New Cameras (and Pentax is Back!)

With the slew of new cameras being released just before PMA, one does get into thinking if a new camera would do a better job than the current one. While I’ve come to realize that a better camera alone does not make better photographs, I know that it makes it easier for the photographer to take better photographs. For example, image stabilization, a larger viewfinder, better high-ISO performance, better lenses, lighter and less bulky equipment, longer-lasting batteries, etc. all contribute to a higher image quality.

Notice that I didn’t say a word about more megapixels! I’ve come to appreciate the 8 MP of the Canon 30D, and I know that they are enough for making a stunning 30 x 40 cm (12 x 16″) print. I’ve not tried printing any bigger, but I suspect that I can make a very good 42 x 60 cm (A2 or 17 x 22″) print, and that’s really enough. Nevertheless, a few more pixels would not hurt — in case I need to crop significantly. But please no more than 12 MP — it makes no sense, just larger files!

Anyhow, I was hoping to see a replacement of the Canon 5D at PMA, but I guess it won’t come until Photokina.

But I digress here… Have you seen the new Pentax bodies and lenses? Fantastic! They are loaded with excellent features (image stabilization, ultra-sonic focusing, good viewfinders, compatibility with manual focus lenses, auto-ISO mode, etc.). I was a Pentax shooter in my film days (1996 — 2003), but when I wanted to go digital, Pentax was delaying and delaying their first dSLR, it was hard to find a store that carried any Pentax products, and Pentax was discontinuing one lens after another… So I bought the Canon 10D, and while I was never excited about the design, size and weight of Canon equipment, I was very happy with the technology, choice and availability.But now the game is turning! The other players too have CMOS sensors, ultra-sonic focusing, live view and so on. Nikon landed a major coup in 2007 with the D300 (very impressive feature set) and D3 (incredible high-ISO performance), and just now Pentax refined its highly successful K10D and introduced the very small, light and amazingly capable K200D. If I were to switch to Pentax, I guess I’d go with K200D, DA 16-50/2.8, FA50/1.4, and DA 60-250/4 (to be released soon).

Amazing! Between 2002 and 2004 I wasn’t even sure if Pentax will manage to survive the jump to digital, and since 2007 they are already up front, contesting the positions of the top players. Way to go, Pentax!

Review of Mastering Digital Black and White

I’m now through with the second book that I recently bought in order to learn more about digital methods for creating good black-and-white photographs. The review of the first one can be found here and today I will talk about Mastering Digital Black and White / A Photographer’s Guide to High Quality Black-and-White Imaging and Printing by Amadou Diallo.

Let me start off by saying that this is a good book. But, and this is a big “but,” the book has little to do with black-and-white photography. Whereas the book by John Beardsworth spent more than half of its pages teaching me general things about image composition, the book by Amadou Diallo spends about 80% of its pages on technical things like tuning Photoshop, calibrating my monitor, etc. Don’t get me wrong, these are all extremely important things that everyone should know, but they simply don’t belong in a book about black and white photography! No one in this day and age starts out immediately with black-and-white photography. We all learn photography, composition and basic Photoshop editing in color. At some point we want to experiment with black-and-white, and we do not need all this stuff repeated in a text about black-and-white!

But enough ranting! Who is this book for? It’s definitely for the technically oriented photographer, someone who does not care or already has mastered the creative and artistic part of photography and who is looking to understand the ins and outs of the digital process. If you are just starting with digital, you should probably look somewhere else for help. If you’ve already read a bit about JPG vs. RAW, color spaces and profiles, linearization of your ink-jet printer and so on, then this book will be on your level, but I think that there are better texts out there, (different texts for different topics) that treat each topic with the necessary depth and breath. What Amadou Dialo has done is survey these topics and illustrate them with CS3 dialogs.

The book starts out with a black-and-white gallery of about 30 images, which I found good, but not as inspiring as images by others. The print quality of the images in this book is average at best.

The next 40 pages are a survey of modern computer equipment that has pertinence to digital imaging. They cover CRT vs. LCD, DVI vs. analog, Mac vs PC, CPU, memory, hard-drives, video cards, configuring Photoshop, external storage, scanners, ink-jets, paper types, spectrometers and test images and charts. The section on printers lists current prices, size, weight and paper-handling capabilities. Do you now see what I mean? It tells you what you should think about, but it does not go into enough detail to teach you something. And what does this all have to do with black-and-white photography?!?!

Now come 33 pages of good discussion about calibration and Photoshop settings and 40 pages about the histogram, RAW converter, basic RAW editing and film scanning. Everyone working digitally should know this stuff!

Then come 52 pages of “Photoshop in Black and White” — a section that introduces Photoshop, its tools, palettes, levels (forget about levels!!!), curves, 16 pages on blending modes, exactly 3 pages on color-to-black-and-white conversion (wow, in a book about mastering black-and-white!!!), one page on sharpening and one page on soft-proofing. Hmmm, I would have expected that this section fills the entire book!

The book continues with 40 pages about “Black-and-White Ink-Jet Printing”: color vs. monochrome setting in the printer driver, economics of ownership, roll vs. sheet paper, printer profiling, inks, output sharpening (good!), and Photoshop’s printer settings.

Next are 27 pages about the imaging workflow. This is interesting, but teaches hardly anything new.

The book finishes with 32 pages about limited-edition prints (including law regulations, but probably applies only to USA) and 28 pages about assembling and presenting a portfolio.

So, should you read this book? I’m hesitating here, but it’s a good technical book, so I’d say yes, but because of its survey nature of the state of digital photography in 2007 and not because of its black-and-white content.

Cataloging My Old Images

I switched to digital in December 2003 and since then I’ve probably taken about 15000 images and I’d kept about half of those on my hard drive. But they were not ordered in any way and I had no easy way of finding any particular image. Moreover I had lots of near-duplicates and lots of so-so images. So on 6 July, 2007 I started a major undertaking: look through the 7500 images, delete the bad and mediocre ones and catalog, rate and add metadata to the remaining ones. Over six months later I’m finally done and I’m left with 2997 images that fill 17.7 GB of disk-space:

• 188 JPGs (120 MB) taken with a Casio QV-4000, which I owned between 23 Dec, 2001 and 18 May, 2003
• 701 JPGs (1.5 GB) and 364 CRW files (2.1 GB) taken with a Canon 10D, which I owned between 25 May, 2003 and 07 April, 2006
• 201 JPGs (340 MB) and 1423 CR2 files (10.5 GB) taken with the Canon 30D, which I own since 15 April, 2006
• 120 PSD files (3.1 GB).

Let me tell you, it was a lot of tedious work, but I’m very happy that I did it — for all the reasons listed here (1, 2) and more. My images are now copyrighted, fully “keyworded” and divided into 16 main categories (abstract, architecture, details, fauna, flora, food, macro, nature, panorama, people, performances, personal, places, seasons, still-life, transportation) and countless sub-categories.

I currently award Photoshop’s stars as follows:

• * — a snapshot; representative of a place or an event, but without artistic merit and possibly with technical flaws
• ** — an interesting and technically competent image, but still without artistic merit
• *** — some artistic value; can be shown in an Internet forum; non-photographers will be impressed
• **** — good enough to be printed or added to a portfolio; clear theme, technically and artistically very good; invokes some emotion in the viewer
• ***** — among the best 50 that I’ve ever produced

And the colors go like this:

• blue — interesting content, typical of the location
• green — funny situation or funny pose
• purple — a nice pose or expression of a person; he or she would be happy to have this image
• red — a sad or thought-provoking image
• yellow — currently not used

At this point I have 15 five-star and 59 four-star images.

Just for the record, I started shooting RAW in August of 2005, while on vacation in Sweden. I’d bought Bruce Fraser’s Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2 a day before leaving, and after the first 20 pages I was already convinced by the power of RAW. Reading the entire book taught me everything I needed to know about working with RAW images in CS2, and I’ve shot 99% in RAW since then.

And now, after all this talk about images and image ratings, I’d like to share an image with you, from my very first day with the Canon 10D. Before you think it was just dumb luck, consider that prior to that day I’d been chasing the wood warblers with my film body for a few weeks and I knew a thing or two about where they live and how to approach them.

Review of Digital Black and White Photography

Recently I decided to learn more about digital methods for creating good black-and-white photographs. I looked around on Amazon and after reading quite a few descriptions and readers’ opinions, I ordered three books. I’ve now finished reading the first one: Digital Black and White Photography / A step-by-step guide to creating perfect photos by John Beardsworth.

Even though I didn’t learn much from it, I’d say it’s a nice introductory text to photography, image composition, digital editing, black-and-white conversion, several Photoshop effects, and presentation of digital images. Despite the subtitle’s claim that the book is a “step-by-step guide to creating perfect photos,” all topics are treated at a relatively basic level. But this is not necessarily a bad thing — like I said, the text is probably very good for beginners.

The book presents virtually all topics on exactly two pages, the only exceptions being “converting color to black and white” (6 pages) and “optimizing tonal range” (4 pages). Each pair of pages contains 5 to 7 images, a short explanation for each image and 4 or 5 short paragraphs with the main text. One probably cannot learn very much from such short texts, but you’d be surprised by how much information fits on two pages, especially when the accompanying images are carefully selected. Whenever necessary, the book shows a screenshot of a Photoshop dialog or of the layers palette.

Digital Black and White Photography starts with 14 pages dedicated to the (digital) camera, lenses, focusing, exposure and flash and follows with 34 pages on composition, learning to see and on light quality. The section is entitled “how to shoot great black and white photos,” but the material applies equally well to color photography. The next section is “digital imaging techniques,” and that’s where most of the interesting stuff is. Unless you know quite a bit about the digital workflow, you’ll probably learn a good bit from these 34 pages. Even Russel Brown’s two-layer technique for converting to black and white is explained, although the name “Russel Brown” is never mentioned (but who knows who really invented the technique anyway).

The book continues with 22 pages dedicated to “simulating classic darkroom effects” where you learn how to emulate sepia toning, split toning, infra-red film and how to darken the image borders. You also learn about hand-coloration, bas relief and solarization, but I doubt that anyone really needs these techniques.

The closing chapter is titled “showing and sharing your pictures” and uses 14 pages to briefly touch on monitor and printer calibration, paper and ink types, creating a slideshow and burning it on a CD-ROM, creating a presentation and burning it on a DVD, and uploading images onto a web-server. All these are treated very briefly, but at least the reader is made aware of the possibilities and is encouraged to look for further information.

The book is printed very well (not quite like a fine-art book, but much better than a textbook), and if you are a relative beginner, it’s probably well worth its price. However be aware that it contains very little content dedicated exclusively to black and white. Then again, if you know how to use your equipment, know something about image composition and about digital editing, it will be very hard to find any book that teaches you something new with every page.

New Web-Portfolio: Milan, Italy

The trip to Milan was in late October, so it took me quite a while, but I’ve just added a new portfolio to my web-gallery: Milan, Italy. I had about 18 good images, but decided to go with 12. Am I right in thinking that a portfolio should not contain too many images? It seems to me, more than 12 images and the “art” turns into a travel-guide.