Visualization, Flickr and Look Magazine

I was thinking recently about the emergence of visualization as an important trend. Visualization is gaining mindshare rapidly among academics and information technology people. The overwhelming volume of data on the network is prompting this interest in visualization as way coping with this emergent, crushing tidal wave of data. There are billions of digital photographs online. I remember when I could see nearly every historic photograph with online access in week. There are trillions of texts and billions of images. The only way to make sense of this data, the only way to organize and explore this data, may very well be through visualization.

Visualization is not photographs or illustrations. It is making data visible. Numbers, statistics, metadata, information about texts or images, the activity of users, authors, creators, contributors, visitors, etc. It is using visual means to make this kind of statistical data and the architecture of information visible and comprehensible.

I like to think about how to organize and present images and text. I was thinking about visualization in comparison to the way magazines organized text and images. In the heyday of the photographic magazines, the images were the most important thing, so they were printed large and allowed to run freely through margins to the borders of the paper. The texts were small captions. This was an ideal, expressive and easy to comprehend presentation (note that presentation is not visualization). It allowed photo editors to engage in the creation of visual narrative, through the juxtaposition of images. Using montage and arrangement on the page, the editor could create a mood or a story. Although text was secondary, it is essential to understanding the meaning of the content in the images. A photograph is just a jumble of meaningless or misleading objects without context.

It occurred to me, that if a way could be found to tie the presentation of the photo magazine (Life, Look, etc.) to the idea of visualization, it could create a powerful new kind of experience. What if the presentation of pictures and text could be as satisfying and transparent as that of the picture magazines, but the mass of data the pictures and text are drawn from, from a collaborative photo and text site (Flickr, for example), could be exposed and explored through visualization? How could these two elements be combined?

HDR Chrome Effect in LightZone

An popular effect is the HDR, gritty, "chrome" look. After watching a video on the technique, I thought I'd give it a try in LightZone.



This look is achieved without actual HDR, but by contrast, local contrast and saturation adjustments.

The steps in LightZone involve dropping a number of tools on the stack and adjusting them, which is a different approach than Photoshop or Lightroom.

1. Drop a Hue/Saturation tool. Set Vibrance to 100.
2. Drop a Sharpen tool. Set Amount to 500 and Radius to 50, adjust until you get a "comic book" or "chrome" look (strong blacks, faded, three-dimensional pastel colors).
   
3. Drop a Zone Mapper tool. Define points at 2 steps down from white, 5 steps down from white and 4 or 5 steps up from black. Push the white point up to where it divides the top step in two, leave the middle point alone, pull the black point all the way done to keep contrast. Later, you can adjust the middle tone contrast by adjusting the middle point.
4. Drop another Hue/Saturation tool. Pull the Saturation slider back, reducing saturation until you like the effect.
5. You may choose to drop a Relight tool to adjust overall brightness and graininess, but you may want to zero the Detail slider or turn off the Sharpen tool and use the Detail adjustment instead.
   

So you do not have to go through all of these steps, I created the HDChrome style you can download for LightZone here to use as a starting point. Download the archive file, extract the .lzt file and save it to your LightZone templates folder and it will appear under Custom styles.

Reducing saturation gives an image the feeling of a drawing, as if an ink drawing has (or photograph) has been tinted. Starting with a pastel image, mostly gray with touches of color gives this result, if there is texture, this will become the "ink" part. If you start with a metal object, like a car or motorcycle, it can enhance the curves and create the appearance the metal has been chromed, and enhance already chromed parts.

Olympus E-620

I am collecting reviews and information about the Olympus E-620 here with the idea of replacing my E-510 with it.

Reviews

The E-620 (Four Thirds Photo)

Review includes sample images (all JPEG).

Techradar Olympus E-620 review

CNET E-620

The E-620 is a revolutionary camera. It combines one of the most compact and lightweight DSLR camera bodies with an articulating LCD screen for use with Live View. I cannot imagine a more portable and flexible camera. It is perfect for a vacation or for getting views from unusual angles. Mount the 9-18mm ultra wide angle and you have an incredible camera for reportage, with its wide all encompassing view and deep depth of field.

Olympus cameras are excellent starter cameras. The kit zoom lenses produce better image quality than most kit zoom lenses. You cannot find a better a value than the dual zoom lens kits.

If you are an average person buying a DSLR and not a professional photographer, the E-620 does not fall "behind the competition on most counts." The kit lenses are ahead of the competition, with designed for digital lenses that are not warmed over designs from twenty years ago, which are sharp from edge to edge and wide open. The 14-42mm and 40-150mm are the lightest and most compact lenses I've ever seen for a DSLR camera. I own and use them myself and I can go out walking, with one lens mounted and the other in my coat pocket. The quality of the kit lenses is more than sufficient for any purpose a family or amateur photographer could want, except for low light photography. The resolution of the lenses is higher than most lenses on the market, and 4/3 sensor is more than adequate for printing at 8 x 10 inches or less, which are the sizes the majority of photographs in the world are printed at. Most wedding photographers produce images at 8 x 10 or less. Think about it. I know a wedding photographer who several years ago shot weddings with a Nikon 990, a 3 megapixel camera. 3MP is enough for 5 x 7 or less and good enough for a few carefully processed 8 x 10s. The 4/3 sensor is many times larger than this one and is not much smaller than an APS-C sensor. At 8 x 10 or smaller, the majority of photographs, any noise due to the slightly smaller sensor is not going to show up unless at high ISO sensitivity. Take a look at my Flickr album. Do you see any noise in most of the pictures? Most people will be sharing images online or printing 4 x 6 with an occasional 8 x 10. The 4/3 sensor is more than enough to handle this, much more than enough, with the exception of high ISO photography.

Let me say something about 4/3 lenses. Before you stand in awe of the large lens collections available from other makers, consider that many of those lenses only work on a particular camera, there is something you need to know:

All 4/3 lenses work on all 4/3 cameras.

This means the best lenses made for 4/3 cameras can be used with the least expensive cameras. I can put the awesome 150mm f/2 on the E-410 (or in my case, the outstanding Panasonic Leica 14-50mm f/2.8-3.5 on my E-510). In other makers lineups, the best lenses may be unavailable on the lower end cameras because the mounts differ.

But I digress. The review agrees, the E-620 has "fabulous photo quality." The review goes off the tracks on several points.

though it offers competitive photo quality, it lacks the (admittedly primitive) video capture capability that Canon and Nikon have brought down to this price segment

Why is it not competitive to avoid releasing a poorly implemented, low quality video capability into the marketplace? It seems smart to wait. Perhaps the reviewer is unaware of the Micro 4/3 product, which will likely be the camera line Olympus will cover video with.

It has Olympus' trademark grip, shallower than its competitors' grips, which I find less comfortable; definitely a reason for you to hold the camera and give it a feel before you buy.

"Trademark grip?" Olympus cameras have several different grips. The E-510 sytle grip is the best I've ever used, and fits my hand perfectly. The E-410 grip is inspired by grips from the SLR period, and suited to the compact design of the camera body. The E-620 grip tries to be unobtrustive and suited to the compact design. You don't hold a camera by a grip, you hold it by the lens. The grip is to hang onto the camera and steady it. I can't imagine it being less comfortable than the Canon 450D, which is small and cuts into my hand like a knife blade. Admittedly, it is a personal decision.

The super control panel is a dream. It makes most of the menu digging unnecessary. Nearly all photographic controls are directly available with a single click of the OK button and a bit of navigation. They are correct to note the Exposure Bracketing settings are buried in the menu, which can be a pain.

Most professional photographers prefer Compact Flash cards and I prefer them to the fiddly little SD cards. The SD card may be easier for the user stepping up from a digicam, but if you transfer photos from the camera using a USB cable, you can simply leave the card in the camera and never have to worry about bending a pin on the CF card.

It powers on and shoots in 1.4 seconds, which does rank on the slow side for its class.

Once again, we have to put up with the idiotic "start up time" measurement. The power up time is slow because the world class dust removal system is operating on power up. Are you willing to sacrifice a few tenths of a second for hours and hours of spotting dust flecks or minutes each day of sensor cleaning? I am.

If you think this startup time is slow, I challenge you to take an E-system camera, turn it on and try to bring the viewfinder to your eye before the camera is ready to shoot. I can't do it.

This is a straw man. If you feel the need for instant start up, just put the camera in sleep mode. It will wake up immediately when you press the shutter button.

Some good things pointed out by the review.

The 2x multiplier (compared to 35mm). They note the coverage of the kit zooms is 28-84mm and 80-300mm EFL.

The 12MP does provide extra detail from what I have seen in RAW examples. The TruePic III+ engine improves on the already excellent JPEG engine Olympus cameras are known for. Many photographers choose Olympus because the JPEG output is so good they do not have to post process.

The one weakness of the E-620 is high ISO. It does produce a bit more noise at base ISO, but so do other high megapixel cameras like the A350. At high ISO, other APS-C cameras will do better, but you must ask yourself, will you see the difference in your prints or on the web?

Though it's a solid, serviceable dSLR, if you're looking for an easy-to-learn, entry-level camera, I'd steer clear of the Olympus E-620.

The conclusion seems contradictory. I believe the reviewer meant to say that for people stepping up from digicams they should consider the other makes, but that for serious, advanced photographers, the E-620 does fine. This seems complimentry.

The E-620 has many features that people stepping up from digicams should find beneficial.

* Image stabilization. All 4/3 lenses are image stabilized on the E-620. From other makes, pricey stabilized lenses are required. Image stabilization just works, without any need for the digicam shooter to know or do anything on any 4/3 lens.

* An articulating LCD screen. To take full advantage of Live View, an articulating screen is necessary. I want to warn digicam users: a DSLR is not a digicam, the Live View on ANY DSLR is not going to operate as quickly and easily as your digicam LCD view for shooting. This is due to the mechanics of the reflex and interchangeable lenses. The Live View cameras are improving, the E-620 is one of the best, but you will sacrifice some ease of use for a more capable camera, if you're willing to learn something about photography.

* Dust removal system. What they don't tell you is the time you save on "start up" will be spent in hours cleaning dust spots from your images if you don't have a good dust removal system. The E-620 has the best dust removal system of any DSLR camera. Some people will tell you it is easy to clean your sensor, but if you're stepping up from a digicam, you probably don't want to ever clean your sensor. I haven't cleaned mine in two years.

* Art Filters. I think digicam users will enjoy the art filters. You can see how the effects apply in Live View.

It seems the review cannot decide whether it wants to present technical information for experienced photographers or provide advice for those stepping up from digicams. If the camera is being reviewed for beginners, why bother to include the technical gibberish?

The E-620 takes good pictures. It will take better pictures than a digicam, if you're willing to learn a little about photography. You won't have to worry about cleaning the sensor or spotting dust in your pictures (dust is a part of life with interchangeable lenses). You will get extra detail with 12MP without going too far and getting too much noise, as 12MP digicams do. It comes with excellent kit lenses. You can use any lens in the 4/3 lineup, but most people will be satisified with the kit lenses.

If you expect to take pictures of your kids playing ball in the back yard at twilight you may want to get a Canon, because the E-620's one weakness is high ISO shooting. It's good, but with the slow kit lenses provided by most makers, high ISO is necessary for shooting in near dark or under poor flood lights. This affects any camera, but Canon is the high ISO king. You can always fit a faster lens, like the 14-54 f/2.8, or use the flash.


Previews

DPReview Olympus E-620 Preview

Preview includes sample images. Full-size downloadable image samples. This is the best of the previews.

Olympus E-620 Digital Camera First Impression Review

(Cursory review of pre-production camera. No image samples.)

DCRP First Look: Olympus E-620

(Review of pre-production camera. No image samples.)

PMA 2009: Panasonic GH1 & Olympus E620

Olympus' E-620 raises the bar for entry-level DSLRs

Olympus

Olympus E-620

If you're looking for raw images to compare cameras, try http://raw.fotosite.pl/ where you can download E-1, E-3, E-510, E-30, and I hope, E-620 images for comparison.

Life, Flickr and the New Panasonic GH1

The HD video version of the Panasonic Micro Four-Thirds camera is coming out, the GH1, and it confirms my idea this camera has potential to facilitate a new visual journalism, citizen journalism, social media journalism, whatever you want to call it, and Panasonic is aware of it (as I would assume they were from the time they started development of the system).

According to Twice.com "fans who bring their Panasonic DMC-G1 cameras to Beck’s live performances will have the opportunity to take photos and videos at the event." Fans can submit photographs for inclusion on Jeff Beck's website.

We may be seeing the beginning, with Flickr, JPG magazine and others who may follow in their footsteps, of a new great era of the "picture magazine" recapitualted on the network (I say network, because it is not just the web or email, anymore but content is becoming social and available throughout the network on all kinds of devices in all kinds of human contexts) through camreas like the G-series and social photo sharing sites.

The process described in the article, whereby fans photographs will be allowed to bubble up through an edited system for display on Facebook or the artist's website is reminiscent of the collaborative rating system on JPG magazine bubbles up content, so it is brought to the attention of editors, who then use their critical understanding of the art, and the state of the art, to decide which images appear in the official magazine. A very similar process to Life or Look magazine, which catered to an audience interested in learning about the world around them visually, before television.

Dynamic Range

The Online Photographer has posted an excellent article, More on Dynamic Range, on the range of brightness in a scene, how it is captured as a photographic image, how to fit that range into the range of lightness levels recorded by the camera and express that range in the rendered medium, whether a JPEG image viewed on a monitor or a paper print.

He's right that dynamic range is the most abused, misused and poorly understood term in digital photography. It's the only short hand we have for "range of brightness values" or "range of tonal values," which are both going to give your fingers cramps if you write them often enough.

There is a lack of understanding by many photographers about the basic process of recording an image and producing a visible print from it. There are crucial, but precise, distinctions to be made, which took a long time and much expertise to establish in analog photography, so the confusion is not surprising.

The first thing to consider is the range of brightness in the scene (which the Online Photographer article demonstrates and discusses). It may seem obvious to some, but is often counter-intuitive, that a distinction exists between the range of measurable brightness values in the scene (and remember, most are reflected light, but some is direct from light sources or specular reflections, for purposes of exposure, it is good to consider only reflected light and not specular highlights, since they do not contain any detail or information) and the representation of those values as tonal values in the recording medium (in the camera, film or sensor).

The difference between the range of brightness in the scene and the translation of the brightness levels into tonal levels recorded by the camera (density in film, tonal levels in digital) is not immediately obvious, but the camera does not record brightness, but some analog of it, clumps of grain or numbers. To see the picture, the range of tonal levels must be translated back into a range of brightness values. We do this when printing a negative to photographic paper or viewing a transparency film slide through transmitted light (a projector or lightbox).

In the digital realm, the image rendered from raw capture data or printed to paper is the output, which must be translated into reflected or transmitted light so we can view the image. A complication in digital photography is the JPEG image, which places limitations on the original data. It would not matter either, if it were a TIFF image, since all images rendered from capture data have contrast curves applied to fit the image within the range of tonal values the format is capable of storing and to be "pleasing" to the eye. Linear-data is not pleasing to the eye because it contains too large a range of tonal levels and corresponding brightness range. It won't "look" like the original scene as the eye saw it.

When you are talking about dynamic range, you first need to ask, which range? Is it the range of brightness levels in the scene, capable of being captured by the sensor as input, capable of being rendered to output? Is it the range of brightness or tonal values you are considering?

The scene has a range of brightness values.

The recording medium (film or sensor) has a range of brightness values it is senstive (ISO comes in here) to and a range of tonal values it uses to express those values. The brightness levels are translated to those tonal levels (whether represented by density in analog film or by numbers in digital data).

The output medium has a range of tonal levels it is capable of storing and expressing as brightness values when viewed.

The complications come because of the need to match the range and step of tonal levels in the input to the output. Further complicating things is that the JPEG image has its own set of curves and translations, when printed the printer paper and inks place their own set of limitations and curves on the translation. The environment in which the image is viewed has its own limitations and effects on the brightness values percieved.

The capability of a camera or sensor cannot be judged by looking at a random example of output from a camera's JPEG engine. That would be the equivalent of judging a film by the quality of processing and printing from a randomly selected corner drugstore.

Growing List of Adapters for Panasonic G1

It looks like the G1 is shaping up to be the manual focus lens fanatic's dream camera. A growing list of adapters is available from http://www.rangefinderrestorations.com/photo_posts/G1adapterlist.html or at google docs directly.

I'd like to see an inexpensive adapter for Contax/Zeiss. I have the 50mm f/1.4 although I could use the Contax to 4/3 adapter with a 4/3 to m4/3 adatper.

There is a lot of talk about using C-Mount cine and television lenses for ultra wide angle work, which is interesting, but I wonder how they will compared to the planned 7-14mm lens?

I'm still waiting to see the HD video version of the camera.

I'll be watching.

The Aperture Pin on Minolta Lenses

Manual focus lenses from the 1970s on usually have a mechanism to adjust the aperture during exposure so the lens can be held wide open while focusing to improve brightness. There is usually a pin extending from the lens into the mount throat or mirror box area. When mounting a legacy lens to a modern digital single lens reflex camera, this pin can sometimes contact surfaces in the mount throat, or possibly the mirror. It is dependent on the individual lens and camera model, so there is no general rule that applies.

Since I purchased my Olympus E-510, I've collected a number of Rokkor lenses for Minolta cameras (and a X-700, which is a very nice 35mm film camera): 50mm f/1.4, 58mm f/1.4, 50mm f/1.8, 200mm f/4.5, 45mm f/2.0 (This lens makes a very compact camera mounted to the 510 and I like the color and rendering quality of despite it being very inexpensive lens.) Due to the small viewfinder and lack of focusing aids, such as a split prism, microprism collar and ground glass I was used to in my film slr, I found it difficult to achieve critical focus reliably. Since I wanted to use the lenses wide open or nearly so, this was the case. The result is much better when using the lenses stopped down or with a larger viewfinder of the E-3, according to reports.

The aperture pin does need to be filed down for the E-300, E-330 (I posted a guide to Minolta Lenses on Four Thirds Cameras, covering this on ebay, the source information is the Rokkor Files page on Olympus). My experience is with the E-510 only, but I suspect it applies to all E-x10 and E-x20 series cameras, as well as the E-3 and upcoming E-30. I did have to very slightly file the aperture pin on my 45mm Rokkor. I used an emery board to remove the build up of enamel, which was sufficient for the pin to clear the lens mount throat. The pin cleared nicely without having to file the metal down.

All mount nicely without modification except for above. I believe the same would be true for the newer cameras. I do have to tighten the adapter set screw (This is a small hex screw that applies pressure to keep the lens tight to the adapter, since there is no lens mount locking mechanism as there would be on a Minolta camera.) for the heavier lenses, otherwise, they can unexpectedly dismount while turning the focusing ring (especially if the ring is stiff from age).

Olympus Offers "Proof" Photo Contest

I like Olympus cameras. Ever since I saw and handled the OM-2 at the camera shop, when I was a teenager deciding on my first SLR camera (not that I could afford the OM's) and very impressed with the compactness of the OM-1 and OM-2 and performance of Zuiko lenses, I've had an affinity for Olympus. In recent years they have produced some amazing digital single lens reflex cameras, such as the first ones with Live View and the legendary E-1. But their marketing efforts have fallen short of what is necessary to explain the advantages of Olympus and Four Thirds photography.

Olympus is running a photo contest, asking for images offering "proof" of the ability of their weather resistant cameras to go where most cameras cannot. This is at least heading in the right direction, emphasizing the extraordinary weather sealing that Olympus cameras have, the experience Olympus has with making tough, water-resistant cameras. If I wanted to take a camera with me while exploring caves, I would choose the E-3 hands down. If I wanted to continue shooting on a rainy day, I would choose the E-3. If I wanted to shoot waves standing in surf. If I wanted to photograph off-road vehicle races. If I wanted to visit Africa or some other wild place. It would be the E-3 (or E-1).

Some will say weather sealing is not really important. How many photographs are taken in bad weather? But we really don't know how many photographs or what photographs might be taken if all cameras and lenses were weather sealed. It's like saying you don't need ISO 64000 becuase photographers got along fine with ISO 400 for years. Having ISO 64000 allows you to explore realms you never could before, in ways you never could before.

Henri Cartier-Bresson introduced a whole new vocabulary for photography, which he could not have done without the availablity of high speed black and white film and a small, unobtrusive camera to make "street photography" possible. Not every photographer needs high sensitivity or extraordinary weather sealing, but both give the photographer new possibilities to explore.

More Thoughts on Technology and New Visual Journalism

I truly believe there is potential for creation of an online media publishing system centered around the style of visual journalism cameras like the G1 can create. The rhythm of shifting from video to still photography in the hands of a capable, creative visual journalist, could be expressed through an architecture and presentation suited to it. The combination of video and still images have the potential to create in the viewer a sense of surroundings, a picture of the whole event, seen two different ways.

The mix of still and video is suited to the idea of "quick-slow" development, where first captures can be uploaded for rapid presentation with little or no information and then later, more images can be added, stories added to flesh out the first blush images. Video can be edited to explain and give context to the event or stories can be added to give context to the visuals. The combinations are endless, given a sufficiently flexible system.

Brief posts of video or stills can flow onto a stream of consciousness, blog-like, photostream-like, until there is time to reflect on the event, compose stories to give context and explain the images by adding them later. The needs of journalism, immediacy and reflection are met.

By the way, I feel that Flickr represents, not a "photo sharing" phenomena, but a "photo looking" one, which essentially fulfills the function of the great picture magazines, Life and Look. The popularity of Flickr, I believe, is due to the same phenomena, an audience who enjoys learning about the world and getting their information visually.

Panasonic G1: A Camera for the New Journalism?

I am very excited about the Micro Four-Thirds format and the G1 camera from Panasonic. I have not decided whether I will purchase one or not, since my decision depends on the specifications and performance of the lenses. I am intrigued by the possibility of mounting the 7-14 ultra wide angle Panasonic has in their roadmap. It could make one of the most compact, lightweight and portable ultra wide angle kits to be found in any camera system. The 4/3 sensor size and lens design could provide very good edge sharpness for UWA work.

I truly believe the G1 (and G1 with HD video) could be an online journalist's dream machine. With its articulating LCD and Live View, it can easily move between video and still photography. It is extremely small and lightweight, perfect for carrying all day or unobtrusive photography. The twisty LCD and live view means images can be had from all angles and heights. It is the perfect combination for online photo and video journalism once it can shoot HD video. This camera would be a great way to record events and then quickly upload both video and stills for distribution online, through media sites, blogs or social networks.

Not only does it promise to be a camera for the new journalism, it has the potential to satisfy creative photographers wanting to work with legacy optics. With the right set of adaptors the m4/3 cameras may be able to mount a greater variety of lenses from different manufacturers going back a half century of lens production than any other format in the history of photography. And it may very well do it with better quality.

The EVF promises quick and critical focusing for manually focused legacy lenses. I hope it will be simple to navigate the frame, choose a focus point, click a button and zoom in 10x for critical manual focus, then click and zoom back out for composition before tripping the shutter. Currently, most digital SLRs and terrible at manual focusing because of their small viewfinders, lack of focusing aids and autofocus orientation. The G1 could be a manual focus dream.

As the image quality of the electronic viewfinder improves, I believe they will come to replace optical viewfinders. I hope to see viewfinders with "heads up" displays offering live histograms superimposed upon the scene as well as other information, selectable at a touch of a button, just as the rear LCD screen offers today. Who needs autofocus and old fashioned exposure meters when you have live zoom and a live histogram? Well, maybe that's not for everyone, but it would make a cool camera for photographers who like to drive their cameras the way driving enthusiasts drive their sports cars.

I am very interested in the possibilities m4/3 opens up for the new journalism. In concert with all the new photo sharing, microblogging and social media websites, this category of camera could really add up to something revolutionary. I envision there may be online tools created just to suit the kind of journalism made possible by compact, hybird still/video cameras, the first of which is represented by the G1. We are not talking about taking still captures from a video camera as an afterthought, but a tool specifically designed to operate in both regiemes, easy to take anywhere, use any time by any citizen journalist, the captures ready for distribution through the network. The output of both video and still images from the same event, captured as the journalist thinks appropriate, create the potential for a new kind of presentation and visual narrative. We may see the rise of online versions of the great photo magazines Look and Life, where generations learned about the world through pictures before television chased them from the newstands.

(Some links: Panasonic, AnandTech, Imaging Resource, just google around and you will find a lot of buzz on it).

Micro Four Thirds: The New "Rangefinder?"

Olympus and Panasonic have announced a new camera format based on the 4/3 image sensor format and compatible with the Four Thirds lens mount. Without a mirror and using half the normal flange distance, Micro Four Thirds cameras have the potential to be incredibly small, very similar to the 35mm rangefinder cameras popular in the late 1970s. Read the announcement of Micro Four Thirds at dpreview.

The new cameras will employ a live view LCD screen and electronic viewfinder. The shorter lens flange will mean smaller lenses. An adapter for existing Four Thirds lenses is envisioned.

Nature and culture

Nature and culture are connected. Art emerges in nature. I like to photograph the happenstance or "found art" in nature, which is is just another way of saying that art naturally emerges in nature. The potential exists in nature for the creation of art through the juxtaposition of elements according to natural laws and emergent patterns (what we used to think of as chance). This is what I try to capture in my nature photographs.

If you'd like to know more about how nature and culture are connected, read William Cronon's Uncommon Ground.

Notes on Uncommon Ground: The Mythic Eden

Our approach to nature is framed by the narrative where

"...an original pristine nature is lost through some culpable human act..."

"The myth of Eden describes a perfect landscape, a place so benign and beautiful and good that the imperative to preserve or restore it could be questioned only by those who ally themselves with evil."

Echoes the appeal to nature. The similar religious zeal with which science is protected from dissent by accusing those who question prevailing thought as either delusional or malicious. This similar approach to questioning emerges from Enlightenment thinking, ironically, since this is the source of the "question anything" admonition, yet is also the source of dogmatism, once an idea has been baptized as "fact," which can only be questioned by the allies of evil (witness the scientists who say a "new dark age" is threatened by advocates of intelligent design. The imperative becomes hysterical when the prevailing identification with an idea is threatened, the new idea threatens the utopia the person has invested in, whether religious, natural or scientific.

The most popular images in photography, since the middle of the 20th century, are pictures (surrogate realizations) of that perfect, benign and beautiful landscape depicted in the mythic Eden. These are the images of Ansel Adams, which directly contradict the humanist, compassionate, images of the social realists who vociferously rejected his work as a betrayal of their conception of art as a means for bringing about social justice. He may not have thought of it, but perhaps his critics were right, he was unwittingly bending photography to an anti-humanist agenda. One thing is sure, without the emergence of the mythic Eden into the popular consciousness in the post second world war era, his photographs would be obscure, known to only a few collectors. It was with the emergence of the cult of wilderness, centered around an "Edenic narrative" that his photographs gained wider significance. This remains the prevailing wind filling the sales of photography, perhaps it is time the wind changed.

(refer to p.37, Cronon, Uncommon Ground)

Olympus E-420 First Look

I always admired the Olympus OM-2 when I first got into into photography in the late 1970s. I could not afford one then, but I gravitated to the smaller, light weight SLR cameras represented by the OM-1 and OM-2. I decided on a camera I could afford, the Fujica ST-605, which was introduced in 1977 and designed along the same compact pattern as the OM-1. When it came time to look for a digital SLR camera, I was impressed by the compact Olympus E-410. I decided on the E-510 because the 410 lacked image stabilization and a few other features. It was aimed at a less serious photographer, although a fine camera in the hands of anyone. At the time, I thought this would make a wonderful "street photography" camera if it had small fixed focal length lens available, especially a thin "pancake" lens.

Olympus has answered our prayers with the E-420. An upgrade of the E-410 with a 25mm f/2.8 pancake lens. The first pictures are out. The pancake looks nice, very much like the lenses Pentax is well known for. I would prefer a similar lens with a wider focal length, about 17mm, which would give an effective field of view of a 35mm lens on a 35mm format camera. This would be the ideal street photography lens in my view. At f/2.8, the lens is fast enough to be useful in evening or available light while avoiding some of the image quality problems faster lenses can introduce (such as poor bokeh). I also love the simple, symmetrical lens designs like the Tessar. These lenses often make up in bokeh for what anything they lose in sharpness.

Using OM Lenses on Olympus E-System Cameras

Although this is not a new topic to the members of various internet forums, the new inexpensive DSLRs introduced in the last year are bringing a significant number of lapsed film photographers into the DSLR marketplace. Many old OM-System shooters, who owned OM-1's and OM-2's back in the 1970s (Lucky you! I made do with the closest alternative for a small light weight camera, the classic Fujica ST-605, which will always be close to my heart). There are a lot of young photographers who see the OM lenses sold on ebay and wonder what it's like to use the old manual focus, fix focus lenses.

To use OM lenses on your E-System camera (E-510, E-410, E-1, E-3, E-330, E-300, E-500 as of this writing), I have posted a brief illustrated article on how to mount the adapter, where to get one and some hints using the OM lenses.

Thoughts on the 4:3 Format and Golden Rectangles

I have a suspicion the near 4:3 ratios of the traditional photographic print sizes (probably based on traditional canvas sizes, but I am unsure of this...it seems likely) emerged due to a concentration of photography on portraiture in its early days and that photography adapted the canvas sizes used in painting, which very likely emerged out of portraiture. I am not entirely sure of this, but it seems reasonable to assume the majority of traditional paintings, as painting emerged in the Renaissance as an important feature of Western art, were portraits at first. The landscape I assume is a later invention as nature began to be seen less of a threat to life and more as an enjoyable extension of human space. We have to remember that nature, i.e. the forest, was a terrifying place for our ancestors and only in the 19th century did the modern conceit of the 'pastoral' emerge. So I hazard that most paintings were portraits. I doubt many of the first patrons wanted paintings of the landscape, they wanted paintings of themselves.

So, I conclude from this the 4:3 ratio may be ideal for portraits. Despite it not being as close to the golden rectangle as 3:2 format. This many explain why photographers who love 4:3 often speak of the difficulty they have with portraits using 3:2 format cameras and why landscape photographers say they prefer the wider 3:2 landscape. It may not be that there is _one_ ideal ratio for all images, but that there are ideal ratios for different _types_ of images. I remember my own struggles using a 35mm camera (3:2 aspect ratio) to take portraits, trying to frame the subject head and shoulders, either getting too much ceiling or too much waist in the finder. The 3:2 ratio frame is just too tall and narrow to comfortably fit the human head and shoulders, which may explain why 8 x 10 and other close to 4:3 ratio forms were favored in painting or early photography.

I would have to learn more about the size frequencies of traditional Western paintings before the 19th century to know for sure.

It is interesting to note 8 x 10, 5 x 7, 11 x 14 all are closer to 4:3 and are also the traditional photographic print sizes in the United States, which emerged in the 19th century with photographic print making and plate (glass negative) sizes. The one exception is 11 x 17, which is 1.54 and very close to the golden rectangle. I do not know how prevalent this size was as an enlargement in the 19th and early 20th century, but it seems to be rare. The 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 were the most common sizes from the mid-19th century to mid-20th century, up to the 35mm camera boom from mid-century to end of century. In the box camera era, many millions of snapshots were small, R3 or R4 I think they call it, 3 1/2 x 5 or 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches.

8 x 12 is close to the golden rectangle (12.94 / 8.0 exactly). I always thought the 11 x 14 was an odd size, but seemed to be commonly used in the 35mm days for enlargements, but is very far from 1.6, very distant from 8 x 12 since the nearest golden rectangle is approximately 8 x 14 (9 x 14.56)! An interactive golden rectangle calculator is available at
http://www.mathopenref.com/rectanglegolden.html

I always felt the pull to use the whole 35mm frame. It was just natural. I do not know why, but I loved to frame my compositions using the full viewfinder and hated to crop my images to the traditional sizes. I hated the enlarger frame used to hold the paper down with its fixed print sizes. I wanted to get one with sliding frames so I could choose print sizes like 8 x 12, but there was also the problem of obtaining paper in non-traditional sizes. I had some color prints made later in 8 x 12 after the influence of 35mm point and shoot cameras began to make prints and frames available in the 8 x 12 size for a while in the early 1980s. I used (horribly non-archival) "frameless" frames that sandwiched the 8 x 12 print between a piece of Masonite and glass and appeared to hang magically on the wall. Nothing interfered with the image I had seen through the lens at the moment I chose to trip the shutter. It was only later I learned that Cartier-Bresson had claimed using the whole 35mm frame introduced some special 'magic' to image making. I'm still not convinced he was not pulling our collective leg. There are images that 3:2 butchers and images that it helps.

It was just my style to want to see through the lens and then capture what I saw without thinking about cropping. I still prefer to print my 4:3 images (from an Olympus Four Thirds camera) 9 x 12 inches because I have always found 8 x 10 induces a "claustrophobic" feeling, where slightly upsizing to 9 x 12 gives the image room to breath and a feeling more like the 8 x 12 for some reason. It may have something to do with human visual perception, that as an image gets larger, it encompasses more of the visual field of the eye and "wideness" becomes less important.

An interesting question is when shooting in a 4:3 format, how does the "non-goldenness" of the frame affect compositional elements placed at or the frame divided by a golden rectangle? What happens when a 4:3 ratio rectangle is divided by the 3:2 ratio? We are told that an interesting property of the golden rectangle is if a section whose side is equal to the shortest side is marked off, a new golden rectangle is formed. So the frame is a golden rectangle and at about the third of the longest side is another golden rectangle, which is about equal to photographer's rules of thumb to place the horizon line at thirds vertically. Also, the "rule of thirds" points are about where the golden rectangle would place them. Does the 4:3 disturb the relationship between the outer frame and these golden divisions of the frame?

This is all mostly speculation based on intuition and memory, so don't take it as gospel but as a starting point for thinking about aspect ratio and composition.

Image Stablization on non-Four Thirds Lenses

Thanks to the persistence of Olympus users asking for the feature, and the hard work of the Olympus engineers, the E-510 (as well as the E-3) now supports Image Stabilization for non-Four Thirds lenses, including legacy optics. I had to try it out on one of my favorite lenses, the Minolta MD 45mm f/2.0 mounted to my Olympus E-510 using JR's MD to 4/3 adapter.

Here are the results of my first test shot.



As you can see, it works very well. Shot f/8 @ 1/13 second hand-held in dark room (under horrible compact fluorescent lighting...sorry for the terrible white balance). I just brought the out of camera JPEGs into Photoshop for a quick auto contrast and white balance.

To use IS on a such an ancient lens, you have to enter the focal length into a setting under the IS menu. To adjust the setting, hold down the exposure compensation button and turn the adjustment wheel until the correct focal length appears in the window. You're ready to shoot.

My testing shows the EXIF data does not recored the focal length entered into the setting. I wish they had provided it.

Resizing the LightZone Preview Window

It can be frustrating for new LightZone users to figure out how to optimize the preview window when editing photographs. On each side of the preview window are panes for displaying navigation and the tool stack, which by default, does not leave much room for previewing the image. Most users want the image to fill the screen as much as possible while editing. After all, isn't that why we paid good money for those huge monitors?

On the left border of the Tools pane is a "grip" denoted by a dot pattern. Grab this with the mouse and drag it to resize the editing window. Generally, you will not be able to create much room this way, because the panel stops at the tool stack. You can only take space from the preview area.

To get the most out of your screen, the best approach is to close one or more of the panes. To close the Tools pane, click on the Tools tab. To restore click the tab again. Do the same with the Styles tab and the whole window is devoted to the preview window. The image will extend to the edges of a narrow border defined by the tabs.

Use the navigation window to scroll around the picture. I prefer this to scroll bars (now that I am used to it).

The Basics of Photography

This is one of the best explanations of how aperture, shutter speed and sensitivity (ISO) interact to create exposure.

http://www.pbase.com/wlhuber/the_basics

I highly recommend it. The metaphor of a see-saw makes the concept easy to grasp and memorable. The article and illustrations provide solid answers to common questions new photographers ask, such as is there a relation between ISO and shutter speed or aperture? The answer is yes, and the see-saw makes this relationship visible.

It is helpful to keep in mind that a combination of shutter and aperture (at a given sensitivity)
has equivalents resulting in the same light value. So that 1/125 sec. @ f/11 is the same exposure as 1/250 sec. @ f/8. Increase the shutter speed by one stop and you need to decrease the aperture number by one stop (the aperture opens wider to allow more light in to balance the reduced time the shutter is open). The calculation can be verified at Bob's exposure calculator. Select 14 for existing light, ISO 100 for sensitivity, then f/8 and f/11 on the aperture priority side or 1/25 and 1/250 on the shutter priority side to see the change.

Blown Highlights and Blown Highlights

There is a lot of talk about "blown highlights" in digital photography forums, especially with respect to my camera of choice, the Olympus E-510. I think it needs to be clear what we are talking about. There are two kinds of blown highlights. The first is where highlights are blown in the captured image. These are lost forever to the photographer, even if storing the raw file data from the image capture. The second kind is where highlights are blown in the image developed from the captured image.

The first kind comes from incorrect exposure or dynamic range limitations in the sensor, which the photographer cannot do anything about after the exposure is made. The second kind the photographer has more control over (other than getting the exposure right) through the JPEG engine adjustments. Blown highlights in the developed image can be the result of these adjustments, not a limitation of the camera or exposure.

To clear up any confusion in my mind over the effects of camera adjustments I developed images representing the extremes of the 510's development adjustments. The intention was to show the widest range of contrast possible using the in camera adjustments on a difficult subject.

Noise reduction and sharpness also influence highlights in the result, but their effects are minimal compared to contrast and saturation. I left the sharpness at minimum, as if I intended to bring the image into my image editor before applying sufficient sharpening for printing. Noise reduction, by blurring pixels, can affect the measurement of dynamic range, so it was turned off (the E-510 allows noise reduction to be turned off completely).

Muted



This scene was shot with the E-510 and developed in Master 2.04 using the following settings:

Picture Mode: Muted
Contrast: -2
Saturation: -2
Sharpness: -2
Noise Filter: OFF

(The Master 2 raw developer honors the E-510 camera settings, giving the same results from developing an image at the computer as in the camera).


Vivid



This scene was shot with the E-510 and developed in Master 2.04 using the following camera settings:

Picture Mode: Vivid
Contrast: +2
Saturation: +2
Sharpness: -2
Noise Filter: OFF

The difference is best seen by examining the venetian blinds in the window on the corner of the first floor nearest to the viewer. Although it is difficult to see in the photographs resized for the web, the window shows nicely how the contrast and saturation (including Picture Mode) adjustments influence the highlights of the developed image, so I have provided a detail:



In the Vivid image, the highlights on the blinds appear completely blown. In the Muted image more of the venetian blinds are visible. The lower contrast rendering shows more detail than the higher contrast one. What appears as a "blown highlight" shows detail as the contrast and saturation are reduced, proving the detail was there in the original capture. This is not an example of highlight recovery, it shows how the raw image contains detail that gets obliterated by the contrast curve.

(If you would like to read more about how contrast curves influence perception and testing of "dynamic range" read How to Magically Improve You Camera's Dynamic Range).

True Blown Highlights

In fact, this photograph does contain highlights blown at capture, the yellow sidewalk curb is blown along the front length and the far sky toward the horizon is blown a bit (when recovery of highlights is attempted, this part of the sky posterizes). The detail in these areas is completely lost, even in the captured image.

What does not count as a blown highlight is a specular reflection or element in the scene that is naturally so bright it does not contain any detail. Such reflections should be rendered in the captured image and final print as completely white without any texture. The reflection from a wave top, chrome on an automobile, and the like. In the example picture, the yellow curb is painted with a material designed to reflect light to give it greater visibility, which is partly why it exhibits blown highlights.

Local Contrast Enhancement

There is a way to increase the perceived contrast of an image without blowing the details in highlights. One is called "local contrast enhancement" and is a technique for increasing what is called "micro contrast." Micro contrast is the amount of contrast at the edges of objects. Increasing micro contrast makes an image appear sharper, clearer and increases perceived acuity, which is why photographers seek lenses with better "contrast" by which they mean the ability to provide greater contrast between edges and in details. It is the contrast of fine detail, not the overall contrast of the scene.

Basic LCE is simple. Just set apply unsharp mask with a very wide radius and a small amount. You will see the "fog" lift immediately from your picture. Local contrast can be pushed beyond small amounts without blowing highlights by using a "gray mask" (This is a mask inverted to protect highlights from changes) in LAB space.

Using LightZone, one can protect highlights from changes by adding a sharpen tool to the stack and then selecting only the highlights from the tonal range, and inverting the the mask, which automatically creates a mask excluding effects of sharpening from highlights. Another LightZone trick is softening blown highlights to make the less distracting and more acceptable to the eye, by adding a blur tool to the stack and selecting only the highlight tones, so the blurring only applies to the lightest highlights. Some adjustment of the selection range is necessary to smoothly integrate the blurring at the edges and soften highlights into gray tones. This is very similar to the technique of blurring the image slightly in "glamor shots" to give the image an ethereal look.

Thanks to dpreview.com forum members (Nik121 and gollywop) for their comments.

My attempt at defining some unfamiliar terms.

Blown Highlight. A highlight without detail or tonality, which equals or exceeds the white level of the capture. People find highlights with detail or gradient more attractive and less distracting. A "hot" highlight is one that appears blown or is distracting, but not actually blown.

Specular Reflection. A point source of light or bright reflection, such as the crest of a wave, which does not contain any detail. These highlights will always be "blown" as they should be, represented by white in the image. A point source may not be a reflection, but for all practical purposes it falls under this category in photography.

Highlight Recovery. This is where extra information the camera captured in the exposure is used to reconstruct highlights. Ordinarily, this can only be taken so far, and anywhere detail was not captured in the original raw image, the highlight will be replaced by gray.

Captured Image. This is the raw image data, which cannot be viewed as an image without development.

Developing. The raw image data is converted into a viewable form through development, which either happens at the computer or in the camera through a JPEG engine.

JPEG Engine. The hardware and software the camera uses to develop the captured image in the form of raw data into a usable image in the JPEG format.

reFrame : Yet Another Photo Sharing Idea

Here is an idea I had recently for a new photo sharing application, which would make it easier for anyone to use photographs in their own context. A site is created where users can sign up. They submit the name of their Flickr photostream. The site pulls in any photos from their stream that have rights set to Creative Commons remix license. Any user of the site can select any image pulled from the users Flickr photostreams collectively. There could be a single photostream "lightbox" used to select images from, I'm not going into details here.

The idea is to let any user "reframe" any image contributed to a pool of images by other users. Reframe means to give the image another context. For example, an expert on historic photographic processes might frame an image with a text explaining the history and chemistry of the process that made the photograph and how to identify an example of this type of photographic image. A family historian might frame the same image with the biography and family history of the subjects in the photograph. A single image has a potentially unlimited number of contexts or "frames." The system would allow anyone, in the style of a wiki, to "reframe" any image.

Users of the site would have to agree that others can place their images in any possible context, possibly unintended or unflattering, which is why there is a requirement for the non-commercial remix license. Of course, you can do this already, but I do not think there exists and application that makes this easy and puts it all in one location.

This might be combined with my idea for a photo wiki system that encouraged the "quick-slow" process enabled by the so-called bliki, where the same contextual system could allow a quick caption when the image is posted and later more sophisticated commentary and use of the image would follow by creating "pages" associated with the image.

One might object, saying that anyone is free to combine images and text if there were a word processor style system that allowed images to be freely dropped into text anywhere. But the web has shown that it is better to provide a system that structures content and interaction as it being created (wiki allows this process to be continuous). This is where the quick and easy part comes in...it is not so easy to arrange photos and text with a word processor. You do not see many people using a word processor instead of a blog or photo sharing site, although they could create richer documents and post them to their own website using today's word processing applications.

I wish archives and institutions would catch on to the power of reframing images in their collections using contexts contributed freely by users. The academics, visitors, people on the web, anyone should be able to frame images of artifacts or media artifacts themselves, historic photos, old films, video, etc. to create the richest possible understanding of the holdings. And make both the artifacts and knowledge about them more accessible.

I'm thinking of grabbing phpflickr, Dojo and Codeigniter and putting this together, but with the work on Foody and Folkstreams, I really have limited time. Steal this idea, please.

Isolated Color

When an element of color is seen against a larger background of neutral color, the effect is called isolated color. This is a useful technique for isolating the subject and creating interest. The eye is drawn to the subject by the isolated element of color in the same way it is drawn to a highlight. On a gray day, white can substitute for color against a subdued color background (white against desaturated color).

Although the image here is an example of isolated color, it is also an example of color harmony, since the browns and tans of the concrete, composed of stone aggregate, harmonizes (shares similar tones) with the leaf. The colorful element should fill a significant percentage of the frame to be effective.

Printing 4/3 Aspect Ratio Photographs

When it came time for me to move to a DSLR camera, I chose a camera that produces images with an aspect ratio of 4:3, which is the same size as older motion pictures and standard definition televisions. It is also the same aspect ratio offered by most digicams. Having done all my previous photography with a 35mm SLR, which has a 3:2 aspect ratio, the new camera prompted me to think about printing 4:3 aspect ratio photographs.

Before deciding to go with a Four Thirds camera, I considered what moving from 3:2 to 4:3 aspect ratio could mean for my photography. In the last five years I had made some drawings and watercolors sized 9 x 12 inches. I noticed that I preferred this size to 8 x 10. It had a more "open" appearance despite having nearly the same aspect ratio as the ubiquitous 8 x 10. The 8 x 10 size always seemed a bit "claustrophobic." I occasionally had prints made 8 x 12 to preserve the 3:2 scene I had composed in the viewfinder, but the mats and frames were difficult to find, so I generally printed 8 x 10.

After getting the 4:3 camera I had some 9 x 12 prints made. The 9 x 12 inch size fits the 4:3 aspect ratio perfectly. Mats and frames in the size is widely available in the United States from art supply and craft stores. A couple of sources are http://www.matcutter.com/ and http://www.redimat.com/ as well as http://lightimpressionsdirect.com where I last bought some nice wood frames and archival mats.

I recommend you find a mat supplier who uses archival cores. I've had the core yellow in some supposedly archival mats bought at the local craft store, while my mats from Light Impressions have stayed perfectly white over the same time.

I discovered I prefer to print 4:3 format images at 9 x 12" print size over the traditional 8 x 10" size. The mat and frame suppliers are even picking up on the idea this size is useful for prints from digital cameras. You should be able to get prints made in this size from online photo printers like Adorama, Mpix, etc. The situation may be different outside the United States where metric sized papers are the only ones widely available.

Minolta MD 45mm Comparison to E-510 Kit Zoom

The MD 45mm f/2.0 has an excellent reputation as a sharp prime lens with good bokeh. I wondered how it compared to the "designed for digital" ZD 40-150mm f/3.5 zoom lens that came with the the E-510 two lens kit.

I shot photographs with the 45mm and the zoom at 45mm as close to f/4 as I could. The result is in my picasa album. This was shot with the MD 45mm at f/4 using manual focus and Live View to adjust focus.

And here is the ZD.

Click on the image to get the larger version. This was shot with the ZD 45-150 @ 45mm f/4.1 in manual focus using Live View.

If you look carefully at the lower edge of the MD picture you can see "La Plata" is clearer than in the ZD image. It appears the MD prime has better edge sharpness than the "telecentric" and "designed for digital" kit zoom. This despite the 45mm was designed for a 35mm camera and is probably at least 20 years old, that its image circle is being cropped to 4/3 and probably extraneous light is bouncing around in the lightbox.

I find Live View at 10x magnification to be more accurate than the unaided eye and more accurate than I used to achieve with a viewfinder with split-prism focusing screen.

LightZone "Smooth Contrast" Experiment

I've been experimenting with LightZone to duplicate the effect available through a Photoshop action, which I am told employs layers of sharpening and Gaussian blur to achieve a heightened but smooth contrast. The effect is really attractive, beautiful and heightens the sense of form in a color photograph, to give it some of the essence of a black and white photograph. I have a strong affinity for this look.

This is my first try, with two pairs of sharpen and blur effects, one for shadow and one for highlight, stacked this way: SH Zone Shadow, GB Zone Shadow and SH Zone Highlight, GB Zone Highlight. The result is a good first approximation to the effect I'm looking for.


The sharpening is set to enhance local contrast and the blur layer above it smooths out any graininess and blends the tones together.

The action I am trying to duplicate is Midnight Black available from Action Central. I have not downloaded or examined this action to reverse engineer it, because I wanted to see if I could unlock its secrets without anything but the results. I doubt I could apply much I could learn from the action to LightZone, other than the tools and stacks in LightZone provide much of the masking and selectivity that PhotoShop does in a much more intuitive way. I believe it has all I need to eventually duplicate this look. I do not have PhotoShop only Elements.

I hate to lengthen this post by waxing philosophically, but use of this action raises the question of how much of the resulting image is the photographer and how much is "Photoshop?" Putting aside the issue of legitimacy of manipulating an image to this degree so easily using a predefined action, I will take a stab at an answer. I give Photoshop credit for half the creative energy in such an image. "What percentage of what makes the image compelling is from Photoshop?" is the question I am forced to ask myself. About half is a conclusion I cannot escape. The other half is the traditional elements of camera and photographer approaching the subject. Without the effect, the image would lose much of its effect.

When I say "image" I mean the original image that inspired me to explore the effect, not necessarily the one in this post, although the same principle applies. You can see the original where this all started on Bootstrap's site (http://www.bootstrapimages.com/Web1107/PB085980-02a%20copyR.jpg), but I won't link to it individually, or guarantee it will be there when you look. Bill Turner also has a blog on Blogger, Eschew Obfuscation.

Minolta Lenses on a Four Thirds Camera

During the summer, I bought an Olympus E-510 digital single lens reflex camera. The 510 is a FourThirds camera and because of the of shallow flange of the 4/3 lens mount it is one of the most flexible cameras on the market when it comes to mounting legacy optics (lenses from traditional film SLRs). A 4/3 camera can mount "legacy optics" or lenses from several other manufacturers made before the DSLR era. Although unintended, this makes FourThirds a revolutionary mount. For the first time not only can a photographer mount lenses from different manufacturers who produce lenses to the "open" FourThirds standard, with inexpensive Chinese-made adapters lenses from nearly any manufacturer from the golden age of SLRs can be mounted as well.

Third party adapters can be found for Olympus OM, Nikon, Pentax, Zeiss and Contax. The only one missing from the party was Minolta.

I purchased an inexpensive OM to 4/3 adapter from ebay and mounted several OM lenses, a 50mm f/1.8, 50mm f/1.4, 135mm f/2.8 and the 35mm f/2.8 with success. But I wanted a very light, compact lens. The OM 35mm f/2.8 is very small and light as well as the 50mm f/1.8, but I wanted a "pancake" lens. Like the Hexanon 40mm f/1.8, which can be mounted on 4/3 cameras with some modification. I also wanted a lens in the 40mm range because it gives a similar field of view to a 90mm portrait lens on the 4/3 camera.

I had a Minolta MD Rokkor-X 45mm f/2.0 I used on my Minolta X-700. I hoped to fit it to my E-510 but there was no adapter (other than a very expensive one made a while back). A member of the dpreview forums helped to get a manufacturer in China to make a MD to 4/3 adapter, not as easy task given how thin the mount must be. The manufacturer came through and I bought one of the first adapters they day they went on sale on ebay.


Here is a picture of the lens and adapter a few minutes after the postal person delivered it (We have a wonderful postal delivery person).

This is the MD 45mm f/2.0 mounted to the Olympus E-510 using the adapter purchased from jinfinance on ebay and in the background the donor camera, a mint condition Minolta X-700 purchased from Henry's.



And one of the first test photos I made of a persimmon tree.


I think the lens performs very well.

You can see more examples from the MD 45mm f/2.0 on my flickr album.

Becoming one with a rock

I've been reading Haiku Handbook, by Higginson, published in 1985. This is a truly wonderful book, which does much to dispel the nonsense taught about the nature of haiku in Western schools. It explains the purpose of haiku is the recording of experience in a way that makes it possible to recreate the experience when shared with others. I believe this is why I am attracted to haiku, since photography is a significant part of who I am, and imagery is central to both haiku and photography. I am particularly fascinated by the teaching of the haiku poet Basho, who once said a unity between poet and subject is necessary to haiku writing.

When we say something like the Zen master can achieve oneness with with world around him, that the separation between objects and his self break down, as if he is "one with the universe" that there is no boundary between the objects and the self, this sounds like unscientific nonsense, it sounds crazy. It is either metaphysical or bullshit. When Basho talks of unity with the subject being perceived as necessary for poetry, we can think once again, this is more Asian mysticism, a kind of bullshit designed to make the simple complex and mysterious. A rational materialist would look at his poetry for formal, structural, concrete elements that explain his poetry and his creative method. Not so fast rationalist.

I believe that what sounds like Asian mysticism is just the recognition of perceptual phenomena. For some reason, Asians have been more attuned to accepting the reality of certain non-rational phenomena arising from psychology and the workings of the mind. They were willing to recognize it and try to put it into language, however vague and strange sounding, they were trying to explain phenomena the West has trouble accepting and explaining.

New science suggests that the experience of becoming "one with the universe" may have its roots in the individual entering an altered mental state in which activity in the part of the brain responsible for the sense of self independent of other things is suppressed. We know that Zen practitioners can slow their heart rate, endure pain, and manipulate the mind and body through these controlled exercises, so it is not surprising they might be able to induce a state of mind that suppresses mental activity in one area.

The metaphysical language is merely the best explanation the practitioners could come up with. They did not know about centers of the brain or areas of the mind that give rise to a sense of individuality, or that breaking down that sense by suppression of activity in a brain center might be responsible for the effect they were experiencing. I can well imagine that it must be a strange feeling should the sense of separation between my body and other objects in the room, my clock, the lamp, books on the shelf, etc. be felt or perceived as part of me. It would be much stronger in the ancient world when most of the objects around a person were simple and natural, the trees, grass, flowers, sky or the temple, lamps, clothing.

Although science recognizes sinesthesia, feeling one sense when another is stimulated, such as hearing colors or seeing sounds, it has always been treated with some trepidation and distance in the West. It is a subject science has up until recently, with the emergence of brain science, been silently ignored. I believe the reason was that it borders on the mysterious and metaphysical, although one can approach it through psychology or perhaps intuit there exists some "cross talk" in the sense perception mechanism, until the emergence of brain science, there was always a hint of the metaphysical to this phenomena.

We know now that experiences like the extending of the sense of self to everything around you and the mixing up of senses are explained as mental phenomena. We know that certain people are born susceptible to these phenomena and that some people are able with practice to induce the phenomena.

I suppose what is interesting is that when a rationalist looks at a phrase like "one with the universe" obviously that sounds crazy since it is physically impossible for a person to merge with objects, but when you try not to take it so literally, you understand what is truly meant, that it _feels_ like you are one with the universe. Moreover, the human perception of the universe, how we perceive and experience the universe, is always colored by our emotions, our thoughts, our memories. The human mind overlays upon the perceived universe a model of it, which is always present and we cannot see the world around us without this model overlaid upon it. When we look at a rock or a tree, there is the physical perception of the rock or tree, the _sensing_ of it, the texture, the dimensions, a kind of sensitometric or photographic recording of the object, as if a robot were looking at it without seeing it. But human beings do not just look, the also see, and seeing involves the overly of this map we construct, a kind of virtual reality analog of the world that includes our thoughts, memories, feelings, associations with other people and society. The rock has properties that we overlay upon it in this virtual world, the rock evokes memories of childhood spent sitting on it on a cool summer night, that the girl you used to sit on with it is now married with children and a corporate executive who does not have time for old friends, that her social standing is great in society, that you think the rock has a beautiful natural shape, that it has been moved in the last ten years by a farmer who thought it got in the way of his plowing.

This rock has an existence that extends into the social world erected collectively by human beings, it has an existence in the emotional world of the individual, it has an existence that extends in all directions into this virtual world erected by human psychology and social connections, which although are not physically a part of the rock, are just as real in their consequences. So it is possible for a person to merge with a rock. It is possible for Basho to experience what they rock experiences as if he was the rock or that the rock might speak to him of its experiences. Since his feelings are somewhat merged with the rock through an interaction with this virtual "map in mind" (extending a concept from psychology of geo-spatial perception). We perceive the rock as a rock, and it physically is separate and insensate, has no feelings or memories or membership in human society, but like the Heisenberg Effect, our perceiving it produces changes in our model of the rock in our map, which causes feedback changes throughout the map in complex ways, which changes the rock (at least as it exists in our mental map which we overlay upon it). I believe this goes a long way to explain how a poet like Basho could be so affected by objects around him, partly through an innate sensitivity (sinethesia possibly) and partly through a practiced way of experiencing the subject, intentionally breaking down the sense of self and separation in service of poetry.

The existence of such a map and the complex feedback loops that occur between the object, perceptions and the mapped object mean that human perception is a complex phenomena, like the weather, which is not likely to be explained by reductionist means, by taking it apart to see what the functions and relationships of the parts are. This has important implications for robotic design and artificial intelligence, since it means that at least psychologically, elements of the physical world become mapped in our minds and we can actually effect changes in those elements as mapped. I am not saying we possess "mind over matter" I am saying, if you read the above, that our comprehension of an object is not pure, but it is mixed, that when we come to know a rock or a tree, that it is impossible to separate the actual qualities of the rock or tree, from the psychological qualities we overlay on it. We look at the rock differently depending on our emotions, memories and social condition, which makes the rock different each time in our minds, but we are barely conscious of this, and to us they are qualities of the rock. The poetry of Basho operates on this fault line between the real and the perceived.

The separations of science and Western rationalism are false, mind and object, person and object, philosophy, mind, mental model and reality, reductionist model and reality, these all come together in a mixed way to create the reality we experience. It may be a convenience to create scientific models that simplify systems so we may take them apart and understand how they work, but we never completely understand them until we recognize their mixed nature, the hallmark of any complex, organic system. As I've said before, science will and is accommodating itself to the new reality by developing branches like chaos physics and mathematics, complexity theory and studying evolutionary systems, such as human evolutionary psychology. So it comes full circle.

Visual history in the hands of the people

I have been strongly in favor of what I have called, for lack of a better term, "in situ preservation" of vernacular photographs. The idea for this slowly emerged out of my experiences with my own family photographs. There were several generations of photographers among the branches of our family tree, starting with my grandfather, my grandmother attended photographic school and worked in the darkroom at her husband's studio and had an early fascination with photography as a child, her favorite uncle was a photographer. Her father's mother's brother was a well known and successful 19th century photographer and stereoview publisher, whose three sons went on to become photographers. We inherited a wealth of photographic heritage and a vast treasure of old photographs. I grew up around photography as a child, not intensely as perhaps a child of a concert pianist might grow up around constant music and the grand piano in the living room, but absorbed this heritage by osmosis.

I slowly learned over the decades the importance of the photographs we possessed, as they gathered in our own family collection, as we inherited each group of photographs, some were family while others were of historical value, of localities where our ancestors lived in past times. Although I held the institutions that are entrusted with the task of keeping our memories, our past alive, through preservation and sharing of artifacts in high regard, I began to sense early on that these institutions were limited. There was a vast quantity of vernacular images, which for many reasons were ignored by museums and libraries. Because these images were not considered "important" they remained in ordinary people's homes. I began to see this as a good thing, since artifacts collected into a single location "put all the eggs in one basket" and sometimes were destroyed along with it, perhaps with a fire or a war, this has happened throughout history. It is frequently the rare item, the significant historical find, that comes from the attic of an ordinary home, the old heirloom that someone saved in a drawer or the odd thing tossed in the attic without any knowledge of its importance, that comes to play an important role in telling the story of our past. I started to conclude that it was sometimes better for artifacts to remain outside the institutional framework and when I started to learn more about institutions, archives and libraries, I understood that it was impossible for them to store, catalog and preserve all the potentially significant artifacts, especially vernacular photographs.

This idea of in situ preservation dawned on me in the late 1970s as a vague idea and by 1995 was nearly fully formed, inspired by my taking a second look at our oldest family photographs, which I had copied once about 1980 while still an enthusiastic young photography student. I discovered and became aware of a vast world of vernacular photographs being bought and sold by collectors and at flea markets, I saw here and there several "finds" of historic documents or images that shed new light for historians on events they thought were settled. I learned new things about my own family through researching our own photographs, which had both genealogical and vernacular historical value. I sought to take an academic approach to our family photographs, by carefully cataloging, recording and preserving the images as a librarian or archivist might do, not as the genealogist would with their concentration on family. (A side note: My interest in family photographs was met repeatedly with great resistance from some genealogists, throughout the period 1995 to about 2005 when all the photo sharing sites started up...I was told at least once that names were the important thing in genealogy not photographs. This perception has greatly changed for the better in the last decade).

As the digital age dawned and the Internet became available to the public, I began to see that it was possible to coordinate, encourage and support this activity of "in situ" preservation of vernacular images. I had already seen that it was happening, that it frequently was an important way of ensuring the preservation of important artifacts, sometimes because they were not recognized as significant until many decades later, and that this "cloud" of artifacts was too large and unknowable to be cared for by any single institution, perhaps not even all institutions collectively. I thought that an online database could be employed to help catalog and track these in situ objects, collect data on them for use by researchers. I eventually built the City Gallery website with these goals in mind and over the years made various attempts to involve people in this project. I had little success because I never made it part of an existing activity. It was only by 1997 or so I began to recognize that people are not going to enter information about their photographs stored in shoeboxes. It is just too much work. I understood that they would contribute images to an album, to share photographs, and that might be a way build such a database of vernacular photographs stored in situ. This was at the time very difficult for an individual to create due to storage and bandwidth costs.

My reach fell short of my ideas for a large part because I lacked an understanding of what motivated people, what I could get them to do, what they were doing already. If I wanted ordinary people to scan their vernacular photographs and upload them to my photo sharing system (this was before shutterfly and other sites existed) and describe them using meta data, this was simply too much to ask. In the UK, they have something called Archive Day (and there may be similar projects here) where people bring their photographs to an institution to have them scanned by librarians. The feeling of civic duty and participation in something larger than themselves encourages people to participate, and they don't have to do the technically difficult work of scanning the images. Yes, by now the consumer scanner is ubiquitous, but still most ordinary people have difficulty using them and generally like the photographic enthusiast of a few decades ago, the family photos are usually scanned by one particular individual in the family. So this is one way in which this can really work. The drawback is that it involves an institution, which must scan, store and catalog, obviating to a great degree the advantage of in situ preservation.

I have to conclude that "in situ" may not be the ideal form of preservation, but it will continue to be a necessary one, it will continue to exist, for the simple reason that we do not now know what artifacts are important or will become important in time to historians and there are not enough institutions in the world to store the artifacts. It may be that this process is such a complex, organic phenomena that it cannot be supported and encouraged, since we do not know what artifacts will be important to future generations. I still believe it is worthwhile to pursue social and technological ways to support and encourage ordinary people to preserve what they believe is important to them hoping that it will with it preserve what is important to history.

Unfolding the City

It is generally believed that order is preferable to unplanned development. The first villages to emerge with agriculture developed without any plan or structure. In time, people would learn to plan towns on a grid of streets and this became the normal way to develop a town or city, along a rigid grid of streets. But we know better now, after observing the formation of towns for over two hundred years in America, according to city planners, that street plans which emerged organically from the seemingly haphazard choices of many individuals over many years, produce the most efficient street plans which help alleviate and avoid gridlock.

If you look at an English countryside village, you can see how the streets and paths are laid out efficiently to follow the activities of actual people. The preexisting activities and their most efficient paths determine the layout of streets. This also interestingly creates a plan of homes and buildings that people find pleasing, or "picturesque." I believe this is due to the streets and structures following an organic plan, similar to nature and the choices going into the making of the plan represent "chaos" or fractal patterns, which emerge and are made visible in the placement of streets, alleys, and structures giving the town the same pleasing pattern as mountains or other pleasing natural forms. It appears the planned, rigid, rectangular street plans are the least pleasing, the least human scale, the most prone to gridlock, traffic and efficiency problems of movement in the city. Sometimes a controlled randomness, a "natural anarchy" of chaotic processes, organically unfolding the city are preferable to order.

I knew this long before city planners began to discover it. My father before me knew it without understanding why or what it was that made driving Arlington easy. That made it easy to avoid "Rush Hour" so well known to Arlingtonians living so close to the big city and experiencing the daily rush to work and rush to home in the bedroom communities. My father always taught me how he had a dozen different ways to get from here to where we were going. There were always four or five back roads, small arteries, little curving streets that cut off corners, like the maze of arteries and veins in the human leg, there was always a way to get from there to there efficiently without blockage. The organic nature of Arlington's streets was known to him without him ever thinking the world "organic" or describing it in formal town planning terminology. I absorbed this by osmosis riding with him in the family car, and would use this knowledge myself when it came time to drive.

Like the weather, like the soil, the streets of the city are at their best when allowed to unfold organically, understood as complex phenomena, not reduced to simplified models. Neither they way nature works or the way human society works is rational. Although we can understand many things by simplifying nature, reducing it to its constituent parts for analysis, and many beneficial things come from a scientific rational study of nature, in the final analysis nature is irrational. The universe is not ordered like the precise gears of a watch, but ordered in complex, organic ways, like the weather. Rationality is a phenomena of the human mind, a way of comprehending and organizing what it knows about the world and is an imperfect match with reality. It is influenced by the reliance of the human mind on narrative for explaining, organizing, comprehending and remembering the confusing and overwhelming sense perceptions flowing into it continuously from all directions through a number of senses.

Creative Photography: Subversive Detail and Conceptual Contrast

Subversive content in photographs. No, I do not mean politically subversive, but details in the image that subvert or comment on the image's subject. For example, you may be attempting a very serious image of an important landmark, let's say the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington, Virginia, but in the foreground are parked a string of dump trucks or perhaps a string of circus vans. The presence of such contradictory details undermines the meaning and mood of the image. Of course, it can also be used by the photographer in a controlled manner to create commentary.

Here is an excellent example where subversive content is used to enhance the image. The graffiti in the background becomes a compositional element leading the eye to the hugging couple frame right and the joyous dancing figure of the iPod advertisement directly behind them communicates what the photographer "mind reads" or imagines is their inner feelings.

Hugs (San Francisco Streets 2007, godfrey digiorgi 2007)

(It reminds me of a late image by André Kertész from the 1970s of a couple I saw published in a photo magazine in the late 1970s, which if I recall, he made from his window).

Reflections in windows have famously been used as a way to introduce subversive content into images.

The important thing to keep in mind is the idea is not to introduce a lot of clutter or trash detail into your image, but to let the extraneous detail become a commentary. It has to mean something. You need to ensure the image forms and idea not just a composition (although sometimes a certain composition has such a powerful affect on the viewer that is sufficient to constitute an great image).

A good example of this by the same photographer. This image is powerful merely for it sense of captured movement and how the woman, coat, dog and background material "divide the frame," which is simply a term of art for how the three dimensional objects in the image divide the flat two dimensional area of the image into sections in an interesting way. Dividing the frame is an important concept in any two dimensional visual art.

Woman and Dog (San Francisco Streets 2007, godfrey digiorgi 2007)

Photographers also use contrast...not not contrast in exposure terms...but contrast in terms of visual language. For example, this image creates a feeling of loneliness by isolating the human figures as impersonal silhouettes in a large space inhabited by shafts of luminous light but contrasts the aloneness by presenting a group of people, not just one person. By this he contrasts loneliness and togetherness in the same image.

Across The Light (Tate Modern, London 2005, godfrey digiorgi)


By the way, I do not have to mention Godfrey is an excellent photographer who understands these important principles of authorship in photography. I found examples of both visual ideas discussed in this entry quickly on his site. He obviously understands that to make good photographs, to make photographs that are significant artifacts for consideration by society, the images must say something, not just be well exposed and composed, that the photographer must establish and manipulate a visual vocabulary. His best images have something to say and the few that fall flat are the ones that fail to establish and communicate an idea. A photograph without the presence of the author is nothing more than a documentary image (those have value as well, but that is not what I am discussing here...I certainly appreciate vernacular and documentary images).

Even if the photographer did not intend a specific message the images communicate one. There is a quote, I cannot recall exactly, but it was regarding hypocrisy and concluded the mind cannot know itself completely at once, which applies.