Category: Photography

Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic

Core competencies

If you are primarily a content producer, running a website or a business inevitably seems to involve doing some work outside your area of core competency. You need to deal with clients, negotiate rates, file taxes, manage webservers, etc.

There is one line of thinking that says all such activities are a necessarily evil, at best, and that we should all stick to doing what we are most skilled at. The Ricardo theory of trade may be the purest expression of this idea. It says that if everybody focuses exclusively on what they are best at and sells the products of that skill to everyone else, they will be able to pay others to provide all the necessities of life.

We all do a fair bit of outsourcing. Consider the case of Thoreau, who built his own house and found some of his own food. Compared to him, we are pretty much all more specialized.

Of course, Thoreau’s philosophy is pretty much the opposite of Ricardo’s. Thoreau thought that you should do for yourself even what other people could do better: haul the lumber for your shack on your own back, rather than hiring a man with a cart.

The main question here seems to be how far you should specialize. There are definitely gains to be made in specialization. As Malcolm Gladwell argues, if you spend 10,000 hours practicing the activity you do best, you might become world class at it. At the same time, specialization produces vulnerability to change. A hummingbird with a beak that has evolved to fit only into a single kind of flower is in a lot of trouble if that flower becomes rare or goes extinct. This idea is well expressed in the anime film Ghost in the Shell: “Overspecialize and you breed in weakness; it’s slow death”.

Personally, I think it makes sense to cultivate at least a couple of sets of skills – something abstract and something practical, perhaps, or at least some sort of serious hobby outside of work. Also, even when something isn’t a core competency of yours, it can be worthwhile to know a bit about it. It would be useful for me to take a course on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), for instance. Web design certainly isn’t a major activity of mine, but it would be nice to be able to customize sites a bit without having to spend heaps of time trawling through forums and plagiarizing the code of others.

Local environmentalism

Perhaps it is unwise for me to criticize environmental groups at the moment, given that we are all trying to push a difficult issue forward at a time of considerable political hostility. Reagan’s 11th Commandment is a major reason why the Republicans are so strong in the United States. At the same time, it is disheartening to see people expending their useful energy on the wrong thing, when there is something they would care about a lot more available. Also, given that the environmental movement makes choices based on things that are still at the edge of scientific knowledge, there is a benefit in having public discussions, and making the strongest possible cases to one another. We should not assume ourselves to be infallible, but rather to be in a dialogue with an ever-emerging collection of complex information on how the climate operates.

All that said, I must confess that I am perplexed by how many environmental groups seem to focus their time. It might be a terrible thing that some ugly new development will replace a nice bit of woodland, but I think people need to consider the scale on which humanity is smashing nature. That little plot of forest is threatened along with a whole lot of other forests if catastrophic or runaway climate change occurs.

It reminds me of a person wandering in the middle of a battlefield, looking for their glasses. They realize one problem – that their glasses have been dropped – and they are working diligently at solving it by scrutinizing the ground. At the same time, bullets are flying all around them. They see the small problem, miss the big one, and focus their efforts in the wrong way as a consequence.

Climate change really is the over-riding environmental priority right now. If we warm up the planet five or six ˚C, it will ruin all conservation efforts that have been undertaken in the meanwhile. We need to solve climate change first – taking advantages of co-benefits where possible.

In any case, I think I can see the appeal of being a part of a group dedicated to saving the local bog. It has locavore chic. Also, the area might have a special importance to you personally. Finally, it has the benefit that even if your quest fails, the outcome isn’t so bad. Being part of something friendly and local is a lot more pleasant than confronting a terrifying spectre of global destruction. And yet, that seems to be what we are facing.

Fewer photos to Facebook

Because of how they get their money, it seems to me that Facebook has a business model that is fundamentally opposed to the interests of its users. Since they don’t pay monthly fees, they aren’t Facebook’s customers. Instead, they are Facebook’s product, which is then sold to advertisers in the form of eyeballs and (more worrisomely) databases of personal information.

Because of that, Facebook is never going to be proactively involved in protecting privacy. Instead, it will always be pushing the boundary and doing as much as users are willing to accept. Bit by bit – visibly and invisibly – it seems that privacy protections will be eaten away and more and more data will be available to Facebook’s real clients, the advertisers.

In response to this, I have been gradually stripping down my profile. That’s not all that possible, however. For one thing, Facebook never forgets information you entered, even if you delete it. For another, it can guess all sorts of things about you based on your friends. It can guess what sort of products you are likely to buy, or even if you are gay.

Some people may not be bothered by this, but I am. As such, I am going to shift away from posting photography on Facebook. Instead, I will mostly rely on Flickr Pro, which is a paid and user-focused service.

[Update: 6:39pm] Fear not, photo appreciators! There will still be photos uploaded, and they are likely to be in smaller batches of higher quality work. These are from today: Rideau Canal Skating 2011.

Crediting friends for photos

I put a lot of photography online. I try to put a photo per day up on this site, and I have heaps of photos on Facebook and Flickr. It’s a hobby I enjoy and people seem to enjoy seeing my photos, including ones of themselves.

As photo and computer gear have made it easier and easier to store large numbers of digital images, my library is ballooning. I use iPhoto to store ‘digital negatives’ and currently have an album of 36,109 photos. Most of those photos (over 2/3) have been taken since I came to Ottawa.

While lugging around a giant SLR, it is fun to let other people try taking a few shots. One person brought the gear, but that doesn’t mean people with different perspectives shouldn’t be allowed to make use of it.

I do try to memorize which shots are mine and which ones were taken by others, but I deal with a daunting number of photographs overall. Once in a while, I may accidentally mis-attribute a photo taken by someone else as my own. It is never my intention to do so, and I ask you not to be offended if I haven’t remembered which shots you took. I would always be pleased if you would let me know, so that I can provide an appropriate caption or hover-over text.

Does that seem like a sensible approach to people?

A bit overstretched

Between work, the job search, running this site (and BuryCoal), and photography, I am finding myself rather busy these days.

That is the context in which I have been receiving a number of requests to do commercial photographic work. That is exciting and an opportunity to learn new skills. At the same time, it is a possible distraction from activities that are ultimately more important, such as making my own small contribution to the fight against climate change.

As such, I am going to be pretty picky about the projects I undertake. If the work is interesting or serves a group or cause that is worthy of approval, I will consider a potential project more favourably. Otherwise, I will be demanding a rate of pay that corresponds to the scarcity of my free hours.

2010 happenings

Some of my more notable 2010 undertakings and experiences:

  • The end of the Low Carbon Cross Country Trip
  • Two new jobs
  • The transition from beardedness to beardlessness
  • Time with Emily
  • More than 12,000 photos taken
  • Photojournalism and documentary photography course taken
  • Several Montreal and Toronto visits (one wedding included)
  • Collarbone breaking and partial healing
  • Improved health
  • BuryCoal launched
  • Visits from some friends not frequently seen
  • A solid number of books read
  • Several concerts attended
  • Camping with Rosa
  • New York with Kai
  • Multiple Vermont visits, Christmas included
  • Blogging out loud
  • Dozens of cans of kidney beans eaten
  • Many kilometres by Greyhound
  • A departure from my current home, nearly completed

The priority for 2011? Find a job in Toronto and move there.

Testing Google’s OCR

Previously, I briefly mentioned the optical character recognition (OCR) technology within Google Docs. I decided to test it in the relatively challenging circumstance of converting photographs of pages from a book into text:

As you can see, the image to text conversion isn’t perfect. Indeed, it doesn’t work terribly well in the conditions to which I subjected it. Substantial strings of text are missing, and there are many errors.

Probably, the system would work better if the pages had been perfectly flat and evenly illuminated, and if my camera had been perfectly parallel to the page.

War photographer

In my photojournalism class, we watched the 2001 documentary War Photographer, about the work of James Nachtwey. The film showed him working in both conflict zones and zones of acute poverty, including Indonesia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. It was interesting and well done, and may well have been a balanced portrayal, but the absence of any kind of critical comment on Nachtwey made it feel somewhat like a hagiography.

It may well be the case that Nachtwey is a talented and self-sacrificing man who has helped to increase public concern about various sorts of severe suffering. At the same time, an account based on his own perspective – along with that of his friends, admirers, and co-workers – cannot make that case convincingly. I suppose this is a fundamental problem with autobiographies. Perhaps there should be some sort of third-party certification process where impartial outsiders compare the content of a book or film with all the information they can gather, and then certify or refuse to certify the content. Of course, not many politicians or other public figures would be willing to go through such a screening.

One potent message conveyed by the film is about extreme poverty. Seeing families living right beside dangerous railroad tracks in Indonesia sends a powerful emotional message. Of course, our intellectual response to seeing that varies depending on a constellation of other beliefs. Some people will see that and think: “This shows why economic growth is such a vital phenomenon, when it comes to improving human welfare”. Others will focus more on distributive justice, and say that the issue is less about enriching everyone, and more about transferring wealth from the affluent to the desperately poor.

Evey in The Glebe

A little while ago, my friend Evey was in town and was good enough to pose for some portraits around The Glebe. She writes a fashion blog called Hey, Good Lookin’.

Remarkably, despite being a native of Ottawa, Evey had never been to the Wild Oat restaurant.

It’s a nice place, with excellent loaves of olive bread available. Just don’t expect to find anywhere to sit during the most popular times of day.

I rather like this cape-like garment, and the thick wool is well-suited to Ottawa’s shortening days.

Octopus Books is an independent shop with an entire section devoted to ‘U.S. Imperialism’. Here, Evey is posing outside.

Proximity to the canal is one of the nice things about The Glebe as a neighbourhood. That, and the presence of Ottawa’s best bagel shop.

The bridge shown here is the same as the one incorporated into the current banner for this site, though I am going to need to find a Toronto bridge to substitute in fairly soon.

When Evey is back in Ottawa around Christmas time, I am hoping we will be able to add to these with some shots in the snow.

Small cameras versus big cameras

When I went to visit Toronto this past weekend, I had to lug a suit bag with me. The idea of bringing along my Canon 5D Mk II digital SLR (dSLR) and associated gear and lenses was too daunting, so I brought along my little Canon A570IS point and shoot (P&S) camera instead.

It has been quite a while since I used a point and shoot, so the experience felt novel to me. Those little cameras certainly have a few things going for them:

  • It can be carried in a pocket and easily held with one hand.
  • Since the camera fits in a pocket, you don’t need to constantly advertise that you are carrying it.
  • It can fit into small spaces, allowing for unusual compositions.
  • Subjects are not intimidated by such a small camera.
  • The tiny shutter is very quiet.
  • The relatively low value of the camera makes you less worried about loss, damage, and theft.
  • There are fewer condensation problems, since the smaller camera and lens have less thermal momentum.
  • The camera takes ubiquitous AA batteries, rather than expensive proprietary cells.
  • The camera can automatically detect faces, and focuses on them.
  • For a small camera, a small tripod is sufficient for long-exposure shots. It is also easier to brace a small camera on most horizontal surfaces.
  • The camera is so light, there are no problems with carrying it around everywhere, for hours.

Of course, there are a few reasons why I missed my 5D. By far the most important is image quality. The sensor in the A570IS is small and produces visibly noisy images at 200 ISO, and ones that are terrible at 400 ISO and up. By contrast, images from the 5D look very decent at 2500 ISO. Because of the superior lenses, shots taken on the 5D also look better in more subtle ways. The 5D also has a more accurate viewfinder; the shot that ends up on your memory card looks much like the one composed through the viewfinder, with minimal cropping and parallax problems.

80% of the time, the ideal option would be something that is about the size and weight of the A570IS but which has the image quality of the 5D Mk II. The rest of the time, the size and weight of the 5D would actually be preferable. In particular, all the dedicated controls spread across the 5D body make it easier to choose the ideal settings for a particular shot quickly.

Alas, for the foreseeable future there will always be the need to choose between convenience and quality.