Light Meters c. 2007

"My DSLR is the best light meter I've ever used."

My radar screen has lots and lots of low-level blips on it, and I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out which ones are planes and which seagulls. One such faint blip that I've been "sort of" aware of and "sort of" tracking is the rejuvenation of the old Minolta light meter line by Kenko, imported by THK in the U.S.

I'm a little worried about my screen-reading skills on this one. Try as I might, I can't really interpret who's going to buy these things, or who's going to care, or who should.

I might be wrong, but it seems to me that if any species of photographic kit has been rendered 100% redundant—and hence, obsolete—by digital, it's light meters.

I mean, light meters were never any fun to use. They added nothing to the experience of photography. They just existed to help you see in the dark. You didn't know how the exposure was going to look until you had the film developed, so you set the camera based on the light meter. I suppose there were studio pros who used light meters to calculate lighting ratios, but the studio pros I knew—and their ranks included some serious high-dollar shooters—didn't. One pro I worked for briefly, who had two separate stages at his studio and more than $100,000 invested in C-stands and other Matthews gear, to give you an idea of the level he was at—never touched a light meter. "Polaroids are my light meter," he proclaimed. He did everything from the Polaroids. The light meter stayed in the cart drawer.

Digital, of course, is the apotheosis of the Polaroid. Its feedback is instant. Mine shows me a "proof" of the scene with the overexposed highlights or underexposed shadows (or both!) blinking. I can get a color histogram at the touch of a button. It works equally well for ambient and flash. Frankly, if these features had been available in a handheld light meter back in, say, the '80s, the manufacturer could have charged $1k for them and they would have sold like cold beers on Bay Bridge.

My DSLR is the best light meter I've ever used. The picture above was taken with an off-camera monoblock on a stand, through a white umbrella. Setting the exposure was laughably simple—with the shutter set to the sync speed and exposure on manual, I just fired off a few test shots, adjusting the aperture until the exposure was perfect. It might have taken a whole minute if I wasn't hurrying.

I know that many photographers are still shooting film in medium- and large-format cameras. Maybe some of them prefer light meters (and don't already own one). In any event, if I've missed something here, and you're eager to buy a handheld light meter, Kenko's got the goods.

Me? I'd buy a DLSR and just use that. (It has other uses, too.)

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

M'ate!

I spent part of the day today photographing hither and yon with a Leica M8, loaned to me by Mike L., a T.O.P.-reader friend from Minneapolis. He and I met in Madison the other day to look at work and talk photography, and he's apparently one of those admirable fellows who actually keeps his camera insurance payments current. So off I waltzed with his M8 and a couple of lenses, for a brief trial.

I can't imagine that more "tests" of this already-famous camera are needed or even wanted, so I imagine I'll restrict my eventual comments entirely to "user impressions." Mike needs his camera back on Friday of this coming week, so look for my comments to be posted on or near next weekend.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Bad Cloning Everywhere

Apropos the Detrich controversy at the Toldeo Blade, PDN is reporting that the New York Times ran an Editor's Note on Wednesday admitting that it had run a page-wide color photo in its Metro section that had been digitally retouched.

The excuse in this case was that the picture was taken by a NYT staffer who was not a staff photographer and was therefore presumably ignorant of the paper's rules. The Times stated, "Had editors been aware of the manipulation and seen the original picture, they would have either published the picture with the blemish or not used it."

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

So You Thought You Had Good Buffer Depth

"...We can comfortably say that in 10 years photojournalists will only be carrying video cameras."

—Dirck Halstead

Many readers have recommended Dirck Halstead's editorial essay "The Coming Earthquake in Photography" from the April 2007 issue of The Digital Journalist. Predicting the future has never been a high-percentage business, and it's possible that some of Dirck's predictions are "mileu-specific"—that is, he's looking at photography through the prism of photojournalism—quite naturally, since that's his bailiwick. You might not read the same predictions in the pages of PDN, for instance—I can't see studio advertising photographers succumbing to a pressing need to shoot video—and of course the camera market as a whole, despite the preturnatural popularity of the deathless marketing word "pro," is almost entirely driven by amateurs, enthusiasts, and consumers. It's a fascinating essay nonetheless.

And check out the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's Red One, which to me looks for all the world like the over-the-top plastic alien-zapping space guns I used to buy for Zander at the Toys'R'Us when he was a little guy. It'll shoot 60 12-megapixel frames per second. And you thought your Canikon had good buffer depth.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to erlik

Featured Comment by Juan Buhler: Regardless of whether still photography dies completely, this is extremely interesting. Imagine what would happen to street, 'decisive moment' photography when there is a device that fits in the palm of your hand and can capture 60 12MP images per second. Will pictures that we would consider great today lose some of their value?

I think this goes right in the heart of what is art and what isn't. Is the difficulty involved in making an image an intrinsic part of the image's value? It is a fascinating issue.

Featured Comment by Matthew Miller: This is just the first step. In the somewhat farther future, but very possibly within our lifetimes, lenses will be obsolete.

Instead, a sensor will capture the unfocused image and transform it digitally into the focused one—you'll pick focus point, focal length, and aperture in post-processing. Combine with the idea of constant recording, and you can choose the instant you want and select "exposure" too. The shutter button just becomes a handy way of tagging interesting points.

Sounds crazy? Consider this: a lens is just an analog computer which does a mathematical transform on the input data (light rays striking the front element). Anything an analog computer can do can be approximated with a digital one with the right algorithms and processing power. We don't have that yet, but it's a very safe prediction to say that we will. At that point, instead of primarily analog cameras with a digital recording element, we'll have real digital cameras.

Quote o' the Day

"I have no idea what a 'megapixel' is. No idea. But I'll pay $300 for an extra one."

—Craig Ferguson, on the Late Late Show

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

The Status of Still Pictures

I guess I hadn't realized how far still photos have fallen in status and prestige in the popular imagination.

For news reportage, video has many clear advantages over still pictures. But one of its big disadvatanges is that it's difficult to get video footage of unexpected news events as they occur. That fact, coupled with the national media habit of saturation coverage and its subsequent voracious appetite for footage, means that sometimes some pretty inadequate video is heavily overused.

This situation is especially bad with regard to the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech. The two most-repeated video clips seem to be a jiggly view of a parking lot with pops of gunfire heard on the audio portion, and a clip of an obese law enforcement officer in a brown uniform running up an incline. I've seen the latter at least thirty times, and it hasn't added anything useful to my understanding of the event past viewing #1.

Into this void came the killer's own videos, which have naturally been overexposed as well, to widespread objections.

Still, it startled me when a TV news commentator said something like, "Surprisingly, some of the most powerful images of the tragedy have been still pictures."

Who is surprised by that, exactly? Not me. But then, maybe the tendency to overvalue still photographs and undervalue videography is another of my personal idiosyncrasies. I don't know.

Whether by chance or design, the shooting spree occurred at the very beginning of the publication cycle of the weekly news magazines here in the United States. I anticipate that as the new issues of the newsweeklies hit the newsstands over the next few days, we're going to be reminded again how powerful still images can be.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Chris Jordan

Wow—talk about photo-illustration!

Any idea what this is?

Over the past few days we've had a few posts about the differences between photojournalism and manipulated photographs, with manipulated photographs claimed to qualify as photo-illustration. That might actually shortchange photo-illustration pretty severely. Real photo-illustration can be far more than an ordinary photograph with a few power lines removed—it can be conceptual, imaginitive, abstract, decorative—and powerful. All those descriptives apply to Chris Jordan's American Self-Portrait project.

One more description applies—"statistical." Jordan's project makes statistics visible. "Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing," he writes, "making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs."

Here's a detail, at close to actual size if you click on it to enlarge it, of the picture at the top. It—the top picture—represents 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the U.S. every five seconds.

Note that Jordan also says, "My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended." Which must surely be true—"Plastic Bags, 2007" in the original is 60x72 inches. Still, I think they already have a pretty powerful impact at monitor size. Cool stuff.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON, thanks to Stephen Bartlett