So a while ago, I posted a crash course of sorts about digital cameras, and I mentioned Flickr, and their stripping of uploaded color profiles. As an update to that, I discovered today that in addition to the stripping, Firefox also has no current support for color profiles. That means that even if an image is uploaded with an ICC profile, it is ignored. IE and Safari have have support for ICC profiles, with Safari going a step farther and if it comes across an image without an ICC profile, it applies your monitor’s output ICC profile to it. All of which is really frustrating for me, because Firefox is, in every other respect, the better browser, and my preferred browser. But since I spend a good amount of online time looking at art and photography images, color correction is an important thing for me, and I don’t want to have to switch browsers depending on what I am looking at. But the more important thing is that as someone who spends a good deal of time working on his images for presentation, it’s frustrating that there’s not cross browser support for the standard ICC profiles, so that the colors that I see and want others to see, are the ones that are delivered, correctly.

In downtown San Francisco there was a large protest today, protesting Taiwan’s president, Chen Shui-Bian outside the St. Regis. I have some images up on my Flickr page from it.

Neatorama has a post up on 13 Photographs That Changed The World that is an interesting read. Most of the photos are your standard canonical famous photographs, but considering licensing rights, you don’t see most of these together in print ever.

I do like this entry, about Philippe Halsman’s photograph, “Dalí Atomicus” (the emphasis is mine)

But before settling on the “Atomicus” we know today, Halsman rejected a number of other concepts for the shot. One was the idea of throwing milk instead of water, but that was abandoned for fear that viewers, fresh from the privations of World War II, would condemn it as a waste of milk. Another involved exploding a cat in order to capture it “in suspension,” though that arguably would have been a waste of cats.

A friend of mine, as one of her New Year’s Resolutions, said that she wants to take better photos, so I thought that I would make a post about how to get the most out of your crappy digital point and shoot. Now, I am no digital guru by any stretch of the imagination, so this is not comprehensive, but I have been shooting digital for a while and have learned a few tricks about how to make due with what you have. And here we go:

1. If your camera has an Auto ISO setting, disable it. The ISO settings tell your camera how sensitive to light to make it. So the higher the number, the more sensitive to light it is. But the catch is, the algorithms that make it more sensitive to light also make it more susceptible to noise. So a good rule of thumb is to disable the Auto ISO and keep it on the lowest numbers possible. (The lowest on my camera is 50, and I usually keep it on there or 100) Most cameras will compensate for it in the shutter and aperture settings, so you don’t have to worry about it. Noise is a pain, and there is really nothing you can really do to get rid of it that leaves your photo looking nice.

2. Turn the flash off. Unless you need it, turn the flash off. In a lot of cases, I see shots with people way too close to the subject, and the flash blows out the shot (meaning the flash is so bright that you can’t see any detail) or they are so far away that it’s ineffective. And natural light looks good. So turn off the flash.
Just check the LCD and see what the shutter speed is at. (Most decent cameras will display this along with the aperture, which is usually 2.8, 4.5, 5.6, 8, etc) If it is at 1/24 to 1/60 or higher, you are money. Anything slower, like 1/8 (by the way, these are fractions of a second, for anyone really starting from scratch) you will want to rest the camera on something, because otherwise you are going to get shaking and blurring in the shot from holding the camera.

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One of the interesting outcomes of my recent portfolio organization that I have undertaken recently is that it has given me a perspective on my work that I don’t think that I have had before. Looking back over ten plus years of work, I am able to see common threads and themes throughout my work that I didn’t or couldn’t see at the time. I am really discovering the old maxim of “You don’t know where you are going unless you know where you have been” to be very true these days, because the individual points in your life only begin to make sense and take shape given time, when the connection between them is made and a trajectory becomes apparent.

I finally got around to getting my old negatives from my dad’s house with this last trip, and one of the other projects that I have given myself is going through and scanning them in. With the printers that we have at school, I can get some damn good output with scanning these in. Even with the printer that I have at home gives me passable quality, enough to make me have no need to ever go in a wet darkroom again.

The odd thing is working with these negatives now, I remember just battling with some of them the first time around, (some of these I haven’t touched in ten years or so) with small scratches here and there, dodging this corner or that one, getting the right amount of contrast, and the juggling act it was getting all of that right on each print. I would spend days working on a print. And now, going through these, I’m spending 15 minutes, scanning them in and doing all of that. Even more so, I have control over so much more than I ever did before that I have been able to get an almost totally different print than before. But even though it was hard, and a pain in the ass, I wouldn’t trade those years in the darkroom for anything.