thechrisproject photography

I was first introduced to Robert Frank’s book The Americans by Ken Dozo, whom I met on Flickr. Ken pointed out that a few of my pictures were Frankesque and asked me to add them to the pool of a group he had started. I had always been curious about street photography but hadn’t really had the time to get into it. After reading about Frank on the web, I got a copy of The Americans from my local library. It was a fantastic book. I posted my initial thought in a thread in that group. Susan Catherine particularly liked this paragraph of my impression:

But what I never really thought about is that getting good pictures isn’t necessarily about just carrying your camera in your daily life and finding the great angles of the things you normally see. It’s about putting yourself in situations that are interesting and worth seeing. It’s about going out to get those good shots and get yourself involved in interesting things.

I read through the book a few times and ended up paying a nice late fee on it. I also read this long and heavily cited paper on the book that illuminated a lot of things for me. If you’re interested in Frank’s work, it’s a good read.

The biggest problem with this book? It’s hard as hell to find. It’s been printed a few times and is currently out of print. About 5 weeks ago I saw an Amazon ad for the book on The Online Photographer and immediately bought it. Well, I immediately ordered it. Amazon told me it’d be a few weeks, but I waited. Today I got the bad news:

Though we had expected to be able to send this item to you, we’ve since found that it is not available from any of our sources at this time. We realize this is disappointing news to hear, and we apologize for the inconvenience we have caused you.

Used copies of the book start at about $150. I hope it gets printed again soon. In the meantime, I will continue to advance my street shooting skills. Here’s a Robert Frank inspired photo I took a few weeks ago:

Magnum Photo (wiki) is a photo cooperative that was co-founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson.  When I was younger, my dreamy photography goal was to work for National Geographic.  I think my adult dreamy photography goal is to be a part of Magnum.  I digress.

Slate’s “Today’s Pictures” section yesterday featured photos that changed the world from Magnum Photographyers.  Check it out.

Does anyone have any idea where this is? I’d love to know.  I downloaded this picture years ago.  The file is named “00.jpg” and has no metadata that I can see.  I have no idea who took it.

I’ve been fascinated by large, indoor, hopefully underground, spaces for quite some time. I don’t remember when it started at all. I’m not sure what it is, but they really delight me. I’ve seen a lot more man-made structures like this than I have natural ones. I’d love to visit Mammoth Cave sometime. The artificial caves offer a lot more symmetry and uniformity, which brings along a certain type of beauty. I suppose this love led me to my garage project. Parking garages (or “parking ramps” depending on what part of the States you’re from) are the closest and most easily accessible of this variety of structure. Their ubiquity and invisibility give them a unique place in our car culture.

Last night I finished up the redesign for my website, www.thechrisproject.com. I wanted to make something that was simple and just focused on my photography. I might have taken simple to an extreme, but I think my personal sites have always been like that.

I anguished over many of the decisions: background color, font, text color, image size, etc. I got a lot of input from my girlfriend, a gal with a good eye, in my opinion. I took out all the old links to my old bands and music, although they’re still there if you know where to look. I will probably add that stuff back in later when I do the next redesign.

The most interesting thing to me about creating the site this time was that I did it all in a text editor. It’s all straight html, css, and javascript. There is no server-side anything, a stark contrast to my day job where there is no very little static client-side anything.

Oh, and you can use your arrow keys to browse through the gallery. I don’t know why every site that does serial navigation of some sort (i.e. image galleries) doesn’t do something like this.

And for today’s image, I’ll give you two versions of the same thing. This photo is called Ghost of a Printing Press and I posted it to my flickr stream a few months ago:

I had to create a print of this photograph a month or two ago so I went through the processing again from scratch and came up with what I think is a much better image. The difference is very apparent in an 8×10″ print, but it’s even fairly evident in a 500 pixel image:

A week ago I sent in a CD for consideration for the Coalition of Photographic Arts Juried Exhibit in Milwaukee. The juror is Brian Ulrich, a photographer whose work I admire. I’ve seen it before in Adbusters. I got an email yesterday informing me that two of my photos had been selected. Here are the two Brian chose:

Garage Study 3

Garage Study 5

The award recipients are chosen on July 23rd and there’s a reception on the 27th. I hope to make it. I’m very happy to have been chosen. Even if I don’t win and don’t sell either one, I’ll be happy. I’ve put a lot of time and work into my parking garage study and it feels good to be recognized for it.

First, the printer. My first foray into printing my own pictures has been the HP B9180. So far, I’ve been very happy with it. I still have some difficulty printing from Lightroom or, well, printing with anything other than HP’s Photoshop plugin. I recently upgraded my home machine to the much awaited Photoshop CS3 Extended and found that the HP plugin doesn’t like to play nice with it. In fact, it won’t play with it at all. After some searching, I found a solution online.

As an aside, I’d like to mention that dpreview.com has the worst forum software ever. Searching for “cs3 b9180″ brings up a dpreview thread high in the results. Take a look at that page. The conversation that people are having there isn’t threaded very well. You can only see one reply at a time! It’s quite the pain in the ass.

So one of the posts there led me to this post on photo-i, which has the brilliant solution: copy two files out of your old Photoshop directory into their analogous locations in the CS3 directories. I’m glad my CS2 uninstallation didn’t delete those files. If yours did, or you never had CS2, you can download the .msi installer for the plugin and manually extract the two files you need. The beginning of the photo-i thread has instructions on how to do that.

Which leads me to print permanence.  The much esteemed Wilhelm Research has released print permanence ratings for the B9180 and they look pretty good.  On HP Glossy Advanced paper, the unshielded color print scored 102 years.  230 years under glass and 250 under UV filtered glass.  Black and white prints had much better longevity, scoring 230, 250, and 250 years, respectively.  I’ll tell you what: that’s good enough for me right now.

Next: Picasa. In the beginning, I used Picasa. It was Good. It was fast. I could look through thousands of pictures in seconds. It didn’t render large previews on import, but it rendered them pretty quickly when you wanted them and the search… well, it was a Google search: fast and good enough. I really liked Picasa for quite some time. I used it to post pictures to my now-defunct Blogger blog. I uploaded galleries to my Picasaweb site. When I got my new XTi camera last winter, I was horrified to find that Picasa didn’t support it. Digging into the Picasa Support group, I found that people had been reporting the same problem since September! I posted and discussed and waited for another month or so, using Adobe Bridge in the meantime. Bridge was slower, but the previews showed up.

Eventually I gave up all hope on Picasa and began looking at other programs, including iViewMedia Pro, Breezebrowser, and Lightroom. Lightroom tickled me right, so I purchased it and didn’t look back. Until today. I had a number of pictures from a friend’s party that I wanted to put online. I generally add pictures like that (high volume, low development time per picture) to Picasaweb and set them to private. This allows friends to see them and keeps all the quickie pictures off my Flickr stream. While I was uploading the set of pictures (which I had already made into JPEGs via Lightroom), I asked Picasa to check for updates. It found one, installed it, and then opened again and started importing my XTi’s CR2 files without the pinkish hue.

I’m glad they finally got around to fixing this, but I’m definitely not switching back. The other main issue I had with Picasa was that there isn’t a decent filtering/ranking system. When I’m going through 700 shots, there needs to be something other than 1-star/no-stars and tags. You can work around it by creating tags that imply rankings, but it’s a hack and it’s not convenient. Being able to hit a single key to rank an image is very important when you have hundreds of pictures to go through.

In the end, the problem is this: Picasa just isn’t aimed at me. When I bought a new DSLR and started shooting thousands of pictures a month, I guess I just jumped out of their target demographic. The thing that irks me is that they do so much right. Browsing and searching speeds are amazing. The development controls are enough to prepare a bunch of snapshots for an online gallery. You can do white balance, contrast, cropping, and many other things with amazing ease and speed. If only Adobe could match the speed, they’d have the killer app in Lightroom.

So, that’s my tech update. Here’s a picture for your reading effort:

Madison Guy’s recent post on Frank Lloyd Wright got me thinking about a lecture by Malcolm Gladwell I heard last year.

In it he discusses the phenomenon of prodigies and late bloomers in art. It’s a very interesting and engaging lecture and definitely required listening for anyone who is, or was, sad at 27 because they didn’t produce the wonderful works of art that others have done by the time they were 25.

Listen to the lecture at the New Yorker site.

The photograph of the girl in the window above is a self-portrait taken by photographer Lara Jade, now 17, when she was 14. The image was ripped off by someone (either a stock photography organization or a porn company) and now is the cover of a porn DVD. Click on the image for more details.

This is a somewhat common occurrence. Not with the underage girl/porn company angle, but photos on the internet getting ripped off. I’m not talking about people just hotlinking images, I’m talking about companies ripping off images without permission and using them to make money. The common defense seems to be “well, we bought that image from somebody else who told us they owned it, so it’s not our fault.”

Occasionally the situation can be amicably resolved. A case in point is James Duncan Davidson , a software developer/photographer who took this great photo of the iPhone:

You can read some of the details on his blog. A website took his photo, cropped out his watermark in the corner, and posted it on their site without any credit. What seemed to happen then was that a bunch of people bitched about and to the infringers, who then complied with his request to credit the photo properly and to not crop his watermark out of the picture. Mr. Davidson is a relatively popular software developer, speaker, and author. When he complained on his blog about the infringing website, he had a posse behind him in a second.

A similar situation occurred with flickr user Rebekka, who is, as far as I can tell, the most popular flickr user in existence. Within an hour of posting a picture, she’ll have more comments and favs than even the most popular of my shots. A while ago she found out that a company had been stealing her images, making prints, and selling them. She got no credit and received no money. After contacting the company, trying to resolve the issue, and failing, she posted on flickr about the situation. The biggest problem is that the offending company was in Britain while she is in Iceland. The ensuing shitstorm of comments grew to almost 500 when flickr deleted the photo, along with the comments. This is a whole other issue so I’m not going to address it here, but other commentary is available. (spoiler: flickr apologized)

Some people decide to deal with this by putting horrendous copyright watermarks on their images. I use the word “horrendous” here to refer to watermarks that seriously impair my ability to enjoy the picture. Here’s an example:

Putting a huge watermark right in the middle of a picture just doesn’t work for me. It’s definitely a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. And, as Mr. Davidson showed us, putting the watermark in the corner doesn’t work so well either because it can be cropped out. So what can be done? I’m not really sure. I haven’t run into this situation yet, but I imagine that I’ll be fairly mad when I do. I put a whole lot of time, effort, and money into my photography, and for someone to rip off the fruits of my labor would likely rub me the wrong way. I don’t plan on watermarking my images, and I don’t have a posse to help me out. I do upload smaller images to flickr than I used to, though. I rarely go above 800, although there’s the occasional 1024 or 1200 picture.

If you want to use a picture of mine, just ask!

UPDATE: Immediately after posting this, I saw an article on the same topic on PopPhoto Flash. It has a lot of good advice on what to do if someone does rip your images off, although it’s mostly applicable to cases where both parties are in the USA.

Jump for joy!

The transfer to my own domain is complete. I’m much happier already. Things are still a little rough. I expect to change the look around a few times and permalinks don’t work (and therefore the comments don’t work either), but these things should be ironed out too. Hopefully all five of my readers will get over here. The RSS feed will be located at this url, but it is broken until my mod_rewrite woes are solved, which should be tonight.

Victor Malyshko creates wonderful kaleidoscope black and white pictures.  via i heart photograph

Fabio Borquez does a lot of nude portraits.  I particularly like this one full of cool colors.

While we’re on the subject of Flickr users that do interesting nudes, check out VORFAS.  Some interesting concepts, as well as well done high-key black and white and color photos.