brainstorms

Monday September 12, 2005

adobe and nikon, wink wink, nudge, nudge.

just noticed that old bit of news about adobe and nikon agreeing to work together. there is the nikon press release quoting adobe:

Adobe is committed to working with Nikon to ensure that our common customers have an excellent experience when using Nikon cameras with Adobe software, and the company is disappointed that there has been confusion about this in the market.

showel, showel...

confusion in the market? really. there has been no confusion in the market about nikon's myopic move, and adobe's situation. there was no illusion in the market about what adobe really wanted; a photographer revolt against nikon's white balance has only helped strenghten its hand. now that it made nice with nikon, it can legally use nikon WB information for its raw converter, while a part of the photography community is still stuck with a retarded raw file format that illegally hides protographer's own creation from her.

i am a programmer, and a photographer. i want to be able to legally take apart and process my own raw images with tools i develop. this is non-negotiable.

[installed bibble labs bibble 4.3 for processing my images. this is one of the best tools in the industry for professional digital workflow.]

Sunday September 04, 2005

burning chrome [images]

harley davidson, nikon d70 with nikkor 70-180 1/4.5-5.6D micro lens.
[in case it is not obvious, these are slow-shutter-speed images, not photoshop generated.]

Wednesday August 24, 2005

canon and the irresistible urge to switch...

hats off to canon. looks like canon 5d is a remarkable entry in the digital SLR realm. given its [speculated] price point, 12.8 mp specs and a full-size sensor, it will push many non-canon photographers [grind teeth] to the brink of tearing their hair out, selling or trading off their gear and do the switch.

yes, i really would like a full-size sensor dslr to use all existing 35mm lenses that fit, without having to worry about the field of view. even if i could afford the amazing nikon d2x [nearly twice the cost of canon 5d] its APS format chip is seriously annoying; here i have one of the finest wide-angle zooms ever made (af-s nikkor 17-35 f/2.8d) and all i can get out of it is a normal-to-near-normal field of view. couple that with nikon's aggressively myopic vision of their raw data format, and you can see the writing on the wall. [when one is hitting his head to that wall, writing is so much easier to see...]

i think i will start selling some of my nikon gear in order to get my first canon dslr, and a few good lenses, like the superb canon 100mm f/2.8 usm macro, likewise great canon 70~200 f/2.8 IS usm, and so on. i can probably keep some of the top-drawer nikon lenses around for the future, but one can only wait for nikon for so long.

sigh.

musical selection: jazz with prestige: a history of prestige jazz and blues [one of the best 4-cd collections i know]

[see also: michael Reichmann's [luminous landscape] informative commentary]

[updated: dpreview link is now pointing to a hands-on preview.]

[updated: yes there are some nebulous leaked specs for D200, to be announced within months. it looks good, but not good enough to stop me from switching part of my photography to canon 5d. c'est la vie.]

[updated: jan 2006. i did wait for nikon, mostly because of the cost of a switch. i now have a D200, well worth the wait. it is the best designed [d]slr i have ever used...]

Thursday August 18, 2005

a sense of freedom

i had a hard time writing about this image. not quite sure why.

a couple of saturdays ago, eren and i went looking for harleys to make some pictures. i made about sixty images of harley abstracts, chromes, engine blocks. at the time, this adorned harley handlebar was just an attractive graphic in my viewfinder. i captured it in many different compositions, and moved on.

tonight, i finally get to process and organize my harley images. i open this image, and it stops me. i am pleased by the graphic, but i am really thinking about the depth of the simple act captured in this image. i think i find a sense of freedom in here not easily expressed in words.

[i went back to charlie stross's journal, and re-read his depressing entry on foreign travel and the related NYT story. what a disappointing contrast to the image i made.]

[this one is for my good friend duff caldewey]

Saturday August 06, 2005

american society of media photographers on raw formats

ASMP's short but cutting statement is worth reading.

[nikon did a great service to the world of photography by locking its raw format. now everyone is conscious of the raw problem, and seriously annoyed. nikon is the negative gradient lem's golem is referring to in its lectures. [stanislaw lem, imaginary magnitude]]

Monday June 13, 2005

abstract found in a garden

multiple exposures of some flowers found in our garden. [i should know what they are, but i don't. sigh] slightly overcast/diffused light. six straight exposures of a relatively uninteresting part, camera moving up. small image on the right is the third image in the sequence as an example. nikon D70 (iso200) with micro-nikkor 105mm f/2.8 D. all six images combined in photoshop as layers (lighten, 100% opacity) with minor color correction.

[music in the ipod: chieftains, santiago, 1996]

[addendum: something is wrong with the colors. i use prophoto rgb color profile for these images, and looks like firefox and gimp cannot render this profile properly; colors are much weaker than what they should be.]

[2005.06.17: dale woolridge wrote: few browsers support embedded profiles anyway. convert to srgb for web display. proof first if you're worried about gamut clipping or colour shifts (depending on rendering intent). thanks dale]

[2005.06.20: once again dale stepped in and converted the image to srgb for me. what is now displayed is the image with the correct colors. thanks again dale.]

Wednesday June 08, 2005

harley dreams [multiple exposures in digital] gimp edition

i previously wrote about generating multiple exposures (one synthetic, one real) with photoshop. i did not show a gimp example [i rarely use gimp for serious photographic work] so after blogging those multiple exposures, i fired up gimp2, and tried. there were some counter-intuitive results, so i gave up, went back to gimp1.2, and produced the image on the right: a hd fatboy engine block, five exposures. on my ibook g4, both versions of gimp became noticably slower as the number of layers increased. [it may have something to do with gimp's memory management. i did not have a chance to go back and look at it more analytically.]

[script-fu: sure can do, but it is really not that interesting; i prefer blending actual multiple images, or blending synthetic ones by hand and carefully deciding each layer's position. to me, this is not just a special effect.]

Wednesday May 25, 2005

harley dreams [multiple exposures in digital]

if you do not have a multiple-exposure capable DLSR (fuji s2 pro, nikon d2x), there are several things you can do: you can synthetically create the multiple exposure from a single exposure in photoshop [or gimp or digital darkrooom of your choice] or you can be a purist like me and actually make many exposures to be combined into one image, as you would do with film.

here is a harley davidson police edition engine block, in both kinds of multiple exposures. a synthetic multiple exposure [left image] is a simple multi-layer operation, a bit tedious for its mechanics, but quite entertaining for its results:

• copy n layers out of a single image
• for each layer do:
  • shift, rotate, resize or otherwise transform a layer
  • set visibility to lighten
• crop the result appropriately for composition and clean edges

the example on the right is just a double exposure, one regular image, and another image made out of focus for specular highlights. [this one is for lee schlais. nikon d70, nikkor 105mm f/2.8D]

[musical suggestions while gimping along: dead can dance, a passage in time, beggars banquet music, 1998.]

raw flaw

michael reichmann and jurgen specht have published a good essay about the camera raw problem, recently inflamed by nikon's unfortunate decision to encrypt NEF white balance information. [this essay is more or less a summary of what many photographers have been writing; nikon has already lost d2x sales as a result of its decision]

[this line from the article does not work]

But, in the US at least, with the Millennium Copyright Act, the game has changed. Simply put, anyone that cracks encrypted or otherwise protected intellectual property is subject to criminal prosecution. And, since it possibly can be argued that the code (not content) in an encrypted or "protected" RAW file belongs to its creator (meaning the camera maker), any company or programmer breaking that code needs have liability concerns.

this is a confusion over the creator of the intellectual property and the content vs its container. how do we seperate the two cleanly [if we can at all], and what rights does the photographer have over the container, the digital equivalent of mylar and silver halide crystals? i think there is a good argument that says every bit of information [eg. white balance] carried in the container for the unrestricted recreation of the image is a part of the intellectual property and it cannot be kept from its creator. as I have suggested before, hiding any of this information is an intolerable bit of idiocy, and is good grounds for a legal action against a manufacturer.

[musical recommendation: grant green, the latin bit, blue note]

Sunday April 24, 2005

nikon: a raw attitude part deux

nikon released a clumsily written advisory that is supposed to clarify matters with facts and explanations. it is basically a spin document that manages to badly say very little. [also see photoshopnews discussion] it several times refers to bona fide developers [a very strange qualification these days] and nikon's proprietary sdk such developers are allowed to get if they ask nicely enough. this is the line i find the most interesting:

Nikon’s preservation of its unique technology in the NEF file is employed as an action that protects the uniqueness of the file.

very strange. no technical details on how this is supposed to work, except perhaps through obscurity.

[evidently, this line of reasoning did not occur to (say) canon. here is a discussion of canon's published crw/ciff format.]

related links: openraw - digital image preservation through open documentation.
adobe dng resources (adobe: whatever happened to that open source dng library?)

[image note: multiple exposure spinning top, from a series of images for holzmann's spin. nikon equipment, velvia.]

Thursday April 21, 2005

nikon: a raw attitude

not sure what to make of nikon's recent chance to NEF (nikon's raw format) on D2X bodies [and i expect the change to come down to other cameras as well]. i am assuming it is the kind of temporary loss of consciousness that inflicts large corporations from time to time.

photoshopnews discussion is interesting to read. i think the issue that concerns me the most is ownership; i have noted in the past that unshared digital camera raw image files are the only way to guarantee image authenticity and ownership. what i had not thought about was that a raw format could be hijacked by the camera vendor, be obscured, and may be subject to manipulation i have no knowledge or control over.

this is seriously bothersome. it is easy to switch to a less stupid vendor, or to reverse engineer the format (some people think that is an inalienable right.) alas, that is just evading the issue. unless nikon recovers soon and fixes this, it should be challenged in the courts.

related links: dave coffin's excellent open-source dcraw converter
an interesting discussion on various aspects of this raw format: is NEF format truly lossless?
for future: adobe digital negative

Tuesday April 05, 2005

photographing a snow storm in april

an unusual april snowstorm in toronto. it is too warm in the southern parts for any significant accumulation, but snow coming down in large flakes (really clumps of flakes) and getting whipped around by a strong north-westerly wind. since there is not much snow left in toronto, these huge flakes are in stark contrast to the landscape; a rare special effect of nature, like an old tv with a really spotty reception.

good time to go out and make some pictures. [note to fair-weather photographer: do not miss this.]

there was enough daylight to shoot at reasonably fast shutter speeds, which freezes the motion of the flakes in the air. that alone makes an interesting image, shown on the right. [without these notes, people will wonder if this is a photoshop trick.] closing the aparture down for slower shutter speeds, we have white streaks against the trees and the brush; a more surrealist view not easily visible to the naked eye.

rest of my images were made with a combination of slower shutter speeds and zooming from mid to upper end of a 28-105 lens. [note on technique: first zoom out to the wider angle, compose/frame the image, and zoom in with slow shutter.] added zoom/motion makes the images much more abstract, but in my mind's eye, a good visual representation of the storm; lots of movement with strong gusts of wind, white streaks everywhere.

i have made some good images in about half an hour, but i really should have stayed longer and looked for better nature locations. [too worried about the equipment. sigh] a snowstorm without significant accumulation provides some strong contrasts, and good possibilities for nature abstracts.

related reading: freeman patterson and andre gallant, photo impressionism and the subjective image, sept. 2001

[all images made with a nikon D70 (200 iso, NEF) and nikon 28-105 f/3.5-4.5 AF D. rudimentary color correction in photoshop.]

Monday March 21, 2005

velvia, d2x, d70...

just as i was planning to do my own velvia vs digital tests, i came across rollin verlinde's excellent no nonsense review of d2x. this is an eye opener. [i guess i will not bother with my own tests for now.]

i downloaded his carefully photographed moss crop samples, color matched the velvia scan and the d70 image against the d2x colors and compared the details. at higher magnifications, velvia image is a loss. a real surprise is the d70 image: once it is resized (bicubic smoother) to match the d2x sample, i cannot tell the two images apart.

long time ago, i had calculated that given best 35mm optics at around 100/lpmm resolving power, i would want a 10-12mp camera to switch to digital. i realize now all one really needs is a modern raw-capable 6-8mp camera and a good interpolation algorithm...

[this last bit reminds me of helmut dersch's ingenious interpolator quality tests.]

[addendum: here is a short essay that confirms my current impressions: digital image quality]

Monday February 21, 2005

pma2005... o nikon, where art thou?

so far, pma2005 looks like a replay of some yesteryear, except in digital: dozens of point-and-shoot cameras consumer digicams, a few lenses, and two digital SLRs. both SLRs are updates, but while canon cleverly updates its cheap digital rebel as 350d and beats d70 specs, nikon updates its journalist-grade d2h as d2hs. sigh, this means a longer wait for less-than-wealthy prosumer nikon users like me. [d2x costs $4,999. d2hs will be $3,499. d70 costs $999.]

[resolution: by june 2005, i will either own a successor to nikon d70, assuming it shows up on time, or will have sold a part of my nikon gear to buy a canon eos d20 with a few good canon lenses.]

(2005-02-21 16:17:17.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday December 31, 2004

new photography and the problem of authentication

here is an image i made two years ago: an interior shot of the inimitable suleymaniye mosque in istanbul. i occasionally sell limited edition prints, and there is something i can say about this image with great certainty:

i made this image.

i could prove this assertion if needed; i actually have the physical slide at hand. [it is in a sequence of other physical slides showing related interior shots, all frame-numbered] this gives me the kind of authentication power that is harder to match in the digital photography realm: the correspondence between the imaging equipment, the original image and its photographer is very weak (circumstantial) or nonexistent. for cameras that produce pre-processed images, there is no way to directly prove ownership. this is less of a problem for prosumer DSLRs that produce raw images, provided that the original raw image is never shared. (i am assuming the process of going from raw to, say tiff is nearly impossible to reverse, because of antialiasing, scaling etc).

related links: adobe's digital negative (dng) proposal.

(2004-12-31 11:08:19.0) Permalink