Kia ora tatou:

My friend Eva, one of the most talented artists I have met, sent me this essay, written by Minor White, a photographer who has been an inspiration to me for number of years. Many thanks, Eva. I hope you don’t mind-it needs to be shared..

It couldn’t have come at a more timely moment. Of late, as I do from time to time, I have been looking over my work, reflecting on the images I have made, desperately attempting to catalogue (read: pigeon-hole) them, to read their entrails so I can divine the road ahead. And having little success. The past can be singularly unhelpful in discerning the future…One phrase, in particular, caught my eye….

“…to put my act of photographing at the service of an outside power. So that when I photograph an outside (or inside) power may leave its thumbprint” (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Time for a rant.

In a recent post, I let you know that Adobe had pulled the 1.4 update, claiming that it would do no damage to files whatsoever.

Andrew wrote:

I’m just starting to have some faith in Lightroom as a dependable piece of my workflow and it decides it’s going to slice and dice my RAW files as I work. After much hair pulling, checking and rechecking software and hardware I stumbled on this major Adobe glitch. Unbelievable, these guys tell us they aren’t messing with our RAW files then they decide that maybe;
‘Any ensuing metadata update will attempt to incorrectly modify the EXIF time stamp in the original raw file itself. This is the only metadata field that Lightroom will write to an original proprietary raw file. This error will not impact the integrity of your image data.’
Yeah right, come and have a look at about 30 of my mashed files.

I got away with it. Just.

A nick of time thing….

But wait. there’s more.. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:
Marthinus has replied!

There has been a slight hiatus, while he went around all the tennis clubs in South Africa, collecting every spare ball they had.

Now he has served them all, at once!

Marthinus, this is a very profound and thought-provoking letter. I am deeply grateful for what you have to say.

I will reply…in due course … when I have absorbed it.

Thos of you who have been following it, should now draw up a comfortable chair, pour a glass of wine and settle in…..

Arohanui e

“It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs”

-Albert Einstein

Kia ora tatou:

If you have been watching the news, you will see the horror unfolding in Tibet and the Chinese governments’s attempts to vilify the Dalai Lama.

They maintain that we Westerners do not understand what is happening there, but their attempts to keep it covered up only make matters worse. Parallels have been drawn between this and what happened at the Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany in 1936.

Avaaz, a not-for-profit organisation, seek to present a million-signature petition to the Chinese government. So far they have recorded 809 000 signatures in 5 days.

If you feel strongly, then you can add your name to the petition by going here.

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still…

Albert Camus-L’Etranger

Sometimes it seems to me that the journey through photography is rather like driving into one of those parking buildings, the kind where you drive round and round and up and up and up looking for a park. You progress upwards, hopeful that the next level will have a place where you can stop and then for a time, you pick your way along the level looking for that spare slot where you can stop. The only markers you have to show you are actually going somewhere are the numbers painted on the walls, which increase as you continue.

I think photographs can be like that. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:
I promised to lift this post from deep down in the archives, dust it off and repost it.

Think of it a more as a consciousness-raising exercise than a 20 000 word treatise on the subject. There are plenty of how-to links on the Net. Look here and here. Oh, and here.

I do want to talk a little about the whole issue however and offer some guidelines.

It’s less about the tools and more about the philosophy. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Firstly, my apologies to all of you who have suffered having to visit and see nothing new on the Ezine over the last couple of months. If it hasn’t been commercial work for my clients or weddings ( subtitle: how I came to love spending summer in front of my screens), it has been workshops and, last week, the PSNZ Honours Board. My absence was sternly drawn to my attention last week by one of you and I was reminded of my responsibilities. believe me, I am only too aware of them…For those of you who have emailed me and not received a reply, I am just starting on the list ( 75+) so I should have caught up over the next few days.

I hope to be much more regular with my posts. Things I am working on include a review of Lightzone, a curious image editing program that seems at the moment to be a cross between PhotoShop and Lightroom, only different, a further essay on previsualisation, why I am still in love with my Sony R1 ( I have just reprised it from my son’s unwilling fingers after a year), sharpening (the art of), and anything I happen to think of along the way. Let me know if there is anything you would like brought to the surface.

It is that time again. Newsletter, I mean. I am just working one up at the moment, so if you are not on my mailing list (238 of you are) and you want to be included in the mailout, make sure you sign up. It is an easy 2437.025-step process (LOL) and you can do so here. It should go out this weekend.

There is a rumour floating around that 2008 was the last Freeman Patterson workshop to be held in this country.

This is not true.

Sally, Freeman and I are already planning the 2009 workshops, which will be held in Akaroa in February, 2009. At this stage that is about all we have to say (since that is as far as it has got to date ) but Freeman has already booked his ticket, so they will happen. If you would like to be kept in the loop, drop an email to workshops@thistonybridge.com , and we will keep you in the loop. The workshops will be run under new management  and we are in the process of setting things up. Places are limited to 15/workshop and one of these will be purely digital, while the other will have a film processing option available. There will also be a 3-day digital intensive before the first workshop for those of you who need some learning in this area.

Ka kite ano

Kia ora tatou:

If you are a Lightroom or CS3 user, you need to read this post

If you opened either in the last day or two, and they prompted you to upgrade to LR Version 1.4 or ACR 4.4 and you did, then you need to read this article .

Adobe have withdrawn the update so if you haven’t downloaded it, no problem.

For those that have, full instructions on how to regress are given on the developers’ blog .

Anyone would think that Adobe are now owned by Microsoft.

And guess who upgraded to 1.4 earlier this afternoon???

Ka kite ano

PS: I am writing this on my laptop, while the desktop chews its way through installing Vista Business Service Pack 1….I may be still usng the laptop tomorrow…..

Kia ora tatou:

There is an old photographic joke that goes something like this…

Q. What is the difference between a club photographer, a pro and a fine art photographer?

A. Club photographers talk about their gear (photographic!), pros talk about their last sale, and fine art photographers talk about the meaning of life…

Now I am not one to raise a topic which will start a flame war, such as why Canons are better than Nikons or why MacOS is better than Windows or Linux, but I am happy to point you in the direction of somebody else’s war….

Ken Rockwell has written a post on his website giving his opinion on this. He takes the point of view that it is the photographer that matters, not the equipment.

Michael Reichmann, over at Luminous Landscape, has taken the opposing position. He argues that the size/quality of your toys is important…

Have a read and then comment. I challenge you…..

Ah, isn’t hubris a wonderfully predictable thing…..

Ka kite ano

Kia ora tatou:

As some of you know, I have been in Auckland for the annual PSNZ (Photographic Society of New Zealand) Honours Board awards. This year there were a massive 98 submissions to work through in the 3 days we had allocated! Thursday was a particularly big (13 hour) day….

We finished yesterday afternoon and I flew back to Christchurch last night.

Two years ago, when I joined the Board, I posted this back in the archives. It seems timely to bring it back up to the surface and give you the chance to have another look, rather than hunt for it in the basement of my Ezine. I have made some minor edits, but it remains largely the same..( you may wish to read the original article-still there-note the alterations and draw your own conclusions…) (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Canon users may be interested in this little item of news, sent to me by a completely impeachable source in our fair capital.

Rather than clutch it to my chest, I share it freely, dear reader (I always wanted to say that; it is so Dickensian).

There may even be some truth in it…..

Latest rumours about the 5DII suggest that Nikon has put the wind up them. Hopefully they will also respond with accelerated lens design! (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Some of you love MacOS, some of you love XP, some of you even love fixing your own car (I refer to Linux distros).

I am a Vista fan. XP now feels to me like driving a 1960’s British car….

They all have their good points (and bad). She’s a hard road, finding the perfect OS.

I came across this article comparing the merits and demerits of the major operating systems, and ever being one to enjoy throwing petrol on the flames, I include it here.

Enjoy.

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts. ~Minor White

Digital photography offers the promise of doing away with the phrase I hope it will come out.

Well, it does and it doesn’t.

In previous posts, I have talked about the fact that there are two parts to making a photograph; content and process. Content has to do with what is in the photograph and why you are making it; process concerns itself with the how of photography. In this article, I want to discuss the idea of previsualisation, or knowing what the finished result will be before you make the photograph.

While the technology has changed radically, the process of making a photograph has not. (more…)