First Apple Computer Sold at Auction

One of the first Apple computers sold for $210,000 at an auction today at Christie’s in London.

Image Credit: First Apple Ad

Freelensing

WARNING: Do not do this in the Amarillo Wind!

An article on goofy ways to shoot with a digital camera to create effects that look like light leaks in film cameras. It can also create some other odd looking effects. 

A student sent this to me via Luke Roberts blog, his website has lots of photo stuff including an area dedicated to Gimp (PhotoShop Open Source)

Lensbaby also makes some cool lenses that create artistic distortions and effects for SLR. Check out the Gallery.

Illustration Credit: Unknown, found on Luke Roberts blog

Moore's Law & Digital Photography

This is an older article that I found going through my bookmarks (2006). In the article the author gives one of the most succinct explantions of why the sky is overexposed when the foreground is correct, or the sky is correct and the foreground becomes a silhoutte that I have ever read.

A key factor in quality is the ratio in brightness from the darkest to the lightest. The reason many pictures don't turn out is that in daytime the human eye can easily perceive a dynamic range of 10,000:1, while at night it is more like 1,000,000:1. Meanwhile, color slide film can record only about 32:1, and digital cameras, about 64:1.

In many situations, this forces a choice - do you expose for the light parts of the scene and let the dark parts go dead black, or save the shadows and turn the bright parts pure white? Future digital sensors will fix this, with ever broader dynamic range and greater light sensitivity (the ISO rating). At the same time, the digital noise that comes with high ISO today will diminish. - Nathan Myhrvold, NYTimes

The whole article is worth a read... some of his predictions are coming true already.

Photo Credit: Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820–1884), The Great Wave,  Albumen silver print from glass negative, 1857, 13 1/4 x 16 5/16 in. Le Gray is known for his combination printing of landscapes. He would expose one plate for the landscape and another for the sky. Thus solving the problem referred to in the article.

Photography and Technology

When I studied photography, it was all analog. We worked in darkrooms illuminated by amber safe-lights and made black and white prints in 16x20 trays. We grew accustom to the smell of fixer, and the sound of cool running water. The hours would pass. Unless we were shooting - we hung out at the sink, stood around light tables, drank gallons of coffee, and talked about photographs. We were addicted to the magic silver show.

When the first Mac arrived in the faculty workroom, no one really gave it much thought. It was curious, and had potential, but at the time it was still a bit of a novelty. Year by year the software, printing, and resolution improved. Then, seemingly overnight, digital photography took over most advertising and photo-journalism work. This was a natural transition, since at some point the images had to be converted to digital for publication. Once digital cameras became inexpensive, and small enough to be added to a cell phone, digital photography became the standard.

For amateurs, the cameras provided automatic feedback on exposure and composition, fun filters and apps, and memory cards that were much cheaper than film. Internet sites like Flickr became the new photo album, and allowed people all over the world to view snapshots of families they will never meet.

Recently there was an article in the NYTimes about how technology is changing the field of photography. It was somewhat depressing, but not unexpected. Livia Corona, a travel photographer, described it as three forces coinciding: an economic downturn, the abundance of digital cameras, and changes in the stock-photo industry. Through interviews with a wide-range of photographers the article briefly maps out contemporary trends, dwindling prospects, and the causes.

As a photo-educator none of this comes as a shock. For years now, I have thought about how technology is changing many aspects of photography, and how best to prepare students. In the end, I think the answer is the same as always: critical thinking, problem solving, research skills, confidence, and a fondness for learning are fundamental. And for students of the arts - composition, concepts, technique, and craft also remain relevant. In many ways the problem facing photography is similar to what painters must have dealt with when photography was invented. Third-rate portrait painters wound up in the backrooms of photo studios hand-coloring daguerreotypes, but the artists were freed from the shackles of representation, and modern art was born.

Photography is definitely in a transitional phase, but I still believe in its magic.

Photoshop: Content Aware Fill

This is an amazing new tool coming out in Photoshop CS5.

Happy Birthday Photoshop

It's hard to believe that February was the 20th anniversary of Photoshop. Mac Life has a great article about the history of Photoshop and pictures of the packaging for every upgrade. I remember all but the very first version....

When it first arrived at Tarrant Co. College, I was a student and ran the lab at night. We had one copy of it in the faculty workroom for research purposes. It was a fascinating program even then, and as a collagist, I immediately saw its potential as the best pair of scissors and glue stick ever invented. The first project that I did with Photoshop, the images were larger than the floppy disk would hold (approx. 1.5 mg), so I was going to save to this giant tape disk drive called Syquest (60 mg) but it crashed and I wound up "saving" them by doing a screen shot on 50 ISO color film. So from my first digital body of work, I was merging digital and darkroom, and never really stopped.

I bought PS 3 for my home computer and remember reading art history while waiting for the lasso to finish selecting an area. When the marching ants were deselected the selection could no longer be moved, and there was only one undo. So when the Layers and History Palettes were added they were truly revolutionary advances in digital imaging.

Other memories of those early years.... my first scanner was a little hand-held vacuum sweeper looking thing that would do a 4x6 inch photo in one swipe. To scan images it had to be moved in a perfectly straight line by hand, and larger images had to be seamed together. My first digital camera had a goofy detachable lens that could be mounted on the wall to spy on people in the other room (1mg? image size). And I remember buying the first Zip Drive in the metroplex for 300 bucks - each disk held 100 mg ($20), I was so excited to have this little gadget, I drove out to get it the minute the store clerk called, when I got there it was still in the warehouse.

Much has changed in 20 years. What was once a curiosity, has quickly become the standard. Commercial photographers and photo-journalist shoot almost exclusively with digital cameras; and sadly, too many darkrooms are being ripped out and replaced with computer stations. The temptation to manipulate images is greater than ever, and without negatives to authentic an event, the veracity of photographic images is more questionable than ever before.  But the potential of the software to expand photographic possibilities is beyond my wildest dreams.

Three cheers to the Knoll brothers!

Retouching Gone Wild

"No Wonder Our Perception of Beauty is Distorted" - Dove Evolution

I've started this article with the video of the "Dove Evolution" PSA because it really de-constructs the amount of enhancement done to the face for a national ad campaign in today's world. Not so many years ago there was a limit to the amount of manipulation and retouching that could be accomplished on a photograph, and it was a highly specialized field that very few people excelled in. However, since the invention of Photoshop and other advancements in technology all that has changed.

Teaching digital imaging has made me aware of trends in both art and commercial photography. My eye is always searching for examples that can be shown in class. Lately it seems like everyone has a digital camera and editing software, and just can't resist the temptation to fix the image in some small or large way. I see badly shopped work on the sides of trucks, church flyers, band posters, and the glossy pages of catalogs and magazines. Sometimes it's just lazy like using a feathered lasso to make quick work out of a complicated form. Other times it is a third hand or a missing leg that is so obvious it makes me wonder if the person designing it really thinks I won't notice. But perhaps the most amazing aspect is how much of this actually makes it past art directors, and VP's, and into the press.

WebUrbanist has a collection of 15 botched Photoshop jobs found in advertising campaigns that are laugh out loud funny. The timing could not be better since this week in digital imaging the topic is retouching, enhancement, and modifications. Teaching this section is fun for me, because not only does it cover useful techniques but also enlightens students about the degree of manipulation in fashion images. There is a difference between benignly knowing that images are manipulated and becoming aware of just how much alteration is done to the body in contemporary ads. It's like pulling back the curtain on Oz.

Two of my favorite sites that are dedicated to chasing down Photoshop failures are:

Photoshop Disasters (credited with outing the lollipop girl on the cover of Ralph Lauren) and Photoshop Mistakes. 

For more information go to the Links page and look at Retouching.

And Photo Tampering Throughout History, is a good place to start looking at the history of image manipulation.

Super Wide Angle Digital Camera Mod

Step by Step instructions for how to put a wide angle door peephole viewer on the front of a digital camera.

Xeni on Rachel Maddow

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In the last post, I mentioned Xeni on Boing Boing critizing an advertisment by Ralph Lauren where the head is larger than the pelvis. It seems RL tried to force Boing Boing to take down the post and they refused. Rachel Maddow interviews Xeni about the ongoing issues regarding her post and the lollipop-like model.

Ethics and Photography

Photo-manipulation is nothing new. It’s just a matter of where you want to start and how you want to define it. When Hippolyte Bayard posed as a drowned man in 1840, he was stretching the truth by staging the photograph. Oscar Rejlander in 1857 created the seamless combination print, The Two Ways of Life, out of 17 negatives (some say as many as 32). Insertion, adding images to the photograph, has been employed since at least 1865 when Matthew Brady added General Blair, to a photograph of Civil War officers. In the early 20th century, the half-tone printing process brought about a proliferation of photo magazines, and the Dadaist of Germany started making photomontages from the photographs found on the pages.

Digital photo-editing programs like Adobe PhotoShop make the possibility for image manipulation easier and perhaps more tempting. As early as 1990 in his book, "In Our Own Image," Fred Ritchin wrote about the potential of digital images to flawlessly manipulate photographic space and called for a need to label image composites in publications. In the book he gives an example of the pyramids being moved to create a vertical image, out of a horizontal photograph, for the cover of National Geographic.

The power of all of these strategies relies on the inherent nature of a photograph to be perceived as truth by the viewer. The idea that a photograph represents an indisputable truth and the debate about image manipulation starts at the inception of the medium and continues to this day. In Germany, Brigitte magazine has implemented a policy effective 2010 to use normal people (instead of size zero models) for images and not retouching them. In France the politician, Valérie Boyer, advocates passing laws that require enhanced photographs to have warning labels. She says, "These images can make people believe in a reality that often does not exist” which can lead to lower self-esteem and eating disorders. Since most advertising images, and many other images, are frequently manipulated there is naturally resistance to this movement. Currently there is a fight brewing in the blogosphere between the blog, Boing Boing, and a Ralph Lauren advertisement. Xeni, a regular contributor on Boing Boing, criticized the image because the model's head is larger than her pelvis, and Ralph Lauren rather than address the criticism has demanded the blog remove the post claiming copyright infringement.

While these trends are important, perhaps the most effective weapon to use against the persuasive effects of the photographic image is to teach people how to read photographs. In the 1940’s Laszlo Moholy-Nagy said that "... the illiteracy of the future will be ignorance of photography." But over 50 years later, media literacy is still not part of the school curriculum, and considering how many images the average person views in a day, it seems like there ought to be some attempt to teach people how to read those images.

Additional resources:
Dove Evolution
Top 10 Doctored Photos
Photo-tampering Throughout History

This article was original posted at Art21 on KACV blog.

Photo Credit: Oscar Rejlander, Two Ways of Life, 1857