Technique/equipment

Someone, in reponse to photo posts, will usually say they don't take pictures as good as "X" because they don't have the fancy equipment.

Sometimes this is true.

In the digital realm, it can be very true. Not only is there's a lot which can be fixed in the digital darkroom (and a lot of program, aside from the various flavors of Photoshop, can be helpful, though in the aggregate they may cost just as much. I use PictureCode's Noise Ninja to clean things up, before I start to play with them) but the sensors have a lot of differnce between them.

But a lot of it has to do with technique.

This is where digital has made a huge change in things. Scale. Ansel Adams scorned the 35mm camera. I agree with his complaint, and also think he missed the point. Adams said the problem with the 35 was that one could shoot an entire roll of film, and just count on one of the frames being good. It offended his sense of craft.

As anyone who has ever played with a 4x5 will tell you, taking a picture with one is an adventure. The image is reversed, and upside down. It's dim (you think you have a hard time telling what something looks like when you chimp the LCD on your camera; that's nothing to the incredibly hard to see details on the ground glass of a view camera. It's why photographers use hoods). Focus is checked with a magnifing glass. Different parts of the camera get shifted to make the focus do just what one wants. (for an example of how one can play with focus in a view camera see The Photos of Olivo Barbieri He's using a lens which has some of the features of a view camera, but on a 35mm camera, which makes it more doable; as he's in a helicopter).

And he was right, lots of people just scattergun the camera and hope for the best.

But, and this is where I think he was wrong, to get better at taking pictures one has to take pictures. Sometimes one needs to take risks. Risks cost money. Adams, when he lived in Yosemite, would plan things. He'd go for walks, ponder the view, consider the light, think about where the sun would be when (and by when he included the season, as well as time of day). Then he'd come back, with his camera and 6 packs of film, three color, three B&W. That meant he had six shots of each.

If one can't "previsualise" the picture (his term) and then do the math (f-stop, shutter speed, extension loss for the distance of bellows to film plane, filter factors, fall-off for tilt and swing; the list can get pretty long) you might as well stay home.

The 35mm format changed all that. With a very few exceptions (one cannon lens, a few Macro attachments for Nikon, most notably the PB-6 bellows, which has limited swing, and shift at the front, this can be converted to tilt and rise by rotating the bellows) none of that can be done. The image area is so small that getting a lens which covers the corners as brightly as the middle is easy (fall-off at the corners is why old photographs are vingetted, the lenses weren't clear enough to be made large enough to throw light all the way across an 8x10 inch area).

So one could shoot with abandon. And with freedom. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Eisenstadt, all were able to do what they did because the camera was small, and could be made ready in an instant.

One of the truisms of photography classes is, "film is cheap." And it is, for certain values of cheap. Before I got a digital camera, I shot a lot of film. When I was regularly shooting I shot at least a roll a week. When I was being busy I might average four.

These days... I can shoot about a thousand frames before I have to empty the disks. That's 27 rolls of film.

At an average of $18 per roll (total cost) that's $486.

Assume one perfect picture per roll, and five which are acceptable, that's 162 pictures I can use. It means I spent $3 per picture (cash, not time and effort).

But with the digital camera I can leave out the cash (well, yes and no, there's equipment cost, and software, and the like. Where I could pay someone else to deal with the heavy lifting in the darkroom, digital makes me deal with it myself).

Which means I can shoot. If I have a self-critical eye (or thick enough skin to share with people who can step-up and tell me what they think) I can do what used to be really expensive... take a lot of pictures.

I'm wandering. I had an idea, and it got a little away from me because I mentioned Ansel Adams. Back to the point.

What can one do to maximize the opportnities one has to take a good picture?

It isn't equipment, per se. I took some great (and I mean great, I need to dig those slides out and scan them. Thank God for Kodachrome, I'm not worried about the color, even 20 years on) pictures with my N2000. The N2000 was a camera meant for the amatuer with interest. My father bought it for me when we met (long story, maybe it will be worth telling here, but not now). It cost about $250 back in 1988. No auto-focus (the N2020 had that, and if we'd known it had interchangeable viewscreens that would have justified the extra $40 bucks, but I digress).

It had three programmed modes (Aperture, Program and ProgramS, the last was for shooting action, it went for the higher shutter speeds).

But it trapped light. And I bought some lenses, and I shot film. I shot lots of film.

That's part of it. Shoot.

The other part is, Know your equipment. The hardest part of the D2H has been learnging all the buttons and knobs. I still have to look to do things. I'm set in my ways and my other cameras have, at most, a light meter. This thing has two methods of autofocus (well, more like eight, depending on how I tell it to look at things) three means of metering (well, three means and 12 variations), and all sort of other tricks.

Feh.

Photography is about trapping light.

Lenses corall it, the film stops it. Those photons die, right there, to be reborn in the picture.

Flash helps but stability means more. A wobbly camera shooting a well-lit scene will catch a blurry image.

Tripods are your friend. I have three. A heavy one (about 4 lbs, just adequate for the Hassleblad) a medium one (a tad under three-pounds, good for moderate hiking) and a mini (about five ounces, I love it. It lets me shoot things I can't do otherwise. Lichen on a rock, in the shade, when I have Velvia 100 in the camera and a reading on the meter of 3 seconds... Not a problem. Attach the tripod, hold it onto a rock, set the self-timer and when the camera goes "click" the picture is sharp.

But what about those places the tripods not useful? What about those iffy shots (the rule of thumb is, length of lens/shutter speed. So a 300mm lens ought to be at 1/250th of a second) the ones where you might jiggle, you might not? That rule, of course needs to take a couple of things into consideration. If you have a multi-focus lens (it's a bit of geekery, zoom lenses are for motion pictures. This isn't really the convention anymore, and hasn't been since about the time I started shooting, but hey...) which is long/heavy (like my 75-300 4.5/5.6) you'll want to shoot a little faster, in the mid-range, because the lever arm will make it wobble more. On the other hand a heavier camera body will dampen that a bit. A smaller body will make it worse. Do some testing.

I use the strap. I learned to shoot firearms before I learned to shoot cameras. For obvious reasons having a wobble in the rifle is considered bad.

So we use slings, and tension, and body posture to make the weapon move less.

So too do I with the camera. I run the strap around both triceps, open them until it's snug, leaning them toward my chest; so the strap is pressed against it. I turn so the camera is in the pocket of my left shoulder (cameras are built for righties, sorry) and with my left hand I support the barrel of the lens, on the side away from my shoulder. My right hand provides as little support as I can manage. Stop breathing for a second and press the shutter.

How well does it work? I can usually get at least one slower shutter speed, and some times two.

By way of example.



I took that at 1/125. The day had a moderate breeze, the lens was my 75-300, extended to 200mm.

Here's a ( detail )

So now I'm off to take a shower, catch the bus and join Maia with the dogs, where I will take some pictures and try to get some decent shots of hawks.

My brain hurts

I don't watch the State of the Union. Haven't done so since about 1992, when I was last working on a newspaper.

Mostly I find it tedious, and the next day I can read the text, without having to put up with the showy folderol.

This year was more of the same, with Bush vowing (as has been done since at least Ford) that we would wean ourself from Middle Eastern oil.

Right.

No need to raise the minimum MPG, and no need to actually make it happen (as opposed to now when Detroit can make "ethanol ready {and don't get me started on what it takes to make a gallon of ethanol, in terms of energy} cars, and use them to offset not having better mileage on the rest of them... sort of like pollution credits for industry, only these guys get to sell us cars for which there is no fuel supply and then use the "credit" of making a "low emission" vehicle that isn't to offset making not so low emission vehicles) that Detroit make the CAFE standard as good as it might be.

And it turns out that his reduction (which was going to be 75 percent of whatever percentage we import from the Middle East) isn't really going to happen.

I am not quite sure how to parse the gobblydegook that came out of the White House today. From Knight-Ridder

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

Huh? I look up displace in the dictionary and I get:

dis·place (dĭs-plās')
tr.v., -placed, -plac·ing, -plac·es.

1. To move or shift from the usual place or position, especially to force to leave a homeland: millions of refugees who were displaced by the war.
2. To take the place of; supplant.

or

displace
v 1: take the place of
2: force to move; "the refugees were displaced by the war"
[syn: force out]
3: move (people) forcibly from their homeland into a new and
foreign environment; "The war uprooted many people" [syn:
uproot, deracinate]
4: cause to move, both in a concrete and in an abstract sense;
"Move those boxes into the corner, please"; "I'm moving my
money to another bank"; "The director moved more
responsibilities onto his new assistant" [syn: move]
5: remove or force from a position of dwelling previously
occupied; "The new employee dislodged her by moving into
her office space" [syn: dislodge, bump]
6: put out of its usual place, position, or relationship; "The
colonists displaced the natives" [syn: dislocate]

Me, I tend to think of it in terms of ships, and displacement. They take up the space of a given volume of water, and it's moved from where it was.

In any case displace to me would mean (in the sentence quoted) that the oil we are getting from the Middle East we won't be need any more, and so we won't be getting it from the Middle East anymore, because, as the flack said, Asked why the president used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatize the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.

Presidential adviser Dan Bartlett made a similar point in a briefing before the speech. "I think one of the biggest concerns the American people have is oil coming from the Middle East. It is a very volatile region," he said.

This strikes me as a general good, not so much because the reason is volatile, that won't change just because we aren't buying their oil, but because there are a lot of people who want oil, and sooner or later we are going to hit peak. I also happen to think there are a lot better uses for it than burning it to move cars from one place to another.

But the story didn't end at that quotation,

The president's State of the Union reference to Mideast oil made headlines nationwide Wednesday because of his assertion that "America is addicted to oil" and his call to "break this addiction...."

He pledged to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."

Not exactly, though, it turns out.

"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

There's that word again, I don't think it means what you think it means.

Apparently what the president meant to say was we could reduce our oil needs by as much as 5.26 million bbls a day, which happens to be about twice what we import from the Middle East. We won't, however, stop buying it from them because, well that wasn't made clear.

...new technologies could reduce America's oil appetite by the equivalent of what we're expected to import from the Middle East by 2025, Hubbard said.

But we'll still be importing plenty of oil, according to the Energy Department's latest projection. and we'll be doing it from the Middle East because, that's where the greatest oil supplies are.

Mind you the Energy Dept. predicts In 2025, net petroleum imports, including both crude oil and refined products, are expected to account for 60 percent of demand ... up from 58 percent in 2004," according to the Energy Information Administration's 2006 Annual Energy Outlook.

Since this year's budget cut the appropriations for research into alternative fuels, that seems more likely.

But hey, what we do import, it won't come from the Middle East, unless it does; or something.