"I never, ever crop...except when I want to."

—Frank DiPerna, about 1983

Sorry I didn't pull "featured comments" for Kirk yesterday. I was feeling unaccountably out of sorts, and probably would have mucked up the conversation.

I've never shot square, myself, and have always liked longer rectangles. Of course I've had to shoot with various square cameras over the years—my first camera-reviewing assignment, for the old Camera & Darkroom (R.I.P.), was surveying medium-format cameras, and when you review cameras you have to shoot with all kinds of things. My first review was of the then-new Mamiya 6, which shot square. I did mention in the comments that with the one square format camera I owned and shot with for any length of time, an Exakta 66 Model 2 with a waist-level finder, I cropped everything to a vertical. I didn't start out meaning to do it; it's just the way I saw everything. And then once I started, naturally I couldn't stop.

Mike shoots square. That was the Potomac estuary south of National Airport.

It was probably the only time in my life I consistently visualized a crop with every shot. Of course it all had to be the same crop; the work was exhibited around D.C. back in the day (it got nice reviews in the newspapers) which is why I still have some framed pieces floating around the house.

And this will make Kirk smile. The one summer that I did a lot of work with a 4x5 camera, I attached a section of a small, thin ruler to the inside of the camera back so that the camera created a more oblong rectangle—the same aspect ratio as 5x7. I didn't want to deal with the too-squareness of the 4x5 shape.

All my 4x5" negatives have a clear bar at the bottom where I modified the film holder to change the camera's aspect ratio. This is Polaroid Type 55
P/N film, from a project I did on a grant.

I've been shooting mostly with the GF1 lately, and am getting used to 4:3.

Of course, what Kirk is saying is, there was an aspect ratio that was right for him...so, by extension, there might be one for you, too; and, these days, some cameras let you choose. So you don't need to let yourself be bullied by the camera.

Mike

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First Snow, Chicago, 2012

By Ken Tanaka

Here we are in the traditional month for self-assessment and the concomitant vows for change and improvement. Photography is such a natural subject for this ritual. So I thought I'd devote my first monthly TOP column to a few self-assessment topics and some potentially inertia-disruptive ideas. If you're comfortable with your photography or simply have no interest in contemplating changing what you're doing then please just carry on, with my best regards, and look for my February column.

For everyone else, here are a few thoughts and suggestions that might prompt you to turn a new page with your camera this year. And, yes, each of these questions and subjects is drawn principally from my own ongoing self-audits and practices.

How do you feel?
This may seem an odd question but the answer is fundamental to realizing how you can best pursue photography. How is your health? How's your weight, your energy, your mobility, and most importantly your eyesight? Are you unrealistically pursuing a style of photography that's become too physically demanding for you? I don't mean just arduous treks with heavy kits but also long hours on your feet in a studio or darkroom.

More than ever, photography offers virtually everyone with eyesight the opportunity to participate. Indeed, today's small, light, powerful cameras enable you to achieve spectacular success even with rather restrictive physical limitations. You no longer have to carry heavy camera kits to get good technical-quality imagery. So if you've not already done so, now's a good time to evaluate if your equipment, subjects, and style are really good choices for your age and physical condition as well as for your goals.

Are you dead-ended?
Have you been hammering the same type of nail with the same type of hammer and producing the same results for years? Thwack, thwack, thwack. If that's what you enjoy, or it's what you have to do vocationally, more power to you. Otherwise, it's probably time to change your tune. Peter MacGill, of the Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York, knew Harry Callahan quite well and recalls him saying that when he hit a dead end he either changed the subject or changed the camera. Not a bad strategy.

Are you really paying attention to your own work?
Many golfers spend great amounts of time (and money) analyzing their swings in search of performance-sapping flaws. Digital photography and powerful image management tools such as Lightroom and Aperture enable you to do the same, and better, for your photography. Do you realize that you can easily run a query in Lightroom that asks a complex question such as, "How many 3-star (or higher) images did I take last year with my _______ camera and 24mm lens?" Try doing that with your slide and negative collection! More importantly, you can also very quickly assemble "collections" of your images based on such technical (EXIF) queries, on keyword searches, or just by simply placing images into a collection.

This type of facility is not only a tremendous image management system, it's also an incredibly powerful "golf swing" analyzer that was only a dream 10+ years ago. It can, for example, certainly help you determine if you've reached "dead ends." Are you using such a tool to its fullest advantage to study your own work? If you're only using Lightroom or Aperture as Raw converters and print-pushers you're badly short-changing yourself.

'Painting' your pictures
Photography, at least as practiced casually, is largely an exercise in exclusion. Your frame crops the world. Conversely, painting and drawing are all about inclusion and rendering. Figurative painters must decide not only what to include on the canvas but also how to organize and tonally "light" those elements. That level of visual sensitivity, once acquired, tends to really pay off in photography. It's long been my observation that nearly anyone with good training in painting and drawing will almost immediately surpass the camera work of even a relative photo veteran without such training. It just imparts a keener eye for organizing elements in space. It's no coincidence that nearly all of the most admired photographers throughout the medium’s history started as artists or at least as art students.

So if you've not had the benefit of any formal art instruction consider getting some. Don't be discouraged if you suck at drawing or painting. You probably will. If it was easy Pope Julius II would have hired a relative to paint the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. You're not trying to train your hands at this point but, rather, your eyes and brain. I can almost guarantee that $1 invested here will be vastly more beneficial than the same $1 spent on new gear.

What are you lookin' at?
Speaking of the broader art arena, do you spend all of your lookin’ time staring at photos? If so consider devoting more attention to other art media. You may not immediately see how studying, for example, Mannerist or Baroque paintings could improve your photography, but many can actually be very powerful lessons on gesture, proportion, disclosure, and spacial hierarchy, particularly if you mainly photograph people. Similarly if you want to photograph the wind you'll want to study Winslow Homer, who solved the visual problem of painting it. If you want to see the work of a real modern day (20th century) Renaissance artist you’ll want to spend time with Charles Sheeler. He’s among my favorite American modernists because he worked both on canvas/paper and on film, often solving complex visual problems on parallel media.

Get your camera money's worth
The dogma of using only camera-Raw image files was well-founded in the days when in-camera processing produced horror shows and anything shot higher than ISO 200 looked like pointillism.

But those days are gone. Many billions of yen have been invested over the past few camera generations to super-charge the image processors in even rather humble cameras. Indeed, a substantial slice of the R&D budgets for new cameras is earmarked for refining and improving the in-camera processors. And these investments have delivered some truly striking results with nearly sci-fi class image capture automation aids and processing sophistication. To completely ignore these facilities on today's cameras is to discard a big portion of their intrinsic value. Yes, there are times when a Raw file is a must-have. But the plain, blasphemous truth is that most of your images might be better, and more practically handled by your camera's own processor, at least as a starting point. It probably knows much more about what needs fixin' than you do. Wasn't it Ctein who recently remarked here that nobody cares how much time you spent on an image? He is right.

•     •     •

I hope that at least one of these ideas helps to nudge you toward at least a slightly richer photography experience in 2012.

Ken

Ken Tanaka's monthly column on TOP appears in the middle of each month.

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Further Resources
A little more information and inspiration for your cogitation:

Henry Wessel Interviews
Henry Wessel is among my favorite photographers. He's not quite as well known or as dealer-hyped as many of his contemporaries from the 1970s. But his eye is at least as keen as anyone's and he's quite a lively articulator of his work. I've never had the chance to meet him but I feel I know him through many brief interviews such as these 2007 clips produced for his SFMoMA retrospective. He's an inspirational "Frank Buck" with a camera.

KQED Spark Interview

SFMoMA Interview: Photography and the Mind

SFMoMA Interview: Photographing from the Road

Slinkachu
You want "different"? Here 'tis. Slinkachu is a British photographic artist whose specialty is creating and photographing miniature installation sets in cities throughout Europe. Very different, very clever stuff requiring both conceptual vision and good camera craftsmanship. 

Big Bad City (book)

The Economist: More Intelligent Life (2009 [?] interview)

Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard (Phillips Collection) I suggested trying to envision and construct your photographs in a more painterly process. This book, the catalog for a current exhibition, presents the parallel concept: late 19th century painters who embraced and integrated the new medium of photography into their work as painters. Fascinating stuff.

The exhibition opens at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Feb 4–May 6, 2012.

Charles Sheeler: Across Media This is an excellent catalog from a seminal 2006/2007 exhibition of Sheeler’s work and a perfect single-resource to become familiar with Sheeler.

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Backing up a bit from yesterday, I acknowledge that a number of people were mystified as to, well, what the heck I was talking about. A densitometer, more specifically a transmission densitometer, is simply a device for measuring densities, usually, for our purposes, on negatives.

As you know even if you've never shot one in your life, a negative is a tonally reversed image; dark things in real life (called "shadows" through the photographic process even if they aren't literally shadows) expose the negative very little, resulting in clear (transparent) or close-to-clear areas on the film; bright things in life (called "highlights") result in heavily exposed areas of reduced silver metal in the negative—the dark parts.

A negative. Photo by John Loengard. Extra points if you
recognize whose negative it is.

A transmission densitometer merely measures how much density there is in any given area of a negative. It's just a measuring device, like a scale or a thermometer or a ruler.

Of course, the fun doesn't end there. Because anything you can measure, you can plot. (Mathy types rub hands together, twirl ends of mustachios.)

What sensitometrists do—well, the activity we're mainly concerned with here, anyway—is to expose film to various measured amounts of light, develop the film, read the density, and plot the amount of exposure against the density it creates on an X-Y graph.

If you do this a bunch of times for a bunch of different exposures and plot all the points on your graph, you can then draw a line between all the points. Voilà—the film curve.

Courtesy nfsa.gov.au

The parts of the curve are labeled in this nice illustration I found (thanks, Australia!), so I won't belabor them, except to note that "base + fog density" (commonly written fb+f, pronounced "film base plus fog") is simply the "background density" of an unexposed but developed and fixed piece of film.

The curve was first devised by Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield, the fathers of sensitometry, in 1890, and was called the "H&D curve" for many years. Now it's more commonly known as a "characteristic curve" or "film curve." Sometimes you encounter the terms "D-LogE curve" or "Y'know, that charty thing for, like, the films or whatever" ('80s highschoolese*). All different names for the same thing.

Now, see that straight line section of the curve? How steep that is describes the contrast of the negative. Develop the test films for more time, the straight-line section gets steeper or more vertical. Develop for less time, and the slope gets milder. That's the origin of the term "Contrast Index" or CI, which was an method developed by C.E.K. Mees and Loyd [sic] Jones of Kodak Research Labs to describe contrast with a single number; there were even handy CI protractors for measuring the angles of curves. Mees and Jones, by the way, are responsible for our current system of B&W contrast management: developing to an average (or ballpark) CI and then fine-tuning contrast with paper grades. Different story for a different day.

More usual in more modern times has been to plot a "curve family"—several curves describing the same film in the same developer but developed for different amounts of time. Here's one of those, also clearly labeled if you'll look at it for five seconds. Note that as the development times go up, the curves get steeper.

Now, if you think about this, that represents an awful lot of test exposures if you're exposing one sheet (piece) of film at a time in, say, a 4x5-inch camera. So, naturally, a shortcut's been devised. What photographers do now to get this information relatively quickly is to use a pre-made piece of transparent material called a "step tablet" or "step wedge" that has a number of steps (usually 21) of known density already on it. One such is sold by Stouffer Industries. So what you do is expose your film to this step wedge, then read the densities on the film with...you got it, a densitometer.

A densitometer, as I mentioned yesterday, is very easy to use. You turn it on, put the film over the sensor, press the button or lower the sensor arm on to the film, and the reading comes up on the readout. That's all there is to it.

The other type of densitometer is a reflection densitometer, for reading densities on prints.

So what's sensitometry for?
Ctein said yesterday that he has a densitometer but has no use for it. That makes perfect sense to me, because he's mainly a color photographer. Consider this passage from Ansel Adams's fine book The Negative, in its various iterations over the years possibly the most inspirational technical book ever written (cited as such by literally generations of photographers):

Many consider my photographs to be in the "realistic" category. Actually, what reality they have is in their optical-image accuracy; their values are definitely "departures from reality." The viewer may accept them as realistic because the visual effect may be plausible, but if it were possible to make direct visual comparison with the subjects, the differences would be startling.

—Ansel Adams, The Negative, from the Introduction

A densitometer to my mind is really only useful in creative photography in helping to manage the "departures from reality" of the tones in black and white photographs. And, for the most part, they're used by people who can develop film one picture at a time, which means sheet film, which means large-format photographers, who use view cameras.

How any B&W photographer departs from the norm in terms of tonal values is an indivisible part of that photographer's style, from the high contrast of a Ralph Gibson to the low contrast of a Henry Wessel. It's one thing that makes B&W photography so different from color photography: every good black and white photograph is an interpretation.

Ralph Gibson, Priest Collar

Henry Wessel, Albuquerque, N.M.

Note that I've named two photographers who've probably never used a densitometer in their lives. That's entirely by design, because most photographers don't...and don't need to.

Yr. Hmbl Ed. hopes that all the above has been relatively pain-free. Even more fun stuff to come, so please stay tuned.

Mike

*Working with high school students can cause one to crave nouns.

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.