Bokeh

It took me a long time, but I’ve finally broken free of the compulsion to make sure everything in the frame is perfectly in focus – a habit learned and ingrained deeply during my years of view camera use. I still make photos where everything is in focus, but I also feel free to make photos where only one or two things are sharp, and sometimes I’ve made photos where nothing is in focus at all.

I struggled for a long time to get a toehold on how things will look out of focus – lens choice and aperture, and focus distance. When I say struggled, I mean struggled in the sense that I felt everyone else had figured it out and was a) laughing at me, and b) engaged in a large-scale conspiracy to NOT tell me the secret.

Part of it is lens choice. Some lenses have ugly out of focus rendering no matter what you do. Some seem to do the right thing no matter what. But most often, a lens will give you good stuff in some situations, and ugliness in others. How to figure out which you’ll get?

Andreas Manessinger blurts out the secret:

So often I see people ask on forums what lenses they should buy for good bokeh, and then they get all sorts of answers from 50/1.4 to – of course – 85/1.4, but what so many people don’t recognize, is that near focus beats wide aperture all the time. That’s why this lens is so useful and that’s why the Sigma 70/2.8 Macro wipes the floor with the Nikon 85/1.8, although they have so similar focal lengths and although the are similarly priced.

Why does it seem that always, always, the pictures improve as you get closer?

Same words, different melody

Matt Alofs tweeted about having just put new work up on Flickr. I went there, and saw this photo. It immediately made me think of my recent photo, shown above. Well, what it made me think was that I liked Matt’s photo better than mine.

This is amusing. I am not at all sure there’s a causal arrow, and if there is, I’m not sure what direction it might point, nor what it might mean. I’m certainly aware of being influenced by the photos made by other photographers. It’s difficult to imagine someone being influenced by mine, but I suppose it might happen.

But mostly it just made me laugh.

Print/Online

Ooof.

I’ve spent quite a few days fiddling with online versions of things I’ve put together to make into printed books. I started out thinking that, if I just made a few tweaks, I could use the same ‘document’ for both print and online. Sadly, that doesn’t really work.

So I went to producing two versions, which were visually very similar but tweaked in a variety of ways, one for print, one for online. The differences were things like moving copyright information to the back for online version, changing print shape between the two, and so on. Sadly, that didn’t work, either. Close, but not working.

I got quite a bit of feedback on various versions from various people.

None of my fiddling addressed the real, fundamental problem I was having. That fundamental problem is that looking at a photograph printed on paper, and looking at a photograph displayed on a computer screen are just plain different. A photo printed on a sheet of white paper, with a nice white surround from a generous margin – looks great.

But when you take that same layout, and display it on a screen, it looks icky. I thought so. The folks I asked for feedback also thought so. It was universal.

So today, I pretty much abandoned the ‘I have the same thing for print and online’ approach.

The good news is that, freed from that constraint, I think I’ve been moving pretty rapidly toward a design I like for online. Online is complicated, though. Folks can look at your PDF with different viewers, either embedded in a browser or standalone. They can view it in a window, amongst all the clutter of their other open windows, or they can view it full screen.

Things I’ve noticed – dark backgrounds work well. Unlike print, where you want a generous margin of paper around the image, on the screen (and particularly full screen) you don’t need that margin, and it’s better to get the image larger. On the screen, the best page shape is not square, because the screen is not square. And on a screen, it feels to me like the viewer needs more help from the visual design in terms of typography and subtle design cues to help the page make sense. And lastly, just as setting a photo in the middle of a bright white page doesn’t work well on the screen, white text on a black background works ok for small amounts of text but not for a full page of text.

Progress of a sort.

Lens Lust, reprise

Just when I thought my recent spate of purchases had tamped down my lens lust, those rotten scoundrels at Canon announce… the 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM.

Not just regular image stabilization – oh, no, that would be insufficient. This lens will have special image stabilization just for macro.

Oh, sure, they also introduced a bunch of other lenses in which I have absolutely no interest. They threw in a couple of zooms, you know, just so that I might not suspect that they’ve been using special telepathic mind rays to peek into my brain while I’m sleeping and create a lens I can’t resist.

Well, I already know about the mind rays, and if this new 100mm Macro has decent out of focus drawing AND the image stabilization really works, I suspect I will have to buy one.

Fooey.

Playing to Strengths

Last evening Paula and I went to hear a play reading at the Seattle Rep. It’s a new play, still being developed, and it’s co-authored by one of our longtime favorite Seattle playwrights, Todd Jefferson Moore. He’s done a number of plays somewhat along these lines: he addresses an issue by going out into the real world, and interviewing people on all sides of an issue, and then he takes those interviews, interleaves passages from various interviews, and the result is a play that, because it’s expressing all sides of an issue, doesn’t so much present answers as it presents questions.

For this play, Moore was coauthor with Sara Jo Breslow. Breslow is an anthropology student, and the interviews on which the play is based are her field work, and the play itself is her dissertation.

Before the play, I was reading the program, and was struck by this passage

My dissertation would necessarily bring the multiple voices of my interviewees into conversation. But I realised that through theater I could bring this conversation to life – onstage as well as in the audience. A play, unlike a book or even film, requires an audience to come together in the same room, perhaps for the first time, and witness a conversation that until now has only taken place inside my head. A play requires the audience to watch listen, and reflect together.

-Sara Jo Breslow

It’s not so much that this particular point is news to me. I just think it’s an outstanding expression of how, by playing to it’s strengths, art can make a lot of difference.

I imagine it comes as no surprise, then, that I’m a big fan of Lewis Hine.

New Words

I like words. I’m fascinated by new words, especially new words that, by their nature, capture the essence of something.

Amy Sakurai pegs the ‘perfect’ meter with her new word, “Leicarati”, in this interesting post on her blog.

I remember