Visual Cognition

I have to admit that where humor is concerned, I set a low bar. I can see humor in a lot of things, and it doesn't take extraordinary measures to get me to laugh.

And surely, visual recognition is a part of photography. We see the shapes of things in clouds, are highly sensitive to faces, and recognize similarities and symbolism in forms and objects. It shouldn't take a genius to know that when shown a Rorschach blot, it's not the smartest thing in the world to say anything about your mother, dead bodies, or the government. Witness this recent blog post about influence, and one photographer's subliminal connection of a picture he saw to a famous photographer's picture he'd recently seen.

Still, some things are just too much. Here's something that made me laugh so hard my son came in from the other room and said, "Daddy, are you all right?" (Warning: it's somewhat crude, so if that sort of thing offends you, stay clear. If you have an extraordinary love for either dogs or Jesus you might want to stay away, too.)

Form reconition taken to an extreme!

I'm still laughing....

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to stanco

P.S. To the commenter who wrote, "You won't be laughing so hard when one day you bow before Jesus and acknowledge His Lordship," I should point out that I didn't mean to offend anyone and apologize if I have. I am not even the slightest bit religious and perhaps therefore lack the required...sensitivity. But it brings up a point I'm sorry I have to bring up: if you look at the picture at the link, be clear about what you're looking at. It's not Jesus.

I'm not a theologian, but I'm pretty sure about the following: even if you love Jesus, you still don't have to bow down before a little brown dog's ass. And if, like Charlie Brown, you see a horsie in the clouds, you're still looking at a cloud, not a horse.

By October 2007: Hoya Pentax HD Corporation

Word out of Japan today is that Pentax will be purchased by Hoya in 2007. (It's being pitched as a "merger," although Hoya is called in the press release the "merging company" and Pentax the "company to be merged," which I thought was a nice way of putting it.) Although photographers probably know Hoya only from its self-branded lens filters, it's one of the largest optical glass manufacturers in the world, supplying the glass blanks that many optical companies make into lenses. It also makes glass substrates for computer hard drives and has significant business in eyeglasses, intraoculars (replacement lenses surgically implanted in the eye), and other related medical technologies. Besides cameras, Pentax has ventured into medical equipment as well, making endoscopes and bionics among other things. Hoya's assets are roughly twice those of Pentax and it has about two and a half times as many employees. Recently, its profits have been significantly more robust.

The integration will be completed by October of 2007 if all goes well. The current CEO of Pentax, Mr. Fumio Urano (right), will become Chairman of the Board, and the current President and CEO of Hoya, Mr. Hiroshi Suzuki, will be President and CEO of the new company, which will be called Hoya Pentax HD Corp. The new company will be organized around "a small headquarters with empowered business divisions."

And the upshot for us: Pentax Imaging will continue to make Pentax-branded cameras, with "...cost-competitiveness...strengthened by lowering production costs and focusing on unique, high-end products." (We especially like that last part.)

On paper this looks like a great merger, with both savings and synergies waiting to be realized. The Online Photographer congratulates Pentax and Hoya and wishes the new company strength, good fortune, and long life.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Pulp Nonfiction, Ripped from the Tabloids

By Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, December 21, 2006


Enrique Metinides photographed his first dead body before he was 12. It was as if he had caught a fever, because after that he couldn’t stop. For years while he slept he kept his radio in Mexico City tuned to emergency stations so that he could be awakened by the latest news of disaster. He would often throw on his clothes and rush into the night to see yet another car wreck or fire or murder.

He found a cornucopia of gore: suicides, jumpers, accidental electrocutions and exploding gas tanks. (In that case petty thieves drove off from the pumps with the hose still inside their car.) We feel somehow we shouldn’t gawk. But how can we not?

So we do....

READ ON

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Adam McA.

Featured Comment by dennismook: In my 31-year police career, I spent 7 as a forensics detective in a medium-sized urban environment. I worked over 100 death investigations, photographing them all. From a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head to being cut in half by a train and every way you could possibly think of dying, I had the responsibility of photographically documenting the scene as well as finding and collecting the evidence left behind.

The only way I found to survive, keep my psychological health and get the work done well was to develop a way to turn off all my emotions and only look at the tragedy before me in an academic and technical manner, not seeing a fellow human being who had lost his or her life in some grotesque manner. I had to learn to compartmentalize my life. However, I never got used to dealing with the children who were murdered. After becoming a father, I had to transfer to another assignment and do something else within the police department. I couldn't seem to break that emotional connection to a child.

My friends would have many questions about death investigations and many misconceptions. At one point, I made up a loose-leaf notebook of death scene photos so I could better explain how people die and how we go about investigating the deaths. I now think back on that notebook and remember how reality shocked those who looked at the photographs. Their shock was my reality...over and over again. Sometimes a very difficult job, but one that had to be done and done right every time—for the sake of the victim and their families.

Ruth Bernhard Remembered

Legendary photographer passes away at 101

by John Sexton

Draped Torso 1962
Photograph by Ruth Bernhard
©1962 Ruth Bernhard. All rights reserved.

I have some sad news to report. My long-time friend Ruth Bernhard passed away peacefully at her home in San Francisco Monday morning, December 18th. Ruth was 101 years young! Anne and I were deeply saddened by the loss of our friend, but find solace in the fact that Ruth lived such a remarkable life.

There are a number of subscribers to this email newsletter that experienced Ruth's magical personality firsthand on workshops that we taught together over the years. Those of you who knew Ruth will understand completely when I say that Ruth was truly one-of-a-kind. People who did not know her firsthand can find her inspiration in the legacy of photographs she leaves behind.

Ruth's career in photography spanned more than seven decades. Her photographs always seemed to be ahead of their time. Along with her amazing talent as a photographer, Ruth was a gifted teacher. I first met Ruth in 1974 when I was a student at a small workshop she conducted in Southern California. From that very first experience, I knew that Ruth was an exceptional person. I feel privileged to have known her over these many years.

With Ruth's passing a bright light in the world of photography has been dimmed—but only temporarily. Ruth's photographs will shine with great luminosity, and beauty far into the future. Rather than try to describe more fully what Ruth was about, I thought I would include some of her words—Recipe For A Long and Happy Life—which she presented to all the attendees at both her 90th and 100th birthday celebrations. I believe there is wisdom to be found in Ruth's words. You can find Ruth’s recipe below. In addition, here are links to articles about Ruth’s rich life that appeared in the December 19th San Francisco Chronicle and the December 20th Los Angeles Times.

Many will miss Ruth (including Anne and me), but no one will forget her. As Ruth said many times, she is now “flying with the angels.” I think the angels will soon be seeing things with new eyes!

Here’s to you Ruth,

John




(From John Sexton's email newsletter. Reproduced with permission.)

Featured Comment by Chantal Stone: I read this on here late last night and I put a link to this post on my photoblog....

When I was in high school I had this feminist English teacher, who, when I told her I wanted to be a photographer, made me write a list of 10 women photographers, and write a little something about each of them.

Ruth Bernhard was on that list...and I immediately felt drawn to her sensual, evocative images...I was only 16 years old.

It was a Mapplethorpe exhibit in Hartford CT that convinced me this is what I wanted to be...it was learning about great women photographers—pioneers—like Ruth Bernhard who convinced me I could do it.

On Testing a New (Digital) Camera, Steps A and B

by Carl Weese

Step A
The first thing I do to test a new digital camera is just go out and make pictures with it. I read the manual and figure out the basic operations, then spend as much time as I can making the kinds of pictures I like to make. I keep reading the manual to find new features and try them out to see which ones I’ll find useful.

The reason this is so important with a digital camera is that when you buy one, you aren’t just getting a new piece of hardware whose ergonomics you need to learn. You’re also in effect buying the film supply you’ll be using for the life of the camera. Even if you’ve upgraded to a new model of the same brand you’ve been using, the new updated sensor will not only have more pixels, but a new image character. It’s going to take time to get used to that character, and only real pictures, not abstract tests, will show what you can do with it. Don’t go straight to tests of lens resolution or AF accuracy or speed, and try to refrain from pixel peeping the shots at 100% view. Just see what pictures you can make with it.

This was important with the camera I bought recently. First, I’d gone to a different manufacturer’s line so not only the camera and imaging sensor were new, but also the pair of lenses I got at the same time. On top of that, the lenses were a return to compact prime focal lengths from the massive zoom lenses I’ve been working with for nearly three years. I wanted to get used to the new equipment by making pictures. So that’s Step A. You can see a few of the pictures from that exploration over on my web log. After about a week and some 1300 captures I was getting really comfortable with the camera and lenses. I discovered new, or new-to-me, features that I really liked and others that don’t interest me at all. I’ll get to that in another post. So it was time for:


Step B: The Paper Towel Test
My impression from that shooting was that the new Pentax K10D had a longer tonal range than the Olympus E-1 I’d been using. This is a welcome, but not surprising development given there have been more than three years of technical development between the two release dates. Tonal range is important, and it is a major task for the elves who design our equipment to give us more pixels without compromising tonal range. Time for an objective test. I think this test is vital for anyone with a digital camera because it relates directly to a specific technique that lets you determine the best possible exposure in situations where the tonal range challenges the ability of the sensor. I raided the kitchen for a paper towel and taped it to a window. Bounty is a good brand because it has a strong embossed pattern. With the longer of its two lenses mounted and the metering set to spot, I put the camera on a tripod facing squarely at the paper towel, close enough to fill most of the frame with towel. In manual mode, set to record in-camera DNG RAW files, I found the “correct” exposure and shot a capture. Then one stop over, two stops over, then 2.3, 2.7, etc. all the way to four stops over. Then a second exposure in the middle (makes the set easier to understand on screen in a browser) and repeated the same procedure going down four stops.

Next step, download to the computer, let Bridge build a cache for the folder, then highlight the middle-to-over set and hit command-r which brings the full set into ACR in filmstrip mode. (There must be somewhat similar approaches with other software; Photoshop is what I use). Just looking at the set of gray captures confirmed my real-picture impression of increased tonal range. The reason for the textured subject is so I can see detail rendering instead of simply relying on the software’s histogram and clipping readouts. The central exposure was, at level 118, a little darker than it should be—halfway in the 255 available levels should be 127. 2.3 stops over was fully detailed, while 2.7 had lost some but certainly not all detail. Selecting that capture, it turned out that a fairly modest –45 move of the Exposure slider brought back fully convincing detail, although technically there was still some clipping. Here's what that looked like.


(Note: sharp-eyed readers familiar with ACR will notice some very strange white balance numbers up there—I'll discuss that in another post.)

So I tried the 3-stops-over shot, and found it preserved fully convincing detail with –75. That’s a lot of move on the exposure slider, but not so much that the quality of the file will be compromised badly. But at 3.3 the party’s over. Even –125 recovers only partial data. There’s texture, but it’s really ugly. Past that point ACR starts inventing, not recovering, data and I don’t find it convincing.

Next I dropped out of ACR and repeated the Bridge procedure to view the dark set in ACR. The surprise here was that the paper texture was clear and distinct right down to four stops under. I clicked on the darkest one just out of curiosity and found it bunched at, but not against, the left side of the histogram, no clipping at all. Perhaps I should have gone out and made more shots to see how low the K10D can go, but really that’s all the answer I needed. I did spend a little time using the ACR controls to see how far I could bring up the two to three stop underexposed captures with convincing results. That’s a preview of what I’ll be doing to bring up underexposed sections of real-world pictures that were set to the most exposure possible without losing the highlights.

So, now I had numbers to confirm my sense that I was seeing a greater tonal range. Here’s the technique that this test lets you use. Let’s say you are making a picture of a meadow on an overcast day with interesting texture and pattern in the stormy sky, using this camera. The camera’s built in meter will almost surely overexpose the sky. If you set the right exposure for the meadow manually, you can bet the sky will burn out. So flip the meter to spot, meter the sky, and set it 2.7 stops over. We know that a –45 Exposure compensation in ACR will retain full detail, so this is the maxium exposure you can give the rest of the picture without losing the sky. If a histogram check shows the shadows are still clipped, go for that extra third of a stop that will call for even more rescue in ACR. Easy, as long as you’ve tested to find your camera’s limit at the top end.

That is Step B. Next time—Step C, which in my case was to check out the K10D’s anti-shake, which is a feature I’ve never had in previous cameras.

Posted by CARL WEESE

Less is More?

By Carl Weese

My new camera uses SD cards instead of Compact Flash cards. Is it just me, or does anyone else marvel at the technical accomplishment...
...of getting all that data into such a small package, but at the same time...
...think that these things are so small they are actually more difficult to handle than those big, clunky, late 20th-century CF cards?

Posted by: CARL WEESE

Featured Comment by Mark Myers: In reference to Carl’s post, I offer the following…

Guess what this is:

It's a hard disk in 1956....

The volume and size of 5MB of memory storage in 1956. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data.

Let us start appreciating our gigabyte-sized memory cards!

And the Winner Is...

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious*

My offhand question the other day about great black-and-white movies quickly racked up a near-record number of comments. I've tallied the results (no trivial task, either—see what I do for you?) which are presented below. Note that readers made what they wished of the question; I'm sure some people nominated great films, some people nominated favorites, and others paid more attention to the actual cinematography and the use of monotone. It's all good.

I've arranged the results in order of the number of mentions a film got, and then, within each category, alphabetically. In some cases I added the year of release to avoid confusion with remakes or other films of the same title, and for consistency I've generally listed the titles in their original languages with the common English-language title, if it's known by one, in parentheses. For simplicity's sake I haven't italicized all the titles in the main list. You should be able to find all of the titles on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). I've added a few Amazon links here and there, but not to everything, as it would have taken me all day.

Of special mention are Sunrise, a silent film that got two votes, and In Cold Blood, which is B&W but also in Cinemascope. A few "finds" among little-known films may be Eric von Stroheim's Greed (although it's not available on DVD yet), Alphaville, and The Battle of Algiers. For obvious reasons I disallowed movies shot partly—or all!—in color; however, the runaway runner-up not on the list is no doubt Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, which got a whopping three votes despite the fact that it was shot in very subdued Eastmancolor. And, finally, the Special Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, which is not only in B&W, but has a plot that turns on a B&W photograph—and the movie includes a scene in a darkroom! Can't beat that.

My only personal comment is that I see a subscription to Netflix in my future—I've seen nine of the top ten (gotta go rent The Third Man) and I consider myself fairly cinematically "literate," but haven't seen anywhere close to half these films.

Thanks to everyone who participated. And if you see any mistakes in the list, please let me know.


The T.O.P. Readers' List of
Great Black-and-White Films

Citizen Kane (14)
The Third Man (13)
Casablanca (7)
Dr. Strangelove (7)
Breathless (6)
Raging Bull (6)
Shichinin no samurai (The Seven Samurai) (6)
Schindler’s List (5)
Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) (4)
Manhattan (4)
Nosferatu (4)
Touch of Evil (4)
La Dolce Vita (3)
Eraserhead (3)
Good Night and Good Luck (3)
M (3)
The Maltese Falcon (3)
Paths of Glory (3)
Psycho (3)
Rashomon (3)
Le Salaire de la Peur (Wages of Fear) (3)
Sin City (3)
Stagecoach (3)
Stranger than Paradise (3)
Throne of Blood (3)
Alphaville (2)
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (2)
The Battle of Algiers (2)
La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast) (2)
Creature from the Black Lagoon (2)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2)
Double Indemnity (2)
Down By Law (2)
Ed Wood (2)
Elephant Man (2)
High and Low (2)
High Noon (2)
Hud (2)
Ikiru (2)
Jules et Jim (2)
Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, Bicycle Thieves) (2)
Metropolis (2)
Night of the Hunter (2)
Nóz w wodzie (Knife in the Water) (2)
One, Two, Three (2)
To Kill a Mockingbird (2)
Pather Panchali (2)
pi (2)
Rebecca (2)
Some Like It Hot (2)
Sunrise (2)
Them (2)
12 Angry Men (2)
Yojimbo (2)
Young Frankenstein (2)
Angel-A
El Ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel)
Angels with Dirty Faces
Aparajito
Az Én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century)
Battleship Potemkin
The Big Sleep
The Blob
Bob le Flambeur
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
C'est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog)
Charulata
Dead Man
D.O.A. (1950)
Double Indemnity
8 1/2
Les Enfants du paradis
Fort Apache (cited for innovative IR photography)
Frankenstein (1931)
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Dictator
Greed
La Haine
A Hard Day’s Night
Hidden Fortress
Hiroshima Mon Amour
The Hustler
Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke (Samurai Spy)
In Cold Blood (cited for being in Cinemascope)
Jalsaghar
Key Largo
The Killing
King Kong (1933)
Kiss Me Deadly
Kurutta kajitsu (Crazed Fruit)
The Lady from Shanghai
The Ladykillers (1955)
The Last Picture Show
Laura
Lolita
The Long Voyage Home
Lord of the Flies (1963)
Lost Horizon
The Magnificant Ambersons
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
The Man Who Wasn’t There
The Manchurian Candidate
Meshes in the Afternoon (short)
Mighty Joe Young (1949)
Misummer Night's Dream (1935)
Modern Times
My Darling Clementine
Night of the Living Dead
Night Mail (1936)
Notorious
Of Mice and Men
On the Waterfront
Orpheus
Ostre sledované vlaky (Closely Watched Trains)
Persona
Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows)
Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers)
Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly)
The Scarlet Empress
Scrooge (1951)
Seppuku
Soy Cuba / Ya Kuba
La Strada
The Stranger
Stray Dog
A Streetcar named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
Sweet Smell of Success
Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story)
Tsubaki Sanjûrô (Sanjuro)
The Wrong Man

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

*The uncredited still photographer on Notorious was none other than Robert Capa, although I don't know if he took this particular picture. Thanks to robert for this information.