Categories
Books

Digiterati

For someone who has mainly read the O’Reilly animal books, Adobe Photoshop CS and Digital Photography: Expert Techniques have been a completely different experience.

Both books are beautifully produced, rich with graphics and using the glossier paper that is typical with highly graphic publications. However, like the animal books, both are rich in detail with lots of examples and tutorials.

The Adobe Photoshop CS: One on One book is by a well known Adobe trainer, Deke McClelland, and includes a 2-hour tutorial on CD. As you step through the video you can follow along with the examples (also loaded on the CD), as you learn all the ins and outs of Adobe Photoshop. Though the book is focused on the newest Photoshop, CS (version 8.0), I found that most of the examples worked equally well with my Photoshop 5.0 on Windows and Photoshop 6.0 on the Mac.

I really liked the comfortable writing style, and the fact that the author embeds his own opinions into the text. That’s important – you don’t want someone to just tell you how to use Unsharp; you want someone who will tell you why you would want to use Unsharp over the other Sharp filters (even though he will also demonstrate these, too).

Photo correction is a major component of the tutorial, but much of it is focused on some pretty extensive photo retouching, in addition to building rich graphics for publication. This book will be particularly good for someone who wants to learn some nifty new tricks with Photoshop–including good examples working with the layers, which I don’t use probably as much as I should. However, I did use the book to help me tweak the production quality of some images I was trying to print out (to inkjet).

The images in the book are wonderful, and the production quality is above average. This is not a cheap book. If I have one problem with it, it’s that each chapter has an introduction and summary section associated with it. You know what I’m talking about: “Here’s what you’ll learn…” and “Here’s what you learned” with questions and answers. I’m not a kid, I don’t need this type of assistance. However, this is only a couple of pages in each chapter, and easily ignored. So ignore it, unless you like that sort of thing.

Good book, could definitely recommend for all beginning to beginning/intermediate Photoshop users.

The next book, Digital Photography: Expert Techniques had a little more appeal for me primarily because I don’t necessarily use all the nifty tricks of Photoshop, but I would like to improve my use of the digital camera.

This is an unsual book. As with the Photoshop book, it’s full of beautiful images, but the focus of the book is how to set up and take the best image directly, rather than using Photoshop later to try and recover the image. And it covers everything, including the equipment you’ll need, why, and basic photography how-tos and information such as focal lengths and the use of gray cards for accurate color balancing.

Once you have your image, the book then gets into basic digital photo manipulation and correction, but with an assumption that you have had some exposure to Photoshop. The reason for this is that the two books are meant to complement not compete with each other.

Digital Photography has chapters such as “Retouching and Rescuing Photos”, “Sell it on the Web” (which includes some good advice on creating portfolios and how to make animated images), “Bringing out the Best Picture”, and so on. It also has a chapter called “Creating Fictitious Photos”. For the photo purists out there, “Creating Fictitous Photos” will drive you crazy. The chapter focuses on how to create images by merging multiple images, or removing entire objects–even how to create a collage! This is a twisty chapter; if you like to play around with your images, you’re going to like this chapter.

All in all, if you’re not experienced with photography and have or are planning on buying a digital camera, and then investing in either Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, this book would be a very good use of your money and time. Even if you’re fairly experienced with photography, there are some interesting tricks in the book that should make this is a good buy.

I think that O’Reilly’s going to do well with these new brands. I believe that digital photography is going to open photography up to a whole new audience, and the members all going to want to know how to do great photos. The book packaging– covers, graphics, and the production quality– are perfect for selling the books.

(Once you convince people that O’Reilly books aren’t just for geeks, anymore. )

Now, would I write for either of these series? Not a chance.

I am in the midst of taking my photos in a new direction, and taking a lot of my work back to ground zero. Writing for a book like these is best left to those people who have had their ground zero moments. Additionally, I’m not a heavy hitter with Photoshop, having just started mastering Unsharp. So it would make no sense for me to work on this series, I couldn’t do the books justice.

They sure are pretty books though. I wonder if I can convince O’Reilly to do a second edition of Practical RDF, but using photographs? I can demonstrate an RDF Photography Finder.

Categories
People Photography

Walker Evans: Objective purist

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I recently finished a wonderful biography on Walker Evans: Walker Evans: A Biography by Belinda Rathbone. Some critics have said that the book reads a little too matter of fact to be interesting, but that’s a perfect type of biography for a man like Walker Evans–an objective biography for an objective man.

In the book I discovered that Evans was born in St. Louis, though he didn’t live here long, moving to Chicago, and eventually ending up in New York. He came from a dysfunctional family, was himself married twice, had numerous affairs, almost always with married women, and preferred rooms decorated in black, white, and gray. Additionally, I found out that he was not a particularly good student, kept flunking Latin, and always saw himself as a writer. Even after his photographic career was established, he saw himself as a writer, an interesting fact which I’ll get into in more detail in a later essay.

From the start, Evans rejected much of the contemporary style of photography that was prevalent in his time (and to some extent, still in vogue today). One style of photography popular with art photographers at the time was called pictorialism and rather than utilizing the power of the camera to capture images as is, featured created images that were contrived rather than found. You still see these types of photos today when a woman or man is posed holding an apple, looking pensively off into shadows, staged next to a carefully undecorated and plain white wall.

The second style popular at that time was modernistic photography, subjects of which are best described by a quote from M. F. Agha, art director of Conde Nast:

Eggs (any style). Twenty shoes, standing in a row. A skyscaper , taken from a modernist angle. Ten tea cups standing in a row. A factory chimney seen through the ironwork of a railroad bridge (modernistic angle). The eye of a fly enlarged 2000 times. The eye of an elephant (same size). The interior of a watch. Three different heads of one lady superimposed. The interior of a garbage can. More eggs…

One can see why Evans rejected both pictorialism and the modernistic photographic styles, but he drifted about for a time, trying to establish what type of photography he wanted to do.

It was after seeing a photograph by Paul Strand, of a blind woman with a hand lettered sign reading “Blind” hung around her neck that served as Evan’s inspiration. As Rathbone wrote:

The picture implied an encroaching crisis of the American dream of prosperity, but it showed no obvious emotion. The fact that the photographer had stolen his photograph was pointedly expressed by the stark sign hanging around the woman’s neck, as if the subject had come with her own caption. Was the portrait cruel or sympathetic? It was the fact that it was neither, that it appeared not to reveal the photographer’s feelings at all, that intrigued Evans.

…that it appeared not to reveal the photographer’s feeling at all. If there is any key to Evans, it is contained in that one sentence. In all of his photos, not once does he impose his view, his thoughts and feelings, between the subject and the audience. He disdained photos that deliberately attempted to manipulate the viewers emotions; particularly those that used sentiment, which he considered contrived.

The distinguishing component of all Evans’ work, was his objectivity.

evans.jpg

But Evans wasn’t just known for his objectivity and his excellent eye for an image — he was also known, or should I say, not known for his grasp of the mechanics of photography. He would ruin several images by his somewhat haphazard lab skills, and lose other images because of under or over exposure. It was not through knowing the mechanics of photography that Evans achieved his work; it was through his exceptional ability to see an extraordinary image from every day things; and then to patiently stalk that image, returning day after day, if needed, to capture it on film. He would never change the scene, or add or subtract elements from it. This, to him, would be completely dishonest. The most he would do would wait for a different light, or if he were taking photographs of people, wait until they were either unaware of the camera, or had relaxed from being in front of the camera.

Needless to say, Evans was almost always late in delivering on his assignments, and drove more than one person to distraction by his exacting nature. Lucky for us, he was not a conciliatory person.

evans_subway3.jpg

In fact, one of my favorite Evans photograph (another one I can’t locate to reproduce here) was a somewhat blurry photo of Evans’ second wife, Isabelle Boeschenstein, wearing evening dress, hair in her face, lighting a cigarette at what looks to be some kind of gathering. It was not the photographic quality of the image that caught my eye; it was how much information about the woman was captured in that one simple photo. It is astonishing.

Evans did not rely on photographic tricks to make his images, and rarely did more in the darkroom then crop shots. But he was obsessed with how they were presented at shows, usually asking to hang his works himself, with no one else present. For the first edition of Now Let Us Praise Famous Men he was determined that the images for the book be perfect, and worked almost daily with the engraver to make minor adjustments to correct an engraving until it reflected the image he had of it in his mind. From Rathbone:

The wrinkles on the Burroughses’ bedsheets did not show up clearly enough; could he make them sharper? Could he show more clearly the tear in the pillowcase? Could he bring out the texture of the wooden wall and the objects around the fireplace? Could he soften the lines on Allie Mae’s face, sharpen the creases on Bud Fields’ overalls? Under Evans’ scrupulous direction, several of the plates had to be made over again entirely, while small imperfections in others were painstakingly corrected.

The engraver was too helpful at one point, and removed dead bugs from a photo of a bed, and Evans refused to allow the image be used as it was, and the fleas had to be added back in.

This reminds me of earlier discussions about the purists view of photography. Despite the care taken with the engravings for the book, Evans did very little with the actual images himself. Because of this, and his belief in photographs reflecting the image as taken–the true image–we would consider Evans a purist. I’m not sure what he would make of today’s digital cameras and Photoshop, though I have a feeling he would like the camera. So much easier to take those unexpected, hidden photos.

evans_girl_in_fulton_street.jpg

Earlier I published a link to a baby squirrel image that had been rescued from a mediocre photograph through the use of Photoshop. I have no doubts that this is not something that Evans would do.

No, if Walker Evans wanted a photo of a baby squirrel, it would be because he discovered the baby squirrel by accident one day and was struck by the image for some reason*. He would then get someone to hire him to take photographs of Native American wildlife, and would use the money to purchase new camera requirement, and probably to take other images in the neighborhood–the broken fence, the lost cat notices on the telephone poles, the old woman buying tomatoes at the market. He would then set up his camera by the baby squirrel’s hole, and if the baby didn’t oblige with the proper image one day, he would return the next. If a week goes by without the image, and by then the squirrel was too old, Evans would return the next year, much to the consternation of his employer (who he would still charm, even while irritating).

But by the time he was done, you’d have a rich, fascinating image of a squirrel, sitting in a hole of a tree, the grain of which would stand out in the image, almost as if the image was three-dimensional. The light wouldn’t be the proper light, it would be the perfect light, and the squirrel wouldn’t be enticed to pose–it would be acting as a baby squirrel acts, normally.

And it wouldn’t be a photo of an adorable baby squirrel, eliciting cries of, “How cute!” It would be a photo of a rodent.

*I doubt Evans would be interested in a photo of a baby squirrel.

Categories
RDF

Door opens and a single candle appears

Who says you can’t have fun with RDF? Not the creators of this online game that’s who.

The witches look at your naked body and titter. Then they see your bar of soap and take it away, muttering about scented baths and candles

(Thanks to Peter Van Dijick)

Categories
Weblogging

But I like the box better

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

When I started this weblog three years ago, it was a continuation of my web site that I’ve had since 1995. As such, it focused primarily on technology, with an occasional aside into science or art or literature. I started with a free Manila-based weblog hosted by Userland, which was removed sometime last year, probably because it hadn’t been updated for so long. I regret now that I didn’t copy some of the entries, but not too much because I didn’t really write anything special during that time.

In my first few months, I rarely wrote just to write, to be a writer; I was intimidated by the medium. Unlike my other writing, in articles and books and online, weblogging lacked abstraction. I could view the statistics and watch the numbers of readers rise and fall and realized that there was a core of readers who would come by daily who didn’t do so because they followed a link to a tutorial or found a page from a search engine – they were returning to read me, and I didn’t know who they were.

It became a game with me to write a few posts in a certain manner or on certain topics and then watch the statistics to see if my readership would increase or fall off. I wasn’t writing, though I was using words to the best of my ability; I was fishing, and trying different bait. Moreso, I was trying to carve my space into a small audience amidst others who were famous (at least within this subculture), or very talented, and occasionally both.

Among these others, the first weblogger I started reading was Dave Winer, but I eventually connected up with the Cluetrain gang through the writings of Chris Locke, otherwise known as Rageboy. This was back before 9/11, the event that sent Americans scrambling for guns under their beds, flags to hang from their trucks, and made weblogging what it is today. (At least, until some other pivotal moment that will make weblogging what it is today, tomorrow.)

Back then, in 2001 we were trying to understand what weblogs were, and to me, they were all about the writing. I wrote the following, till preserved at Rageboy’s site:

Within these things called weblogs there are gems of creativity and brilliance that take my breath away. There’s writing that’s so good that I feel gifted with the words.

Sometimes the people who write the weblogs are known; most of the time, they aren’t. Doesn’t matter, though. All that should matter is the writing. It’s the words that count – everything else is just fluff, sparkle, and zazz.

That was in November of 2001 during the time of the infamous Blogmatch between Winer and Locke, which focused on the question of that time: what is a weblog. Winer said that …weblogs are rational writing, that’s why it’s so close, if you’re serious about it, to academic writing. To which Locke responds with:

There are two things I want most in life. The first is to be taken seriously. The second is to be mistaken for an academic. No wait, there are three. The third is to set my hair on fire.

Today Dave Winer works for Harvard and hosts BloggerCons and talks about weblogs and politics; while Chris Locke paints posts with pictures, some naughty, some nice, about narcissim and new age cranks, pulling words reluctantly from the page like a fisherman heaves fish, line caught and fighting, into a boat. (And Voidstar preserved the Blogmatch, to which we owe him, “Thanks”. )

Through Chris I was introduced to another Chris, otherwise known as Stavors the Wonder Chicken. Today Chris/Stavros appears in an Empty Bottle but back then it was Waeguk Wasn’t Soup.:

I don’t beat small children senseless, although I have been known to swallow them whole when they cross my bridge without permission.

I should clarify what is no doubt an overwhelming impression that I hate Korea. I don’t. Well, sometimes I do, goddamnit, but it’s more complicated than that. I do hate the chaos, the filth, the racism and casual cruelty, but there are scores of Korean people I just love to bits. I live in hell. My Liver is a big, misshapen bubbly fat-encrusted abomination that keeps functioning through sheer power of will I’m grumpy. Old Korean men – fuck, how I hate them with a white-hot eye-popping passion. I’ve got no problem with people eating dogs, if they want to. Shit, I’ve done it.

I’m afraid I’ve walked through the portal into bizarro-world.

Sometimes, my mind reels. Other times it just kinda sashays around, coyly. Sometimes I surprise myself. I don’t fucking know.That’s cool with me. I’m pure misanthrope, with enough scorn to go around for all of humanity. At the same time, love love love. It’s weird being me.

As Chris Locke would say, What a pleasure to read good writing once in a while, even if it does make you want to puke.

(Others concur because our Chicken is now destined for fame and glory, and it behooves us to toddle on over to his place and put in links to our favorite ravings from that grumpy old man with the pickled liver who doesn’t swallow children whole.)

What are weblogs is a question that keeps re-appearing over time, and as new webloggers come along who begin to question the format and all the written and unwritten rules. The issue of what is a weblog splits into two major categories: what makes a proper weblog, and what makes a proper weblogger. Over the last three years, I’ve watched both being defined and redefined again and again, and have spent, as I look back now, an inordinate amount of time defending weblogs against proper weblogging etiquette and form and webloggers from being classified as everything from political activists to citizen journalists.

The question of weblog form has resurfaced again this week, when Eric Meyer of CSS fame wrote that Weblogs are temporarily broken. He based this posting on the reverse chronological order of our front pages, and started a conversation carried by other webloggers including an odd one by Scoble about just wanting to know that the rabbit was eaten being good enough.

The proper form for a weblog was a large topic of discussion once long ago based on an article that Meg Hourihan wrote for O’Reilly titled What We’re Doing When We Blog. In it, Meg started out promisingly with the following, in response to American Journalism Review article:

In her article, Catherine forgoes the more traditional weblogs-are-links-plus-commentary definition to carve out a new meaning for the word, limited to the type of blogs she reads. But Catherine’s analysis misses some of the very subtleties that distinguish weblogs from other writing. Rather than rant that Catherine just “doesn’t get it,” it seems to me that her article, and others that are similar, are perfect opportunities for the blogging community to talk about our own evolution.

But then wrote:

If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share – the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.

The article received almost universal acclaim, but I wasn’t one of the admiring crowd. I wrote a critical essay but then I pulled it based on some misplaced sense of honor, which I’ve since shed – not the honor, but that honor could be misplaced. However, others also responded including Stavros, (and here), Jonathon Delacour, and Jeff Ward.

Stavros wrote:

How tedious is this, how perfunctory and lacking of any sense of the mad, wild spirit of creativity that is tearing through the souls of (fill in the names or pseudonyms of your favorite bloggers here)? Sorry, Meg, but this piece strikes me as soulless, by-the-numbers, and regrettably keen to dumb things down as much as possible, custom-designed for Big Media to understand and quote it. Calculated to be Just what the Market Wants.

Like me and Stavros, Jonathon Delacour was also struck by the reduction of weblogging to the format, writing in a post (that’s since been pulled from his active archive, proving yet again that old posts never fade away, as long as they live in the memories of your readers–dammit):

Just like those photo-technicians, Meg Hourihan defines blogging in terms of the format: reverse-chronological and time-stamped. In this sterile depiction, the key elements of a blogging post are the links, the time-stamp, and the permalink.

God give me strength. I could describe a Walker Evans photograph by saying that it was taken with a Zeiss Protar lens on a tripod-mounted 8 x 10 Deardorff view camera, at f/45 to maximize the depth of field and with a G filter to emphasize the clouds. All of which is true but, frankly, who gives a shit? Such a description refuses to acknowledge that Evans’ image of a highway corner in Reedsville, West Virginia in 1936 is not just visually complex and gorgeous to look at. Evans’ radical approach to picture-making subverted many of his contemporaries- most deeply ingrained beliefs about pictorial beauty and the purpose of documentary photography.

Which is not to say there’s no place for an explanation of the mechanics of weblogging: tools, posts, links, time-stamps, permalinks. But wouldn’t it be better to leave those prosaic details for later? And to start by mapping out an imaginative vision of the medium’s potential?

Jeff Ward, though, likened weblogging format to a grammar, which in the end fosters a new form of communication. Returning to Jonathon’s photography analogy, Jeff wrote:

The technology of photography is indeed of great importance, for example, in examining how the small hand-held camera and high speed films fundamentally changed the content of photography. In a mature medium, these questions are less important. But still, Walker Evans’s nearly recursive move back into heavy view cameras deeply effected the character of the images he produced, when contrasted to his street photography with roll-film cameras. The grammar of the machine affects the content. I gave up infrared photography largely for the reasons Jonathon suggested; people didn’t care about the photographs, only the technology. But, how old is blogging? Shouldn’t we be asking precisely these sort of questions?

Weblog as format continued to surface from time to time in other contexts. There is the issue of the long-format webloggers as compared to the linkers (the link/comment blogging), and what is or is not “good weblog writing”. Halley Suitt recently discussed this:

With a new project I’m working on, I am teaching some non-bloggers how to blog and it’s really interesting to show someone the ropes. I have a whole different attitude about blogging than I used to.

For instance, I think brevity is the soul of blog wit more than ever. Look at my archives and see some of my first year’s worth of posts – too too long and ponderous I think.

Short and sweet – the best blog is a fresh blog full of lots of little posts.

Halley did not get universal agreement for her ’short and sweet’ assertion, and she would later point out examples of longer writing that she felt were acceptable. However, if you ask many old time webloggers what a weblog post is, they’ll say it’s a link to something interesting, with a short comment, no matter how many of us fill pages and pages with writing (causing all sorts of havoc with weblog tools finetuned for links and blurbs).

How much we syndicate is another issue of format that has occupied much of our writing. In this case of proper weblogging format those of us who provide excerpts in our syndication feeds are pushed to provide full feeds. The reason is that others who link to hundreds, thousands, of webloggers can then read many thoughts at a single gulp, disregarding carefully maintained weblog appearances, thoughtfully crafted writing, and how can one differentiate so many voices compressed into one simple aggregator.

Or as I wrote in The Gluttony of Information:

Rather than fight information overload, give in to it. Embrace it. Accept complete saturation as nothing less than that which is to be achieved. Apply the same practices to our consumption of information as we’ve applied to food and consumer goods and foreign policy, because we can never have too much.

After all this reading about RSS today, I finally get it. I finally understand the magic:

RSS is the both the McDonald’s and Wal-Mart of data”

(And then there’s the topic of RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 and Atom. I have so many writings on these that I can’t link to all of them – you can just search on Atom to get a feel for how much this has impacted on my writing. What would we write about, if we didn’t have RSS and Atom?)

Proper form, short and sweet, aggregated and conjoined: sometimes the demands of the weblogging medium have grown so large, and the format so important that I’m reminded of a time my mother received a present for Christmas one year that was beautifully wrapped. It had gorgeous paper and an intricate paper flower surrounded by glittery ribbons of many colors. After opening it and seeing what was inside, some silly knick knack, she laughed and said, “I think I’ll toss the gift and keep the box”.

I wrote the following April, 2002, in a post titled My Weblog has Fallen Down:

A weblogger’s nightmare:

I am looking at a weblog page with a Google box to the right and a NY Times box to the left and several buttons with coffee mugs all over them that generate OPML, RSS, and various other assorted and sundry XML flavors. Within the page there is this outline with links and plus signs and you click on the plus signs and the content is expanded to show even more outlines, which can expand to even more outlines, and on and on and on.

And I see myself hunting desperately through the page knowing if I look hard enough, deep enough, I will find the truth. I will find what the weblogger has to say.

Finally, after I click enough of the little plus signs, and get rid of all these boxes that keep opening up and tell Google to shut the fuck up for just one second, I find it.

Hear the words of The Weblogger:

You are The Doc Searls Weblog!
You are located at http://doc.weblogs.com/

You are rather jolly. You write a lot of geeky stuff. You are so fond of penguins that you edit a journal about them.

At which point my head implodes from one mind bomb too many, and the weblog falls over and the Internet gets sucked up into this huge black hole and the universe as we know it ceases to exist.

What is a proper weblog. Might as well ask, what is proper writing and hope to find a universal answer that will satisfy everyone. Or as I wrote wrote in April, 2002:

We’ll never know what is or is not good weblog writing, because the writing is as unique as the number of writers, as good as the worst of us and as poor as the best. We define the rules and we can break the rules, and the first rule we break is to throw out all our assumptions about ‘what is good writing’.

Categories
Photography

Photography as Maze

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Towards the end of 2001 I started posting photos from my walks or explorations of my neighborhood, using my new digital camera. And though I was pleased at the photos of Yosemite Park, or the Embarcadero and the Golden Gate or Bay Bridges then, I am not as content with them now. Whether this makes sense or not, they fit me then, they don’t fit me now.

yosemite4.jpg

Odd thing is, I see scenes from my memory, that I regret I didn’t photograph: the homeless lady dressed properly who made her home on the Embarcadero benches by my condo; the boats nestled among the bridge bases; the graffiti covering the abandoned warehouses, and the birds among the tall grasses along those fingers of the Bay that stretched inwards.

Still, there were a few Muir photos I like.

muirwoods1.jpg

Photography is learned, and our skills grow over time, as we learn the tools and techniques–like climbing the steps in the path in the Muir photo. What I’ve come to discover, though, is that the art of photography is more like a maze than a simple path.