thechrisproject photography

What has digital done new? Make uglier versions of captured light than we could before? Perhaps, but it’s lowered the barrier of entry for photography, and I personally think that’s a great thing. I wouldn’t be here without that. But what I’ve really been wanting is some new, original paradigms in cameras, and I don’t feel like there’s been much of that yet. But imagine if you could shoot 8 stops faster because the sensor could render that light level without noise? Imagine being able to select the aperture or focal point after taking the picture. Or being able to apply polarization after taking the picture. How about a rock-solid body/mirror/viewfinder with replaceable CPU and sensor?

I feel like digital cameras have just been mimicking and barely keeping up with film technology as far as image quality and enjoyability go. They excel in some areas, like high ISO (and they’re getting better and better there), and they definitely have a convenience factor that can’t be denied. But they have yet to totally eclipse film in a number of areas.

Here’s what I’d really like to see in the next three years: a DSLR with a back that looks like an iPhone, complete with touchscreen and 3G internet connection. I think this would be a godsend for photojournalists and other people working on tight deadlines. Imagine a great interface for weeding down a large set of pictures and performing simple corrections like white balance, curves, and sharpening on the camera. Think Lightroom or Aperture Lite, running on an iPhone taped to the back of a camera. And that’s not even forward-thinking technology, that’s just combining some existing thing together.

Mike Johnston (do I quote him too much?) said this a few days ago:

I’ve opined elsewhere that one of the great disappointments of the digital age thus far is that, after all the creative furor of its cradle period, digital has settled right back down to where camera design was in 1990—to a norm of Wunderplastik SLRs and dinky point-and-shoots, the exceptions being few and far between (some of the exceptions being the same exceptions that existed then, at least in terms of form—even down to a virtual replica M6, only digital this time). I was expecting, and certainly hoping, that digital would open up whole new vistas in camera design, and create whole new categories of cameras. Some of them I’ve even defined myself (the “DMD,” I mean), to little effect. That very much appeared to be starting to happen back in the early part of this decade. But then it fizzled. The market might or might not be infinite in its wisdom, but it sure as hell is conservative!

Anyway, I hope to see some great improvements in the digital camera market. I hope to see them at least cover some ground that film has already covered. Let’s see a decent digital rangefinder that’s under $4k! I want my Canonet in digital form!

Here’s a picture that has nothing to do with any of this:

“I don’t like explosions. I don’t mind progress. But digital photography has made every man, woman, child and chimpanzee a photographer of sorts and consequently has numbed down the general quality of photographs.”Of course digital photography is essential for economy and for speedy results (news - fashion photography - advertising and the like) but it also is too damned easy and doubtful for archiving as technology and conservation methods always change. Silver halide is still the most reliable material but regretfully on the way out.”

I saw this photo of Eliott Erwitt on The Online Photographer a while ago.

I consider Erwitt to be a master photographer. I think the shirt is hyperbolic, but his words above ring somewhat true with me. But I think the idea that photography has a general quality that is subject to being numbed down is flawed. Recently, also on The Online Photographer, Mike Johnston said this:

Show me an artist who doesn’t loathe or dismiss whole categories of artistic endeavor and I’ll show you an artist who isn’t committed to his own art.

It made me think about Erwitt’s position in a different light.

This interview with Ralph Gibson has some interesting thoughts on digital as well. Ralph is still a film guy, through and through. But it sounds like he keeps up on digital things and uses them a lot when appropriate. That’s what I appreciate about his take on digital: it’s not fanatical. Not that I don’t have a certain amount of respect for the fanatics.

Ralph:

Ralph: I have. And I’ve gone to InkjetMall.com (Cone Editions). I’m pretty much abreast of what’s going on. And I have used those inks, and they’re great. It’s just that they’re not better or worse than photographs. They coexist. They’re not photographs. They’re another kind of very beautiful print.

The whole interview is worth reading. I have an immense amount of respect for Mr. Gibson. I saw a number of photographs last year.

As for me, I got back into photography because of digital. The low cost per photograph allowed me to shoot a lot and learn quickly. Though the last camera I bought was a film rangefinder, which I love.

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: