWII arrived on the scene and the US started the draft.

Eyvind registered as a conscientious objector, and went into the medical corp. There he met his first wife Alice Johnson, whom he married in October 1944 (or 1945?). Their daughter Kristen was born the following August (though possibly it was a year later - I couldn't figure out the dates from the book). Eyvind and Alice were always close to their only child. She went to college in California and eventually married her long-time boyfriend Tom, an architect. Tom and Kristen eventually moved to Canada.

In 1951, Eyvind's father died of a heart attack in California. Eyvind wrote that he "cannot forget the hundreds and hundreds of spankings, whippings, slappings ..." nor hearing him beat his mother. However, he called him

The most inventive person I ever knew.

The hardest working person I ever knew.

Also, the greatest influence on him as an artist.

Much much more painful for Eyvind was the slow death of his first wife Alice by lung cancer in 1970. He tried hard to improve her life during this time, and her death was a crushing experience. During this time, he worked as a painter, and galleries sold his art he provided them within months. He was so hurt by his wife's death that he moved to Canada near his daughter for a year or so.

Eventually, he met Joan Kennedy, whom he married in 1972. They moved to New York, where his art business and creativity thrived. He started silk-screens at this time, where he silk screened his own graphics

Joan helped Eyvind care for his mother Charlotte, who grew more and more forgetful and hard of hearing. Since she would forget, Eyvind would write his mother every night a little "good night poem", and left it near her bedsite in case she work up in the middle of the night. One reads

Starting from nothing to where we are

is farther than the farthest star.

And farther than the farthest star

is where we're going from where we are.

This loving attention continued until her death of natural causes in 1981 (or 1982?).

It was in 1984, not long after his mother's passing, that Eyvind and Joan moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they lived for the next 4 years. He continued painting and silk-screens, and hired several assistants to help him with the silk-screens. However, even with Eyvind's close, loving attention, his wife's health was declining. Following her doctor's recommendation, they decided to move to a less dry climate. Their next house was in the Carmel area of the California coast, with a view of the Pacific ocean. The writing ends a few years later, around 1990, when Eyvind is in his mid-seventies. He was in good health and painted every day, at the time the book stopped. Other sources indicated he died in 2000.

A remarkable man.

Some links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyvind_Earle
• http://bestuff.com/stuff/evyind-earle

Hi:

Does anyone have some good suggestions for medium format film (negative) usb scanners?

I'll use either a mac or linux machine, but the linux machine is more convenient. It seems the commercial program vuescan www.hamrick.com will interface with most scanners. I don't object to this but would prefer an open source interface. So, if you know of a good medium format film scanner scanner, great, since vuescan probably works with it, but if you know of one that definitely works with linux that's even better.

TIA, David

There is a wonderful blog written by Errol Morris with the title "Photography as a weapon" at

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/photography-as-a-weapon/

I think this might require a free registration to read since it is the NY Times (you have to give them your email address and choose a password is all, I think), but I think you might find it is worth the effort. Morris is an Academy-award winning documentary film-maker and in this blog he intersperses his own views with some very interesting interviews. A good read IMHO.

These are the rest of the notes I took of the Vision and Composition class taught by Dick Bond.

 

Day 2

Your out-of-focus exercises emphasized shape (form), light (exposure), shadow, and color.

• An out-of-focus photo is abstract if its origin is unrecognizable.
• When taken out of focus, a small bright point of light in the distance can grow into a very large circle of confusion, dominating the image. This can have a very nice effect.
• The human vision system has a let's-not-get-eaten-by-tigers "program" which tracks the eye to the most recognizable object. This "program" is not activated for an out-of-focus image.
• Black and yellow always work great for such an image!

 

For example, a very out-of-focus photo of a fern might have lots of horizonal shapes. Horizonal lines make a photo look static. Pretend the photo was projected onto a screen using a projector. Can you imagine looking down on a photo having horizonal lines? Looks odd. That is because horizonal lines can act as a vanishing perspective. When a vanishing perspective is below us, it makes us uncomfortable. Likewise, take a photo with no vanishing perspective (for example, a photo of your feet). Now, if that photo was projected onto the floor or ceiling it doesn't seem so odd.

Learn this: An image is anything within a camera frame, but there are no rules. Composition rules are self-imposed boxes.

Exercise: Take 10-20 images. Everything must be green. Nothing but green. Can be out of focus, can be cropped, but must be completely green. Warning: This light from the sky gives off a blue highlight. No blue highlights! Some white and black is okay.

Day 3

Your green exercises emphasized shape (form) and texture. It also empahsized the following aspects of photography. It is surpisingly hard to capture pure green photos, even when
that is what you see. Several effects play a role in how our eye perceives color.

• The light source is often not pure white. For example, light from the sky gives off a blue highlight, whether you are in direct light or in shade.
• Light bulbs might seem white when they are in fact slightly tinted.
• A sharp edge which is made out-of-focus edge can color the edge in a way which was not observed before, due to diffraction. Diffraction results when propagating light waves encounter an obstacle (such as the object creating the edge; for details, see, for example,
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction).
• The human visual system uses the brightest nearby object as the "white balance card" of your brain. So if you have a black frame for a photo, that will have a much different effect than a light blue frame in how you perceive the color.
• The effect of "gremlins" is emphasized (a gremlin is an object which creeps into the frame of your photograph the moment you take the picture!).

 

To eliminate the blue tint from the sky, use a "81 yellow filter" on your lens.

As stated already, shape and form is emphasized when color is "taken away". The more circular a shape is, the less dynamic it will appear. A straight line, for example along a diagonal, adds a dynamic quality to the image. However, if the leading line to this diagonal is out-of-focus, then the effect can in many cases be ruined.

Exercise: Take 8 images, made up of 4 pairs. Each pair must consist of one photo of a scene with "normal" exposure and the other either over-exposed by one stop or under-exposed by one stop.
In either case, the "improperly exposed" image must be an improvement over the original. Any subject is allowed. All exposure setting must occur in camera, but software is allowed for the purpose of cropping.

Day 4


A showing of some of my photos is at the 47 West Gallery on November 15th. There will be a preview on Nov 14th and you are all invited.


I don't use the same exercises each time I teach this. (However, the first exercises, the "out-of-focus" one, is always the same.) For example, in winter you can't always ask for "everything green" shots. One good exercise I sometimes give is:all images must consist of straight or curves lines.

The last exercises was concerned with teaching you how the light metering of your camera affects your photos. As you can see, the light meters' suggestion is generally to be disregarded.

Under-exposure usually increases color saturation. However, over-exposure can bring out pastel colors. Over-exposure will lose texture but underexposure will nor necessarily bring out details. This loss in detail can be good - for example, if you lose detail in the background, you can often emphasize the subject more.

General advice

Photography is not a contact sport. Photos are not taken to get points in a competition. So ignore the "rule-of-thirds"  and other criteria that judges use to score photos in competitions. (However, placing your subject smack in the center of the photo is often not a good idea either!) Judges who always use the "rule-of-thirds" to "score" a photo are petrified (as in fossils)! Styles change, photographers change, what types of photos we like and why we like them also change, even for photography judges. So, ignore rules and let your own growing sense of style be your guide.

Just as placing a subject such as a flower in the dead center of the photo makes it boring, so does taking a photograph at an angle, dividing the photo in two. Try to avoid starting and stopping in corners all the time.

Photographs with more than one vanishing point are problematical. (By a vanishing point, I mean a point in the distance that the eye is naturally attracted to.) Often when these are naturally
separated the photo decomposes into two separate photos.


This is the last class but here is something you may want to do at home:
Find a perfectly white wall or sheet of paper. Photograph it, and increase the stop by 1. Photograph it again, and increase the stop by 1. Repeat this process until the image is black.Now you have your own custom-made grayscale! If you print them out, remember that paper often prints darker than its digital or projector image.

Once in awhile I wondered what a photo would look like with a square format. Of course, you can always crop to a square on the computer but that doesn't help with the original framing of the shot. So, I spent several hours yesterday searching for information on square format digital cameras and thought I'd post some of the information, for those interested.

There are very expensive square-format digital cameras (Hasselblad, for example). I was looking for something very affordable, just to experiment with. First, I found the "toy camera" Minidigi Rolleiflex, but it lacked other features I wanted (I don't remember the price). Then I read about the Ricoh cameras (GX100, GR Digital II, R7, R8), all of which have a 1:1 aspect ratio option. This seemed great, except I didn't really like the feature set on any one of these (though a combination of the R8 and the GX100 would be nice). Ricoh seems to be a popular choice for people who like the square format. Finally, I googled for digital cameras with aspect ratio options. This was the key. Lots of cameras have different aspect ratio options, though not always 1:1. In fact, it was because of this google search that I discovered that my Nikon p5100 has a square format option!

I was both happy that I already owned a camera with that option and chagrined that I spent so much time on the computer searching for something I should have known. In any case, it was under the "image size" setting in the camera's menu. Apparently what it does is darken a portion of the LCD screen, so that you see a square image. I'll try to post some examples after I next go out shooting.

I'd be interested in hearing if any of your cameras have unusual aspect ratios.

I really only began studying photography about 18 months ago when my wife bought me a Nikon D50 for Valentine's Day. Before that, the only art classes I took were in grade school (if you can call them art classes). So to try to improve my photography skills, I've been reading art and photography books, learning a lot from people at ipernity and my local camera club, and signed up this summer for a photography class called Vision and Composition. It was held at the Maryland Hall for the Arts and taught by artist-in-residence and long-time photographer Dick Bond. (There was a recent story on him here: www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2008/06_22-34/LIF.) These are my notes of this very interesting course, which met for a few hours at a time, once a week (next week is the last class). The notes will be split into two parts. The first day had a lot of lecturing. The others were mostly discussion and looking at photos taken by the class members. I learned a lot from the exercises and really enjoyed the class. I hope some of you enjoy reading these notes and that these can maybe spark a discussion of art/photograph classes you've taken or some positive learning experiences you've had with photography.

I alone am responsible for any mistakes. Please email me or add a comment if you see anything wrong. Feel free to distribute these (license: CC, Attribution + share Alike, as usual).

 

Day 1

 

What makes pictures succeed or fail? I don't believe there are rules for composition in photography. It is primarily a visual art. Thinking can get you into trouble! For example, do the "photo dance" (which DB demonstrated by looking into a camera rangefinder and shifting back-and-forth, front-to-back) to frame the shot properly; this is not a "thinking" activity. Photography is not an intellectual  exercise in composition rules, rather a vision-based art. Cameras don't take pictures, photographers do. Knowing the details of the camera's engineering or the chemistry of film emulsion will not help you take better pictures. You must learn how to visualize.

This course will involve exercises in "seeing''. What do we see when we photograph?
 

Light and exposure

You must be aware of light and its peculiarities. How does light work?

Physists tell us that light is both a particle and a wave. This means we can think of light eminating from a candle (the light source) analogous to a pebble being dropped into a still pool of water. Think of the ripples causes by the pebble (light source) as the light waves.

 If you have an SLR camera then after the lens, you have a mirror which must capture the light you want to record for your image. You can see that if the mirror is near the light source then it will capture a higher percentage of the photons that if it were farther away.

When you double the distance form the light source, you quarter the intensity. It satisfies the inverse square law: the intensity is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance from the light source.

It is hard to visualize light exposure because our visual system has a very sophisticated autoexposure system which corrects for dimmer light by dialating the pupil.

 

Focus

 

Our two human eyes focus much better than one camera eye. For example, cover one eye, place two fingers 6 inches from your face and look at me between your fingers.  One is out of focus - me or your fingers. On the other hand, if you use both eyes and just look around, everything is in focus! As anyone who plays a sport such as tennis or racketball knows, the focusing ability of our vision system is remarkable.

The human eye has a lens at the front and retina at the back. The brain compensates for the effect that any lens has in inverting an image. The SLR camera's eye is analogous. The mirror just behind the lens flips the image horizonally (flips top-to-bottom). The pentaprism in front of the eyepiece (at the top of the camera) flips the image vertically (flips right-to-left).

How do you improve focus of a far away object? You squint, or narrow the opening of the eyelids. Decreasing your camera's aperature has a similar effect.

On the camera's film or sensor, images which are out of focus appear as circles. The depth of field is the range of distances which are rendered in the camera in focus. The focal length of a lens is defined to be the distance between the lens and the plane (in front of the camera) of sharp focus. The larger the focal length, the more area can be captured in the camera. The smaller the aperature, the more objects in the image are in focus.

The lens aperature is the diameter of the lens opening divided by the focal length of the lens. A relative lens aperature of 1/N is written f/N. The number N arising in this way is called an f-stop (or f-number). The larger the f-stop, the smaller the aperature. For example, the close-up of an image taken with f/2 has all the objects in the background out of focus. However, a photograph taken with f/20 might have all objects in the image appearing in focus.

Shutter speed: Aperature and shutter speed settings are used together to control the amount of light from the subject that reaches the film/sensor. The formula for the exposure is exposure = (intensity) x (time), or E = I*t. Here the time t is measured by the shutter speed.

 

Exercise

Take 20 images. All must be completely out of focus. Show courage - take color abstracts with nothing even close to being in focus. You will realize how different the eye and the camera imaging system are.

Using motion blur on some shots is okay but you must also get some shots with "genuine circles of confusion''. No computer manipulation allowed! Prefer that you don't even look at the images on the computer before class!

 

There is a very interesting, if someone salaciously titled, article on photographers' rights at http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0806.html#1 written by security expert Bruce Schneier. It has lots of great links, is not specific to the US (though I think he only gives links related to US, Great Britain, and Australia) and I thought some of you might like reading it too.
Main points:

• Since 9/11 the harrassment of photographers has increased at public places, such as
  train stations, etc. He says that, in fact, *none* of the terrorists captured so far actually took photographs as part of their planning. (I didn't know this.)
• He gives a link to the NY Times which quotes the following statistic: according to the market research firm InfoTrends, US's amateur photographers produced 28 billion digital pictures last year, 6 billion more than they shot on film,  That does not count pictures deleted before being printed or transferred for storage.
• Lots of links on the "Photographers' rights" and anti-photography "incidents".

I've never run into any problems but thought I'd post this, hoping it might help some of you other ipernity members.

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may
learn how to do it.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish Cubist painter (1881 - 1973)

In the spirit of Picasso's quotation, this post will be on abstract photography, a subject which I love but have no real experience or formal training in. So, please post or email me with comments or corrections and please take whatever I say with a grain of salt.

First, I'll record a few definitions.

Call a photographic composition abstract if its subject is somehow separate or `abstracted' from
reality. Likewise, abstract art is art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead
uses color and form in a non-representational way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_art).

 

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has
nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.
Wassily Kandinsky, Russian abstract artist (1866-1944)

Abstract photography is of course distinct from documentary photography, which illustrates or `reports' something external to the photographer. The book by Hurn and Jay (On being a photographer, 3rd edition, LensWork Publishing, Anacortes, WA, 2007) has an excellent description of documentary photography.

Abstract photography can be subdivided into two subfields:

• Non-objective or non-representational abstract photography. A special case of non-objective abstract photography is geometric abstract photography, which is based
  on the use of simple geometric forms combined into non-objective compositions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_abstraction).
• Representational abstract photography: A photographic composition representating a real object in an unusual way which illustrates a pattern or abstract concept.

 

To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,'
I respond, 'There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.
Ansel Adams, US nature photographer (1902 - 1984)

One might argue that all photography is abstract in that it is a depiction of a moment frozen in time separated from the constantly changing nature of reality. However, abstract photography is not `reporting' a scene or event, it is depicting a concept. A photograph can be both representational yet connotate an abstract concept - for example, an photograph of a place of worship. To some extent, whether a photograph is primarily abstract or not is a subjective matter for the viewer.

I'll end with another quotation by Picasso:

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
        Pablo Picasso

Comments?

 

I went to the Baltimore Museum of Art "Looking through the lens: 1900-1960". They own some works of several famous photographers, for example Ansel Adams, Robert Cappa, Man Ray and Paul Strand. For example, they own Man Ray's Tears photograph and Paul Strand's Blind Woman, among many others (why the Getty museum has it on their website, I don't know). It was 93 degrees and humid when my wife and I arrived and 101 degrees when we left. A typical Baltimore summer day. Photography was forbidden insider the photography exhibit but allowed in most of the museum. The indoor shots that did come out well weren't very interesting, but I posted some of the shots of the building fromt the outside.