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Quote of the Week:

All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.
-Gaston Bachelard

Notes from Notchcode

5.07.2008

Digital versus Film: Like comparing the Avs to the Red Wings at playoff time (and we all know which is best, right?)

I have a client who has asked me for some on-location photography of their staff, in a remote location. I recommended large-format film, because they want to use the images on large exhibition display graphics. For the resolution required for such a display, you'd have to use a 22.8 megapixel camera to get the needed pixels per inch. There is one available, by the way, for about $27K, and if you want, feel free to buy one and send it to this address.

With large format film, you get a functional resolution that (still) beats digital (for now). Notice the caveats? And if you were only ever going to use the images online or in a smaller printed piece, like a brochure, well, digital is fine, in most cases. I think that black and white film has higher fidelity over color-sensor-based digital cameras, so there's that caveat in the other direction. But I am fine (from a commercial standpoint, anyhow) advocating for whatever option fits the project best.

Apparently this client is having to listen to other competing photographers gripe about the large format requirement. I can almost hear them saying "It's sooooo heavvvvyy! And you have to take all this tiiiiiime to set it uuuuuup!" Well, I've been shooting with a large format rig for nigh on 20 years, and I can setup and shoot a scene in about 2 minutes, which is hella fast, at least in the large format world. But there are other reasons to shoot large format film...aesthetic ones, ones which relate to previsualization, that I won't go into here, because this is a discussion about the pragmatics of large format vs. digital. And like I said: if anyone wants to buy me the digital Hasselblad, please please please, send it over. I'll convert immediately.

Except for my personal work of course, in which case you'll have to pry my Deardorff from my cold, dead hands.

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5.02.2008

I'll be heading out to Southeast Utah in a few weeks...

...for a photo shoot near Lake Powell. But not close enough to Lake Powell to actually enjoy it. Anyone have any good ideas on where to go and what to do near Blanding, in my spare time? Not that I'll have much (the Canyonlands and Moab are probably out of my range)... send me your fun-in-the-desert ideas and if I do them I'll post a photo here.

photo of typical Blanding activity by takeitez

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4.27.2008

Jill Freedman: Back in New York and looking for a publisher



Jill Freedman made some incredible images in the 60s, 70s and 80s in New York and Washington, DC. A recent New York Times article gives a brief overview, but you can find a more comprehensive collection on her website. A show of her work is also up right now at the Higher Pictures Gallery in NYC if you're nearby and want to have a look, by the way.

She says elsewhere that she is shopping a compilation of her images around to publishers at the moment; it would be a coup for any house to get it and make it available. Jill: if you need a book designer, well, I'd love to do it. If I were you I'd send it over to Richard Benson and have him make the separations, though ;)

Freedman mentions she is going to resume shooting in NYC, after relocating back there from Florida recently. There's a lot there to shoot, Jill. It may not be quite the same as the late '70s, but it's just as compelling. I know you'll find something interesting to say about the Big City.

image: Busted During Demonstration, 1968, by Jill Freedman.

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4.14.2008

Site Launch: CarlSanderSocolow.com photography

I completed a gallery site for Guggenheim Fellow Carl Sander Socolow this morning, and I encourage you to check out his work, entitled Scenes from Civic Life.

His latest project involves documenting the town of Mata Ortiz, in northern Mexico. He writes,
This work is a photographic study of the ongoing transformation of a number of heretofore isolated northern Mexican villagers into a community of world-class ceramic artists. This transformation is having a profound historic impact on their lives, the life of their village and on the social, economic and cultural life of the surrounding region. I began this project three-and-a-half years ago with the ambition of depicting the harmonies and paradoxes shaping these artists and their village as both are inexorably compelled, by virtue of an event in the history of art, to confront the modern economic and cultural world and find and take their place within it.


In a town of 3,000 people, more than 400 potters are now working in what has become recognized as a form of high art, he continues. This has an enormous impact on the economic and social life of Mata Ortiz, and Carl's documentation of it it touching for its humanity, artfulness, and compassion. These are real people in his images, not just stereotypes or one-dimensional characters. They are potters, fathers, mothers, daughters, cowboys, baseball enthusiasts, and more.

His other work from the US and europe are also worth viewing. His scenes of a debutante ball and of Venice are especially compelling.

Some notes on the site: we experimented with several navigation methods, including a sliding scroll of thumbnail images on the right side of the window, but eventually settled on an arrangement of squared-off elements of each photo, set in a grid, with links to the full image from each photo element. A Java Script runs the enlargement, which also includes title and date information. This format is hierarchically simple, and will make it easy for Carl to add more images whenever he wants by simply adding a thumbnail image to the grid, and linking it to a full-size image with the included script.

above: Courtship with Dog, Mata Ortiz, Mexico, 2004, © 2004 Carl Sander Socolow. All Rights Reserved.

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4.09.2008

Good Times


I did this sort of thing everyday, once upon a time. Now, with my practice focused more on branding, design and interactive experience, it's a treat to get into the photo studio when I can.

This shoot was a day-long affair for a client of mine. They are a small skunk-works operation made up of obsessed lighting engineers. They have a new product coming to market, and asked us to create a product booklet, brand, and shoot the images for the piece as well. They are a fun crew to work with, because they are so passionate about their work, and are obsessive in their attention to detail. At the same time, they are very open to collaboration, new ideas, and new perspectives. This is a great combination: obsessive and open.

In any case, I spent a day with Kevin from the group, and two sets of freshly-minted fixtures, down at Camren in their large studio. We shot digitally, and reviewed our shots in realtime, making it easy for a film-boy like me to make decisions on tweaking lighting positions, intensities, and so on. Needless to say it's also a bonus to have a lighting engineer on hand to look over your shoulder as you figure out how your strobes are going to refract through the product's diffuser, say. All-told, we had about ten set-ups, and shot about 200 exposures that I kept. All this for about seven final images for the booklet and their website.

I had a great day; great enough that it makes me want to do more work like this. So: you need some photography? I might know a guy.

P.S. Once we get the booklet out, I'll post some of the shots from the shoot. -a

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3.25.2008

Yeah, Barack has a posse, and I'm on it.

Just in case you were wondering about my ability to win friends and influence people:

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3.21.2008

Simplicity, and Beauty in the "Mundane"


Piper photograph - 2
Originally uploaded by notchcode
A few photographers have said this better than me, but here it is anyway:

Look for the beauty in what is around you, right now. Questing for it elsewhere just makes for a longer trip.

Piper, my four year-old daughter, took this image. With all my training, I couldn't have done better.

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3.20.2008

Why cropping can be bad, and why failure can be good

Two items of linklove for you guys:

Matt Soar: Fail Again, Fail Better, in the Design Observer

"Jonathan Hoefler says, 'Increasingly I think about the work that I do not so much as a directed effort, but as the ability to recognize accidents and interpret them productively. Even failures have their place, since without them there’s no progress: anything that’s truly 'experimental' has to run the risk of failure.'"


Cropping: A Duh Moment, in the Online Photographer
(referencing this amazing image)

"Once you start cropping, why stop? You've entered context-elimination mode; you're engaging in the activity of denying information to the viewer; why not take it a little further, and then a little further than that?"

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3.13.2008

The new Zeiss Ikon Z1: Me Want

The Online Phoptographer has posted a review of the Leica-like Zeiss Ikon Z1. Ever since Carl came through town with his Leica over his shoulder, I have returned to lusting after small film cameras again. The Z1 is less spendy than a Leica, and according to the review, possibly just as good (don't tell Leica owners that). And if I am going to shoot 35mm film (I already shoot 5x7) why not use some of the best optics in a well-designed camera, too?

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3.04.2008

Help out a great photographer and get some great art--all at the same time

My good friend Andrew Bale just got a commission to create work for a show at the Espace Ecureuil in Toulouse, France this summer. It's a pretty cool gig: they pay for a fair amount of his travel and his stay while in France. What they don't cover is expenses related to hauling hundreds of rolls of film around the countryside, printing the final images, and so on. Andy is raising money to fund his trip in a novel way: for a limited time, if you send him $185, he'll send you five images from his Europe portfolio, plus another photograph from his upcoming project in France.

Now, even if Andrew weren't my friend, I'd sing the praises of his work. Beautifully-crafted images, sought out in the wilderness, industrial backyards of Pennsylvania, and streets of America, Ireland, Paris and Italy. He and I both print using the lush platinum/palladium contact printing process, and he has also become an expert in digitally-printed archival ink pigment prints too. The images from this Five plus One portfolio consist of the latter.

Usually Andy's images sell for between $125 and $450 each. With this offer, you are getting six images for the cost of one. That's a pretty cool deal, and a great way to jumpstart your collection. Head on over to the portfolio page to see the images, and read more about the project and the artwork. Then buy a set and become a partner in Andrew's latest project.

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2.29.2008

Out-of-this-world Photography: Developing film in space

Some of the highest resolution images of the moon still in use by our intrepid scientists were shot by five Lunar Orbiter Spacecrafts, launched by NASA in 1966 and 1967. Did they use some sort of really advanced digital imaging technology to make these images? Nope; that sort of tech was years--decades--away, at least if you wanted to put it into a satellite small enough to escape the earth's gravity well and get all the way to the moon. These orbiters used film to make their high-res images.

These spacecraft were the world's first extraterrestrial mobile foto-mats: they exposed, developed, and printed (by way of scanning the film line by line into a tv transmission beamed to earth) photographic images so fine that they are still in use today. The scanned images were beamed back to earth, reassembled on a kinescope, and then re-exposed to terrestrial-based film.

Whenever I am out on assignment for a client shooting a seemingly impossible subject, from a seemingly impossible angle, I am comforted by the fact that at least I'm not trying to expose, develop, and scan my photos 246,000 miles from earth.

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2.04.2008

Adobe to discontinue Stock Photo service

Macworld is reporting today that Adobe will stop selling stock images and illustrations via its Bridge interface as of April 1, 2008.

I had used Adobe Stock Photo off and on since purchasing my CS3 upgrade, and found it a bit slow. As in "slllllloooooooooowwwwww". Especially when you did a search for something returning more than about a dozen images. The server up at Adobe seemed to be going out and taking the photo, developing the film, cropping it, getting it licensed, and uploadingit to my computer each time I clicked the "search" button. I won't be particularly sorry to see it go.

The service relied on a host of other providers, such as Getty Images, or GettyOne, or whatever they have branded themselves as this year. If I bought a ton more stock each year, I might have found the trade-off of speed vs. an all-in-one-place solution acceptable, but for my needs, not so much. While my clients use a bit of stock photography, they also use a bit of assignment photography, especially location work, which I am happy to provide. And for those with tight budgets, the lure of shutterstock.com and istockphoto.com (even if they have relatively crappy images) is hard to resist.

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1.17.2008

See what your grandparents saw, in color.

Not blogging much this week due to the new baby, but something caught my eye that related to the photography side of what we do here:

The Library of Congress has released a large number of images (but still a tiny portion of their overall visual catalog) onto the internet, via Flickr. favorite set so far is the 1930s and 40s in color. Think everything was black and white back then? Then (aside from not knowing your photographic history) you are wrong: check them out and see some amazing kodachrome snaps from the era. Then go get your grandparents to check it out and have them reminisce!

Since I do HABS/HAER work on occasion, I actually have some images in the Library of Congress archives. But this stuff is way cooler than mine, because it's from (from my perspective) long ago, and shines a light into our recent history.

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12.27.2007

The Space Between the Sky and Me: Photos by Steffanie Halley

A few months ago I was cycling along, doing my brisk late fall morning ride through Crown Hill Open Space, when my phone rings. It was SCAD MFA candidate Steffanie Halley calling me to see if I'd be interested in looking over her body of work. She was in town, and her adviser and my prof-of-old, Craig Stevens, had told her to look me up and get my reaction to her images. She was about four months out from staging her thesis show, and had a lot of images to work with. Later that week, I met Steffanie in south Denver and checked out her photographs. They were large, color location portraits of women. Some were fairly straightforward, and others were more fragmented. I saw two or three possible thematic groupings, any of which could turn into a nice show. They struck me as wonderfully mysterious and narrative, with a strong sense of composition and color. Pretty cool, all in all.

I got a postcard from Steffanie this afternoon for her thesis show, titled "the space between the sky and me". Judging from the four images on the card, it looks like a nice tight show, with some great images. I wish I could go and see it for myself. If you are in Savannah in January, go check it out. It's at Alexander Hall Gallery, 668 Indian St.. The opening is on January 11th, from 5-7. If you see Steffanie, congratulate her for me!

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10.11.2007

Diana: Not just for Lovers


The classic Diana camera is back, and they're taking pre-orders for it now. Move over Holga!

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1.24.2007

Photographer of the Day: Phillip Toledano




I ran across Mr. Toledano's site tonight, courtesy of stumbleupon, a lovely Firefox associative linking tool.

Toledano spent a decade as an art director at the higher end of the agency atmosphere, and is now back to making images. He does it full time. Which is lovely inspiration for a creative business owner who has a BFA in Photography. The collections that caught my eye tonight were his video gamers portrait series, and his work up above the arctic circle. Lovely, inventive, and playful. The portrait above is from his video game portrait work. Go and have a look.

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12.01.2006

Whisky Photo

I have learned that a photo of mine will be appearing in a book about whisky (that's Scotch to you infidels), to be published by Appletree Press in 2007. Can't wait to see it in print!

The image, of a bottle of Cask-strength Glen Grant, is pictured here. Glen Grant is one of the best, and rarest, whiskys I've had the pleasure of hosting in my pantry. It's almost gone, so now you know what to get me for the holidays, eh?

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