DIY-photos in magazines: authentic or trite?

A weekly had asked its female readers to send in their best pictures of their husband (partner, or whatever politically-correct term you want). Many sent a picture of hubby in bed with a cat. Maybe those were the pictures that made these readers happiest. But if you then make it into a policy of your magazine to use only pictures made by its readers instead of professionally-made photos, will you get 'authentic' content or just trite DIY-pictures?

This discussion I read about in my newspaper got going because a magazine for young parents wants to use only illustrations it gets from its readers. The main argument from the magazine’s editor is that in this way the pictures will be more authentic and ‘de-glamourised’. I can agree with their point, and also with the other point they made, namely that small children are so spontaneous and that parents can capture those moments better in natural situations at home than professional photographers who always intrude into the natural situation.

An old example from my own experience (scanned from an analogous photo): a pro would not have got that relaxed-curious attitude from my daughter.

A professional photographer made the counterargument of triteness, using the anecdote of the hubby & cat pictures. Amateur photographers simply lack the imagination and the vision that a professional photographer brings to the scene.

Looking at (too many of!) my own pictures, I must agree with the counterargument, too: my pictures may be too conventional, not surprising enough. Or just made too lazily, as when I do not want to take the trouble of getting down on my knees to get a better perspective, or when I do not want to set up a tripod to get better sharpness.

And I also agree that getting the imagination and vision is largely a matter of training. But I don’t agree that only professionally-schooled photographers have that training. A lot of advanced amateur photographers have that too. Sometimes my own pictures are not too bad, and I see others’ which are much better, also among my internet friends—no professional would be ashamed of them!

Finally, there is more to photographic vision than training; maybe there is such a thing as talent. I’m thinking, for instance, of my own daughter, who without any training sometimes went out with her simple compact camera and then shot really good pictures. But she too has her share of conventional, boring pictures—a bit more training or experience would help! She has her own DSLR now... Still, here comes a little example of what she made from an inspired day in a museum.

Photos, photoshop and reality

'Between all the plastic surgery and Photoshop, who knows what celebrities really look like anymore?' Something I just stumbled upon here.
Just for fun ;-)

Dressed-up portrait

WinterfairArcheon09-6714
Originally uploaded by DFW-Photo

At the 'Midwinter fair', 12-13 December in theme park Archeon (Alphen a/d Rijn, NL), people paraded in fantasy and gothic dress. You're welcome to look at my Flickr-photostream for some examples of my snapshots. (Just click on the picture and you'll be taken there.) My best portrait, I think, was made inside, of this wood nymph, or was she a Maid Marian escaped from a Robin Hood story?

Taking pictures outside was a challenge--to put it mildly--because of the low winter sun and the high contrasts it created; high ISO-setting was needed because of the low light intensity overall, but the difference between sun and shadow sides of faces almost called for HDR solutions, which of course is impossible with moving targets (to keep with the bow and arrow inspired metaphors). I'm waiting for HDR-sensor chips in a next generation of cameras!

Lightroom 3 makes a difference

Lightroom 3 Beta does make a difference against version 2: one of my favourite photos of this summer was the dancer's portrait made with impossible light conditions and impossible camera settings: ISO 6400--the highest sensitivity on my Sony A700, so that noise ("speckles") was guaranteed. Nevertheless, I liked the result and put it into this blog on 2 Sept. ("Beauty in 36 Months"). But now I re-imported the picture from its RAW form into LR3-Beta and lo and behold, the noise level was already lower on the rough import and after using the Noise reduction option it got even better. Maybe the dancer did not need that many speckles to be a nice photo after all.

Between f/2.8 and f/64 (2): Mr. 2.8

You can overdo with selective sharpness at f/2.8. Another of my favourite bloggers, Jeffrey Friedl, always uses f/2.8, it seems.
Did I mention Jeffrey Friedl before? No, I did not, I believe. He is an American who lives in Japan, and who is an avid amateur photographer--if he is an amateur, that is. For like a professional he seems to be taking photos full-time, and of everything, though he is especially good at landscapes—Japanese landscapes are good anyway and he makes them even better! He uses f/2.8 to make a subject stand out clearly from the background, and his professional lenses help to make the bokeh especially good: the number of blades in the diaphragm and their curvature seem to play a role in making the gradient from sharp to un-sharp as well as the rendering of un-sharp objects without irritating double contour lines and the like.

I came across Mr. Friedl when I looked for a smart way to upload photos to Flickr from Lightroom, and the official Adobe Lightroom website linked to his plug-in. Jeffrey Friedl proved to be a real Lightroom buff, who published all kinds of upload plug-ins, for all (well, almost all) kinds of photo sites. Once you know the trick, it's probably not so difficult anymore. Besides, his real profession is in programming. The Flickr upload plug-in was worth all its money (which was not much)--and more! It works really handy, once you have followed the (very clear) download and installation instructions from Mr. Friedl’s site.

As I said, he uses f/2.8 all of the time: check his blog full of photos, under each of which he neatly gives the essential statistics of time, aperture and if you drill down a bit also location(!). If nothing else, you can find a few nice wallpapers among his collection (watch out, that page takes some time to download!). But I wanted to make a little bit of fun of this Mr. 2.8. Once he wanted to take a group picture of a bunch of children and he was frustrated at not getting them all in focus at the same time. The examples he showed a few days before, again gave the statistics: f/2.8 most of the time. In the final one he used f/5. If he had simply gone down a few stops to, say, f/8 (the aperture at which many lenses have their optimum resolution and sharpness), the whole group would have been in focus from the beginning even though kids tend to move a lot more than landscapes—no problem at all! Even good photographers may forget their basics for a moment, sometimes… As long as you remember in the end!

Beauty in 36 Months

If, like me, you are interested in what makes beauty in a photo, you're obliged to buy Dutch photography magazine Focus for the next 36 months. For they started a new series of one-page columns called 'beauty for the advanced'. Hopefully a bit tongue-in-cheek the introduction states: 'The experience of beauty in photos is complex. After much research it appears that 36 elements are important for it. Usually in combination.'

Element number one is: focus, or rather out-of-focus. Out-of-focus photos suggest things, stimulate the viewer's phantasy. And they say a couple of other things about unsharp pictures, all true and interesting. But then the paragraph ends on: 'This is perceived as artistic.' Is this serious? Is it Flemish-Dutch (the columnist might be Flemish--I don't know)? Or is it ironic: who would want to be accused of being perceived as artistic? I don't know what to make of this column, but I will follow it for the next 36 issues--I subscribe to the magazine anyway.

And it inspired me to show you this photo: taking the idea of 'unsharp' in a slightly different manner, this portrait of a belly dancer at the Sonsbeek Theater Avenue, last month, is no out of focus, but as it was made without using a flash, there is some unsharpness due to the dancer's movement. Besides, there is unsharpness because I used a high ISO setting (6400, to be precise) which gives visible specles. Does this make her more 'symbolic', 'not THAT woman but THE woman'? Beauty?

Portrait workshop for kids was a success

Yesterday I survived a workshop for kids in a creative class--the kids (my daughter being one of them) and camera survived as well! The idea of the class teacher was to have old-fashioned portraits of just the kids' heads; they would then cut the heads out, paste them on paper made looking old with diluted black ink and then draw or cut-and-paste old-fashioned clothes and attributes, all in black, greys and white. I gave a short introduction about differences between photography 'then' and 'now', and a little about ligth and shadow in portraits. Then the teacher handed round some copies from real old portraits (found on Flickr).

It was quite nice to do, but the real fun started when I was busy quickly converting the photographed portraits to black-and-white and printing them (I love working with Lightroom!). For then my daughter got hold of my camera and started making modern portraits of her friends! They had gotten the message about differences between then and now, and they had fun taking pictures and modelling. Perhaps that fun with photos shoots was an even more important result than my portraits rolling out of the printer.

This time's picture is a slide from the presentation I made. You won't get to see portraits of children whose parents did not get a chance to agree to their pictures being published.

Yvonne van der Mey wins with photo "against the rules"

Yvonne van der Mey, who directed the workshops on nature photography that I followed the last two weekends, won a prize! The prize photo, entitled "Leopard male in the early morning, desperately looking for a female" she had shown to us during the workshop as one with which she was quite satisfied, although it went against a primary rule of composition, namely that you ought to see the subject's eyes in a portrait-like picture. But here, clearly, that rule does not really apply: we as viewers are following the leopard's gaze into the depth of the unknown, almost feeling his anxiousness.

That's a point about so-called rules of composition: you have to adhere to most of them to avoid mistakes in your photo, but you must know when to break one of them to make a truly good shot.

By the way, I wonder if the title of the photo was really true: maybe the leopard was just looking for food, or was frightened through hearing a pride of lions roaring, rather than being on the lookout for a mate, but it is a nice title that adds to the picture's meaning--it makes the animal more symphatetic to human viewers, and if that's what gives you a prize, why not?

Improving Reproductions

Did a second batch of old portrait reproductions for my father-in-law. I took more liberties than in the first batch. Let's call it progress of insight, but it was also a matter of realising the uses of technical tricks. The change of insight was that this was not about being as faithful as possible to the old pictures as they lay before me (as I worded it in my 2008-08-07 'Old skool' entry), but to aim for the best effect from the point of view of the beholders—my father-in-law, in this case. He wants these pictures as reminiscences of the ones depicted, or to get a better impression of family members deceased before he could know them. So what he wants is as clear a portrait as possible, a reconstruction of the original photo at least when it comes to the persons' portraits. Why didn't I think of that before? Every professional photographer knows it: people are not interested in the photos per se but in the persons!

Sometimes the photos were so bad that it was not worthwhile to try to improve them, but there were some cases where Lightroom 2 could spice up the persons' faces. Here's a little 'how to': photo 1 in this blog is a detail cut from the version I would have handed to my father-in-law in the first batch. But I did not like the flare from the backlight flowing over the roofs in between the houses. LR2 gives the option to apply corrections to parts of the photo: you just 'paint over' the area with a brush (in the Develop-module). To see where I am working, I set the brush at '+2 exposure' or something similar—as long as it is visible (see photo 2, from a different one, obviously, than the comparative picture). The brush settings include large size (for working fast) and a high feather (for a flowing, invisible border). Remember: LR makes no changes to your original photo at all, everything can be undone—no need to be nervous about painting a granddad a little white!

Then I set the sliders in the painted-over area to what gives the best effect: in this case especially exposure down a bit; besides I added contrast and sharpness. The result is not dramatically different (my father-in-law must think it is the same old picture), but just a little more recognisable as a portrait. I hope you can see the difference in this small reproduction; I do, in the original of this 1930s family photo.

Pictures at conferences

Tomorrow I'll be a speaker in a conference, so it will not be my task to take pictures. But if it is your task or wish to do so, clicking here will lead you to some good tips--and nice examples as well of lively portraits and overviews.

Old skool

Pictures are not always about expressing beauty, not even those of an amateur like me. This evening and some evenings before I have been busy copying old pictures for my father in law. Then the rule is to be as faithful as possible to the original picture. Still I have been photoshopping a bit, because of course you discover afterwards that you forgot to avoid some reflections of light. Or that the camera on its tripod was not exactly in the same plane as the picture, or the old photo album was not lying quite flat... Some transformation/distortion was then necessary to make the pictures into rectangles again. Moreover, I did not really hesitate to reduce most of the RGB-photos to greyscales, both for the economy of space and to camouflage discoloured spots due to old age. Another change was increasing contrast in greyish pictures, or even in the lovely sepia one that I copy here. I find sepia as an effect almost always out of place, but here it is just a copy of the 19th century original, and then it fits with the character of the picture. By the way, this lady is my daughter's great-great-grandmother (don't I forget one 'great-' more?), sitting for her portrait in her smart dress including the Frisian cap. Year of original picture: I'll try to find out for you...

Truth and Beauty

Should I have photoshopped the spiral stairway picture to get rid of the reflections in the glass? How much 'correction' is allowed in pictures? What is the balance between truth and beauty? Of course, this has been a discussion almost since the beginning of photography in the mid-19th century. But it has not been finally solved and the possibilities to manipulate pictures have become larger, more sophisticated and available to almost anyone with Photoshop, The Gimp and all the other software packages. It is another subject that will return in this blog every now and again, for I keep struggling with it.

The idea 'photo = truth' has been naive from the very outset. At best, a picture gives a little part of the truth: that which can be seen in a certain light, at a certain location in place and time and in a certain frame. It never is 'the whole truth': there is so much else that was not photographed at the same moment! Photo journalism and documentary photography rely on their telling bits of truth: JFK shot, the misery of the homeless, etc. But was Robert Capa's dying soldier in the Spanish Civil War real or was it a staged picture? Does it make a difference for the message Capa was trying to give? The picture functioned as if it were real and maybe that is enough. Yet it undermines the trust in pictures telling the truth if it were a staged picture; it would detract from the effectiveness of messages of photographs in the long run. So let us hope that evidence will be found that it was real in the famous briefcase full of Capa's negatives that was recently found.

But my pictures are not documentary, they are more about beauty than about truth. Still, to me photography has to do with 'reality out there'. Shaping 'alternate realities' on the computer screen with the aid of photographic images is not my thing. But a little embellishment is not a problem to me. At first I thought that I would draw the line at the tricks that I could do in the chemical dark room: leaving out the unnecessary foreground by enlarging just part of the picture, a little dodging and burning, or correcting the perspective. But the temptation of further corrections is so large: removing red eyes in flash pictures, retouching a few blemishes on the skin (makes the portrayed person much happier), and ... and there you go. Where is the end? Is it a matter of ethics, of communicative effectiveness, of phantasy?

Anyhow, in this picture--another one of the street snapshots from the Queen's Birthday--I did do some retouching, just to reduce a little bit the white glare of the sun on the woman's forehead. Now that is not too much beauty for truth, is it?

Queen's Birthday

Today is the Queen's (official) Birthday. Spent the whole morning with my daughter, she trying to sell toys for which she grew too 'big', me looking at the people passing by. Just a few pics...

What are you looking at?

Let's get back to basics, before we wander further off into the realm of estethics: photos are meant to communicate. I want to show you something, but as communication theory discovered, and as postmodernists made popular, the three elements sender - message - receiver are different. What are my intentions? What is embodied in the message? What do you see?

Most of us think of words or text, when we think about communication. Like this text. That is a difficult enough medium to pass a message from me to you. Quoting Karel van het Reve again: 'it's impossible to write so clearly that you are not misunderstood.' In my work, which involves writing a lot of texts, I am acutely aware of that and I try to write clearly, I repeat my message in different words, I use 'metatext' to tell readers what I intend to do, what I am going to do, and I summarise to tell them what they should have remembered from the previous section. For the attentive reader there is redundancy in the text, and 'tedium' (as my former colleague Guy Neave once called all the reasonings and references that make up so much of social science writing). And still people quote me wrongly! Or students don't understand and they fail for their exam. Sad, isn't it?



One of our famous sayings is that a picture says more than a thousand words. That would mean that an average scientific journal article of about 6,000 words could be replaced by 5 or 6 pictures. My problem is that with a picture, I don't know which 1,000 words I've captured! I know, of course, that something in a situation caught my attention, fired a signal in my brain that 'this is a nice picture!', and triggered my finger to push the button. What caught my attention, why was this man with dog a nice picture? I think, looking at it a few weeks after taking the photo in Taiwan, that it was the contrast of the large man's head and the little dog, the fact that the dog was being carried instead of running on all fours along the pavement, and finally the curious yet friendly way both man and dog looked up to me as I held the camera aiming at something behind them (a garden, now no longer in the picture). Those are three potential messages in 55 words (way less than 1,000). Is it one of the three, or the combination of all three those messages, that makes this into a good photo to you? Or do you read something else in it that I did not intentionally put into it?
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