Kia ora tatou:

1. I always intended this blog to be a community. We grow as photographers when we debate and discuss. As Robert Adams said, “Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny but that carry with them a reminder of community.” I depend on my mentors and artists’ models; I also depend on you and I value your visits and the comments that you leave. Please, if you have a thought, a debate or question, ask it, state it, vilify me, whatever. If it is an Ian-Walls-question (many thanks, Ian, you hook me every time!), I will write a post about it. Morris Dancing excepted!
   
2. For those of you still thinking about attending the Freeman Patterson workshop in Akaroa next year, there are still a few places left in the first ( Digital Intensive) and 3rd workshops. This is an ideal place to spend a week working with other photographers and taking a solid step towards photographing with your own voice. The three of us never cease to be amazed at the way attendees’ photography takes a giant leap forward.
3. I am on the cusp of sending out a newsletter. If you don’t get it, that is because you aren’t on my database, and spam laws prevent me sending it out on a whim. You can sign up here or here.
   
4. Last Saturday night I did something I haven’t done in 31/2 years. I went out and shot a roll of film, AgfaChrome RS 1000, dated 12/96. I won’t tell you the number of times I shot, took a look at the back of the camera, and then called myself a Richard. But it was fun. More importantly, It showed me a new technique that I can add to the armoury. Appearing on a Creative Workshop near you…. O, and yes, I have given it a little nudge in CS3. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? I am excited! Now, where is that Mamiya RZ67? And if anyone has fast transparency film in the freezer they don’t want, my address is…. (more…)
   

When you come to my fights and I’m under the lights
and you see that my footwork is false
don’t count me out, at the start of the bout
I’m just doing the secondary waltz
doing the secondary waltz

- Mark Knopfler (from the Kill to get Crimson album)

I blame Mark Knopfler. It is all his fault.

Sometimes I am as influenced (read: informed) by music as I am by what I see, and sometimes music affects my perception of the landscape. Heaven knows what I will produce if I start listening to Metallica or ACDC while I am on the road!

Lately I have been giving myself permission to move beyond the representational, to move further into post-visualisation and expressionism. Let me explain. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Here, for you Mac users, is the wonderful advice Donald has sent me about keeping your Macs running sweetly.

BTW, the evangelist on the right is Steve Jobs. Mac fanboys genuflect to him daily. PC users may know of him….in the same way we may have heard of Knockemstiff, Ohio..but who wants to go there ? (LOL)

Make sure you have 25-30% free space on your primary hard drive, otherwise things can get flaky.

1-2 Gb free suits most people, and if this gets compromised the machine will warn the owner, by suggesting they free up some space, however many people don’t understand the message and ring me. Cultural language differences sort of cause this. I’ve seen disks with zero space free and the machine runs fine, but of course you can’t save anything. Despite it saying zero, memory management systems probably are still doing things like creating scratch disks or virtual memory, so may be this accounts for the continuing stability. (more…)

Data: Canon 1DS Mk II, EF 100-400/4.5-5.6L, 1/640 @ f5.0, ISO 100

Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to
see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object
enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of
Heaven reflected in the shadows.
::: Claude Monet :::

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the
artist, not of the sitter.
::: Oscar Wilde :::

It has taken me 2 years to get back to this image, to finally understand the feelings I had at the time I made it, to realise what was in my heart at the time and bring it out into the light. My photographs are like that, which is probably why I have so many in my catalogue (>120 000) and why I only ever delete the duds. I never know when an image that has been sitting back there in the shadows, patiently (or impatiently awaiting its time, will stir restlessly out there on the corner of my vision, will shuffle grumpily in the darkness, raising a small cloud of dust and attracting my attention. (more…)

Today a good friend and mentor passed away. A number of you will know him.

Richard (Dick) Poole, my friend and mentor of some 20 years, died in his sleep yesterday morning after a battle with cancer. Like the late Brian Curtis, he was one of the grand old men of New Zealand photography, one of those people you take for granted, until their time has passed. So I want to take some time, to take some time to remember.

I remember the day I first met you, a tall, lanky, balding man in a brown jersey with a bushy beard fierce eyes and an uncompromising attitude. For years I marvelled at the sensitivity of the portraits you made, at your passion for photographing women beautifully and your unremitting concern for craft. I marvelled at the way you made light sing and dance and the way you made it look so easy, the sign of a true master.

I remember the day you took me into the Ilam Gardens and taught me to see light, and how in the space of 20 minutes you taught me to see that light in the field could be read in terms of studio lighting, and vice-versa. In doing so, you moved my photography forward immeasurably.

I remember the day, standing on the shores of Lake Pukaki, when you taught me the two-cigarette method. You never said anything much that day, but by then I had learned to read the lessons contained in your silences and on that day I learned that a good landscape photographer needs patience and the ability to be still inside. All your lessons were profound.  You taught by example, always willing to freely share what you knew.

I remember the long conversations, where, of an evening, we would sit around an evaporating bottle of whisky and discuss the merits of D-76 and Rodinal, and the papers we each fancied (you Kodak Elite, me Agfa Brovira), and the intricacies of the Zone System. It took you ten minutes to show me the easy way to load a double-dark. You were that sort of teacher. You knew your subject so well that you could make it seem easy. I never ceased to admire your deep knowledge of the history of photography, and how well-read you were. From you I learned to mix and use  Amidol and Ferri;  I heard of the lives and philosophies of  Weston, Bullock, Adams and Modotti; I learned about the Graflex and the Ur-Leica. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

I was recently asked to participate in a debate this coming weekend, in which the Motion is: that digital photography is dancing on the grave of film photography. I am to be the 3^rd speaker for the affirmative, so it relatively easy to take that stance. The more I thought about it however, the more I have come to realise that the argument is academic, that digital has replaced film as the mainstream means of image capture. Further reflection leads me to think that the whole argument is pointless (I will of course, debate my accorded stance with enthusiasm, conviction and not a little vitriol, as I should) and that photography has come of age. Film photography has as much of a part to play as digital photography. They are the same, only different, much as petrol and diesel engines exist side-by-side. They both do the same job, but have their own strengths and weaknesses.

So why would you shoot film anyway? A phone call today from a student I taught years ago on the West Coast further brought the topic to my attention. Georgie is an 80-something who got her Voigtlander back in 1967. It has finally given up the ghost and she has been told that the cost of fixing it makes it not worth doing. She told me that she had checked with a couple of local photographers, who had both told her to go digital. She assumed I would agree. Not necessarily.

A year or two back, I would have agreed. Now I am not so sure.  A long conversation with Freeman Patterson has shifted my thinking. Although he “gets” digital, he has decided to stay with film. It comes down to this. Do you like computers? He doesn’t. He would much rather be outside, working in his garden. Or taking his camera out and making photographs.

Fair enough. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

No geeky posts or software updates here.

After a six-month hiatus, I have responded to Beth’s last post.

While I have posted it in full on the appropriate page, I have decided to post it here as well.

You may want to download it and read it over a glass of wine and a Diazepam…

Now on to Marthinus… (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Things you might want to know…

1. The brave among you might want to know that a final release candidate ( geekspeak for somewhere between Beta and Final release) of Lightroom 2.0 is now available. Lightroom 2.1 is supposed to address issues with performance and cataloguing ( ie no cool new features. Think of it as an engine tune-up. It needed one!). You can download it here.
2. Those of you who shoot portraits and have major issues with skin tones and complexions might want to check out this piece of software. By all accounts, it does a pretty remarkable job!
3. You saw it here first… I had a chat with Brad Malcolm at Athentech in Calgary last week. He was off to Photokina to demonstrate Perfectly Clear this week. Apparently we can expect to see a live version later this year (and yes, a Mac version is coming). He sent me down this screenshot. He is really interested in knowing what you think of it and how he might improve it. You might want to also chip in your pet hates and loves about the software you use and what could make it better (interface-wise). How often do you ever get the chance to have a say in the design of a piece of software? O BTW, The images (butterflies) are placeholders, not actual images.
4. Users of Proshow ( Gold or Producer) will be interested to know that version 3.5 is now out. Amongst other things, it supports writing to Blu-Ray. Now I have a reason for that 96″ HD TV…
5. Nikon users (both of you) will be positively slavering over the thought of a medium-format Nikon digital camera with a 48 x 48mm sensor. If the rumours are true...
6. Lastly, if you thought the convergence between moving image and still image was a bad dream, then you need to read this and this.

The way to Art is through Craft, not around it

-Ansel Adams

There’s nothing worse than the technically brilliant execution of a fuzzy concept

-Edward Weston

Dear Reader (Just indulging myself. Hey, it worked for Charles Dickens):

The last post threw up questions from a couple of you that I wanted to talk about in a full post, rather than hide in the comments section. It is a bit of a ramble with disparate elements that won’t appear to hang together at first.

I will say it again:

I am pedantic about image quality. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:
I know I bang on about this, but the fact is:
I am analpedantic about image quality.
Once again I have been reminded that quality matters.
Every time I make an image that blows my trumpet, I want to make it BIG, or rather to make it BIG if I should choose to so so at some time in the future. In fact my explorations of picture space over the last ten years or so  have been to do with the structuring and arrangement of dense amounts of information. A major picture-making issue for me has been a concern with finding the order in complex picture structures, in defining the balance point between not enough and too much information.

It still is. (more…)

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Kia ora tatou:
Lightroom 2.0. I love it!
The list of cool things goes on, and while it is slower than 1.4.1, the new features justify the slight slowdown. I have converted to using .dng, ie importing and converting my .cr2 files to dng. After a conversation with Adobe Ambassador John Doogan (look for some joint workshops in the future), all my doubts have been allayed. And the main reason? The new dng 1.2 standard, which allows you to import the picture styles in your camera-specific software and use them inside LR2.0 and finally have a reason for using the calibration tab in the Develop module. Not only that, you can create custom camera profiles. It is so damn good, it was worth the upgrade price just to get this. I am not going to explain it; others have done it sooner and better. Have a look here and here and here. Then go and download it. Awesome!

If you are wondering what the future of photography of photography looks like, then there are 2 words you need to get to know; RED and Scarlet. The movie industry already know about them. We will need to do so as well. Read about it here and here

Kia ora tatou:

The deathly silence (whatever sound a deathly silence doesn’t make) for the last week or so is because I have been in Tauranga at the the NZIPP (New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers) conference, where I was invited to be a judge, to join four others and assess the work. It was an incredibly hard three days. The judging is open ( i.e. members of the public can watch it), and it is nerve-wracking to pass comment when you know the author may be in the room! FYI, the New Zealand Photographer of the Year for 2008 is Jackie Rankin, from Queenstown, who scored two of her awards with some amazing images shot on Acros 100 (anybody remember that?)

There were some fine speakers, including Jack Reznicki from New York (www.photoworkshop.com) and the usual tradeshow with some very cool toys tools (say after me: Tony, you do not want a Sinar Hy6). But it was about the company, the opportunity to be among and to be judged by your peers. It was a real joy to see Stewart Nimmo from Greymouth ( they were going to call it Jubilee City, but they changed their minds and got the name right) gain his Masters, and his daughter Lydia get a bronze award. A big shout out, guys.

And yes I did enter. And yes, I did do reasonably well.

Mark Racle sent me this link about the perils of street photography in Britain. Blimey! It’s not that bad here, but getting that way…feel free to share your own stories… it is worth mentioning that you are allowed to photograph in a public place, you are not breaking any laws and that you are within your rights to use the images for exhibition or publication. Commercial use is another matter. And for those of you who are horrified, look at this! ( thanks, Meg Back!)

Those of you with an eye to the ‘Net will know that Canon have announced the EOS 50D. Specs include 14-bit imaging, a 15Mp sensor, ISO to 12800, 3″ 920 000px LCD, and a few other goodies. Read more about it here…

I anticipate being around a lot more in the coming weeks, so I intend to keep the post up to date.

Ka kite ano

PS: for the three of you who shoot Nikon: Nikon today announced the D90. A 12.21 million image pixel CMOS sensor, 4.5 fps still photo shooting rate, LiveView and 720p video capture. Oooh, that’s cool! Are you reading this, OSG?

Check it out here…

Kia ora tatou:

An unashamed plug for a workshop..

MY friend Mark Racle sent me this email, advertising a framing workshop in Rangiora, New Zealand. I have included the guff he sent me and suggest if you are interested, you contact him.

Tony

Hope all is well with you

I wonder if you know any that would be interested in the following (more…)

There ius a cost to upgrade

Kia ora tatou:

Sometime, while we were away in the Maniototo teaching the Wedderburn workshops, the blog turned 200..thousand hits that is. A big BIG thank you to all of you who pass by and have a look, and occasionally comment. An especial thanks to those who offer what they know as well.
The Wedderburn workshops are now over for the year, but we are working on new ones. More information as they become available. It was a real joy to work with such talented people. As soon as I work out how to do it, I will upload samples of the work from the workshops for the rest of you to see. Apparently it was the wettest winter in 40 years, but nothing compared to the carnage the rest of the country experienced. I am told that that the new architectural style in Greymouth is the bunker look.
Well it is finally out. Lightroom 2 is now available. I have downloaded it and begun using it. Unlike Beta 2, most of the bugs have been ironed out ( I say Most), and there are some very cool features in it. Things I like include:

• • support for dual monitors
  • referencing folders by hard drive number
  • the adjustment brush
  • smart collections
  • better sharpening and noise reduction
  • camera profiling

and more…. It may be me, but both my laptop ( T7200 dual-core, 2 Gb RAM, 2 x 250 Gb Sata drives) and my desktop ( Q6600 quad-core, 4Gb RAM, 8x 500GB SATA drives) find it resource-hungry. Can’t wait for the first update!

There is a cost to go from V1 to V2. An upgrade is around $NZ180, depending on where you shop. A full education version is around the same price . Shop around. I suggest Kiwis look here.

Apparently Britons find digital cameras the most difficult device to master in a survey conducted by Revoo.com. Curiously, washing machines come in a t #4, and microwaves at #10. Read more here.

I am currently sifting through the more than 3500 1DS Mk III files I shot during the two weeks. Stories and images to follow.

Ka kite ano

Kia ora tatou:
As a number of you have commented, when the posts drop off, it is because I am busy…very busy…
My apologies.
If they seem a little thin, I am working on it…

1. I have just upgraded the essays page to make it a little less visually constipating. There is a new essay from French photographer Robert Demachy, who wrote many essays in the early 20th century. On the Straight Print contains issues still current 100 years later. A bonus is the wonderfully formal prose…
2. From the Department of VERY Big Boys’ Toys….Last week Hasselblad announced their new 50Mp digital back. Not t be outdone, Phase One came straight back with their 60.5 Mp P65+ back. My spies tell me that it was there anyway, and they were just holding off until PhotoKina in September. But Hasselblad flushed them out of the woodwork…go on, Andrew, you know you want need one…or does the iPhone come first???
3. If, like me, you use Firefox in preference to Safari or Internet Explorer, the upgrade to 3.0 is well worth it. Not only is it faster and less resource-hungry, there are cool plugins available for it. My favourites are Foxmarks ( sync bookmarks across computers), All-in-One Sidebar, Pdf Download, and Sxipper ( keep track of your form details and login/passwords..
4. Lastly a tip from the Department of Pocket Protectors. I have been trying to find a way to send and receive email from my laptop while on the move without having to use slow and clunky webmail. Receive is easy enough. Send is something trickier. Well, there is a way, if you have a gmail account. In the account settings, specify your default smtp server as Gmail and it works anywhere. More details here or google : free smtp.
5. Update: Focusing Fallibilities. Those of you interested in focusing and focus issues might want to read Dave Etchell’s article. At first I thought it was a sound argument for avoiding autofocus. Now I realise it is an even sounder argument for avoiding manual focus. Or is it?
   

Ka kite ano