12 Master Files from Alain Briot

Alain Briot has a new special offer especially for TOP readers.

This is a private page accessible only through our site that features a special offer for $200 off Alain's new tutorial CD titled "12 Master Files CD." This tutorial comes with the master files for 12 of his most popular images, and a nearly hour-long tutorial video describing how he created one of his most popular images, and the cover of his new book, Playa Reflections. In the movie he discusses every aspect of this image, from composition, to RAW conversion, to optimization and enhancement in Photoshop, to printing, mounting, and matting.

"This tutorial is a first for me—I never went into all these details before, not even in my Printing Mastery DVD—and I wanted to offer something special for your readers," Alain says. Check it out at the link.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

And They Call It...Scooba Loooooove

by Ctein

There is photographic import to this column. Be patient.

By now every reader of this web site must know about the Roomba, the platter-sized rug-vacuuming automaton from iRobot. (And is that not the absolutely best and coolest name for high-tech company?)

But, do you know about the Scooba? Scooba scrubs any wet-washable floor. Paula bought us a Scooba last Christmas. We don't keep an unsanitary house, but scrubbing floors is definitely not our thing. Wiping up spills and obvious messes, sure—but a real, thorough scrubbing? Happens to the kitchen floor maybe once every two or three years, whether it needs it or not. Maybe. A great test for the Scooba!

Scooba begins its washing cycle by spiraling out from its starting point, leaving behind a damp, scrubbed trail.

We charged it up with cleaning solution (either a special detergent solution or dilute vinegar) and set it loose. Dutifully it meandered back and forth across the kitchen floor like some blue trilobite, laying down a film of cleaning solution, scrubbing, and vacuuming the waste back up. 45 minutes later, it was done with a scrubbing cycle. The floor was definitely not clean. But it was visibly cleaner!

A half-dozen more floor-washings and and we actually had an entirely clean kitchen floor! Very impressive, considering the several years' worth of ground-in dirt.

And that got me thinking. There's another room in my house that gets stuff spilled on a waterproof floor but that, in twenty years, has never, ever been thoroughly scrubbed. That's right—my darkroom. Oh, yes, I wipe up spills and I occasionally mop it down lightly, but honestly, that's it.

That is Scooba's new task. Strip off all the layers of grime and chemicals that have embedded themselves in the concrete floor of my darkroom. One pass doesn't do it; even a dozen aren't enough. But with every pass, another layer of chemicals come out of the concrete. The waste water that I empty out of the Scooba still comes out an opaque, dirty brown, and the floor gets one shade lighter (figure 2).

In the corner of my darkroom, where Scooba's circular form can't go, there's a dark crescent of unscrubbed floor (upper right). See how much grime Scooba's removed!

A well-cleaned darkroom means less dust and aerosols in the air, less crud settling on prints, and fewer dust specks on negatives. I've always known that; I've just never gotten around doing it properly. Now I have a faithful little droid to do it for me. Yes, I love my Scooba.

Posted by: CTEIN

Book Recommendation: Osterloh

I own many books about Leica, including a number of rare ones, such as the three-volume Lager Limited Editions Leica: An Illustrated History, and various ephemera dating back to the 1930s—but this one's my favorite. It's by Günter Osterloh, who was (still is? Anybody know?) the technical editor of Leica Photography International and Leica World magazines, as well as an instructor at the Leica Academy. It's called Leica M: Advanced Photo School.

I had the first edition of this book, too, until it was "borrowed" by a guy in upstate New York after he bought an M6 from me. Despite numerous requests over a period of years, he refused to return it. I think there is a technical term for this: "theft." Scoundrel!

The first edition is a rare book that is actually rare (not all things known as "rare," such as diamonds or Pentax 40mm pancake lenses, actually are). There are no copies currently listed on Abebooks.com. That's impressive, considering you can find no fewer than twelve 17th-century copies of Sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World on Abebooks, including the 1619 edition.

The Osterloh first edition has a major flaw, however (which might be among the reasons why my thief failed to return my copy). If you so much as looked at it wrong, the pages fell out. Who knows what miraculous modern money-saving technology was used for the binding?

Since then, the Osterloh seems to have gone in and out of print several times. I haven't really been paying attention—but it seems to me it hasn't been continuously available. While the first edition was out of print and the second one had not yet appeared, the prices got astronomical.

This edition also has a flaw: it omits some of the information about previous versions of the lenses. Since people still use Leica lenses going all the way back to the screwmount era, those omissions seem difficult to justify. But at least the binding is good.

And even so, it's a very good book. Anybody from veteran M shooters to digital photogs simply wondering what all the fuss over Leica is about will get a lot out of it. I think it would be worth having even if you don't shoot Leica—and even if you never hope to.

It gets my recommendation, anyway. It's cheap right now too—half the price I think I remember seeing the first edition sell for when it was new, and a fraction of what the first edition would be now, if you could find one. My advice? Nab one whilst you can.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

What Photographers Need

Ambling preamble
We all need to look at the world from our own perspective. At least sometimes. Maybe it's not the most realistic viewpoint, but it makes sense for us to put our own needs first. (Classical capitalism assumes it, for one thing.)

Among photo hobbyists, one development that's emerged from the Age of the Internet has been a greatly increased interest in the business side of photography. (It parallels similar interests in the business sides of sports and of entertainment.) Tens of thousands of guys who took a couple of business courses in college have discovered that it's deeply diverting to speculate about the interests of the camera companies and the rest of the photo industry. They argue hotly about it all day long until they arrive at some sort of rough group concensus, never mind that most of them have no reliable sources, no inside insight—in short, no data whatsoever—and that much of their conclusions are thus based on nothing but warm air and rumor.

At first, this struck me as profoundly absurd. I couldn't fathom how anyone could care, much less why any photographer should care, and I had no idea why people would put aside their own interests in favor of sycophantic sympathy with large corporations. But time has passed, and I've become habituated, and at root I'm basically a tolerant sort of fellow where this hobby is concerned—people are gonna do what they think is fun, and whatever it is, more power to 'em, no matter how damn stone dumb I might think it is. I ain't the boss of them.

The preceeding is an elaborate qualification—a way of saying that I don't give a stink about what's good for the companies that make our equipment. I mean, I do, but not here. Here, I want to talk about what PHOTO- GRAPHERS need.

Rant mode...er, still on
Oh, and one further point, as long as I'm in rant mode. Photographers— people who like, and make, pictures—have always been in a minority in what's now known as "the market," meaning the much larger Universe of People Who Buy Equipment. And the relationship between a) the kinds of equipment photographers really need to do their work and b) the kinds of equipment the photo industry actually makes has always been uneasy, without very good correlation. A lot of photographers recently got what they actually really wanted/needed when the Leica M8 came out, and I'm sure that seemed almost like a miracle to them, simply because such things don't happen all that often. Mostly, we don't get what we really want—we come as close as we can and then make do.

Consequently, there is a long and honorable tradition of photographers making their own equipment (in fact, many camera companies got started that way), or modifying existing equipment to suit their needs. That tradition is being killed by electronics. Nobody makes their own sensors. Nobody writes their own firmware. Now, more than ever, we're stuck with what "they" want to give us. We always have been...but it's getting worse.

All of the foregoing is a polite way of saying: puh-leez don't write business 103-name comments about the following list. I don't care that the companies have to make a profit (duh), or if not enough people will buy it, or if a similar product failed, or if it doesn't fit a corporate philosophy or a product lineup. I just care about what some real photographers need in order to do their work. Yeah, sure, we might never get any of these things. Yeah, they might not make sense. Neither of those things is the same thing as saying they are not wanted or needed.

Rant mode off (finally!), and thanks for putting up with me here. And now, a short off-the-top-o'-me-head list of a few things that photographers could use that they ain't got.

In reverse order:

Digital Cameras We Need

8. A Sony R-1 with anti-shake/image stabilization. This is a beautiful camera, and the people that own 'em love 'em. It's a pity it has to go join the Nikon 950 and the Olympus E-1 as the best camera designs of the digital era to end up as evolutionary dead-ends. While we're daydreaming, they can leave off the EVF. And for that matter, what's wrong with a square sensor? We can crop. (Yes, I know we're never going to get this—but see above.)

7. A full-frame Nikon. (Yes, I've said in the past that I think APS-C is the sensible standard. No, I haven't changed my mind. Yes, I do admire Nikon for sticking with APS-C consistently, so it doesn't have the Tower-of-Babel crop-factor confusion Canon's gotten itself into. Yes, I think it's the right decision. But this is not about me. Photographers want this. And what photographers want is the topic of this post.)

6. A higher-end Sony equivalent of the Konica-Minolta 7D. Where the heck is this, anyway? Sony took over the Konica-Minolta DSLR business and promptly introduced its own equivalent of the 5D, which apparently made a big splash, at least in Japan, and evidently captured a good big healthy chunk of the DSLR trade, in Japan and at first. Now the really good Zeiss lenses are starting to become available and yet, on the topic of a higher-end follow-up to the A100, there's been...nothing. Just silence. Onward Sony goes into the Wild Blue Yonder with a one-camera lineup. If Sony were a person, you would think they had just lost interest. So is Sony going to become a player in the DSLR market or not? As one who's stuck in the lensmount I wish it would make up its gigantic friggin' corporate mind. At least throw me a bone and make one of those vague far-off means-nothing future product announcements.

5. A Canon reduced-sized-sensor body with in-the-body IS. At least as an alternate variant of a mainstream DSLR body for a few hundred bucks extra. (Can you say "40D and 40D-IS"? I knew ya could. Pace the above, amateur bean-counter analyses of why this will/will not happen are not encouraged.)

4. Two words: Zuiko primes. (Well, maybe three words, if you want to add the word "wide.")

3. One letter, one number: E-2. Come ON. (What are those clowns thinking? How can that much high-priced business and technical talent be so eternally, neverendingly clueless? Slap that 8-MP sensor in an E-1 and get on with life, fer chrissakes. Sheesh. Of course, maybe I should wait until Monday before I complain, ya think? Nawwwww....)

2. At least one DSLR with a high-quality black-and-white-only sensor. This could easily just be a variant of an existing DSLR. We badly need a modern version of what we last had in 2002 with the ill-fated Kodak DCS 760m. (As Pete Myers said in his review, "Without an anti-aliasing filter and no Bayer color matrix, the resolution of a 6-megapixel monochrome camera is astonishing. In monochrome, 6 megapixels effectively does what it takes 12–24 megapixels with a color matrix." A friend who owned one of those at the time told me that he got the prettiest black-and-white with it that he'd ever gotten with any kind of equipment (and he had a lot of equipment). Some photographers like high-quality black and white, and some company or other is going to step up to this plate, sooner or later. So who's it going to be?

1. The DMD. I've ranted about this before, so enuff said. I'm amazed—really, honestly amazed—that we still don't have this. It's so obvious, so crucial for street photography and some kinds of art photography, and it would require absolutely zero in the way of new technical development. It could easily be put together with existing technology. Whoever does it first will instantly create a new digital camera category. I hereby offer my services, free, to any camera company that wants me to spec out what it ought to be. Just because it hasn't existed heretofore doesn't mean it shouldn't—to paraphrase Al Gore, all that's needed is the will to do it, and that's a renewable resource.

So—your comments? Put aside your analyses of what's likely and what's not, what's good for the corporations and what's not, and just tell us what you wish you had to do your work with.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Flak Photo

Paul Octavious, Naugatuck , CT—photo © Paul Cribb

"Flak Photo is a daily photoblog featuring distinctive photography from an international community of photographers. It aims to promote interesting visual approaches to seeing the world and celebrates the art of exhibiting quality photography on the web. The blog is edited by Andy Adams and is published Monday through Friday, using Expressions. Flak Photo is free of charge and available online 24/7."

Prom Gown #3, Yellowstone National Park & Richmond, Virginia—photo © Tom Chambers

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Portraits of Scientists

H. S. Brown, Agassiz + Agassiz

Here in my home state, the Wisconsin Historical Society yesterday unveiled the online digitized archive of Increase Lapham's collection of carte-de-visite portraits of scientists. Lapham was a pioneering leading light of science and civilization in the area. WHS says of him, "He wrote the first book published in Wisconsin; made the first accurate map of the state; investigated Wisconsin's effigy mounds, native trees and grasses, climatic patterns, and geology; and helped found many of the schools, colleges and other cultural institutions, including the Wisconsin Historical Society, that still enrich the state today." (He also wrote our first work of forest conservation, with the characteristically wordy 19th-century title Report On the Disastrous Effects of the Destruction of Forest Trees, Now Going On So Rapidly in the State of Wisconsin, in 1876.) When Lapham would correspond with his fellow scientists around the country—sometimes sending samples and fossils through the mail—they would include cartes of themselves so they would know what each other looked like.

Shown above is a carte-de-visite photomontage double portrait of geologist and zoologist Jean Louis Rudolphe Agassiz (1807-1873), by Milwaukee photographer H. S. Brown. Agassiz founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1860 and was a founding member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863.

Agassiz was the subject of one of my favorite passages from Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading:

No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: "That's only a sunfish."

Agassiz: "I know that. Write a description of it."

After a few minutes the students returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.

By this method modern science has arisen, not on the narrow edge of medieval logic suspended in a vacuum.

—The ABC of Reading, 1934, New Directions edition, 1960, p. 17

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Andy Adams

Photoshop To Go Online

Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen (right) says that Photoshop will be online within six months, c|net News.com reported yesterday. Up till now, Adobe's products have been software programs sold in boxes or by download for installation on end-user's own local computers. The pioneering application for the new paradigm is Adobe Remix, a web-based video editing tool that Adobe offers through PhotoBucket, and Adobe's model appears to be Google, which already offers several online applications (such as Blogger, which you're reading right now). Adobe wants to be ready before anyone else (Google again implied) treads on its territory with online apps for imaging. Chizen told News.com yesterday that a basic version of Photoshop will be made available as an online service. It will be a more basic version than Elements and it will be free to users—Adobe will derive income indirectly, through advertisements.

Chizen said that in the future, Adobe will offer complete hosted applications online, and that it is also looking into hybrid models in which online services will introduce users to its more complete, traditionally packaged software.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, with thanks to Kevin