New York on 9/11 from the air

On NPRs The Picture Show blog.

Practice with the Daily Shoot

Practice makes perfect someone once said.

One of the tricks to improving at photography is to practice capturing images that convey something that someone else set the brief for.

The daily shoot does just that. Follow @dailyshoot on twitter; you’ll get a new brief | assignment | challenge each day, take a picture and then post a link.

The humble effort above is for assignment 77, wherever there’s an edge, and is a partial reflection of Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear.

Thank you James and Mike for executing on such a great idea.

Sure, of course I can do an album cover

I’m glad it was chucking it down with rain this morning. Instead of the bike or bus I drove and had NPR/KUOW for company. Marcie Sillman interviewed Jini Dellaccio: musician, graphic designer and photographer.

Proof that news doesn’t, nor shouldn’t, be angst-inducing or depressing. Feeling good & inspired and it’s only just gone 7…

McCullin

The BBC has an audio slideshow with Don McCullin talking about some of the photographs he’s taken. Part of the ‘Shaped by War’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. More in the Image Gallery.

Nothing new after Seventy Two

“Every picture after 72, I have seen pre-72. Nothing new. But it took me some time to detect its death. The first person who twigged was Henri Cartier-Bresson. He just stopped”

Brian Duffy, as told to Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. If you’re in the UK, you can catch The Man Who Shot the 60s on iPlayer.

How to dry a Camera

Patience.

What happened: the camera, a nice pocket-able Canon SD1000 was snuggled nicely in a bag. Also in the bag was a nalgene bottle, almost full of the clear liquid known as water. Unbeknown, the lid was not tightly secured, the bottle was upside down, and a litre or so of water filled the bag and drowned the poor little camera.

Kaput.

In the past I’d successfully restored various electronics from immersion with a combination of gentle heat, sunlight and some patience. Stripping the device down as much as possible also helps, as it did with Paul’s phone after it had come off badly in an argument with a bowl of washing up...

 

So I opened up the camera, removed the SD card and battery, and carefully propped it next to a heating vent to dry.

A day went by, and there was no life to be seen.

A week came and went and the screen began to flickr. Occasionally.

A month later, and the lens started to move. Sometimes.

After another two months I gave up, ordered a replacement SD<something> with more megapixels and Image Stabilization (but not better image quality it turned out), and dropped the SD1000 into a drawer, and tried to forget about it.

Fast forward a couple of months and a hurried exit for an overnight winter hike. In the rush to get up and out I grabbed the wrong camera, only noticing my mistake some hours later when we were already up in the mountains. My heart sank, a little.

Then something unexpected: the camera worked, with focus and exposure improving rapidly with successive pictures:

As ever there’s a lesson to this, I’m just not sure which one:

1. Drying electronics out takes a long time and lots of patience.
2. Drying electronics out is helped significantly by a reduction in temperature, in this case going from +15 to –10 Celsius in the space of about 6hrs.
3. You can break a camera out of a sulk and persuade it to work properly again by making it feel jilted.

Inspiration: Trains of Japan

Faisal Sultan has some great pictures of the trains of Japan.

The colours are great; but I prefer them in monochrome.

Inspiration: Monochrome Wildlife

Kalyan Varma shoots the wildlife and landscape of the Masai Mara in monochrome (with a Nikon D700):

“when I landed in Africa and saw the grasslands stretching as far as the eyes could see up to the horizon, it totally changed my perspective. For a change, one could think about the light, the composition, the perspective, the sky, the background, the position to shoot wildlife […] I realised the only way to do that was in Black and Whites. The monotones let me focus purely on the aesthetics in their simplest form”

http://kalyanvarma.net/essays/mara/

Thanks Ram for the tip.

Compact

A long time ago, on the search for a perfect compact, I mused as to whether the Sigma DP1 was the answer. It wasn’t. A year plus later and the perfect camera still isn’t here, but why?

There have certainly been some excellent candidates. The advent of Micro Four Thirds with the Pen E-P1 (and P2) from Olympus, and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1;  together with cameras like the Samsung NX10 and Ricoh GXR which also boast larger sensors with a corresponding lower pixel density and offer support for interchangeable lenses, have made 2009 a very interesting year for those waiting for a pocket-able cameras without wanting to compromise on image quality.

Looking back at the criteria I had – pocket sized, great photographers control, superb image quality, cheap reasonably priced – I can see that a couple of the examples above fit the bill, so why aren’t any of this current crop sitting comfortably alongside the keyboard as I type this? Two reasons: first I wasn’t complete in defining my requirements: I’d now add fast accurate auto-focus, accurate exposure metering and be more precise about defining image quality (great resolution, good dynamic range, low noise at higher ~800 ISO). Second is feature creep. With these cameras now offering HD video capture, something that was never previously a requirement for me, I find myself marking them down for things like poor audio support.

I guess there’s two lessons here:

1. We really do judge things relatively – my requirements have increased because what’s on offer has got better.
2. If you wait, something better comes along.

So I’m still happy with the little Canon, because having a half-decent camera in your pocket is better than having no camera (or “the best camera is the camera you you actually use”). Here’s a recent pic to prove it:

I’d also note that the Sigma which was ~$800 is now around $530 which brings me to:

3.  If you wait, consumer electronics, including cameras, get cheaper

Perfect Compact?

Still on the trail of the perfect compact and, based on dpreview, it looks like the R8 isn't quite it. Looks like low light and image processing/noise are weak spots.

The new consumables

Digital cameras killed film, and with it 50% of the consumable business (the other 50% being prints, that's a rough 50% BTW). But have camera's become the new consumable? I think Stephen Fry thinks maybe...

Independent best travel of 2007

The Independent has chosen its best travel photographs of 2007.

Does anyone else find it odd that, with one exception, you have to follow a link to see the pictures that won?

I get the impression a lot has changed since I was inspired by Brian Harris' pictures in that newspaper.

More perfect camera

On the trail of the perfect camera, maybe Sigma will be worth keeping an eye on...

The perfect camera

The perfect camera: Pocket sized, great photographers control, superb image quality, cheap reasonably priced.

Ricoh came close except for the noise thing.

Canon arguably got closer.

But what I was really waiting for was a digital something that crossed an XA with an OM-4, only 'more so'.

Then I realized that the real advantage of a pocket sized camera is that it's with you all the time: in your pocket. And while you're waiting for the perfect pocket camera, it's obviously not, well, in your pocket. Thus, waiting for the perfect pocket camera defeats the whole objective of a pocket sized camera.

So I bought one of these & happy I have been.

There's a moral there somewhere...

Flash is bad

Actually, it's not flash that's bad. It's on camera flash that gives flash a bad name. After all, just what is natural light?

Two steps to getting flash off camera:

1. One of these for the flash bit

2. A set of these for off camera bit

Now, if only I could remember what I learnt about lighting at college...

RAW Windows

One of the problems with RAW formats has been the need to use specialized tools to work with the files. Pro photo tools now typically understand many RAW formats, but that doesn't extend to all the other apps that I want to use with photos, or use photos in. In Windows Vista (or more precisely, WIC) that's been made a lot easier by support for image codecs for RAW formats. You can grab a codec for the RAW format used by your camera and then any app that uses WIC to access images gets automatic support for that file type. Great for users and also great for developers, who no longer have to worry about loads of complex code changes just to support the latest RAW format variant.

There's a list of codecs available from different manufactures on the Microsoft Professional Photography site [link] which, interestingly for me, also includes a link to a DNG codec.

Although I shoot with Canon (and therefore .CR2 RAW files), for various reasons I convert to DNG. At the moment that results in a hybrid workflow where I shoot RAW+JPEG because some apps I use don't like DNGs. Looks like we might be getting closer to the time where I don't need to do stunts like that :-) so I'm off to play with codecs for a bit!