NEW YORK PHOTO BLOG / DAVE BECKERMAN

Chapter 5 in which I find that I have to go back to the past to show the present and talk about my mother – Sara

When I read memoirs or autobiographies, this is generally the chapter or chapters that I skip. It seems as I read through what I’ve got so far, I’ve given you the bun without the hamburger. Yes, this is the part I’ve put off because you really don’t want to jump back to grandparents and all that unless it’s relevant and well – you don’t want to make private lives public.

But it turns out, that you can’t – well let’s just say that you should feel free to skim over this chapter because I’m going to talk about two major rocks that were tossed in the family lake that have ripples right down through the generations.

I am using real names, and I’m not so sure that’s a good idea either. Though most of the people who could be hurt by any of this are dead.

My mother’s side of the family are Russian Jews. That last part – the Jewish thing is important because although my maternal grandfather – Charles – had a good job in the Moscow Symphony Orchestra as first or possibly only Oboist – and although my mother’s family were at least connected with what was the equivalent in those days of a chain of bookstores in Moscow – they had to leave because Jews were being drafted and used as canon fodder.

At that point, they only had the two daughters and somehow they all made it out of Russia (like many other Jews) and escaped pogroms and there are the stories of hiding in the cellar as the Cossacks came through town and all that… but they arrived in New York and my grandfather – once a prestigious musician – became a house painter.

It’s a familiar story – and it goes on to this day with immigrants.

But – the kicker is that he was determined to renew his musical dreams through his children. And though this sounds like the Goldilocks story – it goes something like this:

A year after Charles and Lisa arrived in New York, my mother Sara was born. In the meantime, grandfather Charles (a neat tidy little man who always wore a bow-tie and clean suit) began to try and teach the two older girls the piano.

Nothing came from it. Luckily for them – they had no musical ability at all. If they had even had a bit I’m sure Charles would’ve kept at them.

And along comes Sara who at the age of two or three (that kind of thing is never really clear) is able to hum along with Charles and remember tunes. The point being that she had inherited his gift, and maybe even more than he had it. She was the wunderchild – the prodigy – the prayed for miracle. And it doomed her.

It’s another one of those pretty old stories of the frustrated and harsh father pouring all his dreams into his child – and the amazing thing is that for a while it worked. My mother began taking piano lessons while she was barely able to sit on piano bench. And as time went by, her talent was recognized and there were other Russian teachers that wanted to have a crack at the gifted kid.

After she died, one of the things I kept were the piano books from her childhood. I should scan a few to give you an idea of the harshness of the Russian teachers she studied with. The wounding pencil marks about the classical piano pieces – and you can even see that on one page the pencil must have torn through the page and broke off because there’s a scratch that goes clear through the page.

I know from talking to my mom, that these years were a horror. Besides going to regular school, all the rest of her time was spent either performing like a trained dog (her words) or taking piano lessons, or practicing.

It was nerve-wracking and it used to cause her to vomit (there is no polite way of saying that is there mom?) before her piano lessons. Especially when she was a pre-teen and giving performances.

I’ll make this short – by the time she was 12 – she had played at Carnegie Hall with the emperor of the violin (at that time) Joseph Heifetz. And by the time she was 14, she had played on a coast to coast radio broadcast. And hard pieces. You know – Liszt and all that.

And when she was 15, she skipped her first lesson. Just never showed up. Her father took a leather strop to her. She declared her independence and no matter how she was beat – would not touch the piano again.

In her 20′s and 30′s she would play popular pieces for fun at parties – but she wouldn’t play classical music again until shortly before her death. And that upbringing. The sense that it engendered in her of not being loved for yourself but for what you could do. Whatever it did to her, she would become a woman who was strong in many ways – and also terrified of so many things that she would end up in therapy – the real lie on the couch 5 days a week psychotherapy for almost her entire life.

Her fear of what certain men could do, and search for a protector was one of the reasons she ended up with my father. So there’s ripple number one – because on the surface – a more unlikely couple you just couldn’t make it up.

As soon as I was able to drive, I was the one assigned to drive my mother to the psychiatrists on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx because she couldn’t drive. I’d sit there for the hour. She’d usually come downstairs with a tissue in her hand – and you could see she’d been crying. We never talked about what went on in those sessions other than to say she spent most of the time talking about her early days with Charles.

As I said at the beginning – this is the part you might want to skip over as you say what does it have to do with the story – but whatever talent I have – and it came through in various artistic ways (yes, I too took piano lessons with grandpa Charles!) it came from my mother. At least the genetic part.

And I can tell you that although my Grandpa Charles was an old man – when I knew him – at least when you are seven years old he seemed ancient – he scared the heck out of me.

Growing up, we always had a grand piano in the house. As I say, my mother wouldn’t play classical music on it – but for parties she could play any of the popular pieces for people to dance to by ear. She had what they call Perfect Pitch. That means that you could ask her to sing any note, and she could hit it immediately. In other words she could hear it in her head.

It turned out that I had Relative Pitch. Which meant that for example if someone sang a middle C and asked me to sing a third or a fourth above it or below it – I could do that easily. I could hear it in my head and sing it. And I began college as a music major (though that’s a story for another time).

But when Charles sat down with you at the piano, he had his red bow-tie on, and his hair was dyed almost a dark blonde color, and there was a handkerchief in his jacket pocket – in other words he was – at least for his time – dandified – although he was a house painter.

(I have to tell you – from what I’ve heard he was one heck of a house painter. Remind me to tell you the story about how Grandpa Charles and my paternal Grandfather – Max once worked together on a house. The original odd couple).

But back to the piano lesson with Charles. Now sit straight. Place your hands slightly above the keys in a ball. Each finger like a piston – ready to strike. No – not like that. In a ball. Okay, that’s better. Now I’m going to hold this ruler above your fingers as you play. Your knuckles should just brush against it.

And the music was in front of me and the ruler held just so – and there were many times I was rapped with that ruler; many times he’d talk to me sternly – that I wasn’t really trying. I was trying – and he kept at it with me for an hour or so once a week and it’s true – I learned to read music and play the piano – but honestly – when I was about twelve I went to take banjo lessons in the west village and that was the end of the Charles experience.

The point to wrap up this chapter – where I thought I’d get to my father’s story which is much more complex – and in my mind much sadder – is that my mother grew up wounded – but loaded with talent. Not only with music but she painted, sculpted – and could improvise on the piano as well as most jazz pianists I knew. But she wouldn’t touch classical music again – although she bought us phonograph records with the stories of the great classical musicians and we’d fall asleep in our apartment on University Avenue – the place where we were the poorest – to the sound of Liszt dying and the music swelling.

Okay – let me get to my father’s side of the family.

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After quickly rendering three more projects with Autopano Giga – where everything worked the way I thought it should work – and without having to delve into any tutorials – I bought the software last night.

Now I can talk about the workflow a little bit.  But before I get to that, I want to show a few more images here in the secret blog.  One thing – btw- that was funny – was buying APG because it was the first time that I bought a French piece of software, and the site was written in French.  Yes, you could hit the translate button, but still there were funny things such as when you can’t find your country in the drop down box because its Etats-Unis and you’re looking for United States, or America.

And the prices are in Euros.

But besides all that – process went smoothly.  You download the trial version, and you get about two weeks to experiment.  APG was one of eight stitching programs that I tried.  I know there are people in love with PTGui – but that software is a little too mathematical for me.  I want to deal more visually with the image and not have to think too much about the Yaw and Pitch just to get an initial stitched print.

With Autopano Giga – it goes like this.  Take your raw files, and write an export program in Lightroom (that’s what I use) so that the raw files are transformed to Tiffs (or some sort of more generic format) with a file title that’s going to put them into a useful order.  If possible – when shooting – it’s really good if you can shoot in the same order as your grid will be.  In other words, you might start on the lowest row and do your columns, then go up one row when shooting, same amount of columns etc etc.  This way when you export to the tiff files prior to processing you know you’ll make it pretty easy for whatever stitching program you’re using to get a fair crack and putting the rows / columns together.

And there are good stitching programs (few bells and whistles) like Hugin that are free and which other programs like PTGui seem to be based on.

Anyway.  You’ve created your rows / columns of tiff images.  Read them into APG (or whatever program you’re using) and in APG you hit detect.  The workflow for all these programs – essentially the same.  Here are the images.  I’m telling you (hopefully) that there are in rows and columns – now go ahead and see if you can figure out how they go together.

APG and PTGui (among others) will give you a number after this, with 5 being the best – saying what it thinks of your shooting.  Are these things going to be easy, hard or impossible to fit together.

And then there’s a render step.  You decide what size and a few other things about the final output.  You might be making a tour file where you get to take a virtual stroll through the 360 sphere.  I think that with APG that’s a separate add-on.  However – I don’t care much for that stuff (at least right now).  But the real thing is how long does it take to process say a 1000 files!  Or 100 files (which is now more common for me).

So that’s the basic workflow.

Now there’s a second level of workflow – that has to do with moving people – masking – painting out things – removing some part of an image – and if you want to use the program for contrast // saturation and all the stuff you now use another program for — then you can go for that as well.

Okay… let me go back and see if the set of 76 files I put into APG have finished rendering.

The main thing though – the reason that I ended up with APG 1) excellent and simple interface and 2) it did a heck of a job of stitching a complicated pano that all the other programs had issues with.  In short, APG could make decisions without having to ask you about every little thing.  It knows that in general, you don’t want overlapping figures.

31,000 pixels long (without any tweaking)

Well, I finally made the jump from pure technique to something artistic.  It was cold, and as usual I forgot to bring gloves.  But I got to Poets Walk, and I had the idea in my head last night of where I was going to place the camera so that there would be four roads – sort of a cross in each compass direction.  In other words, about halfway down the walk, where there are two roads off to the right and left.  Also I decided to do a lot of overlapping because I didn’t feel like coming back to the house and finding that I was missing some piece (as happened yesterday).

So I was sort of cursing the cold, and my hands were starting to stick to the metal tripod.  They were getting raw – but I had come this far, and there was no way I wasn’t going to do this thing.

I took 24 shots x 4 rows at 15 degrees each.  That is a heck of a lot of data to stitch together.  I’m loading the files into PTGui now.  To the eye – they look reasonable, i.e. I don’t believe I missed anything. Lighting is an issue as parts were shot almost straight into the sky, and other parts down at the ground.  The instructions from most pano groups is to set the exposure and pretty much leave it there, but I decided to let the camera auto-expose each shot.  I also went against the book and let the camera focus on what seemed reasonable.  It was AV at F8.  There were lots of people and I spent a lot of time waiting for people to at least stand clear of the camera, i.e. not get within 40 feet or so.

Then the stupid park police came by, and sat in their scooter, right in my shot.  So again I waited and waited.  Maybe ten minutes and finally they pulled away.

Then a tour group came by, and pretty much surrounded me – watching – as if I was going to do something with them in every portion of the pano.  That would be okay if they wanted to stand still, but no they were just curious about my rig.  Eventually they got bored and continued on.

So that was one setup.  It probably took me about a half hour or so to shoot.  I was happy to easily level the camera (sometimes a real pain for me) with the bubble that the nodal ninja has.

After that, I did one more setup in the plaza by the amphitheater (if that’s how you spell it?). This was even more of a pain as people were swirling all over the place.  Of course next time if there’s anything interesting in either of these shots, I’ll get out there early when it’s empty.

Having moving people in some shots isn’t the worst thing in the world – as PTGui allows you to erase parts of an image so that the image below it shows through – but if you have to do a lot of this – you don’t want to with a super large giga image.

Also, I went against what the rules were for using the 20mm with a cropped lens.  The instructions I found said you could get by (barely) with 10 images for the horizontal 360.  I’ve found this not to be true if the camera was in portrait position.  So as I say – I decided to really do a lot of overlapping, as I say and went with 24 images per row.

PTGui also has a grid tool, which is what I plan to use.  One thing I learned that makes things easier, is to shoot each row in order.  In other words, start with your zero (first) image in the row, and just go around the notched rotation until you arrive back at zero (and don’t shoot that one again – as it makes life confusing).  Also, it’s really helpful to shoot your hand between rows, so you know where one starts and one ends in Lightroom.

Oh – you want to see the picture.  Sorry… I’ve just finished loading it into PTGui.  Will press a few buttons, keep my fingers crossed, and see if I got it right.  Stay tuned.

* * *

I got a bunch of things wrong in the stitching process.  But I’m certain that I have all the files I need.  On top of that – NIK ColorEffx refused to process the file saying it was too large; so I took it from 16 bit to 8 bit.  This time it loaded, but after about 10 minutes of processing (ProContrast) ColorEffex crashed.

So for one thing I can see that I’ve got to do the stitching again.  But also I need to work at a smaller size, at least for now, so that I can make changes and get it right before going into NIK – if I can use NIK at all on such large files.  The file I was working on (or trying to work on) was 1.5 Gigabytes.  As I say — stay tuned… :)