Go!

St Martin's Lane - for a few days only - go see!

they must be on one

For some years the photographer's number one tool after the camera has been Photoshop. I've been using it for about 18 years. There's probably still more about it that I don't know than I do. Working in a design office, where there were graphic designers, product designers, and architects, there was something new, some little tweak or alternative route that I discovered every day. It is an amazing tool.

That amazingness leads to some unfortunate perceptions. To say that an image has been Photoshopped tends to be derogatory, but also tends to display the ignorance of whoever says it. Pretty much every professionally made image will have been through Photoshop (or perhaps Lightroom, its equally amazing but leaner, younger sibling) even if only to leave a printable file: RAW files, the basic building blocks of the photographer's workings, are not viewable or printable in themselves.

There is no doubt that as many bad things have been done with Photoshop as good things; but we don't blame Word for bad writing ("O-o-oh! It's been Worded!") so why blame Photoshop for the crap produced by bad photographers and designers?

Sadly, the industry itself is partly to blame. This morning's email produced a good example. A company called onOne Software has been buying up good software companies and turning their product to shit. I hear from them because I have used the Genuine Fractals plugin for years. When I last checked it was the best image enlargement software easily available. For no good reason, onOne have renamed it Perfect Resize; this has obviously had such a negative effect that they now have to say (formally Genuine Fractals) every time it's mentioned, a good indicator of their idiocy.

Of all the new techniques, the one which can produce the most hideous results is HDR, the trick of making an image look as if all the dark bits and all the light bits are equally well exposed, something which tends to be impossible in reality. This is what makes those vile pictures with over-blue seas and over-red mountains. Even in expert hands it's ugly, but in the mits of an amateur it's positively shocking.

onOne have a plugin dedicated to this, and their video shows how horrible it is (although they seem to think it's pretty.)

But it wasn't this which turned on the light for me today - it was the blurb for their Perfect Layers software which rang the bell that turned the switch: "...the fast, easy, and affordable way to create layered files outside of Photoshop."

Has nobody at onOne seen the VW Golf ads, "Just like a Golf"?

Clunk.

Correction

On closer examination, the prints at Leibowitz's show have remarkably little pixel mangling, particularly the point-and-shoot shots. Others, such as Elvis's bike, appropriately have no pixels, only detail. Water, in all forms, seems to respond well if the pixels are left alone. I've been banging away at this for some time now, so it's a relief to see that others feel the same.

This shows a 100% detail of the solo picture currently on my site, where the phenomenon of water droplets painting on the sensor with white light is well demonstrated. Perhaps some see it as a grey mess, but this is what water looks like; it's not milk, and it's not glass. Back to Sid later.

back to the pixels

I remember discovering grain. Obviously, I was no pioneer or scientist, but in my world there had been, up until then, photographs or photographs which looked a bit blurred. I started processing and printing before I was ten and had a darkroom by fourteen, so the discovery of grain must have come by the age of nine years: I've always found it difficult to start something new without understanding something of how it works, and film works with grain.

The beauty of the way in which it tended to be used was that it appeared to absorb subject and object into the same space - somehow, a grainy picture is more accessible, more transparent than one in which the grain is invisible. This worked well for hard subjects. The word most often used is gritty, but it would seem likely that this usage arose from the coincident similarity to the the word grainy.

It's hard to tell how much of this attitude is learned and how much came unbidden. There is of course a strong pragmatic reason for visible grain: the faster the film, the more pronounced the grain. Shooting difficult, fleeting subjects often means low light, and low light means high speed (or flash, but that's for another day.) It doesn't take long before the mind automatically applies the equation grainy picture = interesting subject - useless as a shooting equation, but useful for interpretation.

This is not an attitude generally applied to digital imagery. It's as if the whole arena is in the hands of photographic puritan dullards. They abhor visible pixels, hence the dismissive description, noise. But the pixel is the basic brick of the photograph, and to be embarrassed by its presence is like a painter being embarrassed by his brush strokes.

It's therefore interesting to visit Annie Leibowitz's current show, Pilgrimage, at Hamilton's Gallery. Many of the pictures were taken with a point-and-shoot. I asked the slime-ball in residence whether Leibowitz had printed them herself. "No" he sneered, "They're all printed by master-printer David Adamson." I asked whether he was primarily a wet print master or digital. "Obviously, wet originally, but they do everything now."

Wrong, slime-ball. Adamson moved directly from lithography to digital. Such a lack of interest in an important part of the process characterises much of this end of the photographic market. It's hard to tell from a first look at the prints how much noise reduction and sharpening (both of which destroy pixels) has been used, but I suspect that even the master printer is toeing the line of using "at least some sharpening and noise reduction."

I am about to go there again to examine further. Meanwhile, this is shot which I believe benefits from being shown entirely without the two pixel manglers. This is, of course a reduced version, so has some inevitable mangling. More (or less) detail later.

Crappy Snaps

It's a splendid thing that kids have embraced film for stills. They love it. And the trendiness of the medium ensures that one more generation will be properly aware of the physicality of photography.

One inevitable drawback at the beginning of any photographer's use of film, the learning days, is that one or several frames on each roll may be blank or fogged. When there was only film, all the processing shops, particularly the high street ones, knew this, and charged per print. If you had a blank frame, you didn't pay for a print of it (although some unscrupulous operations would try this one on).

However, if a kid takes the 120 roll from his Diana into Snappy Snaps, about the only high street print shop left, he will be told that he has to pay for a print of every frame, whether it's been exposed or not. Even more curiously, if the film turns out to be completely blank (forgotten to take the lens cap off?) they will generously only charge just over 2 quid. If it has exposed images on it, the developing alone will cost around 9 quid. The cost to them has been the same, properly exposed or not. If you want prints (see above) it's around 15 quid.

All this will do is tell the kids that they've unwittingly taken up a very expensive hobby, and send them back to their point-and-shoot digitals. It's as if Crappy Snaps want to look cool but can't be bothered to do the work associated with it.

New Prune

Going for a walk at the Hermitage is synonymous with exposing a frame or two, but this time the Nikon was spitting incomprehensible error numbers at me and the Fuji's battery was flat; its charger has not yet found a safe place to travel and so had been left behind.

I walked without a camera and saw a hundred and one shots I would have liked to take. The time of year is fast approaching when it's unwise to be without a camera at any moment: the sun sinks lower, giving off warmer colour and more interesting shadows, the trees put on their gold and bronze while opening their curtains. The landscape changes shape and colour, the smells change.

There was no frustration in the process, rather, a calm excitement. Reminders of unfinished business (anything to do with landscape is always unfinished) were everywhere. Some could stay unfinished (I no longer think that that an extended panorama, electronic or rolled-up-print, of the brook would be of any interest to either myself or anyone else) and some could be happily welcomed back (reflections of sunlight off the surface into dark corners come back into their own as the sun dips and glows).

Above all, it was an almost-forgotten pleasure just to look. Capture, in its usual form, was not there to halt the process. I do retain two of the potential images in my mind's gallery. This will become a problem at some future moment when the image continues to burn brightly long after I have forgotten that I never actually took the picture. I will search my hard drives high and low for it and in the process will accidentally discover taken images which I had forgotten. These will either be rescued from the darkness of the archive or will lead to new photographic forays. Whichever, the act of not taking photographs on one day will certainly lead to more and better on another. It's like pruning, cutting back growth in order to encourage more.

I shall take more pruning walks in the future.

old chestnuts in spring?

In the park today I came across these two objects, lying in the middle of the path, with no sign of an owner.

They had prompted a series of super-fast movies in my head, detailing alternative possibilities for the story connected to the shoe and the sock. I noticed that others appeared to be doing the same thing and so began to photograph their reactions.

Not everyone noticed them.

Then I stopped, because the thought that had entered my head seemed more pressing than making the pictures.

What if it had been me who put them there?

It's a very similar question to the one that landscape photographers ask themselves: if I move that branch out of the way, am I somehow cheating?

And then I became cross with myself, because it seemed as if I was making the same mistake as the viewer who says "Ah! But you've used Photoshop on that" as if there were some contract that comes with every camera, stipulating that all pictures made with the machinery must be a 100% honest and accurate record of what was there.

I suspect that, if I had put the shoe and sock there, I would have felt a duty to show deliberately some kind of knowingness in the images. Photographers like Gregory Crewdson have made careers out of single questions such as this, questions which non-photographers regard with deep suspicion and at which photographers groan inwardly. It seems a simple enough question but it isn't.