Tag Archives: digital

Playing with Lightroom 4′s black and white conversion

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I don’t convert many colour images to black and white. In general if I want a black and white image, I tend to use black and white film. I know that there are many people who use specialist conversion software, but given the cost of this kind of thing, I’ve never been that keen on going down this route.

Incoming storm, by Loch Scridain, Isle of Mull (click image to see larger version)

Incoming storm, by Loch Scridain, Isle of Mull (click image to see larger version)

However, I think the new version of Adobe’s Lightroom (we’re at version 4 now) has improved the black and white conversion processing no end. I installed it yesterday, and today I played with an image from a visit to Mull last autumn that I have tried to convert to black and white several times, but never in a way that I was really happy with. Perhaps it just needed multiple experimentations, but I do have a sense that it was considerably easier to achieve this result in version 4 of Lightroom than in version 3. I’m not sure I’m completely finished with it as I wonder if it’s maybe a little bit too dark, but it certainly now represents more of how I felt the landscape, the clouds and the weather appeared to me at the time - the fast-moving storm from the loch off picture to the left, across to the mountains. It corresponds to how I envisaged the image turning out when I took it. A minute or two after squeezing the shutter, I was back in my car, as the rain hammered down.

I don’t normally find software releases very exciting, but it seems to me that Lightroom 4 is a significant improvement on version 3. And if you want to get it at a reduced cost, Adobe has it on offer at a cheaper price at the moment to mark the release…

PS In case you’re interested in these things, the photograph was taken on a Nikon D90 with a 10-24mm lens at 24mm (that’s equivalent to 36mm in full frame terms).

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Musings on film latitude and related matters

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I’ve posted very little here recently, and have only added a couple of incidental items on my micro-blog. This has two main reasons: I’ve been very busy travelling for work (Germany, Norway, England in the last four weeks), and I’ve also had quite a backlog of films to scan and process. Concentrating on film and finding a revised routine to my workflow - now that I think I’ve understood what I’m doing with my new Epson scanner - takes time, and after various false starts, I think I’m finally getting there. There is now, of course, a bit of a backlog of both film and digital images (I’ve not stopped photographing!), and coupled with a desire to redo the galleries here, you’ll appreciate that I’m struggling a bit…

A beautiful Rollei image, as scanned

A beautiful Rollei image, as scanned

However, this posting is tangential to all of these thoughts! I have, partly because of the 1953 Project (and yes, there are images to go online from that, too!), occasionally been carrying the Rolleiflex with me as a ‘casual camera’. This regularly elicits interesting conversations with complete strangers, which can be surprising and very nice. For example, last week I was dining with a friend in London and after our meal I wanted to photograph her with the Rollei; a couple at a neighbouring table began talking to us about the camera, photography and so on… culminating in a request that I might consider photographing their wedding next year; of course, I declined!

Adobe Lightroom settings

Adobe Lightroom settings

The film I’m using for the 1953 Project is Ilford FP4Plus, which is rated at an ISO of 125. Ilford’s website says it has ‘enormous latitude for exposure error above and below‘ this speed. I chose it for the project partly for this reason, thinking it wouldn’t much matter if the exposure was slightly off on my portraits because I could always recover the images once they were scanned in. I didn’t realise quite what ‘enormous’ meant to Ilford, but these images clearly show that. The first image above is the scan from the negative (Vuescan reversed the negative for me). I made adjustments in Lightroom, as this screen capture shows: upping the exposure by four stops, pushing the fill light and brightness up, and then reducing the contrast and clarity settings to bring the grain under control. Aside from dust removal, these are the only changes I made to the image, revealing… Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music at Oxford University, with whom I had a stimulating lunch at the beginning of September (click on the photograph to go to her blog):

Elizabeth Eva Leach

Elizabeth Eva Leach

It’s not a great portrait, but it astonishes me that it worked at all, not just because of the film exposure issues: the café was relatively dark and I could barely see anything on the ground glass (so focusing was mostly a lucky guess), the lens was wide open at f2.8 with an exposure speed of 1/10th of a second - and yet it’s reasonably sharp despite all this! And this isn’t a coincidence: another portrait taken under similar circumstances was just as underexposed and with similar Lightroom adjustments it came out fine too:

Another Ilford FP4Plus sample, with similar exposure settings

Another Ilford FP4Plus sample, with similar exposure settings

What I love about all this is the visceral nature of the film and the process. For sure, I could have taken these portraits on a digital camera and bumped up the auto ISO settings - but I’m not convinced they would have looked any ‘better’ (they would have been different…). Of course, even the process of ‘extracting’ an image from an almost entirely black square of film gives me enormous pleasure - it’s like finding a treasure! I don’t regard myself by any means as a format fetishist, but returning to film does give me huge pleasure: my use of the Mamiya for landscapes makes me photograph with much greater consideration and precision than I used to with the digital camera, and I LOVE that.

For example, here’s a dawn image from the Mamiya taken on Velvia 50 of the Ratzeburg Küchensee in northern Germany this August. I remember taking quite a while to compose it in order to make sure the twisted twigs were below the tree line, whereas I think with a digital camera I might have fired off a good half-dozen shots at different heights and then hoped one had worked when I was back at the computer - but here I composed slowly and carefully, got it right, and then made… two exposures (er… the first one had a misplaced graduated filter that I noticed after squeezing the cable release!).

Küchensee, Ratzeburg

Küchensee, Ratzeburg

(I’ve lightened the exposure by half a stop and added a little fill light, otherwise it’s as it came from the scanner.)

In a few weeks’ time I’m off to Assynt with Bruce Percy. I’m really looking forward to this, and though I’ll take my Mamiya, I will mostly use the Nikon D90 so that images can be readily critiqued by Bruce and the group. I’m keen to observe myself with this, as it were: I’m sure my recent return to film will have changed how I use the digital camera for landscapes. Before going to Assynt, I’m also going to the Isle of Mull for a week of secluded reading - and I may just take a photograph or two whilst I’m there…

Thinking about colour and monochrome images

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There are some images that I just know need to be monochrome, even before I squeeze the shutter - I think that is perhaps the case for many photographers. And if I have my film camera with me and it has black and white film in it, then I try to compose and visualise accordingly. But sometimes I create a colour image and then come to the editing stage and find I have an image which could be either, and it’s not clear to me which one is ‘better’. This is especially the case when I have a series of images, and I wonder if a monochrome development of one or two individual images might be good.

For example, this image of Ngoni is a case in point. I have a number of these images of her on the bridge in the snow (in her bikini, in a dress, and in a coat), and this one seemed quite strong when converted to monochrome, emphasising her dark naked skin against the white snow and white bikini, with the bridge playing a less significant role than it appears to in the colour version (of course, that’s also an editing question). I did eventually put the monochrome image on RedBubble for sale - and you can see a larger version of the image there - but I’m not wholly convinced this is the right one to have used. The tones (values) of light and darkness are what make or break a monochrome image… and I find I’m not completely sure if this is quite right when examined under these criteria (and you may think this is because it’s not a particularly strong image, despite what I think!). Of course, in the ‘old days’ a camera would have had either colour or black and white film in it, and composition and visualisation would have been guided accordingly, but in these digital days (even with scans of colour images from film), conversion to monochrome is always an easy possibility - and perhaps this makes life a little bit harder. Thoughts on all this in the comments section below are most welcome!

And, of course, these questions apply not only to portraits… they also arise when thinking about landscapes.

I’ve struggled with this before…!

Dornoch images

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Embo - beach

Tim Parkin from Great British Landscapes has been in touch and interviewed me for the magazine; this will be appearing shortly. In talking with him I realised that I had completely forgotten to upload images from the week in Dornoch last summer, when I spent much of the time photographing using just my prime lenses (in Nikon DX format, the 35mm f1.8 and 50mm f1.4). A fault with my film camera meant I couldn’t take that with me, so all the images that week were created digitally, on the Nikon D90.

As I note in the text on the gallery page, this marked an interesting point in my compositions. Click on the image here to see the gallery, or look down the list to the side.

The wonder of film

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This evening I needed to be in nearby Musselburgh, where I would be waiting for half-an-hour at the harbour. Musselburgh has a lovely small harbour, and at the moment all the sailing boats are ‘parked’ in the car park round the harbour (in spaces that are marked ‘dinghy parking’!).

Stephanie, photographed on Ilford FP4 plus (ISO125)

Stephanie, photographed on Ilford FP4 plus (ISO125)

On the way out of the house, I took my camera, tripod, spirit level, filters, a 28mm and a 50mm lens - and looked forward to capturing some of these boats and the harbour scenes. I took my favourite film camera, the old Nikon FM2, with one of the last three rolls of Fuji Sensia that I have: this is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me, since I used to use Sensia a lot before switching to Fuji Velvia for colour landscapes; Fuji have recently announced they are stopping the production of Sensia so I have just bought three rolls of it to play with for the last time. It was fairly dark when I arrived in the harbour, and as I took my bag out of the car and began to set up, I realised that I had left my light meter at home - since the FM2′s slowest shutter speed before getting to the bulb setting is 1 second, the camera’s meter would be useless and I would have had to more or less guess all my exposures… so, sadly, I packed everything away again and went to buy a newspaper instead. Next week, when I expect to be there again, I’ll remember the meter!

I’ve read two nice postings on other people’s websites recently about using film. The first one was from the great Bruce Percy, who discussed how much he enjoyed using a particular kind of Kodak Portra film for a recent trip he made to Ethiopia and then, referring to Canon’s 5D digital camera, noted:

I get a lot of correspondence from people wanting to know how to get the same look with their 5D. You can’t.

If you want the look of film, then shoot film.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that! The other piece I’ve come across is more of a short essay by the wonderful Max Marinucci (though the second part describes how he develops film, so you may want to skim read that bit if you just want to pick up on his philosophy about film):

…patience and parsimony are virtues to be cultivated and nourished. When shooting film, you immediately accept the fact that it may be a little while before you see the fruits of your work and, by living with this, you will become a more disciplined shooter, which will in turn carry on to your digital side as well. It also means that shooting everything in sight without any thought into basics like light and composition is out of the question since you only have 24-36 shots in a roll of 35mm and it makes no sense in spending time/money developing simple, careless snapshots. This is a valuable exercise in restraint and it brings us to actually THINK before we shoot. Would you have taken a picture of your toes with film just because you can? I sincerely doubt it.

Although I use my Nikon D90 digital camera a lot, there is something wonderful about film that cannot be beaten by the more ‘clinical’ nature of digital… and it has to do with all these key components of photography that often go missing in the techno-madness that camera manufacturers obscure from us as they add ever more silly functions to their cameras: patience, composition, light, perspective… I’m not a dogmatic film shooter: of course digital cameras have their place (I couldn’t be involved in the same way in the African film festival if I wasn’t using digital, and I do like my D90). I think it is just a question of being reminded of that at times, of using film and digital in different circumstances as appropriate, and above all, appreciating film for all the wonder it can bring to the craft of photography.

Thoughts on ‘progress’ and loyalty and contemporary cameras

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One of the (to my mind) coherent arguments against digital cameras is that in the longer-term they cost more than film cameras. The idea behind this is that with a film camera, once you achieve a certain quality of body/lens, there is only limited additional quality that can be achieved by replacing the body. So whilst it might make sense to buy new lenses periodically (that is another argument entirely that I will perhaps return to another time), there is generally little point in replacing a body unless you’re a professional who needs a faster autofocus, motorwinder or whatever. But for most of us, we can buy a decent film camera body and be done with it, just spending our hard-earned money on occasional lenses. Then we can direct our attention towards actually taking photographs with all this expensive stuff we’ve bought.

With digital, it’s been a whole other issue, as bodies have improved remarkably over time. Ken Rockwell describes this rather memorably as ‘digital rot‘, and Bruce Percy and many others have also made similar points in the past: people who buy digital cameras will tend to want to buy new digital cameras when ‘the next model’ comes out. In the longer-term, therefore, digital shooting costs more than film shooting, even taking into account developing and printing costs, because you buy new bodies every few years. With digital cameras, the manufacturers keep telling us, there is a marked difference in newer models: better metering and white balancing to make sure the images are better exposed, Active-D Lighting to deal with light/dark differentials (which is what Nikon calls it, I’m sure Canon will offer an equivalent though I don’t know what it is called), more megapixels, greater dynamic range, and so on…

And yes, to be sure, there is a huge difference in Nikon’s early digital cameras and more modern ones (for example, the professional level D1H that was discontinued in 2006 had a 2.66 megapixel sensor, compared to the 12 in my D90). However, I am increasingly unconvinced that all this is changing as rapidly in contemporary times as it did in the past. I write this as the ‘replacement’ for the D90 is hitting the shops, Nikon’s D7000. Yes, it looks very good, and I’m sure many people will buy it, and some of those people will make absolutely stunning images with it. But is it really so-o-o-o much better than the D90 that I should feel the need to go out and buy one?

But… but… the pixel-counter-nutheads will say, how can you ask that? Surely it’s newer, it’s better, it has more megapixels (16, as opposed to the D90′s 12… as if that really mattered! - see below), it can shot 6fps instead of ‘just’ 4.5fps, it puts the milk on your cornflakes for you and makes your tea… ok, probably not those last two.

For all practical purposes, in the DX camera range (Nikon’s cropped sensor cameras), the D90 has , until now, probably been Nikon’s most user-friendly digital camera producing better images than anything else in this price range. It perhaps even surpasses the D300, as this is heavier (though made of metal and therefore sturdier), with less easily accessible options (though they do shoot a little faster and have one or two additional imaging features). Unless you’re a professional taking hundreds of images every day, this is no better than the D90, as to all intents and purposes they use the same sensor and processor.

Now the D7000 has come along. It is an improvement on the D90, but I don’t feel that it gives me that much more than the D90 has given me already. To be sure, if I was now looking to upgrade from the D40 as I did a year ago (Nikon only list the D40x on their website - the D40 was much the same with a 6mp sensor), I would seriously consider a D7000 as well as the D90, but having the D90 now doesn’t make me want to move to the D7000.

I think we need to get away from the mentality that just because the camera manufacturers tell us that something is new and better, we believe them! They cynically presume an inherent disloyalty to the products they themselves sell us: we are no longer supposed to feel so attached to our cameras, instead willing to give them up for something ‘better’ just because it fits their marketing cycles. What we really have are fantastic machines that 10 years ago would have been way beyond anyone’s imagination, and I for one, feel I barely scratch the surface of what my camera can do. I have taken about 10,000 shots with my D90, but know that I am continually learning how to use it better. The early great photographers always said, ‘know your camera so that it becomes second-nature to use it’. I’m quite happy to admit that only after the first 2-3,000 or so shots did I feel I was beginning to really understand what my camera was doing and what I could expect of it. Getting to that point opens me up to using it more creatively, to experimenting with some of the capabilities that lie hidden in the menus or the way it interacts with particular lenses - and only once I’ve got all that sorted out, can I engage with it much more intuitively and create images that centre on the key themes of lighting, composition, visualisation and so on. Buying a new camera gets in the way of that, at least for me - I found it initially quite difficult to move from the D40 to the D90, as certain things kept not happening that I was expecting to happen, and other things did happen that I hadn’t expected!

The only real upgrade at this time, I think, is in format. If I was going to change from the D90, the DX sensor D7000 is not where I’d go. If money was not an issue, I would be interested in the full-sized sensor D700 or D3x - but that would in turn necessitate other lenses…

So if you’re anything like me, don’t fall for the camera manufacturers’ hype. If you have a great camera that you like (and most cameras can be great cameras in the hands of those who know how to use them properly), then stick with it - show it loyalty, and it’ll reward you with images that emerge from your intuitive abilities and interests. And you’ll be doing the environment a favour too…!

—

PS The difference in the D7000′s 16 megapixels and the D90′s 12 is as follows:
D7000: 4,928 x 3,264 - D90: 4,288 x 2,848
This means 640 x 416 pixels more, crammed into the same sized sensor (which brings its own problems, as I understand it…) - if my maths is right, this is about a 13% increase in image size. In practical terms, unless printing huge advertising hoardings, this is totally irrelevant. In fact, even for advertising hoardings, it’s probably irrelevant since you’d never look at the image closely enough to see the individual dots that make up the image. If you want proof of this, the next time you see an advertisement for shampoo at a bus stop, go right up to the image and look very closely at the model’s face and hair to see all the little pixels that make up her ‘smooth’ skin and even ‘smoother’ hair - they are anything but smooth when viewed closeup! But we don’t normally do that, and that is what makes these small differences so unimportant in large prints. Get over the megapixel mania and think about how you produce sharper images using the light you have and the lenses you use - it’s about art, not pixel-counts!

The beauty of autumn

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The beauty of autumn

The beauty of autumn

I love the autumn - the clouds that fill the skies, and the soft gentle light that allows for a different kind of photograph to be taken from the harshness of summer light. So whereas other members of the family, and colleagues at work are sorry to see the summer days going and resent the autumnal weather and nights drawing in, like a little child I’m getting rather excited at the opportunities that lie before me with the soft diffused light that is the hallmark of this season. Of course, all the seasons offer something different, but autumn and spring are perhaps the two I prefer, at least in terms of light.

I’m planning a few short trips over the winter into the Scottish hills so that I can benefit from this light in a variety of landscapes, and am also intending to try a variety of film types (b/w print film in particular) as well as the usual digital images. So interesting times ahead…

Thoughts on keeping still

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Until yesterday, a section on my Equipment page had the following text about tripods:

…I think tripods for day times are mostly a terrible nuisance and often even a hindrance for taking good photographs (at least for me: they restrict my movement and sometimes just make me lazy)… [and] when using a digital camera, the fast 35 or 50mm lenses and the VR feature on the 18-200mm lens enable fairly slow shutter speeds to be used (even in the evening) and so a tripod becomes less and less important for many things.

I had this on my site for a long time, but I now realise this is no longer really true - my understanding of the place of a tripod has changed. I am using my tripod more and more, including with the fast lenses mentioned above. It does slow me down somewhat, but that is a good thing. Particularly with digital cameras, I find I sometimes just shoot countless images and hope that one of them will be worth using. But often I just end up with a (metaphorical) pile of rather bland images, where the basic forms are ok (e.g. broadly decent lighting and composition etc.), but clearly little time and thought has been given to accurate composition, and few pointers to something interesting and stimulating in the image.

One of the very positive aspects of using a tripod correctly is that it makes me slow down and keep still for a little while, which means I compose much more carefully. This means I am more likely, in the stillness, to actively think about what I’m doing, and what I’m wanting to achieve. Slowing down therefore also induces a strong contemplative and thoughtful approach to my photography, making what I do much more deliberative.

When I say “using a tripod correctly”, what I mean is adjusting the tripod to be where I want it to actually be, especially in terms of height. Too often I see people (and I used to be one of them!) put their tripod up and then just keep it at eye level - but one of the great things about tripods is that one can have the camera at almost any level between eye level and the ground, and some of the most interesting images come from very low down, or waist height etc. So using a tripod correctly is essential.

And doing so allows, encourages even, a general slowing down and a more contemplative approach to emerge (accentuated as well through the use of film, which inhibits somewhat the ‘scatter gun’ approach to photography). I’m a strong believer in creating the frameworks within which certain things can happen, and this approach to tripods seems to fit that quite well. So I’ve now changed the text on my Equipment page to reflect this - and I’m relishing the ‘keeping still’ that comes with the careful use of a tripod, and taking time to make better images.

Saying goodbye, hello, and goodbye again

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Sometimes I’m amazed at how attached I become to cameras. I’ve written about my lovely Nikon FM2, and also a little about my new D90. But I haven’t written about my most faithful workhorse, my Nikon D40, that I have been wanting (rather half-heartedly, if truth be told) to sell. The reason for selling is very simple: the D90 is not cheap, and my bank balance will benefit from having funds restored to it having after buying the D90. I’m very glad to have found a buyer, and in particular a very special buyer (more on that in a moment), but I’m still sad to be seeing it go. I bought the D90 for a few specific features that the D40 didn’t have, but I haven’t yet formed quite the intimate bond with it that I feel I have with the D40, even 3,500 shots on the D90 later.

The D40 was my first digital SLR, and in fact, my first digital camera at all. I had always used film until then; now I use both. It was bought reluctantly in the summer of 2008, when the shutter on my film camera jammed just before a holiday and I needed a camera. To my surprise (naive, I know!), it was only possible to buy an F6 from Nikon - whilst I’d love an F6, it’s a bit outwith my price range! So after a bit of research, I went for the D40 - the cheapest digital SLR in Nikon’s range, and despite my initial wariness, I now really love it.

Why? Because it allowed me to explore the art of photography in a way I hadn’t done quite so systematically before then, and allowed me to take some of my favourite pictures ever. This post is a brief review of my D40 photographic life…

Hotel, Bergen

Very early on, I took this image from a hotel window in Bergen, Norway, where I was for an academic conference. The 18-55mm kit lens, despite weighing next to nothing, is great, and served me well on my travels. Although I later bought the much heavier 18-200mm, the smaller lens is not only considerably lighter, it doesn’t have the barrel distortion of the larger one (that sometimes, if not used carefully, results in horizons sagging in the middle, for example).

With the D40, I usually felt I was being relatively unobtrusive - not quite like a rangefinder (which doesn’t have the clunking mirror noise that an SLR has), but it is a small SLR and therefore not as ‘in your face’ as my old film SLR was, which had a large battery grip as well as fairly big fat old lenses; this made the D40 great for social occasions (the D90 is again a bigger camera…).

Stephanie Tait

Speaking of people, it was with the D40 that I took some of my first systematic portraits. One of my very early blog posts was about directing portraits and it was with the D40 that I took several hundred photographs of Stephanie. She allowed herself to be photographed - wanted it even - in itself a new experience for me, and this enabled me to discover a whole new aspect to my photographic interest: aside from landscapes and family photography, I loved being able to photograph someone who was willing to do what I asked them to do, even if I wasn’t very good at doing it!

Stephanie Tait

However, I did go on a very helpful one-day introductory course to portrait photography at Stills, and began to find it easier to think about these things. A later photoshoot with Stephanie resulted in what I felt were better portraits. And of course, the D40 was part of all of this.

Over the summer of 2009 I spent 3 weeks on Mull, and was up about half the mornings to take dawn photographs - a wonderful experience. I used both film and digital for these sessions. Some of the D40 photographs formed the basis of a 2010 calendar I created.

Torridon

And when I went to Torridon for my first weekend course with Bruce Percy, it was the D40 that I took with me. This was the first time I’d ever spent time thinking about how to approach landscape photography under the guidance of a really great photographer, and the D40 was a great camera to have with me for that (I wrote about that in a series of blog entries: 1, 2, 3, 4). It coped with some very soggy weather (plastic bags were on hand to wrap it in whilst taking photographs!), and I came home with a collection of images that I really love.

So the D40 has been through a lot with me. It feels a bit like a ‘first ever’ camera, because we’ve done so much together. I’m reminded of all this because my D90 has been in for repair (a minor warranty issue), and so I’ve reverted to using the D40. It feels so nice and snug in my hands, and I’ve really enjoyed taking it with me for walks and events in the last couple of weeks. As it happens, a day or two after the D90 went in for repair, a friend got in touch to say she wanted to buy the D40. So in a funny kind of way, these last two weeks have felt a bit like a swansong, just before it moves on to a new owner; 15,000 exposures later, and it works as it did on the day I bought it. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a really fantastic camera - if you’re looking for a digital SLR, this is a great one to consider (though now going up in price drastically! I’m not asking for anything like the amounts noted here for mine…).

What I am really pleased about, however, in the sadness at having to sell it at all, is that the D40 is going to a very good new home. My friend Carrie is buying it, and will, I am sure, put it to very good use in her art and more generally. She is a fantastically creative individual, and very reflective of her own place and identity in relation to her art, and I’m sure she will find that a good camera will help her. I realise I’m writing about a device made of metal, glass and plastic as if it were a beloved pet cat that I need to give away when moving to another country, but it almost feels like that. For me, the idea of the camera not ‘getting in the way’ of the photograph is perfectly realised in a camera like the D40, and this fusion is exactly what Dorothea Lange was speaking about. I hope Carrie finds the D40 as useful as I did, and before long finds herself ‘fused’ to it in the way that I did.

Today I collected the repaired D90, so now it really is farewell, faithful friend.

Photography or image capture?

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I’ve just been at a seminar led by David Rodowick of Harvard University on historicising virtual images in a cinematic context. Whilst most of this is way beyond my own academic field and most definitely not something I’d want to pursue in any meaningful way, I had a brief conversation with him afterwards about photography. He doesn’t talk about movies that are digital as ‘films’, arguing that there is something essentially chemical about film which is not present in digital imaging using a digital video camera, for example.

In a similar way, he said he doesn’t talk about ‘digital photography’, but about ‘image capture’, because ‘photography’ involves a chemical process, whereas digital cameras are recording data. The data is manipulated and eventually turned into something analogue, otherwise we couldn’t see it (a screen is, after all, an analogue device). Film, once treated in the appropriate chemicals, can be held up to the light and the image can be seen without this kind of manipulation (though of course, how the chemicals are applied, in what concentration, temperature and for how long has a profound impact on the resulting image).

Is it important to make this differentiation? It is if we are thinking about how we visualise what we photograph and then compare it to how we see the end result. In Torridon Bruce Percy described his workflow from taking the photograph on his film camera: he develops his film, and then scans it in on a high quality scanner, producing very large digital files which he can then manipulate in Photoshop. These files essentially become his negatives, he said. Thinking about Rodowick’s comments makes me wonder about the way they become his ‘negatives’ – after all, the tangible pieces of film are still the ‘real’ negatives (which I presume he keeps somewhere very safe!), and all there is on the computer is a collection of data – zeros and ones that can be re-converted into an analogue form in the right circumstances.

Half Dome, Blowing Snow - © Ansel Adams

Ken Rockwell talks about ‘Real Raw’, meaning film, and if we think of the ways in which some of the great photographers have used film, we know that this is qualitatively different to digital image capture. For example, we know that Ansel Adams used film, and so this famous image by him (‘Half Dome, Blowing Snow’ – click it to go to the Ansel Adams site where you can buy a print), is a digital scan of a piece of tangible film – the very same piece of film that was actually at the scene where this image was taken, in Adams’ camera. In a very real sense, the film ’saw’ this scene, which we couldn’t say about digital cameras! The conversion of the analogue image to digital loses something… and many people feel this also happens with digital cameras, which is why so many people – myself included – still like film so much.

We can see this more obviously in the cinematic context: I recently bought a DVD of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ – originally shot on film, of course. However, it has now been scanned into a computer in order to make a DVD – a digital method of reproducing a film (or perhaps I should say: a film-like experience!). As digital technology improves, the archived film strip will be scanned again and again to obtain ever higher resolution and improved sound… but the ‘negative’, if you like, is still a tangible analogue substance – ‘Real Raw’.

Although for day-to-day photography thinking about all this is perhaps largely irrelevant, I think it is important to always remember that images coming from a digital camera (especially so-called ‘raw files’) are like a negative, but are not the same as a negative, which is a different kind of process and a different way of recording images. So David Rodowick is right, I think, to talk about ‘image capture’ rather than ‘digital photography’ in contrast to film photography. But for all practical purposes, it is perhaps simply something to be aware of when choosing the medium for capturing a particular scene (‘how will this work best?’), rather than necessarily employing this language in the everyday context of creating images.

P.S. None of this is to say that image capture on a digital camera isn’t a form of art - it’s just a different way of doing it than happens with a film camera.

P.P.S. I think I now realise more acutely why I dislike Adobe’s use of the word ‘negative’ in the name for their archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras: DNG, for ‘digital negative’. Of course, I still use DNG for my digital images…!

The camera doesn’t matter, but…

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Although your camera really doesn’t matter, as I say on my website (citing far more illustrious photographers than I’m ever likely to be), I am still excited at having bought a new digital camera, a Nikon D90. After my post a few days ago about prices, I decided to raid the piggy bank (i.e. take money out of the building society account where it is earning next to no interest at the moment), and invest in the D90. To my considerable surprise, it doesn’t feel that much heavier than the D40!

I’m not yet sure what I’ll do with the D40, but for the moment I’ll keep it and probably use both cameras alongside each other. I love the D40, and it is so easy to make great pictures with it…

Price shock!

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Idly browsing on Amazon… I’m shocked that the camera I bought last summer (from Amazon) for £267, a Nikon D40 with an 18-55mm kit lens, is now selling at £449! And the camera that is generally regarded as the replacement for this one, the D3000, is £398. Would I have bought the D40 at this price? I don’t know, but at this level the D40 and D3000 are hardly priced in what I would describe as an entry-level bracket.

It’s all even more confusing when you consider that the D90 is ‘only’ £649 without a lens, and £799 with an 18-105mm lens (these prices are from Jessops, not Amazon). And the D90 can be regarded as the top of the range DX format DSLR from Nikon. What on earth is going on here?

I know we are in the middle of a credit crunch, but these supposed ‘entry level’ prices are ridiculous. What does ‘value’ mean in these circumstances?

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 3

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We were out again early this morning. The day looked like this:

  • 6:30 meet in hotel lobby, out to location
  • 9h return for breakfast
  • we then had time for washing/packing up (we needed to check out of the hotel room)
  • 11h image critique
  • followed by lunch and departure.

Bruce took us to a new location, near Shieldaig (upper Loch Torridon), overlooking water, with quite a steep hill rising up from the shoreline of Loch Torridon. My first reaction was to think: ‘Why did he take us here? Those trees are in the way!’ I realised I was a bit disgruntled about this, and wandered around at first not finding anything I could imagine as an image. I find I often do this: pace up and down looking for an angle, a view, something that is unusual and stimulating that will grab me. But I wasn’t finding it on this occasion. I went down the hill and to the right to avoid the trees, but the view just felt bland - another set of grey mountains with water in front, so very typically postcard Scottish, and at that moment for me, completely boring. So I headed left, nearer to the shore, and this brought me closer to the trees. I was trying to look through them at the view behind, to see if there was any point in climbing up the hill again and looking over the trees. Nothing. As I was stumbling about looking through the trees and muttering away to myself in frustration, I suddenly realised that looking through the trees was just what I ought to be doing. I found myself facing two trees that were distinct and separate from the rest (i.e. the branches were not intertwined). They were also leaning left, which I liked: we often think that moving right ‘leads the eye in’ (see for example, Ken Rockwell’s stair images entitled ‘McCloud, California’ about 3/4 down the page; he shows the image facing both ways), and many of my photographs reflect this. But I think the orientation to the right only works because we read left to right, whereas for readers of, for example, Hebrew and Arabic, this doesn’t necessarily make sense, and given my academic research topics, I felt this spoke to me on that level too. The mountains across the loch formed a ‘v’ just in the middle of the image, balancing the ‘v’ formed by the tips of the trees in the foreground - and so this is the image that I came up with (note that, following yesterday’s post about cropping, this is very slightly cropped at the sides, but otherwise works in the 35mm format):

Torridon

This was my second image of the day, and after taking it I thought, ‘well, it won’t get any better than this, I should stop now…’ - but I didn’t! After my initial disgruntlement and frustration, I felt tremendously moved by the beauty of the light, and began to see all sorts of other patterns:

Torridon

The trees on either side seem to me to be reaching towards each other, forming an upside-down ‘v’, almost like a classic child’s drawing of a house. The other trees in the centre are smaller, almost as if they are in the ‘house’. Bruce later pointed to the four ‘quarters’ in the image that balance each other - I hadn’t consciously seen this, but he’s right, of course. By this stage, I was elated - I realised that even if the images on the tiny screen on the camera had been out-of-focus, I had seen something I thought was special. It’s an interesting issue: here I was, trying to capture an image on a camera not knowing if it would work, but knowing also that even if it didn’t, I would remember this image without the camera’s help. It’s a way of internal visualisation that I will want to explore further at some point, perhaps here.

Bruce came over to me a while later, once I was on the shore line, wrestling with another image, of which more in a moment. He looked at the first of these two images on my screen, and was delighted for me, exclaiming: ‘This is the kind of photograph I always want to take and I never manage it.’ Now although I’m sure that’s not really true, it gives me the opportunity to reiterate something about Bruce: I hope I’ve already communicated something of Bruce’s genius with imagery - but he’s also a genuinely warm and generous person. This is something I felt again and again over the weekend, and although I point to this in a context of his praising my image, I don’t do so to show off (well, ok, maybe I do just a little bit…!), but to say that I saw this repeatedly in his interactions with all the other participants. If you’re thinking of going on a course like this, Bruce will make you feel really welcome, and it will be an affirming and uplifting experience - guaranteed!

The image I was struggling with when Bruce came over to me is this one:

Torridon

Or rather, this is what it became. I felt I wasn’t capturing the mountain behind the first one, which, especially on the right side, looked in part as if it was a shadow of the foreground mountain, but Bruce assured me I was on the right lines. I was sure this could be cropped - it had lots of sky that wasn’t ‘doing’ anything, but I felt I wasn’t really getting the detail in the more distant mountains that I wanted. I knew I wanted this to be black and white, but needed somehow to make that ‘shadow’ appear in order to provide the continuous line of the second mountain that I could so clearly see. Once back at the hotel, I offered this along with the previous two images for critique. From this session, and Bruce’s earlier comments, I was reminded of the complete inadequacy of the screen on the back of the camera, even when zooming in on the image, because the shadow is clearly there, but was barely visible on the camera’s screen. And the lesson is: trust that most of what you can see in the landscape can be seen by the camera, even if it sees it quite differently (note to self: I never doubted this kind of thing with film, so the screen is actually hindering me here! In a different context over the weekend, Bruce mentioned photographers he knows who tape over the screen on their digital cameras and just trust their instincts). In Photoshop, I cropped this down, developed the tones just a fraction, and turned it into a black and white image.

After lunch, we all got ready to depart. Before we did, Bruce gave each of us a large brown envelope - without saying more than that ‘it doesn’t contain banknotes’, he just made sure everyone had one. It was only when I arrived home that I found out what was in it… but I’ll leave the discussion of that for the fourth post about this trip, which I intend to write in a couple of days time, after I’ve had a little more mental space to digest what I’ve learnt, what the experience did for me, and so on. However, I hope you’ve gathered that I have had a magical weekend, in the company of and under the guidance of a tremendously creative, passionate and generous teacher and fellow traveller, and accompanied by five other participants who brought light (in all ways!), energy and laughter to the creative process. Many of their images were fantastic too, and I found myself thinking tonight how nice it would be to have a little online gallery somewhere with one of each of our images, even if that is somewhat impractical.

P.S. I did, of course, have a film camera with me (guess which one!), but found that I only used it a couple of times. I think I was concentrating too much on using the digital camera in order to make images that could be critiqued. Insha’allah I’ll be back to Torridon with a film camera to make many more images.

Torridon - the art of adventure photography part 2

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Day two of our course began very early. Here’s an approximate breakdown of my day:

  • get up 5:30
  • out 6h (rain)
  • ca. 6:20 arrive on location (a LOT of rain) - we are at Loch Clare
  • waiting in the van
  • rain clears a bit, returning intermittently; we’re out, taking photographs
  • back to the hotel and breakfast for 9h
  • out to another location shortly after 10h - this time Loch Torridon
  • more photos, more rain - then lots more rain (run back to minibus)
  • new location (no rain)
  • ca. 13h rain
  • at Bruce’s suggestion, we decide to return to the hotel and have lunch
  • 14h everyone chooses two photos to critique
  • 15:30 out for sunset
  • periods of heavy rain, and beautiful calm
  • moon photographs (visible for exactly 25 seconds - see below!) and more
  • return to hotel
  • 18:30 in the bar
  • 19h dinner
  • and then blog writing and bed!

An excellent day, though a long one… and I think all six of us felt that.

When out, we all wandered off in our own direction, photographing what we saw. Bruce knows the area, and chose locations that he had either photographed in the past, or that he knew would offer something tangible for us to photograph (after all, this weekend is about learning techniques etc., not about photographing something that has never been photographed before - though, of course, each of us returned with very different images from each location). He then made a point of going to each person and reviewing some of their photographs (we’re all on digital this weekend to help with the teaching process, though I am not the only film shooter here), talking through how they were approaching their imaging, what might work differently, ways to deal with particular compositional or lighting problems, suggesting alternative perspectives, exposures and so on. For example, I have often felt that the metering on my Nikon D40 was out, and have therefore almost always had the exposure compensation set at -2/3. Bruce discussed this with me at length and demonstrated, even on the crappy wee screen at the back of the camera, that this resulted in problems with my shadow detail (lesson: there is a difference between dark and moody… and just dark). I realise that this is also partly Bruce’s style - I sometimes think that although he describes himself as a landscape photographer, I wonder if this not more of a convenient label: his images are often not really landscapes, but images of light that is transformed in some way through reflection, absorption etc. in the encounter with the land. That is what attracted me so much to his art in the first place, and so I have no objection if even a tiny fraction of this sensibility rubs off on me.

I want to describe some images. After breakfast we went to Loch Torridon. Bruce drove us quite high up, and we took photographs overlooking the loch, towards the mountains around the water. In the foreground, there were substantial erratics (a new term I learnt: these are the rocks that have been brought to their present location by glaciers that have long since vanished, leaving just the rocks in their incongruous locations), and Bruce wanted us to try and think about the use of foreground detail as well as background material. The wind was strong, it was raining, but despite water droplets dribbling down both sides of the filter, we managed some spectacular images. When Bruce came over to me, we talked about what I had been trying to do, and he asked me if I had turned and seen a particular tree; I hadn’t. He borrowed my camera, and took three or four photographs. He showed me the last one, pointing out the simplicity of the image, and the ways in which the mist isolated the tree from the mountain in the background, making for a very simple, but very powerful image of the tree. This is his photograph (which I post here and on my website with his permission):

Tree and mountain (Bruce Percy)

I liked this immediately, but also wondered about other ways of taking this photograph. I took several photographs, and ended up with this one:

Mountains and tree

Bruce’s photograph is undoubtedly fantastic (though he said he thought it was a little underexposed; without wanting to sound presumptuous, I’d agree - and also add that mine was underexposed too; I’ve corrected this a little here, but didn’t feel I should manipulate his photograph!). But I also like mine, bringing in more of the mountain outlines, setting a wider context, and offering a different role for the tree. In my image, I realised later, the tree almost serves as an anchor for the mountains, rather than the mountains doing that for the tree. It’s as if the majesty and grandeur of these incredible hills is given additional meaning by the tree’s inclusion in the image - although several times as tall as me, it is quite tiny in comparison to the massive mountains in the background - and thereby it perhaps helps to give a sense of the amazing landscape we were in. I also converted this to black and white, and cannot quite decide which I prefer - the subtle tones of the colours in the original, or the even more simple tones of the black and white (comments on this are very welcome!):

Mountains and tree

As we were driving back in really hard rain, Bruce slowed the minibus and pointed out the view. He asked if anyone wanted to photograph this, and two of us leapt out of the bus, getting ourselves and our dried off cameras wet all over again. This is the image I came up with:

Mountains, Torridon

I post it here as a kind of contrast to the tree/moutain images. Although I think this is beautiful, the large white expanse (that’s the mist…) in the bottom left corner decontextualises the mountains, making them almost more of an abstract series of lines than a mountain range. Although these are pretty much the same mountains as in the tree photograph, in this photograph there is nothing much that anchors them to the earth, and so the photograph becomes something quite different.

Undoubtedly the most useful part of the day was the critical review. We had very little time, but we each had to choose two photographs we had taken, and offer them for review (not easy to choose, when you have just a few minutes and are scanning 150 images!). Bruce had brought a projector and showed us our images on a large screen. We then explained what we had been trying to do, why the image was important to us, what we felt about how it had turned out, and so on. Other participants then offered comment, as did Bruce. This was in all cases incredibly positive and helpful criticism. Bruce then went through the images in Photoshop, and showed us simple and effective ways of manipulating them in order to bring out contrasts, highlights etc. There are many many ‘small’ things that I took from this, but the really major one that I took away was a reflection on image size: even when I crop my images, I tend to leave them in the original aspect ratio (i.e. based on a 35mm film image - perhaps this is a subcounscious desire to ‘retain’ something of the ‘original’? even though I know this is a nonsense), even though most images benefit from different shapes. I’ve often felt my images were too ‘long’, and this session radically opened my eyes to the more pleasing ratios of 4×5, 6×7, or 1×1 as well as arbitrary crops - you’ll see that nearly all the images from today on my website are now cropped in such a way, almost as if to make a point to me, never mind anyone else.

In the late afternoon, we went to another loch, Bruce hoping to offer us a location and a sunset for trying out some of the techniques we had talked about in the critique and other locations. It was very wet. Not just the loch from below, but also the clouds from above. I sometimes think that rain in Scotland must have magical molecular properties that other rain does not have… but more on that later! I went down to the edge of the loch, and also into the loch (very slight shoreline, so that wellies were more than adequate). It was cloudy and overcast, making for very soft light. No real sign of a sunset, but despite this, some of the resulting images were great. I was very pleased with my foregrounding of stones, for example, and the capture of the moonlight, which appeared once, for about 10 seconds, and I missed it; but I saw the clouds moving in such a way that it might reappear. It did, for precisely 25 seconds (I know this, because I took five images at 5 seconds each - and it was gone!). The image originally has the moonlight curving, which I think might be the lens’ barrel distortion (I’ll perhaps get around to correcting this at some point…):

Moonlight, Torridon

Bruce then took us all back to the hotel - and our first shower of the day! The dinner discussion in the evening was stimulating, covering the purpose of this kind of photography (one participant argued that it is to document reality/something ‘real’; Bruce asked if that was so, why was this person using a wide-angle lens?!), the processing stage (are images ‘doctored’ if they’re manipulated in Photoshop to bring out the highlights etc.?), Vettriano (is it art?), the BNP on BBC Question Time (should they have done/should they not have done?), free speech in a democracy, the Iraq invasion/war, the significance of 11.9.2001…

Long exposures and the problem of noise

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One of the big problems with digital cameras and long exposures is noise: in long exposures, for example at sunrise or sunset, the shutter often needs to be open for lengthy periods of time. This can be 15, 30 seconds, or many minutes. What happens then, however, is that the camera sensor begins to introduce noise into images - it seems to me that this is often especially visible on “flat” or even surfaces, such as still water (and water then loses the glassy look that makes such images work so well). This noise can look a little bit like grain on traditional fast film. Most digital cameras have a noise reduction “feature”, but it is best left turned off, I think: these usually work by mushing up the pixels to reduce noise. What you get is an image that looks poorly focused - which just defeats the object of taking the photograph in the first place.

So what to do?

I’ve been going through a number of the images that I took on Mull this summer using Fuji Velvia 50 slide film (I plan to add some of them to my website soon; all the Mull ones that are online just now are from the digital camera). Many are taken using longer exposures and there is - of course! - no noticeable noise/grain, even on the longest exposures. So rather than worrying about how to solve the noise problem on my digital camera, for now at least, I think I’ll just stick to Velvia and my old film camera for the long exposures.

(Note that this post doesn’t even attempt to touch on all the other issues that relate to image quality when discussing the digital/film issue, I’m just focusing on noise… clearly, Velvia, properly used, is immeasurably superior to most digital cameras)