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M9 first morning

Ah, yes. Battery charged, I dove in to figuring out this camera. It is, as you might expect, pretty straightforward.

So far I have had only the 50mm f/2 Summicron, which is perhaps my favorite lens ever. It took only a few exposures and a few quick reviews on the display of the camera to remind myself of that look. Once I got started it was hard to stop.

The actual praxis of photographing with a rangefinder is coming back quickly; little habits like picking out the right edges on which to focus, picking distance proxies, leaning forward or back half an inch to tweak focus, and being aware of the framelines but also aware of what is falling outside them.

The only thing that is chafing so far is the minimum focus distance. I don’t recall that rubbing at me before, but I think all that work I’ve done in the past year with the 100mm macro has gotten me in the habit of photographing close and small, and it will be very interesting to see how that practice works with the M9 and how the M9 affects that SLR photography.

M9

My M9 has arrived. I am waiting, somewhat less than patiently, for the battery to charge.

I mean, I am sitting here with the camera, which has an SDHC card inserted, a lens mounted (50mm Summicron, for those who care), and I can do nothing because I am waiting for the battery to charge. Why must the last bit of waiting be so annoying?

Side note: when I picked up the camera, they asked if I would be needing anything else. I opined as to how I might want, say, two spare batteries. The salesman gave me the look of complete pity you reserve for people who are unfathomably stupid, and informed me that they had no spare batteries for the $7,000 dollar camera I just bought. I asked him when I might reasonably expect to be able to buy, say, two or three, and he said that since there were none to bought anywhere at any price, and Leica are mute on the issue, he really couldn’t venture a guess.

He offered, though, to sell me a case. You know, a case, in which I might presumably put the camera when the BATTERY IS EXHAUSTED, to keep it safe from harm while I vent my spleen on the subject of battery unavailability here on my blog.

Oh, Leica. I’m eagerly looking forward to using the camera. Seriously. I haven’t been this excited about a new camera since, oh, since I bought an M6. Really. But this business where there are no BATTERIES to be bought? What, did you FAIL BUSINESS SCHOOL? Because, you know, your markup over COGS and distribution costs for batteries for the M8 and M9 must be, what, 500%? I’m not arguing that I should be able to buy third party batteries that catch fire, I’m arguing that I should be able to pay your outrageous marked up Leica name brand battery price and actually acquire another battery beyond the lone battery that came with the camera. Because you appear to be unaware of this subtle detail, I will point out that if you actually HAD THE DAMN BATTERIES I would buy two, and that would mean that I ended up with more batteries, and YOU WOULD END UP WITH MORE MONEY, and isn’t that really what being a disgusting running dog capitalist is all about?

I mean, really. Get a clue. I just bought a $7000 dollar piece of equipment, and I want to give you another $250 for batteries (or whatever outrageous price you choose to charge), but I can’t because you don’t have batteries to sell me.

If you’re the person responsible for the failure to provide a source of extra batteries for the M9, I hope you bang your kneecap against your desk drawer and get that awful electric feeling that shoots up your leg. It would serve you right. If I ever meet you, I’m going to give you the look that salesman gave me. You know, the one you reserve for people who are unfathomably stupid.

Leaves of Grass

Amusingly, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is not my cup of tea at all.

The actual grass itself, though – endless enchantment.

No more running.

Two of the most read posts on this blog are this one and this one, both of them on the balance between photographers’ legal rights and photographers’ social responsibilities.

If you go and read those posts, you’ll find that, early on in the life of this blog, I urged a policy where rather than use the fact that photography in public places is legal to justify their photography, photographers should instead photograph in public with some sense of responsibility. And you’ll note that I took considerable heat in the comments. Fair enough. That was a bit more than three years ago. I want to make sure that people understand, as they read what follows, that I still am very much in agreement with every word I wrote in that first post titled “The Photos to Not Take”. As photographers, we have responsibilities as well as rights.

But things have moved on, and it has become abundantly clear that the right to photograph in public is under siege. Everywhere in the news, photographers are being harassed for photographing in public places, despite their legal right to do so. It’s happening here in the US, and it’s happening in the UK, and it seems a pretty safe assumption that it’s happening everywhere. Fathers are being harassed for taking photographs of their children riding the coin-pay kiddie rides in public shopping centers. No, not just harassed by rent-a-cop wannabe mall guards, but harassed by honest-to-God police who then go on to accuse the father of being a child molester.

Enough.

I am the guy who was vilified for arguing that photographers have responsibilities as well as rights. And I am saying, now, that this is enough. It is past enough. It has gone from annoying, to stupid and annoying, to the point where this crap is socially corrosive. Governments everywhere are busily engaged in implementing plans to photograph every citizen in every public place all the time 24/365, and those governments are at the same time busily insisting that private citizens do not have the right to photograph public employees on the job. And that, my friends, is not the way free countries are run.

The time has come to say that we’re not going to take any more. Don’t just push back politely against the people who are painting everyone with a camera in a public place as child rapists or terrorists. No more polite pushing back. Sorry, we’re done with that. This is no longer an issue of polite behavior and going along to get along. The time has come for photographers to use the legal system to not just fight off the false accusations, but to go after the people who are doing the harassing. Go after them, and crush them, leave their lives destroyed and shattered in the way a parent who has been falsely accused of child molestation on the basis taking an innocent photo of a kid taking a perfectly normal bath gets his life shattered.

The problem, as I see it, is that all too often what happens is that some person with limited resources is the victim of this policy of harassment. This innocent person doesn’t have the dough to go after the harasser through the legal system. And no one has pockets deep enough to go after all the assholes who are doing this harassing.

But there’s a misconception, here. We don’t have to go after every single one. We just have to pick one. Pick one, crush him or her completely, along with the people who let him get away with it, in a very public way. Careers ended. Huge libel or slander lawsuits. Make it the stuff that causes politicians to lose elections. Turn it from a little encounter between a private citizen and a mall guard or beat cop into a big, whopping public scandal with cries for big, intrusive government investigations into the guard/cop’s boss, his boss’s boss, and his boss’s boss’s boss.

How to do it?

1. If every photographer gives $10 bucks, that’s not going to be enough to go after every harasser with lawsuits. It will, however, be enough to go after one, and completely bury him. Make it big enough, and splashy enough, and all the rest of the stupid power-hungry cops and guards will suddenly realize that their ability to own houses, cars, and live with their families is at stake. And, it will make a difference.
2. When someone engages in this sort of harassment, an effort should be made to photograph or video record the harasser, not just during the event but continuously, as long as that person is in a public space and has no expectation of privacy. Record them driving to work, with the speedometer in the frame so that if they speed there is evidence of their crime. Record them flipping the bird at a driver when they cross the street. Record them, nonstop, and sort through the recordings, and publish the most humiliating, embarrassing ones along with all the ones that contain evidence of criminal behavior. How to organize this? Twitter and thousands of photographers seems like a workable plan.
3. When someone gets harassed for photographing in a location, thousands and thousands of photographers should converge on that spot and make photographs. Make a lot of fuss. Get on TV. Hold the harasser out in the light of public scrutiny.
4. While you do those things, make it blatantly clear that the reason this person is being targeted is that they harassed someone beyond the bounds of their authority. And make it clear that this is what is going to happen to people who do that in the future. Maybe not every single time, but often enough that it is a very bad gamble for a guard or cop to take.

Because what I want is, the next time some mall guard or beat cop gets to thinking “Humm, there’s a photographer, I think I’ll entertain myself by going over there and giving him a hard time”, his partner says “Oh, Bob, I don’t think that’s a good idea. You remember Pete? He did that, and that bunch of crazy-ass photographers went after him tooth, claw, and nail. They sued him for everything he had, he lost his job, car and house. Those photographers, they photographed him every time he left the house. They got photos of him cheating on his wife, and his wife left him and took the kids, and if you want to discuss it with him, you can find him down at 1st and Market holding a sign that says ‘Let’s be honest, I need money for booze.’ He’s got lice, and he hasn’t taken a shower in three months. He lives under the overpass over north of town. Those photographers look like they’re artsy fartsy pushovers, but let me tell you, some of them are the meanest, most vindictive bastards you’re ever gonna meet. Just leave them the hell alone, and let’s go get a donut, whaddayasay?”

No more running. I aim to misbehave.

PDF size, continued

After determining that I couldn’t see any change in image quality when dropping the ‘image quality’ control in InDesign down from ‘maximum’ to ‘medium’, I’ve gone and generated new PDF files for all the portfolios on my static website.

Based on the before/after sizes with those portfolios, it seems that this change results in PDF files that are from 32% to 37% of the files generated with the control set to ‘maximum’. Yes, you’re reading that right – one third the size, same visual quality.

On a related issue, I ran the shrink-it app by Panic Software (pointed out by Paul Bradforth in the comments). It didn’t result in a reduction in size for the PDF files I generated from InDesign. That might not mean much if you’re using ANY other PDF generation tool.

PDF Size

Since switching my static website over to having PDF portfolios instead of web galleries, one of my concerns has been that some of the portfolios are quite large (e.g. 28 MB). That’s bad because it makes them slow and expensive to download, and of course if they’re larger a lot of server bandwidth is consumed as well. Even worse, when the portfolios are large, you get a lot of folks who download part of the portfolio, get tired of waiting, and abandon the download – that bandwidth is completely wasted and the portfolio never gets viewed.

So I’ve been experimenting, seeking ways to get the size of the portfolios down without cutting the number of images in each portfolio.

One way to get the size down is to reduce the pixel pitch of the images. If you generate a PDF with images at, say, 150 PPI, the file will be larger than if you have the images at 100PPI. The downside to reducing the pixel pitch is that the images start looking worse quite quickly, and you limit the size of display at 1:1. I can see the loss of detail pretty rapidly when I start reducing the pixel pitch.

Interestingly, based on some experiments that Martin Doonan did, I started experimenting with increasing the compression. In InDesign, compression is controlled with the ‘image quality’ choice. Switching from ‘maximum’ to ‘high’ reduced the size of a 28 MB pdf down to about 19MB, quite an improvement, and I couldn’t see a difference comparing the two versions on screen. Going from ‘high’ to ‘medium’ got the file size down to 10 MB, and I *still* couldn’t see any degradation. Oh, I’m sure if I went through every image in the portfolio, and spent minutes comparing the images at various sizes on screen, eventually I’d find the differences.

But that’s not really how PDF portfolios get used, I think.

Bottom line: if you want to get the size of your PDF’s down, and you want to keep the PDF’s viewable on large screens, don’t reduce the pixel pitch. Get in there and start increasing the compression. You can cut the size of the PDF down to 30% of the size and have minimal effect on quality of display.

As a side note, I’d give a lot for a tool that would let me switch rapidly back and forth between two PDF files, to make it easier to compare.

The real questions

Ok, I admit that when the discussion turns to the question “Is it Art” I get rapidly confused.

The consensus on the internet, now that everyone has finished gawking in enchanted wonder at it, seems to be that Michael Paul Smith’s photographs are NOT art. Amazing stuff, I thought.

I confess I am not sure why Smith’s photographs of carefully arranged scenes are NOT art, but Jeff Wall’s photographs of carefully arranged scenes are most definitely Art, and Elisabeth Bernstein’s wonderful “Scapes” are Art.

Box score: photographs of arranged scenes NOT art: 1, photographs of arranged scenes IS art: 2. Go figure. Cynical bastard that I am, I suspect in my heart of hearts that the answers here have a lot to do with whether the work is being sold in galleries or not.

The lesson I take away, here, is that when someone starts discussing the question “Is it Art”, we should immediately ask the following four questions:

1. Where the hell did I put the camera?
2. Which way do I point the camera?
3. When do I do the shutter?
4. Is that annoying person still yammering about “Is it Art”? If so, return to question 2.

Look

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e. we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.

Henry Thoreau – [Journal, 2 July 1857]

Keep looking for it.

Translation, please

I recently came across the following text on a photographer’s web page. It appears to be in English but I when I read it, it’s like a drop of mercury rolling off a curved surface – it seems to be so slippery I just can’t get a grip on it.

Not Even But Almost is an investigative look at contemporary life and its unsatisfying nature. By looking intimately at perceived ideals of happiness in the out-there, we can understand how our in-here situations of containment and discontent are created. The understanding of the mind creating a mutually agreed upon reality becomes apparent in these external manifestations, unconsciously creating perpetual unsatisfactory situations. The relentlessness of discovering almost-understanding continues to persist through the inherent flaws in human nature. Through this work I hope to help viewers discover, the quest for wholeness is disguised in our pursuit of happiness.

Is that how other photographers approach what they do? I mean, really? Because that’s not how I do it.

I do it this way: I make some photos. I look at them. Almost always, I think (of one, or two, or some number) “Hmm, that’s interesting. I think I’ll make some more that are sort of like that, and see what happens.” And then I repeat.

And in doing that, sometimes I learn things about what I’m photographing, or I learn things about photographs, or in some rare cases I learn things about myself. Almost always I have a nice time, and end up happier and more content.

This isn’t earth shattering the way an investigative look at contemporary life and its unsatisfying nature would be, I agree. There’s no dealing with my in-here situation of containment and discontent, let alone how it’s created. There’s absolutely nothing dealing with how my mind creates a mutually agreed upon reality nor external manifestations, and nothing about unconsciously creating perpetual unsatisfactory situations.

Despite the lack of deep philosophical and art-theoretical underpinnings, I do seem to be having fun. I admit that I look forward to going to an exhibit of photos one day, and reading an artist statement along the lines of “I take photographs because when I take photographs, I have fun.”