I’ve taken to reading a lot of photogrpahy blogs of what I would call serious photographers, although I make money in photography from time to time, which makes me a semi-professional photographer, I would not refer to myself as a serious photographer. I digress. I’ve been reading a lot about how different papers react with different developers, chemicals and other assorted things, and I must confess, even when I was shooting film, I still relied on the lab to get me the results I wanted, this morning “The Online Photographer” had a post metioning the effect of cyan filtration with VC papers and talking about the contrasting techniques of trial and error experimentation of the traditional print method, versus the instantaneous methods using todays digital imaging options of post processing. This brought me to the realisation that I hit every few months of how little I actually know about the traditional print photography thing.
Now having worked in computers for a long time, I’ve come to understand that a good foundation in the basics is a very important thing from a technical perspective, experience in generic networking technologies can mean the difference between a PC engineer with CCNA after his name and a damn great network engineer. The damn great engineer may have no letters, but has a solid foundation in the underlying technologies, the other guy probably only has a 4 day Cisco course under his belt (obviously having a CCNA and being a damn fine network engineer are in no way connected, it’s just an example of experience vs. classroom smarts)
On to my point; I now find myself wondering, by having missed out on the whole self-developer, self-printing, darkroom in the closet thing, if I’m missing some very fundamental foundations that are causing my photgraphy to be less than what it is? How do you go about finding out what fundamentals you are missing out on? How much of the more traditional process technique would many people consider a good base to digital techniques, and how much is obsolete to the digital process?
Difficult questions, I’m happy to listen to anyone that can offer examples of traditional methods that are missing from my repetoire that I might only have gotten from being a “serious” photographer when I would have used film, that might substantially improve my ability to make better digital images now.
Every now and then I read a book which I find particularly illuminating or useful, I can’t always pigeon hole them into book of the month or book of the year, because there are so many good books out there, so I normally grade a book with a time scale that is commensurate with the level of esteem in which I hold it. This time I’m voting for what has to be the best photography book I’ve read all year (so far). The vote for my “Book for Spring 2006″ goes to David Ward, with his recent (2004) title “Landscape Within: Insights and Inspiration for Photographers“.
There is no discussion of f/stops or shutter speeds except in the broadest most general terms, almost no discussion of technique. But what this almost philosophical photography book will give you is perhaps the sort of information on artistic interpretation within the context of photography that most other books fail to cover. Some people may find David’s writing a little terse or overly complex, but words have very specific meanings and David strives to use an extensive vocabulary to convey his exact thoughts and feelings about any particular subject. This is not something you can hop, skip and jump through, but if you can give this book the patience it commands then in my opinion, it holds great rewards and enlightenment for the reader. I’d love to hear from any one else that has read it to know their thoughts. David Ward is a contributing writer for Outdoor Photography and is a tutor for Light and Land Photography, which runs photography courses/holidays taught by some of the very biggest names in the world of landscape photography.
Soon, I’m not certain exactly when, but sometime in the reasonbly near future, there will come a time when Digital Camera CCD (CMOS, or whatever other technology is coming down the road) will be sufficient to capture film like resolution and detail with ease and relatively low cost. Shortly after this time large CCD’s (or whatever) will be cheaper and more reliable to manufacture in the same way we’ve seen from CPU fabricators. I will welcome this day with relish, because we can all get back to the fundamentals of creating great images, practicing our technique and worring about aspects of our image making other than if we have a good enough resolution to go to A3.
Right now, I need a camera with better resolution, but cannot bring myself to go back to using film. I look forward to the future with interest, to see what it holds for us, but most of all I look forward to going back to creating images, where the resolution of your images was a minor worry, not a major one.
One of my favourite photographers just contacted me to inform me about a new HDR tutorial he’s added to his pages. Sean McHugh is the owner of a website called Cambridge in Colour, he’s a fantastic photographer and has a superb understanding of light and photography. If you get a chance go and check it out, and even if you have no interest in HDR, you should take time to go and check out his other great tutorials. Have fun!!
I’ve not blogged this before, so I thought I’d do so now. I know most people have various number crunching programs running on their computers in the background as a part of a larger distributed project (RC5 distributed.net, SETI@Home, etc). So I figured I’d raise awareness of one that I take part in, which I think is quite a cool and useful thing. There’s a distributed project called D2OL that was created for finding drug candidates for different viruses and diseases, it started out with targetting potential biohazard candidates with the impending threat of bioterrorism with things like Anthrax, Smallpox, Ebola, etc. This was followed shortly after with candidates for various strains of SARS, and most recently this week they’ve added targets for the H5N1 strain of Avian Flu.
From their website: “D2OL, was first to use computational methods to deploy targets against Anthrax, Smallpox and Ebola, and now is first to have a credible SARS target (A target conserved between pig and human coronovirus, the suspected virus behind SARS).”
So that’s my soapbox done for the day, if you feel inclined and have nothing else using your idle CPU cycles, then give it a try, and you never know, you might be the one that finds a suitable cure candidate for some pretty nasty diseases. Head on over and take a look.
Highlight of the photographic and musical year for me so far was, a few days ago on 4th April 2006 I got the opportunity to photgraph B.B. King for his last ever UK concert. Whilst the Arena is looking fantastic and much improved visually, the same disorganisation surrounding events and acts still reigns. I got some great shots, and I’m really happy with them, but I’ll outline the timeline below to illustrate how it went.
19:00 - Arrive at Wembley, park car and go to main entrance to collect photographer passes. I also notice that the doors are already open and regular ticket holders are filtering into the arena, which surprises me. Gig is at 20:00 as published. I figure that 1 hour should be enough time to get setup, get some concept of the lighting, setup the kit appropriately, get my bearings and report to whoever is taking care of arrangements.
19:05 - Get sent to the back of the guest list queue by security, told to wait in line until they are ready. Temperature is about 4 degrees celcius and windy, we are all queuing outside.
19:25 - Member of Security notices my camera bag and asks if I’m a photographer, when I reply yes, tehy enquire as to why I’m standing in the back of the guest list queue, apparently there is another seperate queue (more of a huddle as it turns out) of photographers. I join them and start to talk to them (they’re all standing there managing to successfully ignore each other) several of them are quite happy to break the ice, others prefer to remain aloof. Apparently a few of them have a start time of 19:30 for the first act which is news to me and they are quite distressed that the first act is due to start in 5 minutes. I’m not so concerned, because people are still arriving and the guest list queue has not yet moved.
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Looks like I missed the latest upgrade to 2.0.2 of Wordpress, but no one really cares anyway 
it’s done now. All fixed
