New York Photography Blog

- Item 1.  Teacher of first grade class asked permission to use photographs from the web to give students stimulus for drawings.  Hopefully I’ll get to see what the kids came up with next week.

- Item 2. There were a bunch of people out this morning taking pictures of the snowstorm.  Mostly with point & shoots.  I was on third ave. under an awning.  Just waiting / hoping something would happen.

One guy did yell at me because he thought I was taking his picture (which I wasn’t).  “Don’t put me in the frame.”

- I’m not.

- Well it looked like you were.

- I wasn’t.

- Then how come you were pointing the camera wherever I went.

- Just chance I guess.

- Well so long as I’m not in the frame.  You shouldn’t take pictures of people without their permission anyway.

- Whatever you say, sir.

- Can I see what you took pictures of?

- No.

- Why not?

- Why not… because I don’t feel like showing them to you.  That’s why not.

Of course this is an idiotic conversation but it happens now and then.  Main thing is to size up your potential opponent and he was skinny and well-dressed, and I just couldn’t imagine he’d want to get his nice suit ruined in a scuffle.

I put the camera to my eye and continued to take pictures.  No, not of him, but of whatever caught my eye and then he knocked on the window of the diner (that was closed) near where I was standing.  I hadn’t moved and so could hear the conversation.  It was something about his desire to get a takeout menu.  The guy in the diner said they weren’t putting the menus out because they’d get soaked.

But did they have any dry ones inside that he could have?

No.  The diner guy didn’t know where they were.

Long pause while paranoid menu seeker thinks it over, and then he turns and goes to hail a cab which is impossible in this weather.  Nothing is working out for him.  A guy in a dirty yellow parka might be taking his picture. He can’t get a menu.  He can’t get a cab.  So now he crosses the avenue and disappears into a Korean Deli (open 24 hours).  He walked out a few minutes later with a supersized bouquet of flowers that he can almost hide behind and tries to get a cab from the other side of the street.  No luck.  The flowers aren’t wrapped well  and are drooping.

He must have walked into frame of one of the point and shooters (using flash) on the other side of the street, because now I see him talking to this high-school student guy who had been taking pictures of third ave. in the snow when I first came downstairs.  And the guy with the wilting flowers is yelling at the student. I can’t hear what he’s saying, sort of a high squeaky voice, but I see him gesticulating.

I’m guessing that he wants to see whether he was caught in any of the shots because he’s trying to get the camera away from the kid, and he makes a grab for it and drops the flowers in the snow.

The kid grabs the camera back and gives the guy a push – just a slight push – and the guy slips in the snow and falls on the flowers.  The kid with the point and shoot walks off with some of his friends who have come by to see what was going on and the “don’t put me in the picture” guy with the now crush and wet flowers has become the center of attention.   He slips again while trying to bend over to pick up the flowers and almost falls.  Regains his balance.

Now he heads back to my side of the street and crosses while traffic is coming up third, and he almost gets hit by a car which swerves so as not to hit him and at that point I do put the camera to my eye but just miss what could have been a great shot because when the first car swerved, it causes another car to switch lanes and there’s almost a second accident.

Anyway – the whole thing was pretty strange; and as I say – I’ve really only come across one or two people who were willing to get into something physical because they thought I had taken their picture, though I did once have a cop called on me for taking a picture of an apartment building.  It’s always the stuff you just never expect that turns into something.

“I wondered a little when you posted
that you were buying the 5D with a
28mm lens. I had you pegged as a 50mm
man.” – Stephen Bray

Yes, it’s true.  If I only had one lens to use, it would be a good 50mm f1.4 (full frame).  I picked up the 28mm 1.8 because I got a good deal on it (honey they were on sale, look how much I saved) and because it had been a long time since I had used true wide-angles on a full-frame.  And it is useful for scenics.

If you were to go through the images in the store, you’d find that 90% of them were shot with the equivalent (not counting the camera format) of a 50mm, give or take a few mm’s.  It is one of my gripes with camera makers that the first thing they try to sell you as part of the “package” is a zoom lens.  I would rather see them offer a 50mm f1.4 equivalent.  It’s one of the first things I end up talking about when people (friends, cousins etc.) ask me how to “get better” at their photography.

I look at the kit they have, and try to forbid them from using the zoom lens that came with the kit, and going to a normal type prime lens, at least f2.0

This almost always seems like a novel idea.  How will they be able to get closer to the subject?  (You walk closer).

But what if it is a mountain that is far in the distance (I will make exceptions for objects that you can’t get close to, or if you need the perspective of a long lens).  However, this is a different subject, and you are asking about how to get better and I am giving two rules: use a normal and hopefully “fast” lens, and take the camera with you everywhere.  Yes, everywhere.

The two rules are related.  It is going to be more difficult to take the camera with the heavier zoom lens with you everywhere, and since the zoom lens is going to be slower than the prime lens, you are going to end up wanting to use flash more often.

It is a little bit like the advice a friend once got about playing the trumpet.  The teacher refused to give the student a trumpet at all, and had him only blowing into the mouthpiece for about three months to develop the armature before handing him the trumpet.

My own experience, when I went back to photography was to use a camera with a fixed normal lens for close to a year before getting a camera with interchangeable lenses.  It is really an excellent way to get a feeling for what is in the frame, and what walking a few steps forward or a few steps back can do.

I have nothing against zoom lenses; I just don’t think they are a good way to begin.  Once you’ve got a feeling for a normal lens, I would add a semi-long (maybe 90mm or so) lens for portraits, or getting closer.  And after that you are on your own and can buy out the store.

Before I get mail about my prejudice against zoom lenses – let me put it into context – I’m only talking about the beginner, or the student (at whatever stage) that is in need of a kind of optical purification.  I own and will use a long zoom sometimes – but it comes at a point where I understand the consequences, and I can say for sure that I don’t carry it with me at all times and use it when I need a good long lens.

Wide-angles on the street are often used as measurement of street courage.  The shorter the lens, the closer you need to be to the subject, and hence there is a sort of macho thing about using short lenses for street shooting.  However, I don’t believe any prizes are given for street photography with the shortest lens.  The shorter lenses for the candid shooter usually come later in the career; when you need to up the challenge a bit; or you like the challenge of having more bits of the puzzle in the frame.  So, just as the long lens is not for the beginner, neither is the short lens.

- The Art of Photography, Dave B’ck-mahn

You might remember (I sure do) all the problems I had with smudges on the left side of the print (facing the printer) a few weeks ago.  I went through every trick in the book trying to figure out what the problem was – but all to no avail.  A few days ago, I had an idea.  I wasn’t getting any smudges with the 4800, and in fact never did.  So I was wondering what the difference between the two machines could be, after all, the 4800 is at least a year or two older than the 7800.

I had noticed something odd with the 7800 a few weeks ago.  What happened was that the ink displays on the printer (those LCD bars) didn’t match what the Epson Driver software was showing in terms of the amount of ink.  In other words, the Epson Driver might be showing 5% of ink left for a particular color, but the LCD bar on the printer wasn’t flashing.  Really weird.  (No, I don’t remember if I ever upgraded or changed the printer firmware).

But I got to thinking that if it could be wrong about the ink, it might be mixed up about the maintenance tank as well.  And luckily, the 4800 and the 7800 both use the same maintenance tank.  So I took the relatively clean maintenance tank from the 4800 and swapped it with the 7800 tank which had quite a bit of ink around the circle part where ink is dumped.

And so I began doing test prints and almost immediately I noticed a difference, i.e. less smudging on the 7800.  Hmmm… could that have been the problem?  Later in the day, I did another print on the 7800 – now there were only very tiny bits of smudge on the print.  And after a third print – it came out clean.

I’ve been printing most of the day – all with clean prints.  I ordered two new maintenance tanks  which I now have, and sure enough, the 4800 is starting to smudge.

So there you have it – the crazy problem is solved – mostly – and I’m guessing that something is screwed up with the Epson firmware and I’ll install the latest and greatest.  I should do it for the Epson Driver as well so that the Exhibition Paper shows up in the media choices.  I don’t feel like futzing with either one right now until I’ve got all my orders finished, but once that’s done I’ll update everything.

Ever hear of anything so strange.  The printer firmware had always been correct, at least I never noticed it not being in sync with the Epson Printer Status app until a few weeks ago.  Did I change something?  Not that I can think of, and anyhow, nothing I could have done would’ve changed the Epson firmware.

I suppose this falls under the heading of odd anomaly, though maybe all anomalies are odd if you don’t understand them.

Does anyone know why the Times Square shuttle was painted with tulips and says Holland on it?  Some anniversary of the founding of New York?

Red Sidewalk with Bike

When I got to Times Square last night, after two days of rain, it was so bright that while I was still in the station, I thought for a moment it was daytime.  The sign directly across from the IRT stop takes up about a half-block, is about 20 feet high, and flashes various colors at you – so bright that I was shooting at ASA 400 4.0 1/125th (as I say, at midnight).

I don’t know what that sign on the other side of 42nd street was meant to advertise, but it is the largest, brightest sign I’ve ever seen, and it was turning the sidewalk into a multi-colored watercolor painting.  These shots haven’t been “over saturated” – they are straight from the camera – in the “faithful” setting which is fairly subdued.  But I felt at times as if I were walking through puddles of blood, which I don’t think was the intended effect.

Seriously Cropped (1600 ASA)

The same three files used before, this time tonemapped in Photomatix, and not touched in Lightroom.

The workflow is like this:

1. Lightroom, preset for exporting to flat tif.  Contrast set to linear. Calibration set to: faithful. White Balance: As Shot. Everything else zeroed out.  In other words, a flat file with as much data as possible preserved.  The color tiff files generated are just extremely low contrast.

2. Photomatix: Image Fusion (I use the Average Setting.  No tinkering at this point).

3. Process the Fusion and then into Tone Mapping.  Also fairly straight forward using the Tone Compressor engine.  Luminosity ends up very low (left side) and compression high, almost 10.0  Saturation is zero.  And here you can tweak color temp. and white and black clip points.

Import the new file into Lightroom. Only thing applied here (at least in this image) is a bit of sharpening.  That’s it.

Detail and tonality – very nice – and something I haven’t been able to really show well, though maybe you can get a feeling for it through the larger web images I’m using now.

ONE NOTE: During the IMAGE FUSION process, there are many ways to blend the images.  As I say, in this case I simply chose average (the three shots are one as metered, and then one under by a stop and one over by a stop).  But if this is not giving you a wide enough tonal range, you can do the fusion and tweak how the images are blended, i.e. leaning towards the highlights or the shadow areas.

I have 3GB of memory on the computer, and often run into trouble if I try and run Photomatix straight from Lightroom (which is definitely supported).  Hence the export, and then using Photomatix as a standalone program rather than through Lightroom.

Even if I am using Photomatix as a standalone program, it may run out of memory if I try to fuse more than three images.  This is what the “batch” option is for.  You can set it to do three frames at a time, and then you can combine the resulting files produced by the batch process.  The program really does think of everything.

(Infrared and ‘Tonemapped’)

How this shot was done: this was early in my digital infrared days.  It wasn’t done with a modified digital camera, but by sticking an infrared filter (I don’t remember which one anymore) on the 40D and doing a fairly long exposure.  The resulting image was all RED.  I then created a profile that could be used with the ADOBE DNG profile editor app (free) that gave me a more acceptable color temp.  Still, not very good – but when I stuck it into tone-mapping – suddenly this image popped out at me.

**NOTE**

1. Print prices have gone down again.  I couldn’t sell enough of them to make the ‘outsourcing’ work.  I will still use WCI for large prints, but after several weeks of very slow business which corresponds with the price increases for outsourcing – I can see that it won’t work.

2. There are only about 8 limited editions (11 x 14) of Poet’s Walk left.  In other words, I have nearly sold 100 of them at that size.  Some people care about such things (collectors) so it just means that there won’t be any limited editions of that print at that size.

3. The black-lined grid screen for the 5D is impossible to see at night.  It’s great during the day – but disappears in the dark.  I don’t remember having that problem with the Rollei TLR or with the view camera.  Maybe they were etched into the screen differently.

4. I’ll get in touch with an Epson technician today, or at least try to.  I lost track of that problem while I buried myself in HDR and color.  Though I may have figured something out.  Will write more about it if I have solved the problem.  I do have a work around for sure.  A kludge – but it works.  But I made a change yesterday with the 7800 and I want to see if it works today.

5. As noted, even though I may not end up working in color, I can say that I have gone pretty far with HDR and especially with the tone-mapping tool which is wonderful, whether for color or b&w.  It seems like there’s always one more thing I want to try.