Nasturtium

 

September 2009. This was a test of the close-up capability of my then-new Canon SX-20 digital camera.

Natural Light Photography (Ansel Adams)

 Ansel Adams. Natural Light Photography (1952) Adams was one of the greatest photographers of all time. He understood the technical problems of the medium thoroughly. In his quest for photographs that reproduced what the viewer of the scene perceived and felt he manipulated exposure, development, and printing shamelessly. Nowadays, the algorithms built into our digital cameras perform calculations and judgements similar to his. The result is that we can make technically nearly flawless images. The onus is now on selection of subject and composition, which is, not at all paradoxically, a more difficult and intuitive an art than technical perfection.
     This book, #4 in a series of six on Basic Photography, is a valuable reference for anyone making photographs with film, especially if one has the filters listed by Adams. His Zone system of determining exposure is essential. Our digital cameras, which use multi-point exposure and algorithms, perform the Zone system calculations for us. His discussion of how to compensate for the different light sensitivities of different films remind us that the sensors in our digital cameras suffer from the same inconsistencies, and the algorithms can’t always compensate. As with film, we may have to wait for changes in the light, or manipulate it.
     Even for digital photography, Adams’s insistence on paying attention to the light is his most valuable contribution. It’s the light that creates the impression we want to see in the final print. Whatever technology the photographer uses, they must know and understand how their devices capture the light. The flat light from an overcast sky or open shade, the brilliant light from a clear sky or direct sun, the reflected light from nearby walls, trees, snow etc, all these affect how the final image will look. Adams knew from long experience and careful note taking how to use his “instruments” to make his pictures.
     Despite the obsolescence of many of the technical specifications, this is still an essential book. Skip the tech data, and concentrate on what Adams says about light and its effects.
     The printing technology used is basic letter press and halftone images. These cannot reproduce the subtle range of greys of the photographic prints. Even so, study of the pictures will help anyone wanting to make better images.

     Recommended. ****

Note 2026-05-12: I think it's a good idea to set the digital camera to black and white mode for a dozen or two pictures every now then. Seeing the structure of the image without the distraction and interference of colour should help one see the essence of the image.

Family Album on LensCulture (link)

 One of the photo sets on LensCulture. The backstory behind these photos is fascinating. A sample:

LensCulture: photo site worth visiting

I've kept this site bookmarked, always worth a look: LensCulture.

Some examples from different photographers:

 

Photography for Modellers

 

Mark Hembree, ed. A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos (1991) An odd duck of a book. Four skilled photographers of model railroads (Dave Frary, Malcolm Furlow, John Olson, Paul Scoles) write about how they do it. Beautifully printed, deftly organised text, diagrams, and photos, a pleasure to look at, and to read if you want some insight and instruction. But the puzzle is, Who is the intended audience?  Photographers who want to specialise in scale models? Scale modellers who want to take better photos?
     The four photographers write well. They use 35 and large-format film cameras, hence the emphasis on lighting, exposure, and film choice. Anyone who took photography even semi-seriously in the pre-digital age will feel a few twinges of nostalgia reading about main and fill lights, daylight filters, four-minute exposures and the problems of reciprocity. The advice about lighting, focus, and depth of field is still relevant, and the photos repay study for angle, composition, and so on. The photographers were better known as modellers. That’s why this book is a puzzle: model railroaders looking at layout photos don’t think of them as photographs, but as documents, and inspiration.
     A good book. ***

Photography's history in pictures

Julia van Haaffen. From Talbot to Stieglitz (1982) A survey of the photography collection held by the New York Public Library. I skimmed and sampled the text, which appears to be a thorough if brief history of photography’s first century or so. The well-printed plates will give the casual reader a good overview of how photographers learned to exploit the medium. As the technology improved, so did the range. Photography has I think become the dominant medium. No matter what the medium used, the maker now must take into account what photographers have done with similar contents, compositions, or intentions.
     Photography reduced the price of pictures, which in turn changed the way we use them. The first major use was recording and documenting, which enabled the spread of at least visual knowledge of the world beyond the viewer’s immediate surroundings. This continues in, for example, our reliance on video and still imagery to bring us the daily and hourly news, which in turn affects our political and economic decisions in ways we are hardly aware of.
     Recording the family was once the preserve of those rich enough to pay a painter to paint their portraits. By the nineteenth century’s third quarter, most people could afford to have their pictures taken at least once in their lifetimes. This aspect, too, continues, multiplied a billionfold by posting our “status updates” on the social media.
     It took a little while longer for photographers to understand the artistic possibilities of the medium. From the beginning, photographers cannibalised the other mediums and genres, and in return showed how content and composition of the images could be manipulated in new ways, which other artists adapted to other media.
     Photography’s improving technology eventually reduced the skilled craft component of image making, and so shifted attention to the content and composition of the images. We now expect all art to be first and foremost an image, and only secondarily an example of craft skill. Or rather, we now expect the image maker’s skill to show in the composition and content of the image, not in the manipulation of the materials that go into its making. We also expect the image to somehow express its maker’s personal point of view, which may even be more significant than any depicted content. Or perhaps better, which may give significance to content that would otherwise be ignored, overlooked, or misunderstood.
     All this and more will I think occur to anyone who looks at the pictures in this book. ***

Holmes in London (photo album)

    Regent Street

Charles Viney. Sherlock Holmes in London (1989/1995) Viney links Holmesian locations to photos of late 19th and early 20th century London. A feast both for the nostalgia buff, and for Holmes fans. The photos are generally good, and all are as well reproduced as half-tone letterpress permits.
     Besides the excerpts from the stories with at least  one photo for each, what attracted me was the record of a London long since gone. And yet it lives on. Many of the elegant new buildings still stand. The great hotels were established then, and many still exist (some have been rebuilt). Advertisements fastened or painted on walls and windows and busses fascinate. The habit of “stocktaking”sales was already well-established. London was a commercial city, rapidly expanding and creating what we now often deplore as car-focussed suburbs, but their wide streets were built to attract people who could afford to own or hire carriages.
     An enjoyable book, well worth the $2 I paid for it at the local food-bank yard sale. ***

Michel Lambeth, Canadian Photographer

Maia-Mari Sutnik. Michel Lambeth Photographer (1999) Lambeth (1923-1977) was a Canadian photographer with strong socio-political convictions, which at times interfered with his willingness to take on bread-and-butter assignments. His work as sampled here shows not only technical skill and a sensitivity to the human narratives surrounding his pictures, but also an aesthetic based on understanding the possibilities of black-and-white photography. He did work in colour too, mostly on assignment for Star Weekly, a newsprint magazine distributed with the Toronto Star and available separately as well.
     Sutnik clearly believes that Lambeth is a neglected figure in the history of Canadian photography. I think she’s right. He was one of many 1960s Canadian artists who objected to colonial reverence for British (and European) art, and neo-colonial diffidence vis-a-vis American art. Was he a great photographer? No, but he was a pretty good one, as the cover photo shows. He understood the power of black and white, and preferred prints with a short mid-range. He also had the gift of attracting his subjects’ trust, so that they did not feel the need to mask themselves in conventional poses.
     A worthwhile monograph. Sutnik wrote it accompany an exhibition of Lambeth’s work at the AGO. She asked some of his friends to write reminiscences. An online search will yield many images of his photos. **½

Photography in the mid-20th century: The Picture Universe

Tom Maloney, ed. The Picture Universe (1961) 25th Anniversary collection pf photos from US Camera. At one time, there were many photo magazines, most of them like US Camera thinly disguised monthly catalogues of photographic equipment. The photo captions always specified the camera, the f-stop, and the exposure, and usually also the film, and sometimes lenses and filters. The implication was clear: Buy the technology, and you, too, can be a world-class photographer.
     Well, if this collection is reliable evidence, world-class photographers were few and far between. Most of the photos in this book are safe compositions of safe subjects, including cats. A handful are images we’ve seen in many anthologies, such as David Duncan’s “1,000 yard stare” portrait of a US soldier in Vietnam. The text consists mostly of mini-bios of the more prominent photographers, most of them employed by newspapers and magazines. The notion that photography, even news photography, could be more than a technically excellent record of some momentary event, is beginning to influence picture-taking. There are hints of how photography would change in the 60s and 70s, when photographers began to exploit and extend the aesthetic vocabulary implicit in the medium.
     As a record of US photography, this is unwittingly a pretty good book. It shows us the many then-current competent photographers and images that have been all but forgotten. Then as now, working photographers made pictures that served their purposes, sometimes very well. The limitations of half-tone and letterpress on glossy paper don’t hide the technical excellence of the images. These people knew how to get the pictures they wanted.

    Then as now, a handful of photographers were moving photography beyond the workaday expectations. The few images made by Adams, Steichen, Lange etc seem to jump off the page, in part because they have been seen so often, but mainly because they are so different from the surrounding well-made competent craft.
     Nowadays, photography has become just another medium for image-making. Digital cameras are everywhere, and their built-in algorithms make technical perfection common-place. The emphasis, even for amateur photography, has become the memorable story, the astonishing event, the gob-smacking image, the exotic subject. Images and videos go viral when they confirm the viewers’ suspicion that the world out there pullulates with the weird and appalling, and only the misfortune of being stuck in a dreary backwater prevents one from living a vastly more exciting and terrifying life.
     Has this inundation of pictures done much good? I doubt it. We have lost the ability, or rather the patience, to look. In 1961, good photographers still aimed at making people look again. I think they achieved that objective. That so much of their work now seems merely competent should remind us that they had not yet discovered the full range of the medium. Nor have we.
     There were many other compendiums of contemporary photography. This is an interesting book, but not a keeper. **½

Another 1950s picture book about Austria

    Langewiescher Verlag, compiler not named. Österreich (1957) Franz Nabl, a prizewinning author, supplies a text summarising the landscape of the country. He writes a dense and convoluted prose, intended to be archly amusing. The pictures cover the same ground as Breidenstein’s book, but with more emphasis on architecture.
     The book is one in the series of Blaue Bücher, picture books that originated in 1902, and were intended to provide a concentrated summary of some topic, via a short but authoritative text and masses of pictures. The printing was excellent, since the books began as advertising for Langewiesche’s printing and publishing business. Their dark blue wrapper became their trademark. But the format was much imitated, and evolved into the standard tourist souvenir book that we love to bring home with us.
     A good overview of Austrian landscape and architectural monuments. Nabl laments the reduction of the empire into the small (but still world-class!) country illustrated in the photos. He’s a believer in the mystical connection between landscape and psyche. **

Austria: A Nice Place to Visit (1952 photo album)

     H. Breidenstein et al, eds. Österreich: Landschaft, Menschen, Kultur (1952) (Austria: Landscape, People, Culture) A photo album, with an introduction by K. H. Waggerl and a preface by Dr. Eduard Widmoser, an academic. Heavy on landscape (especially mountains covered in snow), light on people and culture. I suspect that many of the photos are prewar, since the city and town images show no war damage, which in 1952 was still extensive. It took Austria a long time to rebuild. The selection creates the impression that Austria is a country of wilderness and farmland. In fact it’s one of the most urbanised nations on the planet.
     Which raises the question, who is the intended audience? The photo captions, in German, English, and French, suggest the book was aimed at tourists. The hard cover, and the excellent printing on very good paper imply a high price, higher than most Austrians could afford at the time. The book aims to make Austria out to be a very nice place inhabited by very nice people creating very nice cultural artifacts.
     An interesting socio-political document, I think it’s part of the campaign to deny Austria’s complicity in the rise of Naziism. **

Clouds over the North Channel

This morning around 10:30am. You're looking at Lake Huron.

Photos as Social History: New York, Sunshine and History

    Roger Whitehouse. New York: Sunshine and Shadow. (1974) New York from 1850 to 1915, in photographs. A splendid collection of photos, with informative captions, adding up to a social and economic history of the city. We forget that New York began as a scattered collection of villages and hamlets, which were absorbed into the city as it expanded northward from its beginning on Manhattan Island. The early photos show buildings surrounded by fields. The roads were surfaced with gravel and mud. The elegant streets of middle and upper middle class houses became slums when their former residents moved ever further away from the city centre.
     Study and contemplation of these photos shows, I think, why New York became the world class city that it now is: from the beginning, its residents focused not only on making money, but on using that money to invest in amenities. Modern accounting methods would not have justified ventures such as the building of the street railways, or of apartment and office blocks at a country crossroad. Some of the earliest mansions of the oligarchy were built in the middle of fields, but the streets were already laid out to accommodate the carriages and cabs and streetcars that followed the first builders.
     Reproduction of the photos is above average for the 1970s. Whitehouse has done his research. A secondhand-book sale find, given to me. A keeper. ****

1930s German Taste: A book of photos taken with a Rollei

     Walther Heering. Le Livre D’or du Rolleiflex. (1936) Paul Franck and Reinhold Heidecke teamed up in 1920 to produce optical stereo cameras. They used their experience to design and make the Rolleiflex, a twin-lens reflex camera that earned a well-deserved reputation for technical excellence and reliability. Its design was copied by several other makers, including Yashica: my father bought one of those at a Rexall drugstore in Edmonton, and eventually passed it on to me. I still have it. The technical problem with any medium or large format camera is to ensure corner to corner focus. Before computers enabled the design of lenses with complicated surfaces, lens makers had to rely on experience and skill. Plus a good dollop of intuition. Franck and Heidecke succeeded brilliantly.
     So in1935 Dr Walther Heering sent out a request to users of the Rollei to send in their best photos, and this PR book was the result. Published in German, English, and French, it includes an historical essay by Heering, a list of contributors and technical details of exposure and film, and 180 rotogravured plates. The printing quality is excellent. The photos themselves, not so much. Grouped by subject, they are technically very good: excellent exposure, development, and printing. The book is clearly aimed at photographers, both amateur and professional, people who took picture making seriously. This collection of “excellent pictures” was intended to inspire would-be photographers, to show the reader how to make pictures “in his or her own way” with a Rolleiflex.
     How well did Dr Heering succeed? If he intended to challenge photographers to extend their practice, he failed. If he intended to confirm them in their comfort zone, he succeeded. The photos tend to the sentimental, banal, pleasantly platitudinous. Yet this was the time of the photo-essay and reportage of LIFE and Picture Post. In the USA, the Farm Security Administration hired photographers to record the effects of the Depression. Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Adams, Cartier Bresson, Man Ray and many others had shown what could be done with photography. They used the camera to extend seeing, to enlarge one’s visual understanding of the world.
     None of the images in this book prompt one to reconsider what one is looking at. They are nice pictures, presenting a world of nice people doing nice things. The selection holds to the notion that art should show beautiful and interesting things, not that art should make things look beautiful and interesting.
     As a collection of photos, average; as documentation of German taste in the 1930s, useful. **

You may want to write a script for this

An image from this series was posted on a Usenet group. I liked it.

Two Austrian picture books

     Eduard Widmoser & Karl Waggerl, Österreich (1952). Franz Nabl, Österreich (1957). Large format photo-album books intended to feed nostalgia and attract visitors. The photos are very well composed, reproduced in first-class half-tone. The 1952 book emphasises winter sports, the 1957 one the beauty of mountains, forests, and lakes. Neither one presents Austrian city and town life. Both have photos of historical buildings, mostly baroque. Both create the impression of a mostly rural country, although Austria is one of the most highly urbanised countries in the world.
     The texts sketch the history and culture of the country. Both take us up to the breakup of the Hapsburg empire, and stop there.
     Karl Waggerl offers  an impression of the Austrian character, a mix of acute observation and romantic-sentimental claims. He says that Austrians feel that something bad is lurking round the corner, but there’s nothing to be done about it. He claims that Austrians are better able to empathise with and imagine other people’s experience. The essay as a whole has a vagueness, like a horoscope, what he says can be interpreted to apply to anyone. Including people who have not had the fortune of being born and raised Austrian. Widmoser’s overview of Austria’s “situation, history and culture” is workmanlike, sounding like a tourist brochure.
     The Nabl book is one of a series of Blaue Bücher, intended to satisfy popular desire for instruction and entertainment. Nabl yearns for Austria’s past greatness; a large part of his essay is a eulogy to the Hapsburg empire, a federation in which diverse peoples lived in harmony and peace. Like Widmoser, he carefully avoids discussion of what happened after 1918, and there is no hint of 1938 and the Second World War.
     Both these books are fascinating as documents. They show that in the immediate post-war period, Austria was trying to reinvent itself, to bury the political strife of the 1920s and 30s, which prepared for the Anschluss. They show a kind of amnesia; the immediate past is simply not there. A careful look at the pictures suggests that many of them are pre-war. The focus on landscape implies a flight from the city and its commerce and finance, its political and cultural strife, its constant change. The remoter past safe; the immediate past is dangerous. The village and small town imply tradition, and confirm a desire for unchanging values.
     I was taught that Austria was a victim of historical circumstances over which it had little or no control, and specifically, that the Anschluss was an invasion that could not be resisted. These two books express the same stance, as much by what they omit as by what they include. **½

Waves (link)

Boing-Boing provided this link to photos of waves by Roy Collins. Go take a look. ****

Dreams and Realities

      Dreams and Realities (Art Gallery of Algoma. Photos by Roberta Bondar and textile pieces by Carole Sabiston. To May 24th, 2015)
     The curator’s ambition was to help us see the connection between place and self, an odd ambition considering that not a single human figure appears in any of the works. But of course there is a human present, the one who looked through the viewfinder, pored over the images, and selected the ones to print. And the one who layered textiles, their shapes and colours and textures, until what she looked at echoed what she saw and expressed what she felt. We take their places, and with luck and empathy, we will engage with the places as they did.
     This engagement is thoroughly Canadian: an awareness, always present, sometimes in the foreground of our selves, sometimes in the background. It’s the knowledge that we are interlopers, that our huddling cities will not protect us, that the land was here before us and will be here after us.
     Colours are lush and subtle, textures are bold and  and faint, composition is clear and intricate. I found every image and textile piece at least interesting. The photo of sheep on a rock face, and the round construction of landscape, sky and clouds were among my favourites. ***

Route 17

      Route 17 (Timber Village Museum, Blind River, Ontario. To June 18th, 2015)
     Dani Lynn  Redgrift is a very good technician. All her images are well composed, her close-ups with a nice contrast between sharply focussed foreground and out-of-focus colour-field background, her wide angle shots ordering the busy detail in carefully arranged blocks of colour and texture. She uses Photoshop mostly to do what in the days of film any printer would do in the darkroom, to dodge and burn in, to control contrast and gamma. She likes to use HDR (high dynamic range) to dramatise skies and water, or to shift reality towards the surreal. She chooses to exhibit images that she knows will appeal to her audience. The result is that I don’t get much of a sense of her vision, of how she sees the world around her.
     With one exception: landscape and waterscape. She sees the wildness, the dark side, the glimpses of inhuman forces at work. Her pictures of forests, sky, and water remind us that no matter how familiar the bush may seem, it’s another reality, one that doesn’t notice us, in which we are merely guests. She uses HDR both to emphasise the inhumanness and to distance us from it, so that we can contemplate it with something close to equanimity.
     Worth a careful look. Matted prints available. **½

Peter Johnson. Isle of Man Steam Railway in Colour (1998)

    

  

Peter Johnson. Isle of Man Steam Railway in Colour (1998) Most of the photos (one per page) feature the steam engines; the captions provide all kinds of history and other information. Technically excellent, a few include people (staff, tourists), or a bit of landscape. As far as I can tell, the colours are accurate. A very well done album for the fan, and of more than passing interest to the casual reader recalling or planning a visit to the Island. Looking through it, I decided we should go there on our next visit. ***