Zinnie - Day One

Snug as a bug in a rug. Zinnie and his buddies have been installed in their new pad, and have been given the necessary H2O. So, now, er, just wait I guess.

This plant business is not exactly fast paced stuff, but then that was the idea.

On a sanity scale between 0 and 10 (just like the zone system…), where 0 is white single sleeve jacket time, I feel I am around a 4 at the moment. Others would argue that I am already a danger to society. I beg to differ, as there is worse to come, and I need the scope to move into.

nimbyref:210906a Photo: Zinnie settling in. nimby. Canon A620.:endnimby

Meet The Gang

And so it begins. Of course many photographers have photographed birth in the name of art and understanding, and still many more photographers have photographed the point of conception, in the name of the porn industry biological exploration. Luckily these two types of photographer’s come from different, er, fields, so I know of few that have photographed the conception and then gone on to photograph the birth. So to speak.

I actually thought that Zinnie was already lounging in his soil breeding ground, until I opened the box and found that he was in fact residing in chez foil packet. I was also quite surprised to find that Zinnie comes with some friends, so I guess all this goes to highlight just how little I know about pot plants. (That’s pot as in container, not the ice breaking variety – just in case any of my recently installed military regime are listening.) Strangely we are not given the names of the associates that are in the packet, I assume they are the nameless, behind the scenes workers; agents and the like.

So, I guess next step is to install Zinnie in his spacious new residence, through some water on it and get the camera ready.

nimbyref:200906b Photo: Zinnie with associates – That’s Zinnie front centre, with the rather more anaemic complexion. nimby. Canon A620.:endnimby

Say Hello To Zinnie

I stand accused of this blog being too geeky. I stand, and I find myself guilty. What to do? Make it geekier (yes that is a real word) of course! Although I don’t think geeky is the correct word. For example I would accuse pixel peeping with discussions of lines per millimetre resolving power and Bayer matrix interpolation as geeky as they have very little to do with the actual act of taking or making an image, and revolve purely around the technical. I do however get the point – and choose to ignore it. The thing is that this previously mentioned pixel peeping is so rife across the internet that there exists an imbalance of items on the actual important aspects of photography, the images. Shock. I am feeling the pressure of nature’s desire for balance.

The thing is that there are some fairly plain and indisputable facts when it comes to the technology behind image construction, which makes it a lot more objective and definable. Of course there is still room for point of view and personal preference, but within much tighter boundaries. The actual product, the images themselves do not live within these boundaries, and their appeal lies purely in the viewer’s conscience.

If you look at photographs as much as I do, you would soon become bored with the obvious, the unchallenging. As many of my previous posts indicate, your average everyday photograph, no matter how pleasant or well executed it is, provides little interest beyond a two second glance. There is rarely any opportunity to spend more time with the image, and delve beyond face value, as face value is mostly all there is. The thing is that the majority of people from the same culture will all agree that a good landscape is a pleasant image and that is fine, a great deal of my images are landscapes (arguably good), but even though I enjoy taking those images, I don’t really enjoy looking at other peoples. Self-centred? Maybe.

I am not the first either, nor probably even the millionth, to find this dissatisfaction with the obvious in photography. The issue is: where do you go to find satisfaction. A number of photographers and critics through time have reached the conclusion that there is nothing left to be photographed. A prime example of this would be Sherry Levine who believes that original photographic subjects have been exhausted and she expresses this by photographing other people’s photographs. Thankfully I have not reached that point yet, although I can certainly pass by 90% of the photographs I see.

So what is my point? Well, it is in some way to justify what I write here. I am interested in finding photographs that do ask some questions or provide something deeper than aesthetic consumption, and this is a deep and purely subjective subject. Posting it here provides me a way to further explore how I myself see, and what I get from, photographs, and also provides this insight to my thoughts to anyone who may stumble across the blog. If anyone ever reads this and finds them self looking at a photograph to see if they see what I see in it, or to ask themselves what they see that is different, then this blog has succeeded on another level.

Alright, you say, but what the hell has the image posted got to do with it, and who is Zinnie?

Actually, I have no idea who Zinnie is. The photograph at top is a pre-packed seeded pot, and I can only assume that the flower that may or may not be produced from the seed inside is called Zinnie. Zinnie is my new project…

In the 1950’s a writer named Italo Calvino wrote about a fictional photographer called Antonino Paraggi in an essay titled “The Adventures of a Photographer”. The essay deals with Antonino’s grappling with the essence of how we should photograph, and his distance from the conventional thinking that initially prevented him from taking photographs through to his obsession with single subjects and finally to where he believes he finds the true nature of his photographic desires. A number of Antonino’s feelings on photography have been borne out by real life photographers and have been cited by high profile theorists, and it is these overlaps which interest me. I think the beauty of Antonino being fictional is that his thoughts can be expressed truthfully, whereas many living (and even more, dead) photographers we can only guess at their state of mind through their images. Maybe “guess” isn’t the right word, and I expect that critical theorists (that’s art critics/philosophers to me an you) would rather I did not use the word to summarise their analysis.

Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, among others, believed that all photographs suggest death, to a greater or lesser degree. It sounds a little absurd initially, but there is truth in them words. In addition to this, nearly every writer on photography agrees that there is also a lot of possession involved in photography. (It is the primary reason/motive behind advertising images.) I expect that right now you really don’t agree with me, or more accurately them, so hopefully to bring us a little more in line I want to quote from Calvino’s essay about his fictional photographer Antonino:-

“The minute you start saying something, ‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’ you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost…”

The reaction is quite common, but rarely do we think about the psychological motive behind it. This relates both to possession and death or certainly non-existence.

The problem is that if one strays too far into this realm, problems can arise. Antonino continues, “…as if it never existed, and that therefore, in order to really live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness”.

Ironically, Antonino later “became obsessed with a completely empty corner of the room, containing a radiator pipe and nothing else: he was tempted to go on photographing that spot and only that till the end of his days.”

OK, so Antonino was a fictional character, but consider that between 1978 when Garry Winogrand moved to Los Angeles and his death in 1984 it was discovered he shot over a third of a million photographs that he never looked at. After his death over 2500 rolls of exposed but un-developed film were discovered, in addition 6500 rolls were developed but no contact sheets had been made and a further 3000 rolls had been contacted printed, but not even marked for any selections.

To the point, I will get. The essence of this is that to really photograph something completely, you need to photograph it continuously. Now seeing as I have yet to sink to the madness Antonino describes I don’t really want to go to the extremes where he says, “…the only coherent way to act is to snap at least one picture a minute”; but I would like to experiment with documenting an entire existence. The solution is to document something where the time intervals are less demanding – hence Zinnie.

Of course, I am only covering part of it here – as to do it fully I would have to photograph at all angles, but it will be an interesting exercise none the less (subjectively ;-)). Starting from today, I will take one photo of Zinnie each day, as hopefully the seed germinates and produces something – although with my history of growing things it maybe a single blog entry!

I have no idea what this thing will look like, if it ever shows itself at all. And the one thing that you can be sure of, no matter how beautiful a flower Zinnie turns out to be, it will die. I will make sure of that. The real worrying thing is that if Zinnie does flower, I will be adding yet more flower photographs to the internet. But I can rest assured that the pixel peepers will have little interest, I will be shooting the images with the blog cam – nothing to see here, peepers.

nimbyref:200906a Photo: Zinnie, wrapped, dormant…, nimby. Canon A620.:endnimby

Colour Management for Photographers 1

In a slight departure I am going to do a short series (I hope it will be short) on colour management. Why you ask? Well, I am not a spectral scientist, but I do have an extensive background in radio waves, of which of course light is such. I also have a number of years empirical knowledge when it comes to colour management in photography and it is probably the thing I find myself explaining most to the uninitiated. The motivation for putting it up here, on my blog, is that I have not found a concise one stop shop article (or series) on the internet that describes what you need to know. Sure there are probably millions of articles on the subject, but most deal with certain aspects, only skim the surface or delve to deeply into the science behind it. In the worst cases I have read a number of articles which are just plain incorrect, and for what is already a confusing subject for some, misinformation just confuses the situation. In fact it was upon reading an article recently that was so erroneous in its comments on colour management that I finally decided to write my own. If you want to explore the scientific details of colour, then this isn’t the article for you, and that is an interesting subject in its own right. If however you want to know enough to successfully colour manage your photographical workflow, this should provide a solid reference.

The article in its entirety is broken into four main sections, as shown below, however as an ongoing part of my attempts to keep posts to a digestible and punchy length, I will split these sections further, into parts. The first part of the first section is below; the remainder will be posted in the next week or two, at incremental periods. As each is released I will update the links below to provide a method of jumping between the parts.

Section One – Why Colour Manage
- Part One – In the context of the world we live in (below)
- Part Two – Why is our workflow important?

SectionTwo – All About Colour Spaces (coming soon)
Section Three - Capture, Display and Working Management (coming soon)

Section Four – Output Management (coming soon)

So, let’s get on with it before my word quota runs dry.

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Section One - Why Colour Manage?

This is a double edged question. The first is why we need to colour manage in the context of the world we live in and the photographs we take, the second is why that then requires that we need to develop colour management in our photographic workflow, in order to satisfy the former. This first part will explore the former and the latter will be the subject of the next part.

Part One – In the context of the world we live in

As I am sure that anyone reading this with an interest in colour management will already know (being a photographer you ought to!), visible light is a mixture of various different colours, and when combined equally and completely they create white light. However, this theoretical complete and equal mixture rarely occurs, if ever naturally; and so we are left with slight imbalances where one part of the visible light spectrum is more dominant than the others. (It is possible that two parts of the spectrum can dominate, such as in mixed light scenarios, but that is another discussion.) To take an example, let’s talk about midday light. While this can vary too, it is normally accepted that the overall mix is quite evenly balances, with a slight bias towards the blue part of the spectrum. What this means is that we get generally neutral light (and even mixture of all colours) with a slight hint of blue. To show how this changes, think about the light towards the end of the day, in the golden hour. It comes as no surprise that it is known as the golden hour as the light has a golden hint to it, possible quite a strong bias. This is due to the fact that the bias in the mixture has moved to yellow, with more yellow in the mix the result is a yellowy or golden light.

Although it is not strictly anything to do with colour management, I want to discuss briefly about white balance, as it has a huge effect on the colour of light – and so is instrumental in why we colour manage. Unfortunately to talk of white balance, we also need to talk about how the colour of light is defined. There are misconceptions about this all over the net, so I think it is worthwhile delving into for a moment.

Let’s get the classification of light colour out of the way first. Everyone is most likely to have heard of the Kelvin scale, and it is this scale that is most popularly used to define the colour of a particular light. One of the errors I see most is getting the Kelvin scale the wrong way around, and there is a good reason for that, and it initially confused me too. So to provide a way of clarifying the Kelvin scale (where it applies to light colour), I will state how it is arrived at and why it is used. Ignoring why it is called the Kelvin scale and any references to absolute zero, (you can read about that elsewhere) the Kelvin scale is just another measure of heat, such as Celsius or Fahrenheit. If we were to take a solid bar of pure iron and heat it up, eventually it would start to glow, and if you have ever seen metal getting hotter and hotter you will know that it starts out with a red glow. As you increase the heat of the bar that glow will change to yellow, and as the heat is increased will turn white and if the temperature is increased further it will turn to a blue glow. I think you see where I am going with this!! If we want to find the “temperature” of a colour, we heat the iron bar until it matches that colour and note to what temperature (in Kelvin) the bar was to get the match. Thankfully we don’t have to do this, someone already did. Below are a few points of the Kelvin scale for colour.

For interest, 5000K is 4726.85 degrees Celsius or 8540.33 degrees Fahrenheit. So if you were to take your iron bar and heat it to 4700 odd degrees C, it would be the same colour as midday sun light, give or take a bit.

But wait a minute, I hear many of you saying (OK I don’t, but anyway), that’s the wrong way around! On my camera, or in my RAW or editing software when I set a lower colour temperature, say 3000K I get a blue image, and when I set a high temperature, say 8000K I get a yellow image. And this is where the confusion I spoke of earlier comes in, and where many mistakes are made. The explanation is simple – if you apply a colour balance to a RAW image, for example, and you set it to 3000K, what you are saying is that the original scene was lit with 3000K light, which as we know now is yellowish, so what the software is trying to do is NEUTRALISE the light colour by adding the opposite part of the spectrum, blue. Aha, I hear you say (OK, again I don’t.). This really serves to confuse, but the easiest thing is to remember the true definition of the Kelvin scale being the iron bar getting hotter and hotter. The other thing which fuels the confusion is that we talk or warm and cool light, and just to be really difficult warm light has a yellow hue and cool light has a blue hue – but on the Kelvin scale blue is hotter than yellow, so how can blue be cool!!!! Well I am afraid you just have to live with that. Normally we view warm things are yellow/red, as generally they are – but when super heated they turn blue – we just don’t get to see that very often.

So now that we all understand the Kelvin scale, let’s get to white balance, which is usually measured in K (degrees Kelvin). The reason why we are talking about white balance, and hence the Kelvin scale, in an article on colour management is that it is that very colour of light we want to maintain through to output. The last thing we want is to work hard on taking photos in the right “quality” of light, and then to have part of that quality, the colour, changed when it is output to print for example. Which leads me to one more thing I would like to say abut white balance, which really, really has nothing to do with colour management, but I think it is worth stating anyway. Since the advent of digital photography the photographer has an almost infinite control over white balance, i.e getting the colour of the light captured to match what was there. In the good ol’ days photographers selected the appropriate film (mostly daylight balanced) and then if needed used filters to adjust for any bias. These were generally only used in extreme circumstances like neutralising incandescent or fluorescent lighting. The problem now is that with RAW, especially, the photographer needs to set the white balance himself, or use techniques and tools such as the expo disc etc, and most of these techniques are based around neutralising the light colour. That’s fine, if what you want to do is ensure that the subject appears as if it were lit with white light, such as product shots where getting the true colours is important, but if what you mean to do is capture the golden hour light, why on earth would you then try to neutralise it? Sounds logical, but there is so much emphasis on getting a neutral white balance in photography these days that a lot of people are spending time and money on loosing the quality of light that existed in the actual scene. Just something to take into consideration when selecting white balance – set the white balance to ensure that the light colour presented is as it was, or as you interpreted it; and remember that the Kelvin scale in your software is working in the opposite direction to reality, in order to compensate.

Up until now we have discussed only the relevance of colour management on white balance, or the colour of the light in the image. We are now going to talk briefly about the other, and more general, reason we need to colour balance; and that is the intrinsic colour of the subjects in the photograph. The two overlap, as the colour of the light lighting a scene effects all the colours in it (hence it’s important and why it was discussed at length above), but if we imagine for a moment a scene lit with perfectly white light, as may be done in a studio, then every part of the scene will still have its own colour. Flash tones are notorious for being troublesome in this area. Incorrect flesh tones will absolutely destroy and image, but to a certain degree so will every other error in colour representation. If there is a green apple in your scene, you would generally want the image to show that the apple was indeed green, and that the shade and brightness of green are accurate. Its actual shade of green will of course vary as the colour of the light is varied, but we still want that overall colour represented accurately.

So, to summarise this part, we need to colour manage our photographs to ensure the true colours as seen when captured (or as adjusted in our interpretation) are faithfully reproduced when we view the photograph on any medium, be that computer screen or print.

Of course, it is not as simple as making sure what we capture is colour managed, as from capture to print there are a number of steps along the way, such as camera, monitor and printer, all of which need to maintain the colours. And this is where that actual need for colour managing our workflow comes in, and will be the subject of the next part of Colour Management for Photographers.

nimbyref:070906a Photo: Lake Coniston Jetty, nimby. Canon 5D.:endnimby

Images At A Decent Size Contd..

Grrr, see that's the problem, once I have decided that something needs to be a certain way I can't stop. I am like the Terminator (no, really!). Once I had decided that the main images on this blog needed to portray the images in a half decent way, I am afraid hell would freeze over before I stopped attempting to accomplish it.

Yesterday I succeeded in getting the images to a more suitable size by using the fact that blogspot always stores a full size version on their server, even if they don't let you use it. I thought that would be and end to it, trouble is though that as you will have seen on yesterday's post update, I then noticed just how terrible the quality of these full size images are. Blogspot uses some heavy compression to keep the file sizes down, which results in a really mushy image - no good for a blog themed on photography me thinks.

So an alternative had to be found. Of course I could just link to proper images somewhere else but there are three problems with that. Firstly I want to keep it slightly automated, so that I don't have to frig around too much to make a new post. I want the intelligence in the template to do most of the work for me. Secondly, by just inserting the image in the post, the image would still need to be 400px wide max, as the posted data can only take up that much room to fit in the page design. Thirdly I don't want to hold the images on my own hosting, I want to keep this blog anonymous - hence nimby.

I solved the first two problems yesterday, I thought. By using data already created by blogspot I made the template work out where the full size version of each post's image was and displayed that full width. It also prevented any problems with the third issue. But, as discussed, the blogspot images are rubbish. With a capital "R". The only way to get around that is to host the images somewhere else. That not only presents issue three, but also then re-opens issues one and two.

The solution to where to host is pretty simple and quite interesting, for me. A quick search on free hosting brings up some amazing resources, it is unreal what you can get for nothing on the net. I plumped for 110mb.com which is quite outstanding, or appears to be so far. For free you get web hosting, you can also point domains there if desired, you get ASP, PHP, FTP etc etc etc. Basically everything you could want from a host, for nothing! There is a file size limit, but at 10MB that is not going to be an issue for this, and they are talking of increasing it to 150MB anyway! Loads of bandwidth, really seems too good to be true. We shall see how it goes. I may even host my next customer web site there, ya know so I can rake in a bit more profit.

So that was issue three resolved, again. Issues one and two were then just a question of thinking how best to automate the image being displayed. To keep it simple, you will now see a little section of text at the bottom of each post. This tells the template where to pick up the image from and displaying it full width is just a slight modification of the original javascript I did yesterday. I had to include some extra intelligence, so that it does not cause problems with my older posts which will not have the data to display the big image.

So, hopefully job done. And all well before hell froze over.

nimbyref:050906a Photo: Tank by Moonlight, nimby. Canon 5D.:endnimby

Images At A Decent Size

Photo: nimby, Canon 5D

nimby, now with bigger images!!

Ok, so no big deal, but it had always bugged me that for a blog centred around photography (mostly), that this blog template was limited to images 400 pixels in their longest dimension. Landscapes were just about viewable, but upright images were too small. I finally decided to do something about it after posting the vacuum cleaner photo the other day. It really just doesn't work.

So then it took me another few days to actually get around to doing it. Now it is done. Sadly, with the way the blogspot works, I still need the usual image displayed too, so you get a big one and a little one of everything now, bonus! Also, as I needed to keep the image within the overall size of the blog, old images may be a little too big, and require scrolling, but images from now on should work much better.

And just in case anyone is interested, blogspot doesn't make the posted images available to you in your template. You need to be a little creative to find it and display it at the original size. If you wanna see how I did it, view the source of this page and the javascript is there for you to steal. There is no JS on these blogspot pages normally, so it is the only JS there.

UPDATE:-
Blimey! The JPG artifacting is pretty terrible. Nothing I can do about that, seems blogspot compresses them way down.

Photo Of The Week, By Other People #2

Photo by Chris Weeks. Used here for editorial purposes.

Now we’re talking! In my opinion street photography is the holy grail of all photographic pursuits in terms of mastery. To get great street photos you need to be close to mastering ALL aspects of photography, and then be able to put them together in an instant. Doesn’t sound difficult? Try it yourself. However, to get even to the point of trying you have to overcome the awkwardness of intrusion, the embarrassment of being a voyeur (not literally on every occasion!), which is a tough hurdle to begin with.

OK, so that’s one paragraph burnt up in my new keeping it short ethos, treading carefully.

The photo above is a good example of what street photography is, but it is selected here not on it’s own merit alone, as there are surely better street photos out there, but because it was taken by Chris Weeks. Chris Weeks is a very successful PJ, but who’s true love lies in street. He has written an interesting article treaty in your face account essay on street photography, which can be viewed from the link below and is the subject of this rambling post.

Street Photography for the purist - by Chris Weeks

(You will need to click on the download link there to get the PDF)

I just want to give a few of my comments to his essay here, so as it is not seen that I agree entirely with what he says, for some of it is an ego trip banter. is not entirely in line with my feelings on the subject.

For a start, I would suggest you should could skip the forwards written by various other street photogs. They are pretty dull and all mostly say the same thing smacking of someone being rather chuffed to have been asked to write a forward and in their excitement wrote something very nice that says nothing. That will take you to page 49. (Holy cow, that’s a serious amount of “Forwards”)

In fact even page 49, which is Weeks’ preface doesn’t get into the full swing of his in ya face, stuff it down ya throat style which Weeks’ adopts from page 50 onwards.

So, page 50 onwards is where it is at. Weeks’ style of writing here is almost prose like, and for me really works here. It gets quite rhythmic… ooops, starting to get into wind of a long nature again.

So, to keep it short, I agree with everything that Weeks’ says.

OK, so I don’t, and it won’t be that short. What I will do to keep it short and oh so sweet is tell you where I do not agree with him, or find something that I can nit-pick observe, or that I think is poignant.

For a start, Weeks’ theory that to take meaningful street photos you need to have an empathy with the subjects, “Because you have to love people. Street Photography is about sympathy, not hate. It is about community”, as Weeks states. Well, yes, I agree with that sentiment, but then I find that Weeks’ personal view of others is somewhat less understanding. “Trust me. Or don’t. Again, I don’t really give a flying fuck.” Hmmm, doesn’t really smack as a caring and sharing, sympathetic type?

One analogy he uses which I think is perfection is that of comparing street photography to golf, “Golf cannot be forced much like street photography cannot be squeezed as juice from fruit at will.” There are so many similarities between golf and photography in general, it is shocking. It is something that takes a lifetime to never master. It is fickle and usually lets you down when you need it most, and often delights when you least expect. I also found one line particularly humorous, and pretty much sums up how I ended up feeling about golf after my dabbling, “Like I had five hours to waste on a golf course with my friends getting all fucked up.” Bingo.

Right then, back to slagging the man off discussing some of my more negative criticisms of Weeks’ piece.

I think there is a fine line between what tool works best for a job and what tool you have to use to get the job done. Weeks repeatedly claims that you cannot participate in true street photography unless you are using a rangefinder, and goes on to say that the rangefinder better damn well be a Leica. I disagree – in a way. I understand his point, but I think it would be more accurate to say that using a rangefinder will result in a lot more successful street photos, and basically makes the whole process much easier. I don’t agree that you cannot take true street photos with anything else; a good street photo is a good street photo no matter how you get there. The points he makes as to why he believes that the rangefinder is the only tool for the job are spot on, for example the controls on rangefinders permit setting AND shooting from the hip, zone focusing (although older SLR lenses had them too - why the bloody hell not now?) but I think that they just state why the rangefinder is a better tool for the job rather than showing why they are the ONLY tool for the job. To go into the Leica territory, in terms of taking photos, there is little to separate them from any other rangefinder with equal function (ignoring lenses, as I don’t really consider anything without an M mount worth considering). However, they are quieter and more robust than anything else, but that has little effect, in most situations, on the outcome of the photo. To be fair, Weeks says pretty much the same thing when discussing non-Leica rangefinders. He also gets wound up by digital photographers, “pumping the fuck out of your contrast is ugly and proves you don’t know what you’re doing…” suggesting that pumping up contrast of an image deteriorates its validity as a street photo. Hmm. If done correctly, I see little difference between that and choosing a high contrast paper to print from film onto or pushing/pulling the exposure/development, the overall result is the same and looking at most of Weeks’ photographs I would guess that most are the result of traditional darkroom techniques to increase contrast. (I deduce this from the fact that he mostly uses Ilford Delta films, which are not by their nature as contrasty as the resulting images.)

All in all though, a great read; especially if you are interested in street photography. Sections like his beating up on “fondlers” or “pixel peepers” rings so so true; or maybe it is just that I share his downright contempt negative feelings on such people. When he talks of the “fondlers hero” I assume he is referring to a certain Leicaphile whose surname is also linked to golf, ya know those little shots that you do near the whole, and for all the great work that this guy does in lens testing, somehow in the context of photography it all slips into place when Weeks says of him, “I think that the award for making hot Dutch girls look like shit should be awarded to this guy.”

Go read it.

Damn damn damn – that was too long again. Must try harder

Oh, and to make this post EVEN longer than it already is, I am going to post something else!!! In fact I might make this a regular addendum to my posts. It is called “What the Duck” and if you are photographically orientated it is superb. Check them out on Sweet Jelly.