Meters in Digital Cameras

One of the things that annoys me about the current crop of digital SLR’s (or at least the Canon ones) is the sorry performance of the in-camera metering system.  It’s not just that it’s not very good, it’s that it’s utterly pathetic.

Here’s the way it works in practice.  I set up the camera, compose, etc.  I then set the metering system to zero exposure adjustment, then make an exposure – I pick the aperture, and the camera picks the shutterspeed.  Then, I look at the histogram on the rear display, to see what stupid thing the meter has decided.  Typically, it’s decided that the sky is unimportant and should be rendered as featureless white.  Then I make a guess at how far I need to adjust the exposure up/down, to get it ‘exposed to the right’ without clipping the highlights.  Generally this takes one try, but sometimes it takes two.

As far as I can tell, Canon have (for reasons known only to some engineering group at Canon) decided that the vast majority of users of their $3000 camera body are yutzes who use the camera only in jpg mode, and never shoot raw.  As a result, the camera just makes a wild-ass guess about what exposure will get the lower mid tones in the middle of the range, and then doesn’t worry about clipping.

It doesn’t seem like it should be hard to build a $3000 camera with a metering system which can reliably make exposures I consider correct.  I would understand if it was hard to build a meter which detected the clipping of areas of the size of just one or two pixels – say, sky peeking through the branches of a leafed-out tree.  But when the silly thing gets it wrong when the sky fills 1/3rd of the frame, you have to wonder.

Film cameras with built in meters in the ‘dark ages of photography’ had very sophisticated metering systems.  The metering system in the EOS-5d is inherited from that era – it offers evaluative metering, partial metering, spot metering, and center-weighted metering.  All of these are attempts to figure out the correct exposure for film based on sampling just a few small areas in the scene.  But digital is not film, and I’m holding in my hands a device that is, in point of fact, capable of sampling the brightness and color of some 12.7 MILLION spots in the scene simultaneously.  Why, then, does the camera set the exposure using a metering system and algorithms which were developed decades ago for a different recording medium with quite different properties?

You must have a great camera!

It’s one of the things you’re guaranteed to hear when you start showing your work.  People see the work on the wall, and they turn to you and say “Your photos are awesome!  You must have a great camera”. They’re trying to be nice.  They’re trying to say something positive and encouraging, but they’ve stepped on the land mine.

By now, we’ve all heard the story about the photographer who was told this by the hostess at a dinner, and at the end of the dinner got his revenge by telling the hostess, “That dinner was delicious!  You must have wonderful pots and pans!”  The problem with this as a general tactic, though, is that you’re forced to wait until an opportunity for turnabout comes along.

Recently, I heard a comeback that’s along the same lines, but offers an immediate response.  (Sorry, I can’t remember where I heard/read this.)

When someone tells you “Your photographs are beautiful; you must have a really good camera!” you can reply “That’s a very flattering compliment.  You must have a really good mouth.”

Mirrors and Windows

 Some time ago, I took part in an interesting discussion about photographs that were ‘mirrors’ and photographs that were ‘windows’, prompted by John Szarkowski’s catalogue/book Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 (ISBN 0870704761).  So I got a friend to loan me the book, and I read it and looked at the photographs therein.

In my mind, this book is the Platonic ideal of what I think of as ‘art theory’ books on photography. 

In the opening text that forms the first part of the book, Szarkowski advances the premise that there are basically two types of photographers – those who take photographs of things to show what they look like when photographed, and those who take photographs of things because they’re engaged in some process of discovery (and self-discovery is explicitly included).  He further goes on to say that, having drawn this distinction, he’d like to point out that it’s not so much a firm distinction as it is a spectrum along which we have photographers strewn, with someone like Atget at the ‘what it looks like’ end and someone like Minor White at the ‘discovery’ end.

Ok, that’s perhaps a useful observation, and I’ve just explained it in one paragraph.  But for Szarkowski, doing this requires 25 pages, the introduction of no less than three systems of photographic taxonomy, and at least two new proposed nomenclatures for describing photographs.  Then, as if this was not torture enough, he ends with the statement:

The intention of this analysis has not been to divide photography into two parts.  On the contrary, it has been to suggest a continuum, a single axis with two poles.  Many of the pictures reproduced here live close to the center of the axis, and can at the readers pleasure be shifted mentally to the other side of the book’s imaginary equator.  The author, after still further reflection, will doubtless make similar revisions.

25 pages of turgid, hopelessly academic, pompous, bloated, distended prose which expostulates at length on this proposed ‘mirrors/windows’ taxonomy, followed by a summary paragraph that says, in essence “Oh, but… never mind.  It’s all useless, because it is so hopelessly vague that the taxonomy shifts every time a gnat flaps its wings.  In fact, a neutrino passed through my cerebellum, and I changed my mind about everything even though a neutrino has no rest mass and no charge.” 

I couldn’t make head nor tail of how the photographs in the book are divided into two sections.  I labored mightily, really.  But I don’t get it.  I’d think I had the two sections pinned down, and then I’d turn the page and come to another photograph that made me think “Oh, no, I was wrong about that”.  It was an experience disturbingly akin to playing ‘twenty questions’ but with the questions selected from a vast list at random, so that you are continually keeping a mental set of possibilities and throwing things out as counterexamples are presented. 

I confess that I think the entire thing is an enormous practical joke foisted on a very deserving community of art historians and art critics, and that Szarkowski is in fact sniggering through the entire thing, thinking “No one is silly enough to bite on this stuff.” 

But then I think that about virtually everything written by art critics. 

Quo Vadis

I went back the other day, reading the posts I’ve made on this blog since I started it seven months ago.  Seven months, surely time to ponder where the whole thing is going, what people are getting out of it, what things I’d like to put in or take out.

Folks who’d like to offer feedback or suggestions, please feel free to send it via email to blogcontact@butzi.net.

Photography: A Very Short Introduction

Several weeks ago, UPS rolled down our driveway, to deliver to me a copy of Photography: A Very Short Introduction.

Now, I admit that I have not read very many of its 139 pages, because I took one glance at the book, and put it below several others (including several books of David Plowden photos) in the stack of books to read.  But I feel compelled to comment on the book-nature of this book – the object properties of this thing as a book.

I am not opposed to ‘very short introduction’ treatments of subjects.  In fact, I think it looks pretty promising.  But this book is… is… is… just horrid.

Someone needs to inform Oxford University Press (the publishers of this volume) that a book can be short without being physically miniscule (this thing is 11cm x 17cm, the size of a pocket paperback).  A short book need not be set in type which is painfully small and hard to read

And more specifically, it does not need to be that size and have the text set with 3/8 inch side margins, and, what is worse, a gutter margin that’s so narrow that you risk breaking the spine of the book just trying to see all the text.

And then, of course, the reproduction quality is lousy.

But the text – we shall have to see.

Storm Damage

 The photos in my recent post Untitled are from just south of my home, where a huge windstorm caused widespread forest damage.  They’re photos of a salvage harvest – picking the fallen trees off the ground, taking down the hopelessly damaged standing trees, and preparing the area for replanting.  I’d made a number of satisfying photos in that stand of trees before the storm, and since then I’ve tried several times to take persuasive photos of the carnage after the storm.  Every time I try, I come back thinking that this time I’ve gotten something good, and every time the stuff I thought would be great turns out to be dreck.

Part of the difficulty is that it’s a daunting photographic problem, both visually and practically.  What was once a nice, beautiful stand of Douglas Fir was turned into a jumbled, random, tangled mess of trees that were very large.  It’s not just that it’s hard to move around in the mess, it’s that it’s downright dangerous.  That seemed to leave trying to photograph it from the edge, and everything I tried along those lines was just more photos of tangled mess.  I tried getting higher, I tried to isolate things and focus on details.  Nothing seemed to work.

The whole thing is just very frustrating on so many levels.

Tonal Rendering

There’s an excellent post comparing the tonal rendering of 28mm lenses that can be mounted on an Leica M8 over on Siliceous.

And, if that wasn’t enough, there’s more on Photostream.

Check it out, it’s well worth reading.  I project that tonal rendering of lenses is going to be the next wave of thinking about lens characteristics, in the way that ‘bokeh’ was.

(untitled)

One More Thought on Longevity of Gelatin Silver Prints

One more random thought to throw into the discussion of the (assumed) great longevity of gelatin silver prints.

One of the big issues surrounding inkjet printing has been the use of papers which have optical brightening agents (aka OBAs) in them.  There are huge, longwinded discussions about the problems with OBAs, and I’m not even going to try to recap the discussion here.  But there are apparently serious concerns about the longevity of any print made on paper that has OBAs, because the OBAs lose activity/evaporate/fade over time, and so the print ‘yellows’ as the paper base loses whiteness (and perhaps other bad things happen).

Prior to 1950, no commercially available gelatin silver paper had optical brighteners.  After 1966, most did.  My understanding is that virtually all currently available gelatin silver papers have optical brighteners.

Just something to keep in mind when you’re pondering whether the longevity of prints made 100 years ago has much to do with the longevity of prints made today.

Artist’s Statement

Here’s my most recent attempt:

The realism and fidelity of a photograph make it seem objective, but the photographer’s choice of time, place, composition and presentation make it subjective; in the end a photograph reveals as much about the person behind the camera as it does about the scene in front of it.

When I want to understand something, I make photographs of it, and the process of making the photographs helps me figure out what it is and how it works. I want my photographs to go beyond documentation of surface appearance and make plain the significance of a place and the processes that created and sustain it.