I Hereby Highly Resolve. . .

Leslie's Wedding Portrait

Canon 10D, EF 28-70 f2.8L lens

Sorry, I can only show the digital file. The 6x7

negative was probably discarded with other

old wedding negatives some years ago.

. . . that we had enough resolution a long time ago.

Photographers on the (now sadly defunct) Digital Wedding Forum were boasting of making and selling excellent 30x40 prints from four-megapixel cameras such as the Nikon D2H and the original Canon 1D in the early years of this century. When the Canon 1DMarkII came out with eight megapixels, I remember reading a post on the forum by celebrity wedding photographer Denis Reggie in which he crowed that it would no longer be necessary to turn the camera for verticals because with all that resolution verticals could simply be cropped out of horizontal frames!

For myself, I learned early on that huge amounts of resolution are unnecessary for most of our purposes. I made the switch to digital in 2003 with the six-megapixel Canon 10D and, like many, worked it into my wedding workflow over several months, finally doing my first all-digital wedding on June 28, 2003.

My first assignment after acquiring the 10D was a bridal portrait, for which I packed my usual equipment – a Pentax 6x7 loaded with Fuji NPH color negative film. Just for fun, I decided to take along the new 10D and do a few shots with it as well. I wound up shooting every pose with both cameras, and because I didn’t yet know about the advantages of RAW, I shot jpegs in the 10D.

(For those of you who came into photography after the big changeover to digital, I should mention that the 6x7cm -- [2¼ x 2¾ inches] -- was revered, along with its sister format 6x9cm, as giving the highest quality available in a readily hand-holdable camera. The 6x7 format made a negative or transparency seven or eight times as large as the APS-C [half-frame] sensor in my 10D.)

After looking at the files, I said to myself “Hummmh!” I selected a file and a 6x7 negative from similar poses and took them to my local, very good, professional lab and had a 16x20 print made from each. When the lab owner gave me the prints, he said “Hummmh!” Another commercial photographer friend, a Mamiya RZ67 (also 6x7cm format) shooter, walked in just then and when he saw the prints and was told what they were, he also said “Hummmh!”

Then he said “I was saving some money for a trip to Europe this summer, but maybe I need to look into this digital thing!”

To shorten the story, I showed the prints to a number of my commercial photographer friends and several art directors I worked with and asked them to tell me which was which. Only one could tell them apart, and that was because, as I later learned, the digital file had more depth of field.

The fact is that a group of experienced professional photographers and art directors couldn’t tell the difference between a 16x20 printed from a jpeg from a six-megapixel digital camera and one printed from a 6x7 film negative!

I've shown these photos before, but I'll show them again: This is a pair of pileated woodpeckers working on a tree in my backyard, taken with a Fuji X-T20 (with a 24 megapixel sensor about the same size as my old 10D) and the Fuji XC 50-230 lens -- by no means a premium lens. The camera was hand-held at 1/60th second with the lens wide open.

And now we have cameras offering 30--50--60 megapixels and beyond. How much image quality do we need, anyway? We have way more than enough to do just about anything we would ever want to do.

Photographers are like lemmings, eagerly lining up to pay out their money to take a dive over the more-resolution cliff. And then they come back and do it again next year.

Just Looking. . .

Fire on the Mountain!

GA Hwy. 136 at Burnt Mountain Road,

Pickens County, Georgia

Photography is both an art and a tool. You can do all kinds of things with photography, and as a long-time commercial photographer I've been involved in many of those uses. Yet, with all due respect for its other aspects and uses, the photography that most interests me is just looking: the art of observing and exploring the things I see as I go through life and documenting them to share with others or simply to revisit for my own enjoyment.

The very great Elliott Erwitt was an extremely successful commercial photographer, but it's his personal work for which he is best known.  In that regard, we share the same philosophy:

“It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop.”

Clinging to Life

GA Hwy. 22 at Covered Bridge Road

Oglethorpe County, Georgia

In this sense, the observant photographer is like a little boy who finds something interesting and wants to tell everyone about it. He runs to his friends shouting "Hey, look what I found!"

Others may have different ideas, of course, but to me, that's the art at the heart of photography.

Hey! Look what I found!

Praying Tree

GA Hwy. 262, Decatur County, Georgia

 

Rise of the Swamp Monster

GA Hwy. 201, Whitfield County, Georgia

Air Mail

Cavender Creek Road

Lumpkin County, Georgia

 All photos are from my book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait.

Changing Systems, Learning Technology

Two Chairs, Hahira, Georgia

Canon EOS 20D. EF 50mm f1.8 lens

Recently my friend and fellow-blogger Dennis Mook, The WanderingLensman, wrote a post lauding the benefits of the extensive menus built into today's digital cameras. I have a different take on the subject.

I bought my first digital camera right around my 66th birthday and began teaching myself Photoshop. It seems that all I've done since then is learn software and camera menus and I'm thoroughly sick of it! All I want to do is make photographs.

Years ago, I had a small book that purported to teach budding photographers how to use a camera. The author used the acronym SAFE: Shutter--Aperture--Focus--Expose. Personally, I don't think all our complicated menus have improved on that.

Before the Great Digital Switch, I used Canon EOS film cameras for about ten years, and before that used the Olympus OM system for 12 or 13 years. Looking back, I'm sorry I didn't stay with Olympus longer. Aging eyes made it more difficult to focus quickly and accurately on the grid screens that I used, but I could have changed to different screens and kept on using the OMs a while longer.

However, Canon EOS models such as the A2 with its menus and automatic features did help ease the transition into digital. I began with the 10D, then the 20D, which was actually a pretty good camera, the 30D, and then, in 2006, the 5D. The menus gradually grew more complex, but not yet burdensome. (Actually, I should have kept the Canon 5D, which I used happily for eight years.)

All this time, of course, I was also learning progressively more difficult software: various permutations of Photoshop, Capture One, and other programs, all of which were apparently essential adjuncts of digital photography.

To make things even more interesting, in 2010, influenced by the writings of master photographer and blogger Kirk Tuck and others, I bought an Olympus E-PL1. Now there was a menu! But I fought my way through it and wound up using a pair of E-M5s as a secondary system for several years. I learned how to dig out what I needed from the arcane menus to set the camera up to do what I wanted quickly and easily.

However, I switched to the Fuji X system in 2017 and still find myself fumbling through their supposedly easier menus. Go figure.

Sometimes, most of the time these days, I would rather just be SAFE. Shutter--Aperture--Focus--Expose.

If Necessity Is the Mother of Invention. . .

Cover of the Colorado Springs book.

. . . then Desperation Is the Father of Creativity.

One of the first editorial assignments in my fledgling career was a commission to do the photography for a book about Colorado Springs, Colorado. The publisher was Windsor Publications, a California company which specialized in producing magazine-format books for Chambers of Commerce to use in touting their respective cities as ideal places for businesses and individuals to relocate.

I photographed, and sometimes wrote, many such books for them over a period of a dozen or so years, but this was my first, and I made a beginner's mistake: when I returned home, had my film processed, and edited my slides, I found that I did not have a cover shot.

This was a serious problem, especially for someone trying to get established with a new client. The cover shot is the most important photograph in the book. It's largely responsible for sufficiently piquing the interest of a potential viewer to cause him/her to pick up the book and look through it. And I didn't have a single photo in my take that would work for that!

The slide used on the cover needed to be in vertical format because I was shooting Ektachrome 200 film in a 35mm (Olympus OM) camera. The image quality of that combination would not have been sufficient to allow cropping out a vertical section for an 8.5x11-inch cover, so the slide had to be a vertical.

What to do, what to do, what to do? 

Looking through my slides again, I found a vertical format photo of downtown Colorado Springs with Pike's Peak in the background. A 135mm telephoto lens compressed the space and made the mountain appear almost to rise straight up  from the very edge of downtown.

Okay, but still not enough impact for a cover.

Looking through the slides again, I found a vertical-format photograph of a statue of General William S. Palmer, the founder of Colorado Springs. Inspiration struck, and I sandwiched the two slides together in one mount. Viola! I had my cover!

We did things differently in those pre-digital days.

But you can bet that I never again left a location without making sure I had a cover shot or several in the can.