John Delaney’s intimate faces

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I spoke on Wednesday about Johsel Namkung’s “Intimate landscapes.”  That seems almost a contradiction in terms.  You expect to find intimacy in portraits, and today I’d like to talk about the very compelling portraits of John Delaney.  But first we should consider what brilliant portraiture is all about.  If you look at someone, if you converse with them, your eyes meet, and it is through eye contact that intimacy is exchanged and achieved.  So when we speak about great portrait photography, we are speaking about the camera becoming the photographer’s intimate eye.  The camera becomes joined with the photographer, it is now, to the subject, an essential element of the person with whom that (s)he is interacting.

John Delaney offers us a wonderful series of images of the “Golden Eagle Nomads of  Kazakhistan.”  In a sense this is travel photography.  However, what Delaney has done is to set up a mobile studio tent on remote location in which he captures remarkable images of the Kazakhs. Nobody knows exactly when the Kazakhs tamed the Golden Eagle of Central Asia.   Herodotus (484 B.C.E – 430 B.C.E) refers to nomadic eagle hunters in 5th Century B.C. Marco Polo (1254-1324) wrote about them in the 13th century. Genghis Khan is said to have had 5000 mounted Eagle Riders in his personal guard. In these pictures there is a mutual nobility to both the Kazakhs and their eagles, and there is an unpoken intimacy between them as well.  These majestic eagles can attain seven foot wingspans. I want to particularly draw your attention to the marvelous gentlemen of Image #9.  I don’t think that more perfect lighting in a portrait could be achieved.  And the portrait of the adolescent girl Image #14 is just wonderful.  You cannot help but wonder what her dreams are.

Delaney who was a master printer for Richard Avedon, before striking out on his own offers the desire to preserve the image of these noble people before they and their way of life (at least 2500 years old) vanishes forever as his reason for traveling to Kazakhistan to photograph these people.  But if you continue to explore Delaney’s website you learn that you do not have to travel half way around the world to document vanishing ways of life.  In his series “Hoboken Passing” Delaney documents the vanishing store owners of Hoboken, New Jersey a neighborhood “in transition.”  These too are noble and proud faces.

Finally, I would like to point you towards Delaney’s gallery “Himalayan Portraits.”  Once more we find that quintessential humanity that lies within all of us.  I am especially bewitched by the portrait of (presumably) a mother and her two daughters in Image # 10.

John Delaney is a master of portraiture.  His black and white (sepia toned) images of distant people seem quite intentionally to come from the nineteenth century.  In this way they emphasize the distance, creating the sense that we are separated from them in both space and time.  Of course, the essential paradox is that through their eyes we become intimate with Delaney’s subjects.  They are of us.

Are full frame DSLRs superior to APS-C cameras?

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Figure 1 - DSLR camera sensor formats compared. Image from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – DSLR camera sensor formats compared. Image from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain.

I have been dealing with a lens problem over the last few weeks, and as a result, I have been sorting out in my mind the relative advantages between the APS-C and full frame sensor cameras.  At the risk of becoming soporific, the story begins with where does that pesky multiplication factor come from.  But a first question: what am I talking about?  If your DSLR  camera (refer to Figure 1)has a full frame sensor it is a 26 mm X 36 mm or 864 mm2, which means that it is the same size as 35 mm film.  However, if your DSLR has an APS-C sensor it is smaller, 15.7mm x 23.6 mm or 370 mm2 for Nikon and 14.8mm x 22.2mm for Canon or 329 mm2.  Now suppose you put a standard lens (one designed for the full frame format) on the camera.  Your APS-C sensor will only image the center of the field.  Your image will appear magnified relative to the full frame format by a factor of 36/23.6 = 1.53 for Nikon and 36/22.2 = 1.62 for Canon.  There is your magic multiplication factor.

Image magnification is determined by focal length.  For example, a 100 mm lens magnifies two-fold compared to a 50 mm lens.  As a result whatever the true focal length of the lens is, you need to multiply by this multiplication factor to get the equivalent focal length for an APS-C camera.  For instance, if you are using a Canon 18mm to 55 mm zoom lens, it is equivalent on a APS-C camera, such as the Canon T2i, to a 29 mm to 89 mm zoom.

It is logical to ask which is better?  And if you are a regular reader of this blog then you know that I am going to obsess about two factors: image sharpness and image dynamic range.  Given that, and before we can discuss relative advantages, we have to consider one more technical point.  Suppose that you start with the APS-C sensor and you want to make it bigger, indeed you want to make it full frame, then you can do this in one of two ways: you can make the pixels bigger and keep the same number of pixels or you can keep the size of the pixels the same and just add more of them.  This is not a minor point, as we shall see.

Canon’s full frame cameras, for example the EOS 5D and the EOS 6D have approximately 22 Mp “resolution.”  Compare this to their APS-C cameras at 18 Mp “resolution.”  This means that there are about 22 % more pixels or about  10 % more on a side.  Basically, this means that the pixels are bigger, but that the number doesn’t change by much. Nikon kind of goes both ways.  Their APS-C cameras have around 24.1 Mp.  Their full frame cameras come in two flavors.  The D800 has 36.3 Mp, meaning 50 % more pixels or 23 % more on a side,  while their D600 series has a full frame sensor with 24.3 Mp, meaning no change in the number of pixels.

Advantage APS-C – Price

The big advantage of the APS-C sensor is that it is cheaper to manufacture.  The reason for this is that the larger a sensor you try to manufacture there more likely you are to have a flaw.  Flaws were acceptable back in the Jurassic, when I was a lad, and we were first using cooled-CCD cameras for scientific measurements.  In the consumer market, this is totally unacceptable.  There can be as much as a 20 fold increased cost associated with making a full frame, as opposed to APS-C, sensor.  This is reflected in the increased cost of full frame DSLR cameras, approximately five to six fold.

Advantage full frame dynamic range and signal to noise

If you have a larger sensor then its well depth, the number of photoelectrons that it can hold increases as the area.  So roughly speaking, if you hold the number of pixels constant and increase the area of the pixel by (1.5)2 or 2.25, you gain over a two-fold increase in your camera’s dynamic range.  Also the  more electrons the better the signal to noise.  This is going to help you out in low light images, but only by about a factor of about two or one f-stop.

What about image sharpness

The story with sharpness is a tricky one.  First, of all most lenses perform best, from a sharpness or modulation transfer function point (MTF) of view, at or near their centers.  It is the edges that are hard to get sharp.  I am in love with my Canon  EF 70-200mm f/4L USM Lens.  This lens has an outstanding MTF.  Couple that with my APS-C sensor and the performance is just amazing!  In addition, it is easier for lens manufacturers to design high quality lenses for a smaller sensors, and again easier translates to price.

Last October we spoke extensively about photographic image resolution and I showed you that the resolution of a camera lens is 1.22 x wavelength of the light x f-number.  For green light this is about four microns.  We also showed that for good DSLRs this is about equal to the interpixel distance (for a 18 Mp APS-C sensor).   Recognize that the focal length of the lens comes in because the f-number is the focal length divided by the aperture and that this refers to the true focal length.  So if you keep the number of pixels the same going to full frame you will lose a bit in resolution or sharpness.  But say that you increase the number of pixels enough to keep the interpixel distance the same (that was 2.25 fold in the previous example), then your resolution or sharpness will be the same.  However, if the resolution is the same then when you print or project your image on a computer screen you will have more pixels.

Last fall we discussed in detail how many pixels you need as a function of print size.  What we found there is that 300 pixels per inch is more than sufficient and this means that today’s APS-C sensors certainly provide sufficient sharpness for a crisp 12” x 18” image.

My bottom line

When I started writing today’s blog I was afraid of being boring (I have no doubt succeeded in that), but at least I thought the subject pretty straight-forward – 1100 words later, no so much!  You can see that there are advantages both ways, which makes the choice ambiguous.  My bottom line is that for the kinds of photography that I do and the print sizes that I am aiming for there is no real value to going full frame.  Affordability is very key, since everyone has limits on how much they can spend on equipment.  The ability to add another lens to my photographic arsenal, outweighs the minor disadvantages of the APS-C.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Mount Everest

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Figure 1 - Sir Edmund Hillary, 1953. From the Wikimediacommons Pascoe, John Dobree, 1908-1972. Edmund Percival Hillary. Ref: 1/2-020196-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22676310

Figure 1 – Sir Edmund Hillary, 1953. From the Wikimediacommons.  The original source is  Pascoe, John Dobree, Ref: 1/2-020196-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand and in the public domain.

 

As a young boy nothing could thrill me more than a photograph like the one of taken by Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008) of Tenzing Norgay planting the flags on the summit of Mount Everest.  This past week we celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of this first successful assault on the world’s highest peak on May 29, 1953.  Yes. it’s all a bit of macho obsession.  But these kinds of photographs represent the limitlessness of human endeavor and accomplishment.  As Tennyson put it:

“I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.”

 When asked why there was no picture of Hillary himself on the summit., he responded that “as far as I knew, he had never taken a photograph before and the summit of Everest was hardly a place to show him how. “

About forty years after the event, I had the opportunity to meet Sir Edmund, or Ed as he informed us was his preference.  He was warm and unassuming, quite consistent with his oft quoted response upon reaching camp after the summit climb: “We knocked the bastard off.”  I remember a long discussion with him about climbing without oxygen and its adverse, even lethal, effects.  I think, however, that what really speaks to the nature of the man, and what represents his enduring legacy is his Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation to provide education and healthcare for Sherpa children.  To the end he saw no limits on human endeavor and accomplishment.

Optical illusions

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I needed something absolutely light this morning and found it on www.msn.com.  It is a set of “optical illusion” photographs.  Most of them involve the flattening of perspective that telephoto lenses create – like the tree or lamp post that you discover growing out of Uncle Harry’s head in you family snap shot.  Still, I really like the soapy eyeball and the owl and the mountain village about to be engulfed in a giant ocean wave.  Check it out for fun!

Johsel Namkung – intimate landscapes

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There is a wonderful retrospective of the work of Seattle-based photographer Johsel Namkung (1919- ) in this month’s “View Camera, The Journal of Large Format Photography.”  As per usual (don’t gripe, Wolf), View Camera is behind in publication; so this is the March/April issue, at least at my Barnes and Nobles.  This portfolio of Namkung’s images celebrates the release from Cosgrove Editions’ new book “Johsel Nankung A Retrospective.”

Namkung’s work fits in with a recent comment to this blog containing the lovely phrase “the sacredness of the primary source.”  Namkung is fairly unique among practitioners of large format photography in the 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s first in that in worked largely in color and second in that he did little or no image manipulation such as “dodging” and “burning,” staying true to the “sacredness of the primary source.”

To me, Namkung’s work reflects a very intimate form of landscape photography, contrasting, for instance, with Ansel Adams’ monumental big sky vistas.  Instead we have here a cluster of trees or damp moss covered decaying tree limbs in a Northwestern rainforest.  I rush to point out that Adams did this kind of work as well, and to wonderful effect.

I find this genre of the landscape very appealing.  It always reminds me of a Japanese rock garden, where the beauty is both in the entirety and in the minutest detail.  Indeed, it is a continuum between these ends  There is an essential fractal quality to this sort of landscape.  The fundamental defining property of a fractal is that it remains a fractal regardless of scale.  For fractals, of course, this quality represents order out of chaos.  Here what it means is that the beauty of a landscape might lie in a mountain set against dramatic clouds, or it might lie in a grove of trees catching a late afternoon light, or even in a few blades of grass amongst pebbles.  Sir Isaac Newton expressed this kind of intimate beuty in his famous remark:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Unless you are a big wide angle kind of person and if you always have a zoom lens on your camera you will find more likely than not that you photograph with about a 90 mm zoom.  This is because while the field of  view of the human eye is much larger (~160 deg) , we tend to concentrate our attention in a zone captured by the 90 mm lens (~46 deg.).  This defines Namkung’s work and what we mean by intimate.  I’m not saying that he always uses a 90 mm lens.  But I am saying that his field of view is closeup, detailed, intimate.  It is what your mind’s eye sees and, yes, bewitchingly beautiful.

In addition to the Cosgrove Editions Website , Namkung’s wonderful work can also be seen at the Woodside/Brasseth Galley site.  Further, there is an excellent online interview of Namkung, and oral history, on the Smithsonian Institutution website. That said, I find that two of my favorite Namkung prints are unavailable on the web and are in both the retrospective and the current issue of View Camera.  For once my websearching has failed me.  These photographs are “Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, 1992” and “Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, 1977.”  So it is well worth getting your hands on one of these “original sources.”

Memorial Day and the obligation of truth in image

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William "Uncle Bill" Lundy in 1955 at age 107. Lundy was a veteran of the American Cicil War having served in Company D of the 4th Alabama Cavalry Regiment of the Confederate States of America Army. This pictures is from the Wikimedia Commons. There original is in the archives of the State of Florida and is in the public domain.

William “Uncle Bill” Lundy in 1955 at age 107. Lundy was a veteran of the American Civil War having served in Company D of the 4th Alabama Cavalry Regiment of the Confederate States of America Army. This pictures is from the Wikimedia Commons. The original is in the archives of the State of Florida and is in the public domain.

Yesterday, in the United States, was Memorial Day, 2013.   There was a little parade in our town and the whole panorama of American Conflict marched by: Revolutionary War re-enactors , Civil War re-enactors, the American Legion, and today’s local soldiers.  It was a beautiful day here in Massachusetts, and a lot of young men and women never lived to see this day or to have anymore more beautiful days.  We owe a great deal to the people who fought and died in very real and necessary conflicts, and perhaps, an even greater debt to those who lost their lives in unnecessary conflicts – conflicts that the world was manipulated into by the twisting and manipulation of information and image.

I would suggest that this debt should really preclude us from taking the easy way out, when we deal with these issues of altered information and image, of corrupted  concept and manipulated meme.  It is really not acceptable to shrug our shoulders at the complexity of moral issues.  Bertrand Russell suggested that ethics is the last bastion of modern philosophy.  So maybe we should be responsible and take these big questions on.

The essential responsibility and the essential solution must lie within us, as individuals.  Government has pretty much made a right dog’s breakfast of dealing with these issues.  I know that a lot of this very complicated problem – indeed of all complicated issues – consists of gray areas.  Platitudes get us nowhere.  And I am keenly aware of the delicate balance between the exercise of social responsibility and repression of civil rights and liberties.*

So maybe we should begin by focusing on the black and white questions.  Whenever we see photographs or information manipulation designed to mislead and corrupt our political process, don’t laugh it off, rail against it, even if it supports your own political point of view.  The first responsibility of a civilized society is to protect its innocents.  A society that allows the victimization and exploitation of innocents, such as the use of children as sex objects in the fashion photography industry, is a failed society – despite all the trapping of technical and economic greatness (and it doesn’t matter which nation we are speaking about), it is a failed society.

We have spoken before about the fact that science and technology offers us choices.  It is product neutral and maybe that’s a cop out.  Choice is the dilemma.  Let us strive to make the right ones.

* This delicate balance is succinctly, yet poignantly, dealt with in Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy’s thoughtful book “In Our Defense, The Bill of Rights in Action.“

The intimacy of image – real and vestigial

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Figure 1 - The need to witness, hearses in Halifax, NS awaiting the arrival of drowning victims of the Titanic, 1912. Photograph from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain. Original photograph attributed to attributed to William J. Parker or William Mosher.

Figure 1 – The need to witness, hearses in Halifax, NS awaiting the arrival of drowning victims of the Titanic, May 6, 1912. Photograph from the Wikimediacommons and in the public domain. Original photograph attributed to attributed to William J. Parker or William Mosher.

We have been discussing the great race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to be able to send images rapidly across the globe.  Of course, much of this centered on photojournalism, and there certainly appears to be a need for people to be eye witnesses to events, to gain tangibility through sight.  While the written word and human imagination can be very powerful tools, nothing compares to actually seeing something.  Sight creates reality.  And, as we have considered before, part of the reality created is that most intense of emotions, empathy.

We see this everyday on the news.  Whenever there is a natural or human caused disaster, we want our news media to be in the thick of it.  It is not enough to read or hear about tornados in Oklahoma or bombings in Boston.   Before the scope and intensity of these events can truly register, we need, at a photographic level, to be eyewitnesses.

To me one of the most curious aspects of this human phenomenon is what I like to refer to as vestigial intimacy.  Vestigial, of course, means to wear the clothes of it.  In biology it refers to a physical trait, often so diminished or diminutive as to be unrecognizable.  Classic examples are the pelvic bones in snakes and in man the appendix and the tail bone.  How does the appendix serve us save, if it becomes inflamed, to necessitate surgery or death?  How does the tail bone serve us, except to hurt like the Dickens if we fall on it?  Still the tail bone ties us to the phylogeny of our species, binds us to our primate ancestors.

So too is vestigial intimacy of image.  I get up early and drink my coffee while watching the local news.  We have three reporters whose jobs appear to be on-the-scene reporting.  We have a storm, and there is Nicole standing perilously on the side of Boston’s beltway, watching the cars and trucks skid out.  Or worse, Steve is essentially standing in the ocean, in danger at any moment of being swept out to sea or electrocuted by his microphone as a hurricane belts our coast.  And my personal favorite, a crime has been committed the previous day, and there is Victoria reporting from outside the victim’s door.  It is dark, and I have to wonder what the purpose is of her breaking the sleepy silence of the neighborhood.  What knowledge do I gain?  How am I better informed or more connected to events by depriving Victoria of sleep, or by putting Nicole or Steve in mortal danger?  It is the powerful need for human connection, to be intimate with events, a need so strong that it still expresses itself in this almost meaningless vestigial fashion.

Never forget the magic of innovation

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It is very easy to sit back in the twenty-first century and view the development of photography and of the transmission of photographs as quaint.  I suppose that you could even argue that the importance of an innovation isn’t truly realized until it becomes quaint.  When I began writing this blog, I said that one of the topics was to be the magic of photography.  And I believe that no matter how technical we become in our discussions we are never very far from the magic.

What a moment it must have been in 1838 to see your own image on the shiny surface of a daguerreotype.    Would you not have imagined that the photographer had somehow magically captured a part of your soul in silver? What a moment it must have been in 1858 to hear the clicks of the telegraph and suddenly realize that these were being made by a fellow being across the great ocean.  What feat of prestidigitation was this?  What a moment it must have been when the first images of faces came across the wires with the belinographs.  The sorcerer was no longer satisfied to just capture the visage and soul of a person, but now transported them across the wires.  What sort of wizardry was this? And, of course, it was not long before even the wires were not necessary.

The photograph, the telegraph, the telephone, and the belinograph all were magical devices as were radios and televisions.  But in these we were mostly observers.  Now we are all Morses, and Bells, and Belins.  And this is the other dimension of the magic.  Today we all can send images and messages across the planet.  We all participate in this great dance of the memes.  In this, photography and the internet assume a huge democratizing role.  Today in any corner of the world there might be repressive violence and it can suddenly be seen worldwide.  It is raw;  it is intense;  and it is intimate.  We can sit in our living rooms wearing a shirt made in Bangladesh, but we cannot escape the image of the suffering.  We cannot escape, not so much culpability, as interconnected responsibility.

The hope, of course, is that connectedness leads to mutual respect and understanding.  We know that these powerful tools can just as easily be misused.  False information and doctored images seem just as real as authentic ones.  This argues for a diligence and critical consumerism that is rarely practiced.  But we must all seek to practice it.  It is as if we are in some epic fantasy, like the” Lord of the Rings” or “Star Wars,” where the forces of Evil tilt with the forces of Good.  They are jealous of us, envious of our interconnection, and fearful of an enlightened world.

So, yes I think that all of these quaint inventions were magical.  They affected our world deeply and profoundly and they have made it a better place.  I am reminded again of Mark Twain’s message from “The Mysterious Stranger”, that I spoke about on New Years Day 2013: “Dream other dreams, and better.”

Mark Brodkin – sometimes you just gotta gasp!

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I was taking my lunch break on Friday and skimming the inevitable “photos of the week,” when I cam across something really beautiful.  This photograph by Mark Brodkin shows the “Keyhole Arch on the Big Sur in California,: during the very few minutes of each year when the setting sun is aligned just right, and the tide is just the right height to reflect the sum through the arch.  I think that we are talking high definition, or HD photography.  But, not to the point.  This image is truly amazing!

Fortunately, I was not satisfied and visited Mark’s website.  I was immediately drawn to his beautiful image of the Golden Gate engulfed in fog. And then there’s a shaft of light illuminating a cavern of sandstone, in Brodkin’s image entitled “Revelation.”   It is really worth exploring this site especially the landscape images.  It shows the value of patience in capturing the light.  I should also mention the perfection of high definition and wonderful composition. Gorgeous lighting, naturalistic geometrics, I hardly know where to begin.  A visit to Mark’s site is a must for anyone who loves photography in all its beautiful forms. Sometimes you just gotta gasp!