dispatches

Enough obsession now

A back and forth Twitter conversation with Paul Butzi over who was more obsessive (he balances display spots with an incident meter, I used to color balance dual slide projectors with a color meter) got me thinking about this latest craze of mine to properly prepare the wedding photos from last weekend. “Are they going to notice?” Robin asked, knowing, of course, what my answer would be. “I will,” I said.

Once I ran all the RAW1 shots from the Mark II through the kludgy Canon raw processer, I had to reconcile the different look with the shots from the second camera body, the old Canon 5D, which looked great. But different great. Canon read and processed the files fine, but I was absent a lot of the fine grained controls that I'm used to in Adobe Raw Converter. So I ran the batch again, through Adobe, as jpgs, and set black points and color temps to a closer match. You can see above where I started, and where I was aiming for.

Thanks to all the suggestions for alternative RAW processers. I looked at them all, and decided I had invested enough brain time into mastering Canon's (which, because it can't do much, isn't so hard). It's amazing how much variety is out there, and how stuck we're going to be when a particular company that makes our favorite app disappears. It brings home the point, again, how fugitive photography is now compared to the days of silver and dye.

RAW converters make a difference

After talking with Mike Gurley, our local Canon rep, about my image quality problems (he got right on the case) I tried, at his suggestion, the dreaded Canon RAW processing software that comes in that disk with the camera that none of us has ever loaded. Here's a badly underexposed shot (there's correcting for highlights, and then there's just blowing it) and what the various RAW converters have to say about my ineptitude.

The Canon conversion is a good salvage job. The Adobe conversion looks just dreadful. The problem, however, with leaving an Adobe pathway is that, as far as I know, every other conversion workflow leads to a tif or jpg output. In Adobe there's no need to convert files after correction, though I archive in dng format so I don't have to keep tabs on that little xml sidecar. It would be a big disruption to my archive pattern to have a second conversion path.

I'm open to other ideas. One problem I had was finding a converter that works with Mac OS 10.4 (I've resisted the upgrade to Leopard, as I don't know what all will stop working if I do). I'd love suggestions on what else to try.

 

 

Watch out with Canon 5D Mark II smaller RAW file option

The wedding was scheduled for noon. On a sunny day, a week out from the solstice. This is the digital photography nightmare scenario.

My tactic in these circumstances is to underexpose a stop or more, to where I see in the histogram that I'm not clipping highlights. This is the opposite of what I would do under a cloudy sky, where typically the round hump of a histogram fits neatly in the middle of the graph. Then I have room to bump it to the right by overexposing a stop, and gaining all that extra shadow detail in raw processing. Under a sunny sky, the histogram resembles the bowl of an ocean with high cliffs on either shore. You get to pick just one shore to swim to.

Black shadows are less ugly than blown out highlights, and that's the direction I go. Under the new controls in raw processing, I have a life raft for those shadows in the Fill command. It's like gaining two extra stops in the shadows when used carefully. When used poorly, it looks like an entry in a Flickr HDR group pool.

I'm photographing a wedding, and I'm going to have a mountain of data at the end of the day. I decided to take advantage of the Mark II's smaller RAW file option, and generate mere 12mb files every click intead of 24mb. But I ran into a nasty consequence of that decision in my raw processing.

The shadows looked purple and noisy when I lifted them. Then I noticed that my second camera body, the old 5D, didn't have that problem. So I ran a test, visible here. In any setting other than full size, you get ugly, noisy purples. It's the worst at the intermediate RAW1 setting.

My advice now—never, ever use the smaller RAW file settings on the Mark II. Your shadows will thank you.

My movie premiere

Techwoman vs The Necktie Strangler from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Dream Tea's entry in the 48 Hour Film Project, Superhero Genre. A strangler (using the mandatory prop) finds victims using the search engine Bing. Our superhero's power reside in her bluetooth device. She attracts the strangler using Google, and vanquishes the villain.

Oh my. I get it now. This is why people make movies.

To be with other people watching the movie you made.

Last night was the night TechWoman vs The Necktie Strangler hit the bit screen. It looked really, really good. At least next to the competition. The 48 Hour Film Project is decidedly an amateur affair, and some of the “finished” films (which is stretching it) have various, shall we say, problems. Not that ours doesn't. It's a grainy, available light production of a very thin story. But our pacing, editing and camerawork were, I thought, the best of the evening.

And people laughed. They responded. They got our jokes. And when our team leader, Hina, stood up at the end we got the loudest ovation of the evening.  At least I thought so.

The history of my reinvention

I'm a graduate of an unusual school, The Evergreen State College. It stresses liberal arts in a cross disciplinary learning structure. I studied art and printmaking there, selecting my own course of study, and pursuing at one point an independent study with a Philosophy professor on the nature of landscape imagery, which was my abiding interest at the time.

Every year Bob Haft, the photography professor at Evergreen,  brings his class to my office/studio/home, and I get to pontificate on whatever is on my mind at that moment. Apparently, what was on my mind this year, reinvention, made a deep impression. I showed up on nearly a fifth of the student evaluations (Evergreen doesn't issue grades—faculty and students trade written evaluations of each other). They commented about learning that the the life of a photographer is about the embrace of continual reinvention. Even if you've been successful for decades. It never ceases.

I can look at any five year interval of my career, and what I was doing at the beginning and end of any period hardly resembles each other. I started in the early 80s as a wannabe wildlife photographer and an assistant, then did event and PR work, then assignment work for institutions, mostly educational and medical, then stock photography took off, as did editorial work for national publications, then stock cratered, as did assignment and everything else, then digital came along and assignment work came back in a whole other form. Somewhere in there I had New York gallery representation, had my panoramic work widely published and exhibited, and then I didn't. Now I'm adding video to the mix, betting on that to be my next big thing.

Most often though, thinking I know what is going to happen next only guarantees that something unexpected will instead.

Jodi Fleischman and Left Foot Boogie

Jodi Fleischman and Left Foot Boogie from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Here is the latest video, a paid gig for a local dance studio. About 7 hours on site (and about 50 minutes of tape) and 14 hours editing (I kept a spreadsheet). Run time is just over 2 minutes.

"Mama don't take my Kodachrome"

Kodak is ending production of Kodachrome. The film now joins the ranks of the Daguerreotype, Albumen, Kallitype, Palladiotype, Ozobrome, Artigue,  Autochrome, Bromoil, and Polaroid.

It's as though a relative that I haven't seen in decades has passed away. Us older photographers cut our teeth on Kodachrome—in the 60s and 70s it was really the only viable choice for color photography, and we learned to expose within its limited dynamic range. There was nothing like that dense black of a Kodachrome shadow—any other chrome film of the era showed a color-tinted miasma of golf-ball grain in the dark areas. Yet I probably exposed my last roll of Kodachrome around 1992.

The shot above is on 4x5 Kodachrome film that my father used in the Navy. That's him, in 1944, about to head out on an aerial shoot.

Here is Kodak's announcement, and the lyrics to the Paul Simon song.

A premature premiere

Yikes, sorry about that. I just got word from our team leader that we're not allowed to post our films until they're shown at the 48 Hour Film event. Stay tuned, TechWoman vs The Necktie Slayer will be back Friday.

I survived 48 Hour Film

Techwoman vs The Necktie Strangler from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Ages ago, I registered at the Seattle website of the 48 Hour Film project. The idea is, you make a film, 4 to 7 minutes long, in 48 hours. Write the script, get the props, rehearse, film, edit, deliver. It attracts a lot of pro film-type people. I was hoping to join an experienced team so that I could learn something.

The day before the weekend started, I got an email from a Meetup group of “International Women,” wondering if I wanted to join their team. They signed up on a lark, realized they hadn't a clue, and, found my name at the bottom of the resource barrel.

I offered an ambivalent “maybe”, went off to the Fremont Solstice Parade like I planned, and kept in touch by phone as they worked out a story. Their assigned genre (given at the beginning of the 48 hour period, on Friday night) was “Superhero.” At 4pm on Saturday, I was in a condo in Bellevue, with five women, working out a storyline that I thought I might be able to produce.

We started filming two hours later, and finished at midnight, at a Lake Washington park, with our villain tied to a tree with neckties.

That we were a diverse crew is an understatement. Brazilian, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and me. The film is not likely to win any awards (except, perhaps, entry by most naïve crew), but I had a total blast making it. I loved the collaboration, the challenge (how do I convert my pajama clad character into a superhero?), the command of a story and a process of telling it.

I wish I knew how to handle sound in Soundtrack Pro. I've seen Larry Jorden's Lynda.com training about 5 times now, and it hasn't helped much. I wish I knew how to color correct. Heck, I wish I knew how to properly expose video with my Canon XH A1. I hit many of my limits with this project. It shows.

But boy, was it fun. I logged video until 1am, and was too hyped up to get to sleep for another hour. I was up at 7 labeling clips. By 9 I had a rough cut (funny how much faster it is to edit when you've shot with a sequence already in mind). By 5 I had the rough edges in the sound and color sanded as smooth as I knew how.

The theatrical premiere is this Thursday (6/25), 9pm, at the Harvard Exit, in Seattle.

How to photograph a naked bicyclist

A conversation at the staging area of the Fremont Solstice Parade:

Cool paint job! Hey, can I take some photos?

Sure, no problem. I really appreciate you asking first.

Yeah, I don't want to be one of those creepy guys with the long lenses.

Yes, thank you so much for not being one of the creepy guys.

I'd give you a card, but you don't appear to have any pockets.

Elizabeth & Kent

 

 

Steadicam first try

Google DIY Steadicam and you'll find an intense little cult that nontheless has captivated me for some time. Yesterday I MacGyvered together a Strobeframe bracket, a tripod ball head, a couple of Really Right Stuff brackets, and a 2½ lb weight and took the rig to the dance.

I was able to plug my wireless into the soundboard, so I had steady audio while I travelled the room. The mike on the camera picked up ambient room sound onto the other channel. 

I'm showing a longish clip of a single tracking shot so you can see what it can do as well as some of the pitfalls. My initial take is this—it's too tempting, and it could really degrade the quality of my videos. One, because my unit (and my skill level) is not very good, but more importantly, it complicates editing.

I'm starting to gain a sense of how to shoot with the edit in mind. For example, with the dance videos, I know I need a long clean stretch of audio, which means I focus on the music for a spell. I get the long-medium-wide views of the musicians that I can cut away to. Then I capture elements of the dance. These don't have to be in sync with the music necessarily. I capture pieces that I can recombine later—the tight face shot, the swirling skirt, the clasped hand, the sea of feet, the wide view of the hall.

What I haven't a clue to is how to incorporate a steadicam take into my thinking. Which means that, tempting as the technique is, I'm probably going to leave this one in the drawer until I have a good reason to pursue it. Like after I know a lot more about the basics of video.

Steadicam trial at the Lake City contra dance from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Blogroll--the photo blogs

Round two, the photo blogs in my Reader. Tell me your favorites.

Amanda Koster: Amanda is a Seattle photographer of profound empathy who writes wonderfully, and doesn't update her blog often enough. Great stories, rarely about photography, but a reminder that what we bring through the lens has to come from our life.

A Photo Editor: A sometimes jaundiced perspective from the former Men's Journal photo editor. Several updates a day sometimes, which would test my limit for keeping it in the blogroll, but sometimes there's a gem in there.

Chase Jarvis Blog: Chase has more energy than you or me or anyone you know. He pretty much invented the web 2.0 mode for the photography profession, sharing how he produces  ad shoots for his outdoor apparel and equipment clients.

Doug Menuez 2.0--Go Fast, Don't Crash: Doug Menuez's blog is by far the single best read, thoughtful and full of heart. He has been at the top of his game for decades, and the depth shows. Long posts, worth every word.

Frank Petronio: Frank's work is way outside my comfort zone (portraits of young models, wearing not much) but his commitment to make work true to his acerbic heart keeps me interested. Really, I read it for the articles.

Idiotic Hat: A literate, erudite blog from a British photographer about the intersection of perception, literature, life at a university, and photography.

Musings on Photography Paul Butzi's always interesting blog on the quotidian nature of artmaking. Thoughtful, sometimes provocative, and, when he's on a rant, a great entertaining read. I always read him first.

Photo Business News & Forum: John Harrington writes one of the best blogs on being in the business of photography.

PhotoAttorney: On legal issues in photography--a must-read if you're in the profession.

Photographer's Handbook: Articles on internet marketing for photographers.

Photolucida: One of the few remaining blogs in my list that I use to maintain a connection to the fine art photo world. Most of them that follow the trend of the nano-second. Photo Lucida attempts to be a little more diverse.

Photostream: Colin Jago's contribution to that category of photo blogs about the process of seeing.

Resolve--The liveBooks Photo Blog: Largely an interview format blog with a great diversity of photographers.

Strictly Business: ASMP's blog on the range of business issues. Doesn't go very deep into any of them, but covers a lot of ground.

The Big Picture: One of the new breed of newspaper photo blogs that highlight full screen images of world events.

The Online Photographer: Mike Johnston's The Online Photographer is the most widely read photography blog out there. He does too many equipment reviews for my taste, but occasionally there's a philosophical gem of a post that keeps me reading it daily, hoping for another.

Thoughts of a Bohemian: In the past this blog has been mostly about the stock photo industry, but there's only so many ways to bemoan the self-destruction of that gang. Now it often covers legal and marketing, and occasionally an individual profile.

Vincent LaForet's Blog: It appears to have gone dormant, but for a time he offered a great window onto the life of a photographer-turning-videographer.

Blogroll, part one

Blogs come and go from my Google Reader. The ones I keep are updated regularly (but not too often), help me see the world in a way that I hadn't considered before, and don't repeat the same message endlessly. They grow and change, the way I hope I do.  Here is the first part of a list of blogs I pay attention to on a daily basis.  Next time I'll cover the photo and video blogs I follow, but here are the ones that have nothing to do with that.

http://www.davidalison.com/ I found David's blog when I made the switch to Macs a couple years ago. He is my main source of what to pay attention to regarding Mac upkeep.

http://jeffcarlson.typepad.com/thought/ A stew of computer-geek, digital photography, family life, and writing. Always different, which makes for a great blog.

http://doteduguru.com/ One of the education blogs I follow, which are largely about admissions marketing, my main photographic gig. A recent post covered digital asset management, something I'm always reminding my clients they need to get on top of. Most don't know how. This post detailed how Extensis Portfolio was a disaster for their college, but they found the right solution (for free) with Google's Picasa.

http://collegewebguy.com/ By a web designer at a public college. He has great insight on the best story telling formats for the web.

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/ James Fallows is the smartest guy I know about everything. He's the Beijing-based Atlantic correspondent, and writes about China and world events.

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/ This cranky financial site keeps my panic level about the economy at a constant high alert.

http://www.danbaum.com/Nine_Lives/Blog/Blog.html A recent discovery, Dan Baum writes about the life of a writer, from both the process and professional point of view. His insights apply to any creative professional endeavor.

http://writerway.com/ A friend who writes beautifully and succinctly about the issues of being a professional scribe.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/ My guilty pleasure. She issues career advice and way TMI about her sex life, in sometimes equal measure. Her personal life is a train wreck, but the advice is usually spot on, except when it's way, way off base. An entertaining voyeuristic read.

http://themysterioustraveler.blogspot.com/ The Writer's Way personal site. Even the cat posts are readable.

http://traumatherapy.typepad.com/trauma_attachment_therapy/ My wife's blog about issues in psychotherapy. Really smart, cogent writing, even if you don't always understand the jargon. Lately she's been getting twice the traffic I get, not that we're competitive or anything.

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ Seattle's favorite weather geek.

Part 2 in a couple days

Learning time lapse

I've been playing around lately with time lapse video, namely, setting up the still camera with an intervalometer while something is going on. I've fallen into every newbie pitfall there is to fall into (I hope), which is just how it goes when you try something new.

For example. Everything tested fine in the studio, but when I got on site, the intervalometer (a Pocket Wizard) seemed to only be working intermittently. It would fire, then stop for a long time, then fire again. Then cease completely. First I thought it was the power-off function of the camera, and that the signal from the Pocket Wizard wasn't waking up the camera. But it was still wonky. I fiddled with more settings, nothing worked. At last, I figured out that the lens was on auto-focus. If there wasn't an edge in the focus point (I set my cameras to use just one active focus sensor), it wouldn't fire.

I have never shot in jpg before, so I had a learning curve to manage with white balance and exposure. I knew enough to leave it on manual, but it was dusk and the light was changing over the course of the time lapse,. As it got darker I'd just open it up a half stop every now and then, as I couldn't think of a better solution.

The next day, with that steep piece of the learning curve behind me, I set up again. This time I found new mistakes to make, like not regarding the power drain on a battery when a camera is firing continuously for five hours. The next run I had plenty of batteries. I just kicked the tripod once when I went to check the battery and CF card levels (you can spot the moment in the Dismantle video).

Robin watched me go through this process and remarked, “A lot of people are afraid to go through what you're going through. They have shame around failing. You're just plowing ahead.” I think of it as, the more mistakes I'm making, the faster I'm learning. You have to be bad at something before you get to be good at it.

Results here.

The Folkfloor from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

The Folkfloor Dismantle from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Northwest Folklife Festival: the videos

This is the first Northwest Folklife Festival that I've attacked with my newly acquired video skills. I've been cranking these out about one a day. Shooting takes under an hour. Editing about two hours. The bottleneck is converting the 5D files into ProRes, but I do those overnight.

I like the “I'm there” feeling that video provides. I'm still doing stills at the festival, but barely. And I'm doing more dancing than anything. Sore feet are happy feet.

Marimba at Folklife from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Guerilla Contra at Folklife from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Folklife Buskers, Briefly from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Is it a book or a video? Driftless: Stories From Iowa

On MediaStorm is a hybrid video/photo project that is an extension of Danny Wilcox Frasier's Driftless: Stories From Iowa. His project (the 2007 Honickman First Book Prize winner) is a clear-eyed view of contemporary rural Iowa. Absolutely brilliant work.

The notion of using a video to expand the reach of a book absolutely fascinates me. He directed the piece, and it's about 60/40 video to photography, but from the credits it doesn't appear he shot the video or produced the final piece. I'm curious to find out more how this came about. It's a riveting series of videos. Set aside a half hour and watch the whole batch. You'll probably do what I did at the end—order the book.

LCD image burn-in, and how to fix it

I have fallen into the lazy Mac user's habit of never turning off my computer. If you're a Windows user, this may strike you as bizarre. After all, Windows performance degrades the longer you go without a reboot, and every minor hiccup in a program seems to require a system restart. But not so much with Macs.

I had turned off my screensaver, I can't remember why, I think it was interfering with some mega-giga file transfer. Then I left a text document open overnight. When I went back to editing photos the next day, I saw all these faint horizontal black bands in my skies. My LCD had burned in the pattern of the text.

Paul Butzi pointed out this phenomenon of LCD image persistence last year in his blog, and aimed me toward the solution: a screensaver that “exercises” all the transistors and pixels, and erases any image persistence issues. It's called LCD Scrub, and it works. Today my screen is squeaky clean, at least electronically. Now if someone could point me to a solution for maintaining a streak-free exterior. 

Daily Photo is four years old

Four years of a photo a day, every day. Here.

How to microadjust your autofocus

 

So that explains it. I'd been bothered by how my critical focus seemed to be off a bit when shooting wide open. The eyelash instead of the pupil, that kind of critical. I turns out I can adjust my camera body to compensate for autofocus error.

On the Northlight Images site there's a cool tutorial on how to make the adjustment. This only applies to Canon high-end DSLRs (1Ds3 and 5D Mark II), where you can alter the AF Microadjustment under Custom Functions.

From the site you download a target image. Display it on your LCD screen at 100%. Align your camera parallel to the screen (at >50x the focal length). I used my laser enlarger alignment tool, but that borders on the obsessive. Using Live View, you focus on the computer screen. A moire pattern forms when critical focus is achieved, which is caused by the interaction between the computer and the camera LCD pixels (clever, eh?). Then you turn off Live View, and use auto-focus to focus the camera, while watching the focus display on the lens. If the distance marker doesn't budge, then there's no problem. If it does move, then you need to apply a correction.

For my 24-105mm lens, I had to apply an +8 correction to the camera body. For my 70-200mm I only needed a +1.