Guru Fatigue

in General Rants , Monday, April 30, 2012

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to have a bit of a clean-up of the various photography and photographer RSS feeds I’ve been following.  Although I hadn’t intended it that way, the ones that got the chop are, to be blunt, the self-appointed gurus. The ones that stayed tend not to be selling anything. I realised that I’ve been getting far too hung up on various people’s opinions that just don’t matter.  We seem to be going through some kind of bubble, where a whole slew of people who’ve owned a camera for about 5 years have set up websites left, right & center setting out their stalls and inscribing the Truth on their stone tablets. Usually there’s more than a whiff of cod mysticism involved, or some slightly nauseating goody two shoes humanism. And all wrapped up in one of three visual recipes: wild over saturation, fake cross processing, or long exposure complete with vignetting. And spread over countless e-pages in e-books, or even,

, print books.  Travel advertising as travel photography, IKEA prints as art. Sadly the amount of original thought is very low, and awareness of any kind of context or history of photography is even lower. It’s like the world was reset with Digital, or maybe with expired film in crap cameras.

About 10 years ago, things were a little different. I learnt a lot from Michael Reichmann’s Luminous Landscape - which started out around 1998 if I remember correctly, which took a rather different approach. No preachy tone, although plenty of opinions, but opinions, suggestions and pointers backed up with many years of experience. A few others are worthy of note, but none have had the staying power of the Luminous Landscape - even if, personally, both it & I have moved on, and we’re not really in the same space anymore. But actually after all these years it’s still the gold standard.

Much of the preachiness involves the exhortation to “Follow Your Vision (but give me money so I can tell you what it is)” (does that bring the same analogy to your mind as it does to mine) ?  But I’m cutting loose. You can’t buy inspiration in an eBook. Inspiration is all around, it’s free, and uniquely personal. Not everybody in the world can be a great photographer, but everybody can follow their own personal journey through photography. And personally I find it a lot more rewarding when I manage to forget all the gurus whispering in my ears.

Save Hermann Hesse’s legacy

in General Rants , Thursday, April 19, 2012

Ever since I moved to Ticino I have been saddened by the apparent total lack of respect that planning authorities and property speculators (who by some wild coincidence may well be closely related) have for the history and beauty of the landscape.  It is incredibly striking to drive from Lugano along the lakeside road towards Porlezza and then Menaggio on Lake Como. As soon as you cross the border, the banal, ugly mass of concrete blockhouses gives way to a more gentle mix of older and newer building styles which blend in to the landscape and give true atmosphere, unlike the frankly ugly and increasingly soulless Lugano. Of course it’s not all black & white: Italian chaos and disrespect for the environment is alive and well even there. But 100 or even 50 years ago Lugano could rival comparable northern Italian cities for the elegance of it’s civic architecture. Now, well it would make a British 1960’s town planner blush.

But the ongoing march of the bulldozer, crane and cement mixer has plumbed new depths in Ticino. Property speculators now plan to cram a set of square concrete boxes (than you so much, Mario Botta…) into the small park in front of the second house Herman Hesse lived in in Montagnola, Casa Rossa.  This takes not only selfishness, greed and tastelessness to new heights, but it adds in a healthy dose of blind stupidity as well. Ticino lives increasingly from tourism, despite the fact that it does very little to deserve it, and somehow expects the Tourist Euro / Dollar / Yen as a Divine Right. But now to deface with legalised vandalism an important part of one of the richest tourist attractions on the territory to build a few extra lake view boxes (priced in Roubles, no doubt) is beyond shameful.

Even if Hermann Hesse’s legacy was not popular (which is not the case - visitor numbers to the museum are increasing), the lack of respect for a valuable cultural legacy of worldwide interest puts the responsible authorities somewhere near the Taliban in this respect.

There is actually a photographic angle to this, because the issue is being championed by veteran Swiss photographer Giosanna Crivelli, and she has created a dedicated website with further information and a multi-language petition which anybody can sign.

If you also feel that this is a step too far, please take a few minutes to add your voice.

Oh well, that’s blown my chances of Swiss citizenship. Again

The Death of Film

in Film , Saturday, March 10, 2012

The recent announcement of the demise of Kodak Ektachrome E100G - along with all other Kodak slide films - however predictable, came as quite a shock. At the time my stocks of E100G, in my opinion the best slide film ever, were 10 rolls. I’ve just ordered another 50 3 5-packs and whatever loose rolls my supplier can find, and in the meantime I’ve used 5. It will be interesting to see if Fuji are still making my second favourite, Velvia 100F, when I run out of E100G. It was never a very popular type, and that makes it a marginal product line in a very marginal product range. But if not Fuji, who else? Agfa? REALLY? The writing really seems to be on the wall now.

Of course this reopens the age-old Filme Vs Digital arguments. I’ve long had a foot firmly in both camps, and at the same time I’ve been an avid reader of the saner end of the ongoing debate. There are countless very persuasive exponents for and against fim, both making very convincing points. If you remember Paul Whitehouse’s character, Indecisive Dave, from the Fast Show - well, that’s me when it comes to film versus digital.

Apart from the overall arguments about image quality, film brings some practical issues with it. First of all, it needs to be developed. Since I really only work with slide film, then this means lab E6 processing. Long gone are the days of 24 hour turnaround - or even 1 or 2 hours in pro labs. Now it’s a week if you’re lucky. I recently discovered a convenient and remarkably well preserved local photo shop (no, not the abomination from Adobe) that would take charge of my films and could be trusted to ensure that the lab they get sent to follows my instructions and doesn’t cut them up. And sometimes even with 2-3 days turnaround. However, for the last batch of 5 I was charged CHF25 each. That’s basically $25. Each. Plus the initial cost, factoring in delivery, we reach CHF40 per film. That’s untenable, especially as one film had only 4 exposed frames due a mid-roll battery failure on my XPan.

Then there’s scanning. When all is going well, I actually quite enjoy scanning, up to a point. I’ve got a well tuned workflow, and things usually come out as I expect, but one thing I can’t easily fix are dirt and scratches due to careless processing. Processing that cost CHF40, that is. And as I’ve written before, my Minolta MultiScan Pro is showing signs of old age. Dust remains a constant issue, but a good supply of canned air - although good canned air is getting harder to find - and a VisibleDust sensor brush for awkward cases helps considerably.

The impatiently awaited new Plustek Medium Format scanner might be a god-send, at a price. But with no new film to feed into it, it might end up missing the bus.

But really, is it all worth it? Having recently seen what really high-end digital can do, the image quality argument is hard to make. Nevertheless, in my opinion, a correctly exposed piece of Ektachrome, or Fujifilm, has an immediate presence that (my) digital cameras can’t quite match. Of course the density and saturation of film can easily be replicated in digital post processing, but the sharpness of a good slide film is another matter…if, of course, you have a scanner and a scanning technique that can retain this sharpness into a digital file.

Essentially I’m not really fixated of film, but I am very attached to my XPan, and that doesn’t do digital. I’ve been having some thoughts about how to transition to digital panoramic photography - or perhaps transition back - but that’s the subject of another post.

In the meantime, I’m off to round up the last straggling rolls of Kodak Ektachrome E100G.

Goðafoss, Iceland, Feb 2012. A location that has “designed for XPan” written all over it. One day, maybe, I’ll finally get to see it in winter in good weather, having failed at the last 4 attempts. But I guess this is the last time I’ll shoot it on E100G.

In Transit

in General Rants , Friday, February 17, 2012

I haven’t had much time or indeed inclination to blog recently, but since I’m currently about one third of the way through the Stopover From Hell in Copenhagen airport on my way to Iceland, I thought I might as well use the time for something other than warching Father Ted videos. This is also the first time I’ve tried posting from the iPad which I got as a surprise early birthday present last week.

I may well be here considerably longer, as Icelandair, which in my experience offers the worst landside customer service of any airline I’ve ever travelled with (I could go on but it would get ugly very quickly) have got me on standby, after I not only booked well over 2 months ago, but even forked out for Premium Economy hoping it would cushion the pain. The first leg, by SAS from Milan, was an absolute pleasure, as SAS usually is.

Leaving, on a jet plane…

UPDATE Icelandair have upgraded me to Business. Best. Airline. Ever.

Adobe TimeWaster Pro CS Whatever

in General Rants , Sunday, January 29, 2012

The last 5 weeks or so have been pure hell. Essentially non-stop 12 hour working days, with hectic weekends in between. No time for photography. No time for life. This weekend was supposed to be the start of some sort of recovery period. I spent most of Saturday comatose, but today, Sunday, after shovelling last night’s snow fall, I thought I’d spend some quality time printing out a few images. Relaxing, enjoyable, right ? Yeah, sure. So come 5:30pm I’m ready to kill somebody. In fact if I saw somebody, anybody, with an Adobe corporate t-shirt on, I’d whack them hard with the snow shovel.

Having been deceitfully tricked by Adobe into upgrading to a Photoshop CS5 I neither needed nor wanted before Christmas, I finally got around to trying to print from it today, to my Epson 3800.

I had read, ages ago, that Adobe, principally, but with Apple and Epson’s help, had managed to screw up printing (nothing important, just printing) and that there was some issue with v2 ColorSync profiles.

Some issue. Right: like print absolutely F*CK ALL except a pale cyan background.  I’d heard about this, vaguely, but I though it had to do with white areas having a cast, not the whole print.  I tried everything. Reinstalled the 3800 driver, re-started, etc etc, eventually dug into ColorSync and found that the profile (built with ColorMunki and carefully optimised) was indeed a v4 (naturally, since that’s up to date, and worked fine with Photoshop CS3 on the same OS - 10.6.8 - and the same printer). Trying a v2 profile, for a different paper, gave me a print.

So now I’ve got to rebuild all my profiles. Wasting stacks of paper. Until the next time I fall for one of Adobe’s useless, eye-wateringly expensive, bug-ridden pieces of crap they call “upgrades”.

Please, somebody, anybody, out us out of our misery and create a realistic Photoshop alternative. PLEASE!!!