PHOTOheadlines is closing shop and merging with my new weblog Arctic Visions. Please delete your links and check out the new site: http://www.arcticvisions.wordpress.com.
Above Water
It’s Saturday and I’m already dreading the arrival of a new week. After spending a month doing photography I had piles of work waiting in the office. To top it all off I was knocked out with the flue this week and my backlog is now overwhelming. Combine that with trying to get prints and framing done for the upcoming holidays… Anyway, I’m not gonna waste more of this Saturday sulking, rather I’ll kick back and relax and listen to some new music.
A fellow Norwegian Arctic countryman, Jørn Skogheim, caught my attention a few years back. After getting his 2007 album Above Water a year ago it has been collecting dust in the rip-to-walkman pile. I’ve been too busy listening to piano music this past year so there hasn’t been much time to listen to anything else. Anyway, this album blew my mind from the get go! It’s hard to describe what genera it belongs to, but I think symphonic melodic jazz is a pretty accurate description. It’s unlike anything I’ve got in my Jazz collection. It’s an interesting and joyful listen from start to finish. This is one of those undiscovered gems that makes you realize that the best music seems destined to go unnoticed.
The album is sadly hard to get outside of Norway but an mp3 version is available through amazon.com: Jørn Skogheim – Above Water
My art deals a lot with globalization and how it affects areas once thought of as remote and autonomous in Arctic Norway. Local culture is being replaced with imported culture, especially American culture. Hence I found this home video clip of a hillbilly wedding taking place in Northern Norway quite interesting. What caught my eye in this clip wasn’t the “white people that can’t dance” stumbling down the isle like a flock of elephants, but rather how many of the guests that were more occupied with catching the action with their cameras than actually just being a guest and enjoying the moment. Time’s they are a changin’! The video can be watched here: http://www.vgtv.no/?id=26451
It’s hard not to be emotionally engaged by this piece by Maisie Crow: http://2009.soulofathens.com/?q=node/48
It makes me wonder why most of us fail to live our lifes like each day was our last. It’s just too darn easy to become comfortably numb – remember the song by Pink Floyd? I’ll give it a try and seize the afternoon by watching some more of those multimedia flicks…
The merger of photography and multimedia has been a long time coming. The students of Ohio University has made some of their work public, and there are moments of greatness for sure. Let’s just hope some of those talents won’t have to flip burgers for a living – the current state of photography in mind. Check out these small multimedia masterpieces here:
BTW, I’ve just gotten Sony Vegas. As a documentary photographer I feel the siren of multimedia calling, wether I like it or not. It will probably mean a lot work for less pay (per hour for sure). Now, if you just could download food free from the Internet…
Thanks to http://www.aphotoeditor.com/ for the Ohio U link!
Welcome to Nowhere
It’s been a busy autumn, but things are finally slowing down. I’ve still got 160 Gigs of images to sort through after my “away from society trip” in September and October. My photoblog is up and running after a long battle learning to tweak some php code. It’s an aimless place where I post a picture every now and then reflecting what I’m working with at that very moment. You can visit it here: www.svein-frode.com/arcticvisions
The days are getting lighter up here in the Arctic, but it’s still just a few hours of dim daylight. On clear days we can see the sun for an hour or two low on the horizon. Great light to photograph in, but I’m stuck in the office… Looking out the window is enough to make an allready mad man go insane! Anyway, I’m working on a few print portfolios and getting online a few galleries of my sold out editions on www.svein-frode.com.
It’s been a while, but business is good and I am an barely able too keep clients satisfied. On top of that, I’ve just added Lightroom 2 and PixelGenius PhotoKit Sharpener to my darkroom arsenal, and old dogs have a hard time learning new tricks as you all know. Both programs are highly recommended, and as soon as Lightroom gets soft proofing, I see little reason to continue using Photoshop. As for blogging, it’s going to be a while. I am heading for the woods and will leave telephones and the Internet behind for a couple of months. Joining me will be my cameras, tent and sleepingbag.
What would the world of television be without the BBC? I lament the thought. As much as a state owned liscendsfunded television company always will be a propaganda machine for the state, the production record of the Scandinavian and British channels are nevertheless outstanding.
Last night for instance I watched the first episode of BBC’s latest natural history series, Life in cold blood, narrated by the narrator above all narrators, sir David Attenbourugh. The viewing left little to be desired and convinced me once again that BBC Bristol is the gold standard of natural history television. Even before they all turned into reality soap opera channels, the Discovery Channel, Nation Geographic Channel and Animal Planet, to name a few, were nowhere near the quality of BBC productions. Read more here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/lifeincoldblood/
© BBC
But the “Beeb” doesn’t just make excellent nature programs, they create other kinds interesting television programs. Last week I got my hands on The Genius of Photography. It’s a documentary series of six one hour episodes highlighting important movements in photography. Familiar names like Martin Parr, Joel Meyerowitz and Alec Soth are featured and interviewed. Excellent and rare TV-entertainment for photographers. Read more here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/photography/genius/
It seems that with spring my rut is finally starting to let go. I’m one of those candles that burn from both sides whenever I am engaged in a project. Sometimes my high lasts for a few hours, sometimes for months, but I always crash and burn at some point. I am very excited about my current projects and hopefully I will get some time off from the day job to finish them properly.
My latest recovery has much to do with me discovering the superb photoblog of Mark Hobson, The Landscapist. Hobson is as good a writer as he is a photographer. Refreshingly frank and heart-warmingly intellectual his words and photos are a breath of fresh air from the over saturated world of online photography conformity. Getting such thought provoking material for free is almost too good to be true, so tune in before Hobson gets tired and waste his efforts elsewhere.
Ku #513 by © Mark Hobson
I’ve been in a rut lately. After four weeks of photographing the most interesting places in the Arctic, I am back in town (read: civilization) and feel empty and directionless. It’s not that I lack ideas, but my day job has been sucking me dry of energy and I am unable to do anything worthwhile. A few hours of importing my digital archive into Lightroom is all I can manage at the moment. I’m working on two articles that I hope will be published this weekend. It’s inspirational stuff, so stay tuned. While I eat my vegetables and catch some sleep, I’ll post a reminder for myself and all of you folks out there: There’s always someone having a worse day than you!
The weather has been unstable, but that’s what a landscape photographer love. Light changing from minute to minute, gets the adrenaline pumping! Two more weeks and I’ll be back in the darkroom working a truck load of images. 3000 RAW files and counting…
Well, that’s it! One small suitcase of all-weather clothing, and four large bags of camera gear are packed and ready to go. Four weeks of intense shooting awaits, but if the current weather prevails, I will be getting a lot of time to read. I just got two new books on photojournalism, a collection of essays by Vicki Goldberg, biographies of Norwegian greats Roald Amundsen and Edvard Munch, and of course, a new stable of Glenn Gould CDs. Plan A and plan B are covered! Plan C is to kick back, relax and enjoy the Arctic scenery and company of great people.
By noon tomorrow I’ll be on my way. The most important part of the journey, except for the pint of beer as soon as I’m airborne, will be putting a great plan together. I have a book full of sketches for what I want to do, but now I need to systemize those into a tight schedule. With all the places, people and things I plan to cover, it’s simply not doable any other way. Dispatches from the field will follow… Stay tuned!
No, not really. I’m getting ready for a month of travelling around the Arctic, finnishing my website (launching sometime next week) and scanning like crazy to get rid of all those boxes of Clearfile pages stuffed with negatives and slides. While on the road I will be updateing the blog at least once a week with some shots and thoughts from the field. An artist never takes time off, it’s a lifestyle!
”I don’t know a single artist that has ever retired and played golf” – Arnold Newman
Fuji Nexia ISO400 - APS negative film
I’ve been scanning a lot of film lately getting ready for a little print showcasing to some private clients. I’ve pretty much been good at getting decent scans from positive film. Negative film has been a bit more difficult, especially when slightly dark or underexposed. I did extensive testing on a few selected images with up to 20 different scans. Here are my findings:
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I use the standard Nikon Scan 4 Software. It is plenty good enough. I see no reason for getting Vuescan or Silverfast.
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Batch scanning often failed. “Select all -> apply settings” simply failed a lot of times for an unknown reason. Half of the images came out as I wanted, the rest had to be rescanned as the settings weren’t applied and the scanner used automatic exposure (which works OK for a flat original, but not a difficult under- or overexposed one!).
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Dark negatives could be greatly improved by adding analogue gain (0,4 – 0,6 worked for most of my difficult exposures)
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I only used digital ICE on the “normal” setting. Plenty good for any negative you haven’t fed the cat with.
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Neat Image on full auto gave much much better results than using GEM in the scanner software. GEM just slows down your scanning anyway, so I was very happy with that! Grain is a big problem when scanning film with CCD scanners. A drum scanner will prove it’s worth here as it can use different apertures to control the spot size of the image-forming light source (or so I’ve heard J ).
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Stay far away from ROC and DEE. Photoshop does a much better job. Besides, as with GEM, it slows down the scan time! Scanning is boring! DEE can leave som nasty noise as well!
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I leave all other bells and whistles untouched. No curves or colour adjustments of any kind. I prefer Photoshop.
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Multi sample scanning worked like a charm and much better than I’d heard before. It has been a popular myth that it makes your images less sharp. On the contrary I found that using 16 x passes improved sharpness and shadow detail. I think this is because the Coolscan does this by sampling one segment of the film 16 times before moving on to the next segment, rather than running back and forth over the entire negative, which might introduce alignment problems.
I actually had a great time scanning. It was a walk down memory lane seeing many old shots I had almost forgotten about.
Audio slideshow featured on BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/6915318.stm
A frame of Fujifilm as the scanner saw it.
I think the subjects that have been discussed on TOP (view bottom of the post for links) are far more important than many would like them to be. While there is something as being too theoretical, we are in fact discussing the most important aspects of photography as a medium and art form.
We al know that photography isn’t truth in a box and that prints are just paper with images on them. As a visual medium though, there is nothing that comes as close to representing how something looked like at a certain moment in time as photography (including film). It is a far better record than anything stored or made from our own memory and imagination. That is why photography can be used as evidence in a court of law, as a witness statement in newspapers or as snapshots of historical events in a family photo album.
As kids we learn how images are two-dimensional representations of the visual world. Even small children can make the distinction between a cartoon and a film or a painting and a photograph. The latter two are in fact illusions of a historic reality. In fact we learn through a cognitive process a visual language that makes our brain associate images with real world objects, just as words are associated with memories of objects, feelings and experiences.
The important distinction is one of truth. It is important in many circumstances for a viewer to know if the photograph he is looking at is a record of what the camera captured through a mechanical-chemical-electronical (whatever) process pointed at a certain place at a certain moment in time, or if the photographer has altered the film or RAW file to a degree that makes the image more a subjective than an objective representation of that scene.
The transformation from film to digital is an important one. It is undebatable that manipulation is more widespread and easy than before. As such both photographers and viewers of photography will have to alter their perception of the medium and question it’s ability to represent truth. Art is no exact science, but evolve through discussion and practice. As professional photographers I think we are obliged to reflect on the issue and understand that it affects how the public perceives our work. It isn’t just an aesthetical issue, it is one of credibility that greatly affect the entire medium and profession of photography. A photograph is always an image, but an image isn’t always a photograph.
In response to the photography/film/digital/truth debate:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2007/08/the-article-by-.html
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2007/08/six-comment-on-.html#comments
And I thought the Taliban were mad…
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am
But when all hope and sanity is lost you can at least afford youself a laugh…
Stay sane folks!
[...] War is the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings. [...] Too many die. War isn’t worth one life [...], said Harry Patch – The last known surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of World War I when he revisited the site where he fought 90 years ago. I couldn’t agree more!
GOLDEN, CO. (August 6, 2007) PENTAX Imaging Company has opened the doors of www.pentaxphotogallery.com to give PENTAX shooters around the world the opportunity to be represented in the gallery and share their most defining moments of photography. This virtual Photo Gallery is the first of its kind to offer space for passionate PENTAX photographers to exhibit their work, share and gain resources within an artistic community, create an online portfolio, and more.
