Dialing in your camera at the opera. The Sony a77 does Pagliacci.

"The Jpeg engine! The Jpeg engine! Nothing good can ever come from the Jpeg engine!" Hmmm. I always wonder when I hear people trash or praise the Jpeg performance of their digital cameras whether or not they ever took the time to do a little fine tuning. While manufacturers work hard to make their Jpeg files one size fits all it's dawned on me over the years that the same manufacturers would not have gone to all the trouble to wedge in parameter fine tuning controls and different color palettes if they didn't understand that everyone wants something different and they can actually get it with a little metaphorical elbow grease.

I'll admit that the Sony a77 Jpeg files were giving me some issues in the early days. The contrast was a bit wonky, the noise reduction too severe and the saturation was a bit much. Mostly my fault, I can see in hindsight, for slavishly setting the camera in Jpeg beginner mode: Standard, and just hoping things would turn out the way I wanted them to. The reality is that using a digital camera in the Jpeg file mode is a lot like shooting slide film. You're locking in settings while you are shooting.  If the color is a little off you'll need to correct it in post but you'll find that you degrade the files a bit every time you make a change.

My thinking on working with Jpeg files got changed when I started shooting more video in DSLRs and when I started trying to color corrected the video I'd shot in Final Cut Pro X. If you set the sharpening in your files too high (because it looks nice on the LCD screen) you'll regret it in editing because there's no way to turn it back down again and bad sharpening looks worse and worse as you go along.  Same thing with contrast.  And same thing in spades with saturation.

From everything I've read on video production sites, in conversations with DP's and directors who work with digital video files, everyone has the same suggestions: Turn down the contrast, the saturation and the sharpening and add them back, to taste, in post processing. To this I would also add: Get your color balance as close as you can. Since these guys can only do limited global corrections in video post production it make sense and I've been zeroing in my working methodology for using Jpegs using this idea of turning everything down for a while now. It works.

At this point someone with way too much time on their hands will chime in and tell me that everyone should just shoot RAW. While it's a nice option it does take a lot of unnecessary resources (most importantly, time) and it's not always necessary. Figure it like this. I shot 1500 files at the Austin Lyric Opera dress rehearsal of the opera, Pagliacci, last night. The newspapers and arts websites are anxious to get some pictures in their hands.....today.

If I'd shot RAW files with my Sony a77's each file would be around 25 megabytes. That works out to about 37.5 gigabytes of information that needs to be ingested into Lightroom from multiple cards, Lightroom needs time to render standard previews and then, after a much slower process of file cleaning and enhancement, it will take hours to output one or two megabyte Jpegs that the media will want to use. Honestly, newspapers and web masters aren't looking forward to getting 16 bit, 70 megabyte tiff files. Probably would not even take the time to open them....

If I shoot large/fine jpegs I'm looking at around 6 to 7  megapixels per file or around 10 gigabytes of images to work with. I was able to do all of my post production and outputting in a couple hours this morning. And the files look great. They all have been downsized from 24 megapixels to  a little bit bigger than 12 megapixels. I applied a bit of sharpening to the files which they accepted very gracefully. In fact, I am so much happier with my flesh tones and noise reproduction that I'll try to shoot most of my fast breaking projects this way.  So, how did I shoot last night?

I set up my cameras to work in Jpeg using the largest files size and "fine" quality. There is one step above fine called, "extra fine" and I'm sure that if you run the files through a thorough diagnostic test you'll see a difference on the charts and graphs. Will you see a difference on the web or in newsprint? Highly unlikely.  This setting gives me almost 1,000 potential shots on an 8 gig memory card. It also saves on battery power since it requires more electrical juice to write the large raw files.

I set the Jpeg "creative" setting to standard and then I go into the menu and dial the contrast and saturation both to minus one. While I used to shoot my Jpegs with a +1 sharpening setting I've dialed back to zero and I add a bit of sharpening in Lightroom. The next thing I do is to make sure I'm in the right ballpark vis-a-vis color balance. Not necessarily for accuracy but for pleasing colors in the output. The lighting designer used a very blue palette for several parts of the opera and I wanted to keep that psychological effect but I wanted the scenes to render a bit warmer so I set a custom K temperature while looking at the scene in the EVF. Using the EVF instead of analyzing stuff on the rear LCD means I can block out the ambient light that will effect my take on the color. I worked mostly in the range of 4200K to 4400k to make the colors more neutral. While I liked the cool blue washes in the actual show I would hesitate to send files that were as blue to editors since they would see very monochromatic in print.

I've also started to always use the high ISO NR in its lowest setting. At anything under 1000 ISO it looks great and doesn't give me the plastic look that too much noise reduction generally imparts. This makes the a77 an ISO 800 camera for me. I'll go to ISO 1600 in a pinch but 800 is perfect. And perfectly usable. With good stage lighting my spot lit principals were usually in the f3.5 at 1/160th range. Seems just right for shooting a stage show.

Getting your Jpegs into a good flow helps you be a bit more disciplined in shooting RAW as well. Recent Jpeg images we've provided to another client in town recently were used highly cropped on large posters and I was amazed at just how well they worked. There's so much we see on 27 inch screens that's just not relevant to the way images are routinely used.

Finally, if you have the ability to do a micro focus adjust on your lenses by all means, take advantage of that and do it right. My 70-200mm f2.8 G series lens has become a brand new optic for me after half an hour of adjustment and testing. All in all I'm happy with my new Jpeg shooting routine, my lenses and my a77 bodies.  Good to have stuff dialed in.

Finally, if you are willing to go into each color setting and do some manipulation with the color controls it's very likely that you can get close to the overall color palette of most camera families. The tend to put all these controls on the cameras so you can have your images pretty much the way you want them. Might as well use em.

Did I enjoy this rendition of Pagliacci?  Yes, very much. The people at the Austin Lyric Opera did a fabulous job. This is a great opera for beginners. It's very much fun and very accessible. If you are in Austin pony up for some tickets and give it a shot. I can pretty much assure you that you won't be disappointed. Culture. Have some.

In other breaking news of vital importance to our Canadian readers: You now OWN the copyright to the images you create, commissioned or not!!! Read more: http://www.petapixel.com/2012/11/07/canadian-photogs-now-officially-own-the-copyright-to-all-of-their-photos/

Just in time for Thanksgiving. The Nex-6, body only, is now in stock and shipping!

My Friends Have Been Waiting For The Nex 6. Body Only.

I'm pretty happy that Sony and Nikon are announcing product and then getting it out the door quickly. I've got several friends who are trying to decide whether to get the Nex7 or the Nex6 as upgrades from their Nex5n's. It's an interesting trade off. The Nex 6 sensor seems to be a better performer in low light and the on sensor phase detection should help speed up auto focusing, a lot. The only other positive I can see with the newer camera, for some people, is the inclusion of wi-fi for quick sharing. But God help you if you're trying to upload RAW files on a wi-fi connection....

In the plus column for the Nex7 is the robust construction, the Tri-Navi operational controls and the world's best low ISO 24 megapixel APS-C sensor (yes, I am biased).  

I'm happy to see the simultaneous release of both the camera with kit lens and the camera as a body only product. A lot of people have Nex-7's and may want a back up. It would be a shame to have to buy another kit lens in that case. Too many other mirrorless camera companies seem to want to force their customers into buying kits if they want the opportunity to buy their cameras in the first few months after the introduction. Points to Sony for letting us go both ways.

My recommendation? Get the Nex6 body only, add the 19mm Sigma and the 30mm Sigma along with the Sony Nex 50mm 1.8 and you have yourself a lightweight, high performance kit with all primes. Expand from there.

If I were starting my Nex system from scratch right now I'd probably go with the Nex6. As I'm already half a year into using my Nex 7 I'm more inclined to have a second one as a back up so I can set them identically and go back and forth, using each with a different lens. Sometimes it's great not to have to stop and change lenses in a fast moving event or on a dusty day...

Reaching back thirty three years with my Epson V500 Scanner.

I don't know if everyone else thinks the same way but I find that I like to go back to stuff I did a long time ago and see how it compares to the stuff I'm doing now. In many instances I'm disappointed with what I'm doing now when I see the images I made when I was just 24 and very new to the field of photography.

This image shouldn't look as good as it does. I shot it in my first, tiny studio using just the light coming in from a smallish window. I used color negative film in a very old and beaten to shit Mamiya 220 that I bought already quite used. The lens on the front was a 135mm f5.6 of questionable repair. Sometimes the shutter would stick.  I had the camera stuck on the world's rickety-est tripod. It was the only one I could afford at the time and I found it on the "bargain" table of an ancient photography store on Congress Ave. that was in the process of going out of business.  As bad as it was that tripod made my hand me down meter look good.

Finally, I was given to believe two things that have turned out not to be true. One is that C-41 color negative film from the late 1970's would not keep. The pundits of the day estimated that it would fade over time and become thin and unusable. This negative is still lively and effulgent. The other thing I had been led to believe, throughout the last decade, is that decent film scans just could not (for many arcane, technical reasons) be created on cheap, consumer flatbed scanners.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, all these things I never expected to like the final image as much as I do. Of course, part of that appreciation of the image is just the habit of being in love and the critical blindness that ensues.

With no doubt, my favorite portrait. Would I have done better with the latest digital wunder-kamera? How would you measure "better"?

Post Swim Photo. Yes, this one is on film too.

Sarah is an amazing painter who is also a distance swimmer. Her paintings revolve around water. After we swam together at Deep Eddy Pool one day I asked her if she would mind coming over to the studio, getting spritzed in the face with warm water and getting repeatedly flashed with bright lights while standing around in her swim suit. Of course she said she'd be happy to.

My cataloging of technical information is starting to sound like a broken record but here it is:
Camera: Hasselblad 500 series. Lens: 150mm Carl Zeiss Planar. Film: Kodak PMC 5069 color negative stock. Scanned on the reliable Epson V500 flatbed scanner. Lit like most of my images with a big softbox on one side and a weak fill card on the other.  A second light with a medium sized softbox down near Sarah's feet is lighting the background

Part of being an interesting portrait photographer is going out to meet people and convince them to come back to your studio to collaborate with you. A little portfolio you can carry with you is a very good ice breaker. If you can show people kind of what you want to do with them it's a lot quicker to get them to buy in.

on an unrelated note: I'm going to see Pagliacci tonight at the Austin Lyric Opera. I'm photographing tonight's production for advertising and public relations uses. I can hardly wait.

Happy Birthday to Renae.

The most beautiful, talented and brilliant business partner and assistant ever in the history of the world. Really. Happy Birthday!  xoxo

Sometimes everything comes together just right.

Sometimes everything comes together just right. It was a cold and rainy day when Michele and I made this image. I was in the downtown studio and we could hear rain and sleet rattle against the window outside. The studio was very large. I was able to put the background as far away as I wanted and still have room to stand back and use the perfect focal length lens.

The main light was a 54 by 72 inch softbox over to the right. About 45 degrees of center and up enough so that the bottom of the box was high enough to cast a shadow under her chin. There was a white fill card somewhere to the left of the camera but not very close in. The ceiling was 18 feet high and painted matte black. The background was a gray seamless paper and it was lit with  one flash head modified with a broad grid.

We worked casually then. There was no make up person or stylist. No assistants lurking in the shadows. Just a model and a photographer.

For some of the shoot I used an old Rollei twin lens but for this image I switched to a Pentax 645 camera and one of the inexpensive 150mm f3.5 lenses Pentax made. The focal length with this film format was near the 95-105mm that I think makes portrait subjects look best.

At some time after this shoot I bought a Marty Forscher Polaroid back (with a fiber optics bundle that positioned the focus in the correct plane) but on the day this was shot I just used a handy light meter in its incident (as God intended) mode.

I never printed this particular negative but today I was sorting out envelopes in a filing cabinet while also trying to pay attention to some enormously detailed conversation on the phone with an art director. That's when I found about twelve pages of these negatives.

I scanned them in the good, ole Epson V500 Photo flatbed scanner in the nothing special required setting, followed by a few minutes in Photoshop to knock the dust spots off and....ta da. My favorite photo of the month.  One of my long term goals? More like this.

Comments welcome.

Portrait. In the studio.

Love shooting portraits and I tried something a little different with my lights during this session. I used a smaller softbox and put it directly over my models face and slightly in front of her.  Pretty much standard beauty lighting. My subject is sitting at a portrait table and there's a white card laying on the table to provide enough fill back onto her face. Uncharacteristically, I used a hair light (also in a small softbox) and, of course, there is soft gridded background light directed up from a low angle behind my subject's chair onto the canvas background.

I worked at f5.6 on my Zeiss 150mm Planar because that aperture seems to be the perfect intersection of sharp and shallow. And by that I mean that the facial details are sharp where you want them (eyes, nose, mouth) but the depth of field is shallow enough to drop the background detail out of your brain's discomfort zone.

Although most of our portrait work is (by client request) in color these days we do have clients who see the big, square black and white portraits on my website and request that we do old school portraits. This is something I'm nearly always happy to do, unless a short deadline is part of the mix.

There is something very visually comforting to me about composing within the confines of the square. Faces just seem to fit better.

I'm setting up the studio right now (in between writing this blog and going out to eat Mexican food for lunch...) to shoot a series of test portraits on black and white film. I'm using big banks of LED lights punched through really nice diffusion because I want to see how the color curve of the light sources effects the panchromatic response of the film. I'm curious to know if the non-linear nature of the light source will have pronounced effects on the rendering of skin tone and the contrast of the overall image.

It may be silly to want to know about techniques that soon may be irrelevant but that's one of the many little quirks of personality that I live with. If the skin tone rendering is good I'll be interested in shooting more black and white film. I still have three or four hundred rolls in the fridge.

On a topical note...

Swim practice was wonderfully neutral and calm this morning. We have a hard and fast set of rules, learned and implemented for over two decades, of absolutely no political discussions before, during or after swim practice. We love everyone we swim with too much to let our personal opinions about politics and political parties to intrude. But that still leaves us a lot to talk about. Not everything requires a continuous dialogue... Having safe zones from all the contention keeps us all a bit healthier.

And finally, Thanks to reader, Frank, for helping me edit down a recent post. His input was valuable to me and probably added to your enjoyment as a reader of the VSL. A tip of the coffee cup to him.

picking through the piles of trash images to find the ones you always intended to like.

Every artist seems to accrue stuff over time that they don't really want anymore but can't seem to part with. I have an office space that's about five hundred square feet. It always feels full of stuff. And by extension my brain seems to always have a subroutine running to keep track, in a general way, of where most of the stuff resides. But here's the deal: There's a lot of stuff I just don't want to keep track of anymore. And when it comes to film and files I feel even more constrained by the  two extremes; purging everything or preserving stuff for posterity.

Posterity is all about ego. Purging is all about compulsion. Is there some healthy middle ground?

I wouldn't know, I'm not a mental health care professional. But I do know this; up until last week there were boxes full of slides I hadn't looked through since I bought this space 16 years ago and moved all the stuff in. That's all changed. I pulled a big garbage can in from the side of the house and started by pulling out the first bankers box filled with the polyester sleeves that protect, in groups of 20, decades of color slides. On Sunday I filled half a 50 gallon container with slides that I came to realize that I'll never need or want to touch again. A lot of nothing special.

Today we purged another twenty or thirty pounds of non-virtual imaging. But in the role of a stalwart steward of my own version of culture, I held up each sleeve of slides in front of a lightbox and took a quick look at the little rectangles. I pulled out all the images of my spouse and put them into a new set of sleeves. Ditto with any image of Ben or my direct family members. Chalk that up to nostalgia. Family guy. Family history custodian.

The ones that got chunked are client files, street shots that never worked out. Shots of the Eiffel Tower and all sorts of monuments that are, frankly, better as postcards that someone else has shot. As each box gets emptied it gets recycled and my office space gets another three or four cubic feet of space that I'm dedicated to not filling up.

I have a couple more days of editing and purging in order to bring down the clutter to a manageable amount. Then I'm going through shelf after shelf of CDs and DVDs. So many headshots of people from the last 12 years. People who worked for companies that no longer exist. Probably a fair number of people who no longer physically exist. And mostly they are images that will never be printed or shared again.

But the fun part of all this (besides the self delivered gift of increasing space and less clutter) is finding little gems that pepper the archival sheets. The one above is a color copy slide of a hand colored print of Renee Zellweger. We'd been out shooting on the railroad tracks on the east side of town. We started the day goofing around and shooting negatives that we earmarked for an earlier version of Hipstergram filters that was called, cross processing. We actually shot the film in a certain way and then processed it in the wrong kind of developer. By the time we got to this image I was bored with the cross processing experiment and more interested in shooting some black and white.

One of my friends asked me what might be behind this sudden desire to get rid of stuff. I thought for a long time about this and I think I know. I just turned 57 and I remember talking to an older photographer many years ago. He was in the process of winnowing down his collection of images as well. He divided his rationalization of the initiative into two parts. In the first place not all of the images I've shot are great. Not good. Not even mediocre. If I die before I trash them they become part of my legacy as a photographer. That would be embarrassing. Very embarrassing. I'd love to distill all the stuff I've shot down to about 100 nice images. That's a manageable project and, while I doubt anyone but a handful of friends and family will remember the work I've done a week after my website goes dark and my blog runs dry, it still assuages my ego and insinuates that I am leaving something behind.

But in a more honest assessment I don't think there are more than 100 great images in the collection and having to make my kid and my spouse go through 200,000 images in order to find the few is cruel and preventable. Left with an unmanageable collection they would be trapped with trying to decide what I would have wanted to do with all this stuff and the (smarter and better) desire to get on with their own lives.

Maybe we have a moral responsibility to clean up after our selves and create a bit of order going forward. At least that's my rational.

If you scratch a little deeper I think I'm just trying to make space for a whole new wave....

Kissing the last days of Summer goodbye with a yellow flowered dress and a floppy straw hat.

We spent a few days up around Fredericksburg, Tx. and around Enchanted Rock shooting a fashion spread for a magazine. We were taking a short break on an ancient front porch attached to a grand, old, Texas wooden ranch house. I looked over and saw my model's look of quiet (tired) repose and I pulled up my camera in order to catch not just her youthful beauty but also the warm and unhurried feel of the day. It was near the end of September and still in the mid 90's. We were all warm but not glistening. I was drawn to the line of the young woman's jaw, the tranquility of her expression and the little wisp of dark hair sweeping down in front of her ear under her light colored straw hat.

Not lighting trickery here. Just the open shade. No post production elbow grease here just a curve adjustment in the scanning and a tiny bit of sharpening in Snapseed. No Promethean camera here, just an older Leica SL2 and an older, used 90mm Summicron. Fuji ISO 100 slide film.

What's trending in photography?

I think the first step is to admit that most of the stuff we do is nothing special and that we do it to fill the time in a pleasant way. But is that enough?

The last ten years have seen incredibly dynamic growth, excitement and change in photography. At its very best, at the top of the craft, artists have successfully thrown out decades of convention, antiquated thinking and the safety of old rules in order to transform the art. At the other end of the spectrum never before has there been a greater quantity of the same poorly seen and poorly executed work foisted on the world's visual markets.

Collectively, we've spent the last ten years breaking away from the constrictions of film photography only to, in most cases, end up re-applying the same tired conventions in the new medium.

The single most pressing questions I hear when I meet other photographers for coffee and conversation are variations of these: "I have all this gear but I need some inspiration. I'm looking for the right subject matter. I'm bored just shooting. I feel like I'm totally prepared but I don't know what I want to shoot. How do you decide what to shoot?" And, after we talk for a while the conversation floats back to firm ground: "which camera body? Which lens?"

It's time for a new re-invention of photography.

Most of the progress we've made falls into two areas. We've spent a lot of time getting digital to be reliable and of equal quality with the film technologies that we had used for decades before. While digital can be noiseless we are only now conquering the dynamic range issues and characteristic curves that make and made film so alluring. In fact, most of us would have continued to shoot film if not for the stark differences in perceived operating costs. So now digital starts to decisively pull away in terms of technical quality. Cameras like the Nikon D800 and the Sony a99 are delivering very high resolutions combined with wide dynamic ranges and low noise. Equally importantly they are doing it without the bulk and slow operating performance of medium format imaging platforms with which they now compete.

The second area of progress is post production and digital manipulation. I've been using Photoshop since the year it was invented and clearly remember the first iterations which had no options for layers, or even undo. You worked and saved and worked and saved. Now all can be changed with the wave of a hand, the click of an action or the magic of the right plug-in. You can pretty much make any image anything you want. Its very ease seems to impel us to use and abuse it. Coupled with this kind of post processing control is the maturation of ink jet printers which allows us to print to just about any size with high quality, archival keeping qualities and in-house control.

But have we  really moved the art and wonder of photography forward? I would say "yes" for a very small number of practitioners who use the medium as a spring board for their ideas. I would say most of us are stuck firmly in the aesthetic realm of the 1970's and 1980's. We just make it all faster, in greater quantity, and print it bigger (if it gets printed at all...).

One of the first culprits is the pressure of group think that aggressively postulates and then rewards the idea that the only thing which matters in terms of labeling photography as "good" or "bad" is the technical quality of execution. Is the image sharp? Is the image noise free? Does the image encompass a wide enough range of tones? But rarely do we, as a culture, relate to the idea behind the image. What was the artist trying to say with their perfect image? What concept did they put forward that will add to and change our collective thought processes? How will the image move the needle and set the stage for a new way of looking at our lives and our cultures?

The fact is that most of the flood of images we endure is highly imitative and self-conscious. It's more in the realm of proving technical mastery than anything else. At some point a compulsive adherence to even the idea of technical quality as a major qualifier of acceptance is destructive to the art. Not to mention the reality that our eagerness to show off our techniques tends to make us content agnostic.

But how did we get to this place? How did we develop photography into a religion that worships almost entirely at the alter of objective parameter measurement and metric analysis? Why do we copy so many (self fabricated) star photographers (who themselves seem obsessed with teaching technique) on the web? Why is DXO Mark so popular in our photo lives? Why is it important to so many people that their camera or lens be able to squeeze out a tenth of a percent more something than a competitor's camera? Are images of our acne endowed but beloved teens made better and more endearing when rendered clinicially sharp? Do images of our weathered and worn spouses become more alive when rendered by a machine with more or better pixels? Are snapshots of kittens and puppies more enduring because we can now blow up the images and see texture on each follicle of kitty fur?

I would say that, with the help of ad agencies and camera makers, along with the mind boggling explosion of blogs and photo sharing sites, that we've effectively reprogrammed the brains of three generations, and mutated our thought processes to the point where the analysis of the tools trumps anything that can actually be done (creatively) with the tools.

I think most bloggers start out trying to generate a mix of art, experience and gear. They quickly find that every time they talk about gear, or review a favorite lens or camera, their number spike like crazy and every time they post something heartfelt and about the art of photography their blog readership drops faster than a plutonium feather through a vacuum. Their blogs evolve into something they never anticipated. What started as a behind the scenes  showcase ends up as an educational blog with a credit card gateway. What started as a technical sharing site morphs into a  running ad campaign for workshops that teach how to. Never why to.

Let's face it. Most photographers have a financial incentive in running a blog. They wiggle around until they find a selling proposition that works for them and then they optimize. If you find the greatest payoff in click throughs and ad sales comes from gear reviews and the glorification of technique then it just makes sense to steer more in that direction. Which steers everyone into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a technical culture the person with the corner on facts is king of commerce. And so it goes.  Even my favorite non Kirk Tuck blog seems to be larding in more "interesting" lenses and cameras than every before.

My point in all of this is simple. As a culture it's pretty obvious that we're fixated on process and gear and largely ignoring aesthetics and concept. We are dumbing ourselves down in that we absorb and regurgitate stylistic "differentiators" (fancy borders? different filters?) that have no relevance to messaging, thoughtful content and point of view. Adding destructive filters to a banal documentation doesn't elevate the banal documentation into a different realm. Especially when so many others are using the exact same filters on exactly the same kind of banal documentations. Madness. Paint by numbers. Stand here and use f5.6.

If we all become completely invested in the process only, with no point of view and no reason other than our own short term (imagined) pleasure, then the vast majority of images created in our lifetime will have less real reason to exist that toilet paper.

I've always preached the idea that constant practice makes one a better photographer, and perhaps there is validity to this on a commercial level or in the practice of street photography where, at least, you're being out on the street increases the chances that you'll find something worthwhile at which to point your camera. But I'm re-thinking my whole hypothesis. I think we shoot and share too much.  And it's mostly done without regard to challenging ourselves as artists with inquisitive brains. I'm guilty as heck of shooting stuff not because it's the way I see a subject but because it proves or provides a technical point I want to make in conjunction with my writing.

So, what do I hope for? Now that the megapixel race seems less important and now that the web based experts have have taught everyone on the planet how to use small flashes indoors and out, how to shoot people on skateboards and bikes, how to shoot women in halter tops and high heels,  and now that everyone seems to be settling in with their favorite PhotoShop celebrity post processing, I'm hoping that some strong, disruptive and highly creative artists come forward into our collective space to actually challenge us to try and make some art that has balls and a voice. I'm looking for the equivalents of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon who shook up the world's perceptions about photography in the 1950's and 1960's, even in the 1990s. I'm looking for a William Frank who can bring new energy to shooting in the streets. I'm looking for someone like Bill Brandt who re-invented portraits in the first half of the 20th century.  Where is the current generation's Diane Arbus? I'm equally welcoming to painters like David Hockney crossing over to do some unique camera work as well.

For that matter where are the peers and counterparts to Gary Crewdson and Alex Gursky? Why the insistence on only emulating the easy targets?  Is it just harder for people to be found in the clutter? Has the signal to noise ratio dropped below 1:1? Have we just let our aesthetic sensibilities atrophy to such a level that we can no longer even recognize something that has a real message? Or did we never care in the first place?

There are so many big themes in the world: The collapse of economies, the collapse of cultures and countries,  the denial of jobs for a generation of college graduates, the collision of western culture and middle eastern cultures, the clash of religions, the changing domestic roles of men and women in relationships, the ascendancy of women as income earners and learners and how that will effect sexual politics, how we'll redefine beauty as people become larger and obese, and how we envision the future. Love, Hate, Wonder.  Big themes that are just there for the taking. Big referents on which to hang our artistic visions. Or something as simple as a new distillation of what it means to possess beauty.

I would love for teachers to come along and, instead of showing us where to hook up the flash trigger or how to meter fill flash in sunlight, would push us to dig down and understand that we have a voice and a point of view and it's at least as valid as anything else out there. And it's that which we should be sharing and discussing rather than creating another image of a kitten, or a filtered landscape meant to impress everyone else on a discussion forum about how sharp our newest lens is.

I would love to see galleries spring up that are filled with transformative work instead of imitative work. I'd love to see photographic prints that are sharp with vision instead of just sharp as a litmus test.

I've caught myself, in my own little world here, heading out to create images to use in the blog that are quick and functional instead of good and personal. I am as guilty as everyone else because, at the center of our art is that nasty little secret that it's now easy to show off technically. Newbies are entranced by flash in daylight or narrow depth of field or mixed color temperature mastery. But we seem to have forgotten that these are just the tools we should be using to create messages; they are not the actual message.

The state of photography today? We've never had more effective tools and we've never (collectively) used them in a more mundane and safe way.  We're paralyzed by our need to perfect things instead of getting inside our own heads and understanding what we want our photographs to say. We've burned through the value of workshops as they related to construction techniques of building a visual house but we forgot to include an education about how to create the idea of the house. We have the construction company ready and equipment with all the tools and materials but we forgot to include an architect. We forgot that building well is also about building to a design. To a concept.

We built the photo equivalent a super collider but we have no idea what we're looking for or how to get started. At the risk of unleashing a whole new wave of workshops I'll say this very frankly: There is no value to a workshop that only teaches you how. The new value is the workshop that teaches you why or prods you to connect with a voice deep inside of you that needs to sing out.

Gone are the days when it was cool just to be able to show up and make a workmanlike image. We can do that with a phone and pulse now. The real magic will be learning to tell the stories of our hearts in our pictures. And to give them the power to move people because of what they say and not exclusively because of how they say it.

The workshop or online class I want would teach me how to connect to my own subconscious and learn what it is that has the most value to me as a person. As a member of our civilization and as an interpreter. The best workshop experience I ever had was one on creativity given by Ian Summers. No cameras. No photography. But some meditation and a lot of exercises that helped me get clear on what held me back as an artist and how to change my own perceptions. How to become clearer about what I love to see and how I love to see it.

The blogs and forums?  They filled a void for people who wanted current, hard information and needed a source.  But they didn't layer in relevance.

The next big trend? Might be wishful thinking on my part but wouldn't it be cool if we all slowed down and took a chunk to time to understand what drives us to do our art and our hobby and how we can bring the best of ourselves to the process instead of mindless repetition and duplication? And instead of working to sheer quantity wouldn't it be great to distill down our work to a group of incredible images that take your breathe away rather than an unending stack that leaves you tired and out of breathe?

In the end art matters more than technology. It's art that becomes the critical source of our history of civilization. Art and literature. And we have the tools to effect our own renaissance if we are only brave enough to connect with what we do intellectually, intuitively and emotionally.

It's not enough to be sharp and well exposed anymore. It's time to put our better brains to work.

Less an object of reason and technology. More an object of power and emotion.

"Show me something I've never seen before."

Canon versus Nikon? Not here.

People are, by nature, contentious. Love to argue. Love to be right. That's the basis of all the binary arguments. Nikon versus Canon. Democrat versus Republican. Each side clings to the idea that they are irreproachably right and the other side is delusional. Even though I know who is right and I am as political as everyone else out there it is a major point of pride here at the Visual Science Lab that we have had no politically charged blog entries and no nasty comment/squabbles.  And that's not going to change today.

I hope everyone votes. I hope my guy wins because I think I know best. But you've got to love the process and the passion.

To our extra-American readers I presume that the billion dollar election marathon looks crazy. I mean, how many really cool cameras could you buy with that kind of money? But it's always been a bit crazy it's just that our whole circus is much better broadcast these days. The correct way to look at all the expenditures is to see it as a big economic stimulus for the media and advertising industries. I'm sure it adds some percentage to our GDP.

So, which camera company is better? Canon or Nikon? The real answer? Neither! Sony will trounce them all......(kidding).

Have fun out there. Today we make some more history. Take a camera with you. We might as well document it.

Pedi-cab on Congress Ave.

Just a grab shot while walking along Congress Ave. yesterday with a Sony a77 camera set to black and white, and a 70mm Sigma 2.8 macro lens clamped onto the front. I enjoy using the a77 as a black and white camera because the image preview that I see, real time, in the finder, shows me exactly how the image will render when I push the button. I like that. Much better than looking at a color image, trying to imagine it in 2-D and then trying to imagine how it will look after the monochrome filtering.

Also, I think the Sony does well with the skin tones in black and white.