lessons and new ideas

Lots of things been going on in the last month or so. I finished up the images from the Ironman triathlon project. Well - I finished taking the pictures. I've done the basic editing too, but haven't really looked at them all as a set. Part of the delay has been I've wanted to get a bit of distance from them, but also that I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with them. Initially I was shooting them with the idea that there would be a book, and that may still happen. Then I've been kicking around the idea of a small gallery show or end of season party and show, but that would probably need some sponsorship to pay for several larger prints. I did get one image accepted in the Texas Photo international competition opening next weekend, which is a thrill, but still not really the focus of the project. I'd also been contemplating putting something together for the SlideLuck PotShow coming up here in November.

Things fell in to place a bit more on Thursday night here, when I was at the Gathering of Photographers meetup in Austin. I hadn't been to this group before and had a great time. There were several very accomplished photographers there and I got some interesting ideas. In particular, I spent a while picking Julia Robinson's brain and seeing some of her multimedia slideshows. She was kind enough to put up with all my stupid questions and point me in what seems to be a good direction. I've always really enjoyed the sort of work put out by mediastorm, and the general mixing of still images along with audio. I'm a bit of a 'This American Life' and Ira Glass junkie as well. One thing I've realised in the last couple of years is that I want to try and tell stories with my photography, rather than just being happy with a series of greatest hits or one off images. I think the multimedia format has a lot of potential for that. Not really interested in video yet and there is a lot of power in looking at a still image, with audio that increases or expands upon the information in the image, without going to moving pictures.

Of course, that now means I need to work out how to put all that together. I've taken the pictures, but I didn't record any audio. I have a small Olympus WS-110 digital recorder that I think will be good enough to pick up the audio I need, but I have to go record it. Which now means I'm having to consider doing interviews, recording background sounds and arranging some instrumental backing music. Then I need to learn how to mix all those bits of audio together and sync it up to the images. The prospect of learning all this new stuff has really lit a candle under me - it's exciting! Reminds me of all the book structure and design that I absorbed for the first SoFoBoMo.

This evening, I was at Piercarlo's gallery show CHAN-CHAN. He did it in conjunction with another artist - a painter - Luis Abreux. Combined, they had paintings and photography hanging together. The images were all related to Cuba in various ways, and there was a live band playing music from the region too. It struck me that this was an even more engrossing multimedia presentation of the work. The band really evoked the feel of the area and helped transport you while looking at the images.

On the way home from that show, I ran into a friend of mine who's a great musician. Woode Wood is a fixture on the local running trail, playing his music and working on his videos. Things are picking up for him and he's putting a band together now. We hung out for a while and I was lucky enough to get my first guitar lesson from him. My fingertips are still sore. I was also able to arrange to license some of his music as the backing score for the slideshow - things are falling into place already! Check out his videos and vote for them on YouTube.

enthusiastic about enfuse

I've dabbled with HDR photography a bit in the past, but always felt the results were quite cartoonish. The saturation is often off the charts and the local contrast added by most tone mapping algorithms typically seems very heavy handed, for what I want to achieve. While that is a perfectly valid thing to do, it just doesn't appeal to me that much. I have managed to do some more realistic HDR images, using the Wukong beta/ Essential HDR product from Imaging Luminary but since I moved to a Mac, I haven't been able to use their software. I started looking for something similar for OS X and got a recommendation for Enfuse. This is an open-source solution to the problem, that takes quite a different approach to blending the exposures.

Instead of generating a merged, high dynamic range image with floating point pixel values, the enfuse algorithm picks out from across the various exposures what it considers to be the best exposed pixels for a particular region, then merges them all together. There is some level of control for the user; to provide masks, or bias it towards keeping contrast or saturation in the image. The algorithm can also automatically align images, if you haven't shot them all on a tripod. I've found that the defaults work well to merge a well exposed set of images. The resulting merged image is then a great starting point for further adjustments.

While Enfuse is open source and available for free, I've been using an Adobe Lightroom plugin that is sold as donationware, by Timothy Armes. The LR/Enfuse plugin simplifies running the merge from Lightroom. I just have to select the various exposures and run the plugin to get a merged result back in Lightroom, ready for further adjustment.

Many years ago I learned to shoot pretty wide brackets around a given exposure when I'm working on a tripod. With digital, the brackets are essentially free and this ensures you have all the data you might need to merge exposures back at home. Particularly when working with fleeting light or in hard to get to locations, I'd rather shoot a few more frames at the time, than wish I had them when I got home. I'll typically pick a working f-stop, based on the depth of field I want in the scene, then shoot at one stop intervals around the metered exposure, from -2EV, -1EV, 0, +1EV and +2EV. I normally do this in Aperture Priority mode, so that only the shutter speed is changing, but the depth of field is constant. In some cases, if there are particularly extreme lighting situations, I might shoot another stop above or below those as well, but I've found that five stop increment is often more than I need, particularly shooting around twilight. These 5 exposures give me a great starting point to blend for a final image. In the past I might have processed them as multiple exposures and then layered them in Photoshop, using masks to pick out particular parts of the image. Now they are a great starting point for Enfuse. In the example above, the porch of the building was in really heavy shadow, in the noon day sun, so I've shot 6 exposures, to get some detail and deep colour in the shadow areas (in the lightest exposure, to the far right), while still trying to keep some detail in the white, reflective roof (in the leftmost exposure).

To run the merge, I pick the darkest exposure that still had the right levels for the lightest parts of the image and the same at the other end, selecting the lightest exposure that had the shadow values that I wanted. I then use those as the outliers and pick all the in-between exposures and run the Enfuse plugin. I haven't tried varying the default values yet, as it has given consistently good results from the images I took in Big Bend. Enfuse is a great option if you are interested in working with scenes with a large range of tonalities or extremes of lighting, but want to try to produce more natural results. The price is right too. There are other GUIs available for Enfuse, if you don't like using Lightroom. I haven't had any experience with these, but options such as EnfuseGUI do exist if you wanted to avoid Lightroom and also the command line.

the aftermath

So back home and now trying to manage the rest of the SoFoBoMo process. Haven't really even started looking at the images, never mind editing any of them. Just shuffling around the 20Gb, 2000+ image files, renaming them, backing them up, getting previews set up and that sort of thing, ready to start looking at what I took. I've picked out a few that have caught my eye and done a quick edit, like this one above and the previous two posts. I've got no idea if they will make the cut for the final book. I don't even know what the final book is going to be about - probably just bundled under the theme of 'road trip'. I'm sure Colin Pantall has a 'how not to photograph' that addresses that sort of random collecting head on, but it is what I have.

Process while traveling was pretty straight forward. Shoot things that interested me. Drive Amanda crazy. Repeat. Then in the few evenings when we had power, dump the contents of the CF cards to my very small and underpowered linux laptop drive and also to a removable backup drive. These were then stored separate from each other, so that if someone stole my camera bag, or broke into the car, or stole the car, I'd at least have the backups and a story for the insurance company. I did no editing and almost no review all last week. No time, too small a screen, limited power for the camera to even chimp much, particularly when trying to do night shots (long exposure equals quick battery drain). The fun part of that is that a week later I'm now actually hopefully going to start getting to see the images. (when this backup actually finishes) The bad I suppose is that I could well have screwed up many days of things without realising it and it would be about 500 miles for a retake.

The other thing I'm finally getting to grips with, spurred on by SoFoBoMo is calibrating this new Mac and getting things like Adobe Photoshop actually configured again. All things I should have done a few weeks ago when I got the computer, but laziness always finds a way. I shot quite a few images with the thought or potential to make HDR versions of the results, even though I've never tried it with the Mac OS X HDR software options (which I don't currently know much about - any reviews, raves, suggestions there? comments very welcome).

This evening then is mostly book-keeping, fiddling, renaming, filing, sorting and getting ready to start getting ready. All busy work really but essential I suppose, if I'm going to get this random assortment of stuff into some sort of book shape. Should be fun.

The image above was taken in Big Bend National Park, in the Chisos Mountains basin. There was a fair bit of pre-planning involved - picking the right camp site, with the right view of Casa Grande, on the right day that the moon was going to rise over it, as a full moon. The tent was partially pitched with this shot in mind (and mostly pitched with how the ground sloped in mind, too) There was a large helping of luck involved too, I didn't expect the moon to rise quite so perfectly over the corner of the big mountain. That actually was painful because it meant the moon shadow was all around us for a good hour before the light really actually touched our campsite - quite frustrating if you wanted to get some sleep!

For lighting, I put a Canon 580EX II speedlite in the tent, with a full CTO gel over the flash. The tent was already orange and red, but I wanted to use the CTO gel so that I could shoot in Tungsten white balance, to really get the deep, midnight blue into the clear night sky. The CTO gel and Tungsten white balance cancel out for the tent lighting, returning it to the already red/ orange appearance. I used a Canon ST-E2 remote trigger to control the flash in TTL mode and then just waited for the moon to rise and worked out a reasonable exposure, stopped down quite far to give enough depth of field to get the mountain silhouette sharp and the tent in focus. The stopped down aperture also causes the bright moon to create the ray/ star effect.

PDF as a valid end in itself

A thought-provoking podcast from Brooks Jensen on PDFs, over at Lenswork. Brooks pitches the PDF as the next big thing for publishing and the medium where photographers who are interested in working on the cutting edge should be publishing their work. I've heard Brooks talk about PDFs in the past as a great means for publishing but he seems to be going further this time. I assume that's the experiences he's gained with the Lenswork Extended product. Typically photographers think about the published, physical book as the ultimate end goal, but here the PDF is put forward as a better option, particularly as a means of distribution. I've produced a few PDFs and it is a good experience to go through, making the selections, doing the layout and editing. It does always feel home-made - without that stamp of authority that a publisher, other than yourself, gives to work.

But here the argument is made that the PDF is worthwhile goal in of itself, which certainly matches well with the goal of SoFoBoMo. Even there, the PDF decision often can feel like a forced compromise - we'd all really like to have it be a 'real' book, not an electronic file. But perhaps the PDF can be thought of as a higher goal than a printed book. More opportunity try new things. Perhaps even mix in audio with the images. Also, thinking on last year, I was able to see over 50 photographic books, that I'd never be able to see if I had to buy them - because of the cost, and the physical space required to store them. PDF certainly enables more people to see the work. Given how few of my pictures see print, PDF probably makes even more sense. There is the downside that the resolution of a PDF isn't currently as good as physical book. Also you've got the issues of controlling the viewing environment - you have no idea what sort of screen or calibration is being used to look at the end product.

At the same time, photography always feels like a successive series of disappointments, or reduction in quality. The images in your head aren't often as good as the image on the back of the camera. Those small images on the back of the camera often don't live up to the full size version on a screen. Once it's been processed, the prints are always one step removed from how it looked on a screen. Each stage reduces the quality of the image, real or imagined. PDF removes one of those levels of transformations. Maybe it can even be a truer representation of the image than a print, if we can sort out these resolution and calibration quandaries.

So what do you think? Is a PDF a good end in itself, or just something to settle for when you can't make a real book?

growth spurts

One doesn't see with one's eyes, one sees with the whole fruit of one's previous experience.

- Aron Klug

Anita describes a familiar lament over on her blog. She expresses dissatisfaction with the images she is currently taking, compared to those in her head. I've had long periods of feeling the way Anita does - my aspirations were well above my abilities. It has been a strange progression over the last 7 years.

Initially I loved so many of the pictures I took, fatally overlooking my lack of technical abilities that I had no understanding of. I was blind to the faults. I'd print them, share them, enter contests and juried shows and be bemused by rejection. After a while, I started producing passably good pictures - still technically flawed, but compositionally competent, satisfying and generally okay. I'd learned enough to see what was wrong with my earliest attempts. I could start seeing glaring flaws like over-sharpening halos and uncontrolled dynamic range. I have several prints around the house from this phase that I still like. They might now be in the laundry, but they are at least still on a visible wall.

Then I went through another growth spurt. I was back again to seeing the glaring flaws in all the pictures I was taking. I couldn't print anything out because by the time it came to printing or framing it, I already was dissappointed in the picture. I learned quite a bit about composition and technical printing in this phase. By the end of it, again quite a few, better, images adorn my walls. That was about 3 years ago.

The more you learn, the less you know

I guess I'm back in another satisfaction vacumm again. There are no photographs on the walls from the last 2 years. My standards might have shifted again, but also the subject matter I'm shooting has moved away from grand landscapes and other forms of easy wall decoration. The images are now lots of people I don't know or maybe more challenging but ultimately satisfying images that don't look so good on the wall. There are a few I've taken that I could think about printing, but even as I type and think about them, I can come up with all the reasons that I'd be dissatisfied with them. There's a book I suppose, but nothing else printed in the last couple of years.

The thing of it is, though, that these periods of dissastisfaction are really where the growth is occuring. If and when you think you are doing good work, then you no doubt are, but you aren't striving for something bigger. The dissappointment and continuing urge to get better shows you know what's wrong and what can be improved. When that moves to the background, and satisfaction sets in, then you've stopped being able to identify the areas for growth, at least for a while. Those plataeus are to be enjoyed, but the struggle up the mountain is where the improvement is really happening, even if you can't see it and want to just give up along the way.

I first encountered this concept of plateaus on the way to learning in the book Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment A worthwhile read. I've also started using the Amazon affiliate program for links to books - feel free to buy through these links and I get a small amount back - or if it offends you, just type the name into your favourite book store and avoid my small attempts at commercialism.

True knowledge comes in knowing that you know nothing

- Socrates

ETA: Great comment from Paulo Bono on this post - well worth a read. It reminds me of the idea that a writer is someone who writes, and a photographer who is someone who takes photographs. If you aren't actually writing or taking the photographs, then you aren't really being a writer or a photographer or whatever sort of -er you aspire to be. Do the work and the rest will take care of itself.

crime & punishment in texas

Magnum in Motion: crime & punishment Dramatic mix of audio, video and still images. Powerful stuff.

Still alive

I'm still alive but mostly exhausted by the whole book process. I finally finished soft proofing all of the images for a Blurb version of the book. That took most of Saturday morning, to produce a new version of everything then relink to the soft proofed images. Got it laid out and uploaded to Blurb and a printed version should hopefully be arriving in the next week or so. I'm excited to see the finished version and perhaps more excited just to be done, for now. Other SoFoBoMoers are finishing up around now. I've seen several excellent results popping up. I particularly was taken by Paul Butzi's walk around his home with his dog. The words and pictures flowed together really well and there were a few good insights shared along the way. The other Paul, Paul Lester, also shared a beautiful look around a small glen, close to home. Getting to experience his Taoistic approach to arranging the images was a delight. Looking forward to seeing the other books as and when they arrive. I haven't taken a picture since the last SoFoBoMo shot. Almost have a couple of times but the urgency isn't there for now. I did wake up on Sunday morning with a fully fledged, fully visualised idea in my head that I'd love to follow through on. That hasn't happened before - I can really see the image in my mind's eye. All the details. How I'd like it to be lit, what the colours would be, how it would work. I know the story and what the concept is. It even has scope to be an entire other project - a series of conceptual images. But I'm daunted. Daunted by the thought of trying to put it together. Daunted by the work required to pull it off. Scared it might not be as good as it still is in my mind's eye. Unsure why I'd spend the money required to make it happen, with no general point to doing it. All sounds silly after I've typed it out. Mostly though, I just feel tired of the whole thing for now. I need to recharge. Another indication that that's true: I went to set up the camera to play around with some stroboscopic shooting and I've stripped the tripod thread. So no tripod shooting until I can get that repaired (anyone know what the cost is?). I'll take that as a sign to slow down for now and enjoy some other things. Reflecting on the whole SoFoBoMo effort - I'm amazed at how much I learned, in such a short period of time. Adobe InDesign from scratch, in a few days. The ins and outs of basic typography and layout, enough that I could at least understand all the mistakes I'd made when Holly pointed them out. Enough to have not made many more along the way. Insights I gleaned about how a book should be structured. The front pieces and how they relate. The application of graphic design and the torture of trying to come up with a passable design. The issues around layout of pages and display of images. The struggle to take enough images and then to have enough good ones. The always twisted writing process. How little I enjoy editing what I've written after the first draft. The great sense of shared purpose between all the people participating. The fun and excitement of sharing your book with someone for the first time. It certainly makes me want to do it all again, some time soon. I'm just not sure if I can face up to trying to do another one in May. Going to mull it over for a few more days.

sofobomo : more layouts

I'm finding this part of the project the most painful. The shooting was a lot of fun, but now the editing and assembly is starting to drag. The images are mostly edited down and finished, so I've gotten over the hump of that. All I have to do is put them together in some sort of coherent and stylishly designed way. Or maybe just coherent and designed.

Hmm. This is all new. Anyway, here are some more sample layouts that I put together last night. Feedback as always is very welcome. With the realisation that each page doesn't need to be the same as long as they are somewhat related and consistent, the layout design became a much bigger issue than just dropping pictures on the page. Mostly that came from the understanding that just having the exact same layout and number of images on each page would be really boring. As I shot, I also found that some people were more expressive and willing to act up, giving me more material than others. Consequently, some pages deserve more images than others.

Both of those decisions increase the thought that goes into each page - how to lay it out, how many pictures to use, how to size them and so on. I'm trying to just let it flow and keep some design elements to pull it all together - the deep red blocks, white space. Making slow progress with this.

SoFoBoMo

Paul Butzi is putting the finishing touches to the Solo Photo Book Month challenge. I want to urge you to take part. Not for me. Not for Paul. For you. But why would you want to put a book together ? All photographers seem to want to put a book together. It is a cool thing to do - to have a book of your images, in your hand. We print few enough images any more. Digital photographers have drives stuffed full of digital images and not enough printed. At least I fall in to that category and I suspect many of you do, too. Lots of unfinished images, cluttering up the place. Maybe some of them get released into the wild and end up on flickr. Even there though, they are seldom solid enough for you to really look at them. A single finished print teaches you a lot about the image that is hard to discover on a screen. A book is a different order of magnitude, again. Final. Solid. Scary.

That I think is why many of us don't do it. A book seems like such a big task. Daunting and also final. You have to commit to the content of it. Those pictures are there to last. So all the fears well up. I'm not good enough. I don't know how to do it. I don't think I can finish it. Who am I to be putting a book together? Well, why not ? Even if you are the only person who ever sees the finished book, you'll have achieved something. The end result is a completed, finished piece of work - as polished as you can make it. It might be a file generated with a free pdf printer from any word processor, or a presentation tool, even Microsoft works or Adobe InDesign. It could be a blurb.com or lulu.com print-on-demand work. Perhaps you use it as something to approach a publisher with. It might just stay on your hard drive, never to be seen by anyone other than you. But it would still be a finished book. With your name on the cover. How cool would that be ?

But a book is a big commitment and a lot of work. That to me is the beauty of the SoFoBoMo challenge. It isn't a huge commitment. It'll all be over in a month, one way or another. You'll either have a book, or you won't. It can't stretch out into a multi-year or multi-decade albatross around your neck. You finish it, or you don't. So the scale is a whole lot smaller. The opportunity to procrastinate and prevaricate over choices or deciding when it is done just isn't there. The required number of pictures isn't too high - 35 - but enough that you'll need to engage, think about it and make an effort. Along the way you'll learn about editing your images - making those final painful choices on what to include or not. You'll probably learn a bit about book layout, design and what goes in to making a book. You'll find out how good you are at working to a deadline - or not. You'll actually finish something. That in particular is powerful stuff. It forces you to make decisions and live with them. You might find you don't like those decisions afterwards and that way, you'll have learned more than if you never started. I'm sure once you finish the first one that the next book will be that much more like what you actually want to create. If you never finish, you'll never get to start the next one and the next one and the next one.

The challenge would also be a fantastic opportunity to pick a project and shoot images on a consistent theme or subject. Return to a theme multiple times. Explore it. Go a bit deeper than those great one off images you always take. Or start a new short-term project if you normally work on projects already.

So give it a go. Sign up and commit to participating in SoFoBoMo. Make a book.

edit boldly

Editing is important. Really important. 99% of what you shoot is probably bad. 99% of what I shoot certainly is. But I try then to only show the good 1%. I struggle to make decisions about which images I like, or not. I don't show all the variations on a particular image. I'll spend the time to pick the version that really says what I want to say. I think that's important for several reasons. Firstly, it keeps the viewer interested. I'm showing them the best shots - in my opinion. I'm not putting out five variations of each image and expecting the viewer to pick the one they like. For one thing, that gets boring very quickly for the viewer. Secondly, it stops me from developing my own viewpoint. If I ask you to pick, you'll decide which one you like - but that one will be different for every viewer. If I make the choice - you might not like it, but it is my view. My style. My statement about what I wanted to show you. As I go along, picking the images I like, I refine my view. The next time I go and shoot I'll make some of those choices before I press the shutter. I'll have refined my own personal way of seeing and spend more time heading in an interesting direction. Hopefully I can go further on that second attempt than the first time. Editing is a big part of that process. You have the time to contemplate the images and pick what works, for you. You get to reject what doesn't work, for you. You can start to express yourself more strongly, by what you don't show people, just as much as you can with what you do show. If you find yourself unable to pick between two shots, or want to upload both versions, try anyway to pick one. If you can't, then there can't be anything different about them - so just pick either one. But if there is a difference, pick the one you personally like. Be bold. Make a decision. Edit bravely. I also have the luxury of not being paid for many of the shoots I do. People ask me to take a picture or a portrait because they like my previous images, or I ask them to let me shoot. They've asked me to take the picture and part of that is I get to decide what I show them and what I don't. Often I get asked if there are any more - but part of my process is that I get to decide what they see. I edit the images, so there aren't any more that I think were good enough. If I start showing all the images or giving them permutations and choices, the perception of the quality drops. I didn't share those other images in the first place, because I believe the best images are in the final edit, not in the discarded shots. Someone might not agree with my particular choices, but that's part of expressing your own style. This editing process helps later when you shoot, as you start to know when to stop shooting. I find more often than not, that either the first or last image in a sequence is the best one. Either everything fell in to place straight away and the first shot was great. Or, I'm sketching and striving towards an idea that I know is there - once I get it, I move on fairly soon afterwards. Editing heavily after the shoot, helps inform me when I'm shooting if I've got the shot or not. I know more about what I like and what I'm aiming to get. So I can shoot more variety. I don't keep working on the same idea once I've got the shot. I can move on and expand the options. If I shoot just one idea over and over again, that'll be the best shot I'll get all day. If I can edit and understand when I'm done with an idea, I can take more distinct images or ideas. The more I shoot the luckier I tend to get with the results. The collage above (click it to see a larger version) shows all the images I took last week. There are 6 images ringed which are my favourites, but really there is only one shot that I like from the whole day. 393 shots. One good one. Some of the sequences were shot in burst mode, in part to get her attention. But you can see the variety of locations, lighting and styles we went through. Lots of shots to get good expressions too.