Burano: Xpan with 30mm lens on Fuji Velvia 100

Venice, Feb 27th 2010. Somewhere in the Rialto. I think.

Another Ricoh GR-Digital shot.

Venice, 27th Feb 2010

February is a great time to visit Venice. Not too crowded, not deadly quiet. This photo was taken using the Ricoh GRD II, and in my opinion is a great example of the almost magical way the GR lens can render this kind of scene. It’s difficult to explain, but there’s a sense of transparency, clarity and luminance which I just don’t get from any other camera. The Ricoh GR (35mm) was just the same.

This version was processed using Apple Aperture. For this particular shot, Aperture and Iridient RAW Developer have remarkably diverse opinions on what looks “right”. Aperture renders a far less saturated sky, but allows a lot more detail extraction in the clouds.

For what it’s worth, RAW Developer’s effort is a lot closer to Ricoh’s in-camera JPG. But I prefer the Aperture feel, in this case.

Apart from two photos which I had to rework from the archived scans, due a weird digital disease that seems to be afflicting some of my Photoshop files, these are derived from the “reference” versions I made around 5 years ago.

They’re mostly taken on Kodachrome 64, with one or two Kodachrome 25s and a single Ektachrome 64(?). I’d be fairly surprised if anybody could tell which is which.

I took the photos in 1987/88 while working for the British Antarctic Survey, and in 1991/92 when I participated in the Norwegian-led Aurora Programme, working on a European Space Agency funded project at University College London ... back in the early days of climate change research.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with a camera back then, which given that I was mainly using a fully manual Canon FTb, was not ideal. Arguably I haven’t moved on much, but at least I’ve now got a far better idea of what I don’t know.

An XPan photo of Jökulsárlón which didn’t make the last 16

Note: At the moment there’s a bit of a glitch with the display of the gallery thumbnails (they’re too wide for the page). This is due (a) to lack of planning on my part and (b) because I can’t get the fix I’ve kludged together to work yet.

I would like to keep track of all of my photo library in one place. And this includes photos taken on film, both old and new, as well as digital, more recently processed “non-destructively” with Aperture but previously export with baked-in adjustments from Camera Raw, Capture One or Iridient Raw Developer. Aperture is sort of able to do this, but frankly it isn’t ideal. Aperture’s - and Lightroom’s - promise of non-destructive editing has a downside, and this is that it doesn’t really cater for the idea of a “finished” image. Neither are particularly flexible when it comes to free-form labelling. Lightroom is a bit better in this respect, but not much. With Aperture you can use albums and smart albums, but then again with some limitations.  Neither have the subtle but extremely effective depth of support for cataloging found in iView Media Pro (sorry, I should say Microsoft Expression Media). But Expression Media is (a) apparently dead, acquired and smothered by fucking stupid Microsoft, and (b) doesn’t have any concept of linking different renditions of the same source.

Beyond the grave: iView Media Pro 3 still works fine in OS X 10.5

Ideally Aperture 3, if it ever appears, will extend cataloging functionality and add the concept of a “final master”, but I doubt it. And Aperture is never going to be anything other than a very clumsy way of dealing with scanned images. I could live with a solution where I feed masters from Aperture to Expression Media. In fact I could even imagine creating a “bridge” with AppleScript which would allow me to generate catalog numbers and save them in a database. But I have serious doubts about the continued existence of Expression Media.

So what alternatives are there ? One possibility has been AtomicView from AntZero. AtomicView looks good in theory, as an Expression Media for the future, and it’s even Swiss. But it is let down by a very debatable user interface, which seems to screaming for attention and badly detracts from using it in any kind of of serious photographic context. It also has a weird import and organisation process, and finally it is much, much slower than Expression Media. On the other hand it is the advantage of youth and enthusiasm.  But on balance, version 1 is so poorly conceived that I can’t see it will ever get significantly better.

Atomic View would be so much better without the juvenile non-standard GUI

Major issues with the Atomic View GUI include floating panels which are confined within the main window (see at the bottom right of the screenshot above) and a frankly hideous default colour scheme (look at the highlighting of the selected image) which doesn’t get much better even with full use of the limited customisation options. It’s a pity because all of this must have taken significant resources, which could have been devoted to core functionality if the standard UI Toolkit had been used.

A very interesting glimmer of hope presents itself in the new (beta) Mac version of the veteran Windows tool, ACDSee Pro. However, although it does seem to have some nice features, and a major opportunity to attract Expression media “orphans”, I’m afraid that despite the “Pro” tag it is going to end up trying to compete more at the consumer end of the market, and will spread itself too thin.

ACDSee Pro Mac Beta in “manage” mode

ACDSee does seem to be more of a competitor to Adobe Bridge. It does not import images or build catalogs like Expression Media, so it cannot be used in “offline” mode in the sense of a traditional Digital Asset Management tool. It is much slower at building thumbnails than Adobe Bridge, and so far it does not appear to be offering much beyond very basic metadata management. However, it is a Beta, so maybe there is still an opportunity to influence development. In any case, it is nice to see such an established Windows developer enter the Mac market.

So the search goes on. While there remains an outside chance that Expression Media will be saved I guess I will continue to use it (or rather iView Media Pro v3), but I’m concerned about investing a lot of effort in a tool that may soon stop working.

I enjoy using film cameras, and I like the quality of film. It isn’t better than digital, in any absolute sense, but it is different. To me the difference is a bit intangible. I know it exists, I can see it, but I can’t really describe it. There are photos I’ve taken on film which I would - or could - never have taken on digital, and indeed vice versa.

But this is about to end, because I’m planning on selling all my film cameras. There are two reasons for this: reason 1, I need the money. Reason 2, I have far too many cameras, and this is stifling my creativity.

The vast majority of my photography is done with the Olympus E-3 with either the 14-54mm or 50-200mm lens. I occasionally use the E-400 when I want to travel light, or be unobtrusive, or use the Lensbaby. I also use the Ricoh GRD quite a lot.  But I never use the Olympus E-1, and that’s already on eBay.

But the following are going to be looking for new homes too:

• My Hasselblad ArcBody, with 45mm Rodenstock lens and all the accessories, with an A12 back, a Polaroid 100 back, and the quite frankly weird Hasselblad ArcBody inverter mount.  And the whole lot neatly packed away in its custom Pelican case.
• My Hasselblad XPan (version 1) with 30mm, 45mm and 90mm lens, centre ND filters, 30mm finder / level, all packed in a nice Hasselblad leather shoulder bag.
• Fuji SW670II 6x7 rangefinder with fixed 90mm f4 lens - possibly the best lens I’ve ever used (and it’s got some stiff competition in this list)

I’m not sure if I will use eBay. It’s a bit scary.

Then I’ll see. Maybe getting back to basics will help me find some inspiration. Or maybe unloading all this stuff will turn my growing disaffection with the whole business into actually giving it up. I’m also planning on offloading some Olympus lenses, including the 8mm Fisheye, the 7-14mm zoom, the 11-22mm zoom, and probably the 50mm macro and extension tube. If I haven’t got a cupboard full of expensive toys making me feel guilty about not using them, then maybe I can finally get it out of my system, and just enjoy looking at others (considerably better) photography.

Quite honestly it’s refreshing to find somebody who quite clearly is photographing and writing for his own enjoyment, doesn’t particular mind upsetting any egos, and doesn’t beat about the bush.

I like his photography too. He knows when to apply restraint, goes for natural colour, and doesn’t go overboard with the Velvia stuff. His work reminds of that of David Ward, both in style and approach, but he’s carving out his own visual language.

So, a strong recommendation from me - great photography and a lively blog. Can’t be bad.

ps - oh, and he helped me fix my RSS feeds. Thanks, Tim!

pps - and If they’re not fixed, it’s my fault, not his

Føroyar actually reprises most of the Faroes section of “North”, within a collection of 72 photographs of windswept, often fogbound scenes of a land at the edge of the world. Although Paoluzzo favours dark, one could almost say dismal, tones in his landscapes, nevertheless they radiate light, sometimes soft, sometimes brighter, always hinting at something slightly lost, slightly mysterious. The landscape work tends perhaps less towards the abstract than in “North” and “Iceland”, but nevertheless there are some wonderful studies of form and movement. To my mind this book seems to be the work of someone exploring his inner landscape as much as the external world, blending in a touch of a reportage perspective.

It comes as a shock when the sequence of desolate cliffs and mountains descending sharply into the sea is broken up by an overhead shot of a road - a real road, with cars, snaking along a narrow strip between steep slope or sea. Other photographs remind that this is actually an inhabited landscape, sometimes obviously, sometimes more discretely. One wonderful shot shows the bows a ridiculously large cruise liner barely distinguishable just off a fogbound port. Such a ship must be completely out of place in these settings, but finally the fog reclaims it and it just becomes another angular bulk looming up out of nowhere.

But finally, these departures from the “classic landscape” repertoire do not detract at all from the collection. They give it an extra dimension and that sense of place which is often lacking in more formal works.

You can order the book (with text in English, German and French) directly from Marco Paoluzzo. A French edition has also been published, and can be ordered from Amazon.

You can also see a wide selection of Marco’s photography on Flickr.

But in fact, with a few honourable exceptions, all you find is are endless series of formulaic books about different regions, which work ok as documentary and guide books, but are usually full of bland, poorly executed and (especially) dreadfully printed photographs. The whole market seems to be tied up by a small clique of so-so photographers and publishers. Clearly actually getting to the locations of some of the photos in these books was an epic in itself, but unfortunately, this does not automatically translate to good photography. Good landscape photography requires some attention to light, to composition, and technique, not to mention good printing. And this is hard to get right in Ticino: the light is often harsh, contrast is a big problem, and getting to a lot of locations at the right time (which might only exist a few times a year) require a lot of planning, a lot of hard work and effort, and a degree of luck. Not to mention talent.

All this serves to explain why I was so surprised and delighted to discover the book “Spazio Greina” (Desertina Verlag, Chur) last weekend, especially as it is an area I’ve recently started exploring.

Spazio Greina is a book about 5 photographers’ personal visions of the Greina plateau, a region of upper Ticino bordering on Canton Graubunden and classified by Switzerland as a natural monument of national importance. It’s a fascinating blend of wide open stony valley, jagged peaks, glaciers and lakes. The photographers - Roberto Buzzini, Sergio Luban, Tamara Lanfranchini, Giosanna Crivelli, and Marco Volken each have a distinct take on this “space”, but what they all share is that they have taken the time to absorb the landscape and to find their own way to express it. They’ve come up with quite different approaches: Buzzini contributes a beautiful selection of wide-screen panoramics. Crivelli takes a abstractionist approach, finding surprising contrasts in the detail of the land. Lafranchini’s perspective as a film maker clearly shows through in her subtle use of flat light and discrete forms. Sergio Luban shows a wonderful eye for composition with elements of the landscape and capturing beautiful contrasts of light and shadow. Marco Volken has chosen to use black and white, a departure from his usual practice of colour photography, to great effect. It really is impossible for me to say that any of these are my favourite: it is the overall effect that dominates. You can see a nice slide show of some of the featured photos on the swissinfo site.

Although there are 5 distinct visions, the editing and layout by Roberto Grizzi brings them together for a coherent narrative. And speaking of narrative, the text by Leo Tuor (only in Italian, German and Rumantsch, I’m afraid) contrasting the “touristic” ideal of Greina with the lives of shepherds and hunters who call it home is the icing on the cake.

The print quality is excellent, and altogether this is a must-have photography book - perhaps the only one so far from this corner of the world.

NOTE: unfortunately I cannot find a link for ordering the book. If I do, I’ll update this post. It does appear to available from Amazon Germany.

That’s it really. Despite strong fears to the contrary, the venerable Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro (I always have to look at the faceplate to make sure I got that right) works fine under Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, with Rosetta installed.

Tested configuration:

MacBook Pro 2.5Ghz, OS X 10.6.1
Dimage Scan Utility v1.0.0 (Dimage Scan Installer v7.4, 5 Oct 2005)
Silverfast AI Studio v6.6.0r5

No noticeable issues of any kind with either application.

That’s a relief….

Somewhere around one year ago - possibly longer, I don’t remember - and shortly after being awarded “website of the month” by Outdoor Photography, I decided to take my photo galleries, and indeed my whole website, offline.

The website itself was getting old and creaky, and was becoming a real rat’s nest of patched together hand built code.  I wanted to replace it with something easier to maintain, more flexible, and based on something reasonably solid. This I finished a while ago.  But the other issue was the photographic content.

I used to host over 700 photos online, divided into about 10 galleries. Despite the fact that I got a lot of good feedback, this was clearly far too much. I felt that something was wrong, and some good advice from a friend convinced me I needed to cut down the quantity drastically, and focus on quality, and the message I want to send.

Unfortunately, whatever things I may be any good at, editing is not one of them.  The task of selecting a handful of photos to show from a collection of well over 15,000 was not easy. And it was made harder, when, early this year, I indulged myself in a high quality Quato display. Photos that I had discarded for being uninteresting or flawed suddenly popped into life on this new monitor, and I realised I was going to have to take another look at my archives.  I’ve recently completed reprocessing and evaluating just about all of my several thousand photos from Iceland, and the results of this exercise (started around March, finished a few weeks ago) are the subject of the first two of my new galleries.

The new thumbnails layout

Now that the technical stuff is completed, I can finally give my full attention to the fun part - the photography. I’ll be adding more galleries in the (relatively) near future, in particular panoramic format photos from Iceland and elsewhere, and at least one Ticino gallery.

I certainly want to avoid getting back into the quantity overload scenario, but I do want to try to show a representative selection. Probably I will inaugurate a “recent work” gallery soon, with more rapidly evolving content. I may also showcase some of my infra red photography, as well as black & white, since I seem to be doing more of that these days.

But for now, I’m just relieved that I’ve finally got something to show again.

NOTE: Although I try to test as much as possible on different web browsers, some bugs might lurk.  In particular I’ve noticed an intermittent and baffling bug in (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer (7 & 8, I cannot be bothered with 6).  Full size images sometimes display with a white band across them. Refreshing the page clears it up.  I’ll try to fix this, but I’m not going to hold back from going live because of bloody Microsoft.

the Internet Explorer bug. No website is complete without one.

Let me say up front that duChemin seems to be a genuine, likable character, and his intentions are excellent. He sets out to avoid geekery, and by and large he succeeds, although it would be interesting to see what difference it would make to the book - apart from making it commendably shorter - if he left out the chapter on gear.

But the book has many problems, and for me it was a real slog to get through. First of all, it is far, far too long. Early on, the author makes a joke about repeating the word “vision” too often. Well, that, I can live with - it’s the topic, after all. But worse is the multiple repetition of themes and ideas throughout the book, which verge on hectoring at times. It’s a technique that might work in a classroom presentation, but it doesn’t work a book. The text could be half the length and loose nothing in content.

Next, I found most of the content to be statements of the obvious. The fact that it all boils down to putting yourself in an interesting location, keeping your eyes open, and engaging with the subject isn’t exactly rocket science. My impression is that the book doesn’t really have a clear audience. It ends up a lot more “Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Photography” than I suspect it pretends to be. I was hoping for something a few notches higher.

Third, the scope. This is very much A Journey. David duChemin’s main photographic theme is street / portrait photography in a few far flung locations like India and Cuba, and unless you’re into that sort of thing, the illustrating images are soon going to get pretty monotonous. He makes a half-hearted stab at landscape photography, but he’d have done better not to bother. He doesn’t get it.

Finally there’s the photography itself. Personally, if I ever have to flick through yet another average set of narrow depth of field closeup portraits of elderly asian rustics, it will be far too soon. The book’s readers might have been better served with at least some examples which did not require the author to travel half way around the globe. This is of course highly subjective, but I don’t find David duChemin to be a particularly interesting or indeed talented photographer. He’s certainly better than I am - but that’s not difficult. On the other hand, he has nothing of the skill of, say, Steve McCurry, in drawing you into people’s lives and locations. Whether or not he avoids zoom lenses, the bulk of his photos feel like the work of a curious, detached onlooker with a ticket for the next city in his pocket.

With not only a foreword by Joe McNally but also an afterword by Vincent Versace, not to mention close associations with Scott Kelby - the archetypal gearhead - he’s clearly paid his dues on the networking and backslapping front. As they say, to make a business in photography, first you need to be a businessman. The marketing effort supporting the book is impressive and commendable. But ... well, sorry, but it’s just as well.

I wanted to like this book. After all I paid good money for it. I was hoping it would provide similar insights to two excellent books on photographic vision, Landscape Within and Landscape Beyond, by David Ward. But, at least as far as I’m concerned, it just ended up being irritating.

Oh, and note to the editor: for the non-US market, cut out the cringey God stuff. Please.

At the highest point of the walk we stopped for a lazy lunch. Adrian wandered over to inspect a patch of snow (apparently they don’t have snow in Canada ?) and rushed back excitedly some time later saying he’d seen “at least 7” marmots.

Well, these marmots had unusually long horns and were the size of a very large sheep.  In fact they were a little known variant of marmot, valled “ibex”.

Well, bugger. Ibex are not that common. Relatively approachable ibex even less so. I’ve never managed to get so close without spooking them (about 100m). And I had a 28mm lens…

So, here, for your pleasure, a pair of alpine ibex at 28mm.

Naturally, had I dragged 5kg of image stabilised Olympus E-3 with f2.8-3.5 50-200mm lens up there, would we have met the ibex ? Of course not.

Val Calneggia from Calneggia

ANYWAY…

The sort-of justification for this jaunt was to see if my actually rather good Ricoh GRD could subsitute for the 20-odd kg of Olympus gear I dragged up to 2500m last week. So I made sure I had the pouch I use to carry all the GRD’s little bits and pieces with me. I took the Olympus anyway, thinking that I might get a few shots of the waterfall, which I did, or divert to Niva where I have a long-standing wish to revisit a location, which I didn’t.

the waterfall at Foroglio

Having spent half an hour on the waterfall, I went back to the car to switch over to intrepid mountain hiker mode, and swap the Ricoh for the Olympus. It was at this point I realised that I hadn’t actually packed the Ricoh.  So I jammed the Olympus with the 14-54mm lens in the now too small daypack I’d brought, having succesfully added cameras to the list of things my memory has decided not to bother with any more.

Oh well. Next time, maybe.

Here’s how I see it: a small DSLR with the mirror and viewfinder lopped off, coupled with a small zoom lens, which, when switched on, is actually not a lot smaller (and arguably considerably more distracting) than its “full size” brother. It introduces the confusion of two parallel and essentially incompatible lens ranges (yes, you can bolt the ZD 7-14, 50-200, or indeed 300mm on the front of the E-P1, but for heaven’s sake, why??). It produces seriously distorted images which can only be corrected in-camera, baked into JPGs, or in Olympus’ own awful Studio software. And it skirts with being seriously over-priced.

Addressing the issues like the viewfinder and producing the promised “pro” version is most likely going to produce something only marginally smaller than the E-420 or E-620.

Ok, I get the plus points: it has workable Live View (which is just as well), it’s pretty, and you can stick all sorts of exotic, obsolete and expensive lenses on the front and get results almost as good as the kit zoom.

Hopefully having failed to make much money from an excellent series of E-System cameras thanks largely to the pixel-peeping mindset prevalent with all reviewers, Olympus will now cash in big time on selling this new set of Emperor’s clothes to the same people, and then invest the proceeds in a worthy successor to the E-1. Yes, I know, you’ve also got a tower in Paris you can sell me.

—-

I want a small camera with interchangeable lenses, but I don’t want a crippled DSLR with the top sawn off. The original PEN, and the half-fram Pentax mini-cameras actually compromised by using a smaller format. We’ve heard enough about with the 4/3 format is equal to APS or even “full frame”, and in most cases I agree. So, why not go to the logical conclusion and use a “half 4/3”, larger than the standard digicam, but smaller than DSLRs ?  Then we could see a genuinely small system camera. My feeling is the only company with the guts and vision to try this is Ricoh. Now there’s a thought - a Ricoh GR-D with interchangeable lenses. Yes please!