The Last Word

[Another technical post. I promise to get back to art next month.]

My last post, the one on multicore processors, ended on a down note. I don’t feel great about the future of multicore computing. However, there’s something else on the near horizon that’s going to dramatically increase the performance of photographic computer systems– the gradual replacement of disk storage with nonvolatile semiconductor memory.

Before we discuss what’s happening today, let’s get a little perspective. I’m not going to take you back to Babbage’s Difference Engine, but only about fifty years. In the mid 1950s, the standard technology for main memory was magnetic cores. Core memory provided access times on the order of the computing cycle times, was nonvolatile (you could power down the computer and it wouldn’t lose its program or main memory data, and was expensive. In 1956, IBM shipped the first disk memory system, the RAMAC 350. Designed in San Jose, and operated by vacuum tubes, the one-ton machine stored less than five megabytes (Yes, megabytes; but that was a lot; computer main memories were a few tens of kilobytes in those days). The RA stood for random access, and compared to tape, it lived up to the name, but it still had the usual disk behavior where, on a read, there’s a delay waiting for the first part of the desired data to rotate under the head, and then the data comes off fairly rapidly. The disk memory provided a storage medium midway between magnetic tape and core memory in both cost and access time. Before the disk, there was rotating magnetic memory in the form of magnetic drums, but cost per byte was much higher than for disks, and capacity was limited.

The magnetic disk was an instant success, and changed the architecture of computer systems. Large-scale transaction processing applications such as airline reservation systems were suddenly possible. IBM introduced faster, bigger, and cheaper models; competitors appeared in droves. Fast forward twenty years, to the dawn of the personal computer era. By that time, semiconductor memory had replaced magnetic cores, and that memory was volatile, that is, it forgot everything it had stored when the power went off (and whenever a cosmic ray happened by, but that’s another story). At first, magnetic disks were too expensive for personal computers, and we made do with cassette tapes (excruciating) and floppy disks (better, but still painful to someone used to minicomputers). Finally, in the early eighties, magnetic disks came to the PC, with IBM’s PC/XT, introduced in 1983 with a 10 MB disk, one of the earliest successes.

Since the RAM had become volatile, the disk offered two advantages to the personal computer: it provided a way to store data when the machine was off and automatically return it to main memory when power was restored, and it offered cheaper and more capacious, although slower, storage than the semiconductor D-RAM used for main memory. At the end of the eighties, conventional wisdom was that disks had about another ten years of life before they were supplanted by nonvolatile semiconductor memory, probably based on flash technology.

It didn’t happen that way. Giant magnetostriction, thin-film heads, perpendicular recording, and other technologies accelerated the evolution of the magnetic disk and kept it ahead of the steady advance of semiconductor memory. But it looks like time is running out for the hard disk. Already flash-based nonvolatile disk replacements are appearing in high-end laptops. In that application, their advantages are speed, ruggedness, reliability, power consumption, weight and size. In the Lenovo X300, the semiconductor “disk” can deliver up to five times better performance than the real thing. As prices come down, we’ll see much greater penetration into the portable market, until only low-end machines have hard disks.

The next step is the desktop, which doesn’t value ruggedness, weight, size, and power consumption as much as the portable market, but surely cares about speed and reliability. The advantages of semiconductor “disks” over desktop magnetic storage aren’t as great as their benefits over laptop disks, since desktop platters spin faster and their arms move more quickly. We’ll first see flash buffers on magnetic disks, then small flash memories for program swapping and access to often-used data, and then desktop computers with no rotating storage at all. Eventually, solid state storage devices will drop the interface that makes them look like magnetic disks in favor of one that is more suited to their internal structure.

We’re not talking about small performance improvements here. Using a Lenovo X300 is a startling experience. Programs load faster than you think they will. Going into and coming out of sleep state is dramatically rapid. Lightroom imports from “disk” are downright snappy. If the same level of improvement occurs when nonvolatile semiconductor memory hits desktop computing, it may be enough for us to forgive the fact that CPU utilization on our 16-processor system hardly ever gets over 30%.

[This post is unabashedly technical, and contains nothing that you absolutely need to be a good photographer. I couldn’t help myself.]

You’d have to be living in a cave to miss the big switch in personal computing from a single processor per chip to two or four, with eight coming soon. The power dissipation of single processor chips was going through the roof as the designers cranked up the clock rate to get more and more performance. Power supplies got beefier, computers needed bigger and noisier fans to keep puddles of molten silicon from forming at the bottom of the cases, the electric bill started to climb, and there’s that global warming thing. So in order to get the possibility of more performance with reasonable power consumption, the chip designers turned the clock frequency back down, put more than one processor on each chip, and left it to the software engineers to figure out how to turn the potential into performance improvements that users could see. 

I’ve been reading articles saying how clever the hardware people were, and how the software folks are behind, and need to work hard so that computers can effectively use all those new processors. I have a different perspective. I think the hardware folks basically gave up and punted, and left the software people to sort it out.

For thirty years or more, it has been easier to get more instruction cycles per second by adding more processors than by getting a single processor to run faster. The difficulty has been, and continues to be, that many problems are difficult to parallelize, or cut up into little pieces that can be simultaneously executed. Because of that, for the first 25 years of the last 30, the only computers that employed many processors were what were then called supercomputers, designed for problems for which the utmost performance was necessary. For all other computers, the designers just kept finding ways to turn up the wick, and clock speeds went from a few megahertz to a few gigahertz.

Now we’ve reached to point where a) the clock speeds have gotten to the point where power dissipation is a real problem, and b) we can cram so many transistors onto a chip that it’s easy to use them to build multiple processors. The chip designers have taken the path of least resistance.  What else could they have done? For starters, they could have rethought processor design with the idea of getting faster scalar (single-threaded) performance more energy-efficiently. That’s hard work; my favorite approach involves asynchronous circuitry, which is difficult to design and more difficult to test. Slapping more processors onto the chip is conceptually easy, although I admit that details like cache management get tricky. 

Some problems have a good deal of inherent parallelism. Luckily for photographers, image processing is usually pretty easy to parallelize, since the operations done to one pixel sometimes don’t affect the value of any other pixels (color space conversion, curves), or if they do (unsharp masking, Gaussian blur), they don’t affect the value of sufficiently distant pixels. Even so, current implementations of most image editors and plugins don’t ever peg the CPU meter on my four-processor system (Lightroom is a notable exception – Thank you, Adobe).

This isn’t the first time that the hardware designers have given up and left it to the software folks to clean up the mess — I myself have been guilty, and I hereby apologize to Dave Ladd and Steve Plant for the complicated Connection Table constraints in the Rolm CBX. Sometimes the best systems designs require that the software deal with a lot of messiness – Dave and Steve, I’d do it all over again. This could be one of those times, but it’s not something of which hardware designers should be proud.

I don’t have a good feeling about this transition. For the first time in the history of the personal computer, scalar performance has decreased. It’s pretty easy to get enough parallel processing to get back ahead in a two-processor system, but faster clock rates don’t seem to be in the cards, at least for a while, so the route to better overall performance has to be more and more processors per workstation. In order for that potential performance to turn into something we users can appreciate, the software designers have to figure out a way to keep all those new processors busy.

So it is true that the software folks are behind in the multicore game. They’re behind because the hardware designers changed the rules on them. They deserve our sympathy, because it’s not going to be easy to get on top of this situation. Automatic parallelizing has not had great success in thirty-some-odd years of trying. The software tools for manually parallelizing problems are not highly evolved either. Now that multiprocessor systems are thoroughly mainstream, perhaps there will be some breakthroughs.

You hear it at workshops. You read it over and over. Get to know your camera really well. Get to the point where you don’t have to think about how to use it. It should be an extension of your body. The corollaries are:

1) don’t change cameras often;

2) don’t use many cameras (one is a nice number);

3) don’t use many lenses

Like most conventional wisdom, there’s a grain of truth here. You don’t want to have to think about the mechanics of operating the camera; you want to think about the photograph your making. A sufficient condition for achieving that level of unconscious, effortless, competence would be owning only one camera for your whole photographic lifetime and using it every day. But it’s not necessary, at least if you make photographs the way most artists do.

If you’re a mere mortal, you don’t get up every morning with a completely new idea for a photograph, and spend the day making that image. You evolve ideas for photographs over months or years, each image building on the many mistakes and few successes of the previous ones. You work in series of pictures, each one quite similar to the others. If you’re muse takes you to the studio, you may spend years making images with one camera and lens at nearly the same aperture, shutter speed, and subject distance. That’s an extreme case, but even situations that are considered unpredictable, such as street photography, fall into a routine with little variation as a photographer assiduously pursues a creative thread. You pick a favorite body and one or two lenses that seem to suit the project. You get to know what you’re going to see through the finder before you raise the camera to your eye. You know what the light will do to the image without metering. Your movements become fluid through practice. This learning happens quickly, because the boundaries of the project create boundaries in the way you use the camera. You use a subset of the capabilities of the camera. The smaller the subset, the quicker you learn what you need to know to make the images you want.

There’s a useful analogy between a camera and a powerful computer program. Microsoft Word is a monster of an application, capable of doing a variety of things. Most people only use the subset of Word’s features that they need to get their work done. If you’re writing a thesis or a paper for a scientific journal, you need to know how to create and manage footnotes and endnotes, so you learn the necessary arcane incantations. If you’re writing poetry, you probably have no idea how to produce a footnote, and you are not disadvantaged in the slightest for your ignorance.

There seems to be six ways to perform any given operation in Photoshop. However, a photographer only has to know one. Or maybe none: a portrait photographer doesn’t need to know anything at all about high dynamic range techniques or stitching; a maker of traditional landscapes has no use for compositing.

The analogy between using a camera and a program is inexact in that level of knowledge is different in the two cases: to use your camera well, you must know it intuitively, and you can approach a computer program less spontaneously. However, cameras are far simpler than large computer applications, so you can fairly quickly learn to use a small set of features with effortless fluidity.

The result of this line of thinking is that serious photographers who commit themselves to a project should ignore the conventional wisdom and feel free to use whatever camera they think is best for the job, knowing that they will quickly become appropriately facile for the demands of the project. A corollary is that photographers should feel free to change cameras during a project. If the instrument they chose at the beginning isn’t doing the job any more, or never did do the job the way that they have now come to see it, they should get something that is right for the work.

I realize that there are excellent photographers who pick a camera early in their careers and either take the same kind of picture all their lives or bend the pictures that they make to fit the capabilities of their chosen instrument. It works for them, and I’m not knocking it. But if you’re somebody who chafes under that kind of restriction, don’t feel guilty about ignoring it.

[The idea for this post came up when I was interviewing Jerry Takigawa several years ago. All credit for this piece should go to Jerry. If you’ve got a beef with it, blame me.]

You start a photographic project. Maybe you stumbled into it by accident; maybe you planned it out meticulously well in advance. It’s going great. You’re really happy with the work, and you’ve gotten into a groove. Then, slowly, over months or years, you notice that it gets harder and harder to get really good images. You can’t figure out why. You’re doing what got you to this point. You haven’t fallen into a rut. You’re still excited about the project. You still see new things. You’re just not getting as many keepers as you used to.

Jerry points out that this is natural, and it’s caused by your body of finished work not expanding as rapidly as your production of new images. As you start the project, every good picture goes into the “exhibit someday” pile. When you get twenty five or fifty exhibitable images, you start pruning. You put two pictures in, but take one out that you don’t like so much anymore. Sometimes, you go through and throw out a whole class of images (see the previous post). Over time, the quality of the pictures in the keepers pile goes up. It’s no wonder that it gets harder and harder to create images that make the cut.

Not only does the general quality of the images get higher the longer the project progresses, but certain niches with room for only one image get filled. I returned from a photographic trip in October pretty darned happy about the work I did, but I found that I couldn’t use the very best picture from the trip; it was too similar to a slightly better image that I’d made in April.

So cheer up. Your pictures aren’t getting worse. Your standards are getting higher.

There comes a time in when nearly every photographer decides some once-loved old work is crap. Edward Weston scraped the emulsion of some of his old glass negatives and turned them into window panes. He’d moved on, and considered the early work an embarrassment. I’m sure many pictorialists who saw the f/64 light felt the same way about their fuzzy pictures.

I remember the first time it happened to me. I was almost a year into a new series, and it was all coming together for me. I was getting even more excited than at the beginning. I was clearer about what I was trying to do. I could tell when things were working while I was making the exposures; I didn’t have to wait until I got to the darkroom. As I was reviewing the work that I had done at the beginning of the series, I realized that something was wrong. The pictures that got me started on the productive road I was so happy about, pictures that I had loved a few months ago, seemed dull to me now. They were vague, cluttered, lacking in a crisp insight that the later work had. I was depressed. The images that I had thought were great I now realized were, well, crap. The ones I was making now were so much better. But what would keep me from feeling the same way about them in a year or two? I’d lost my confidence. I didn’t know what to do but just keep on with the series, and go with what felt right at the time. I kept at it, but I’d lost the faith that I was on the right track.

It all worked out. When I came to the end of the series after five years, the only pictures I’d soured on were ones that I had made during the first few months. Then I started a new series. After a few months, the same thing happened. This time it didn’t bother me so much, and I didn’t falter. By the third series, and the third tossing out of work I had once thought was great, I recognized the pattern. That changed my attitude entirely. The reevaluation of the early work was a sign that the series was maturing, that I was moving beyond the facile early pictures to ones that went beneath the surface. Rather than a cause for despair, discarding once-loved pictures was a reason to rejoice.

The unpleasant aspects of the museum-going experience are pretty obvious: dealing with bad weather, traffic jams, parking, standing in line, trying to get an unobstructed view through crowds, having your feet stepped on, having the guards tell you not to get so close, backache from bending over to read descriptions three feet off the floor, and questionable-but-expensive food. What’s good about going to museum? Or, asked in a way pertinent to the subject of this post, if high quality books and magazines are available, what will be the reasons to go to museums?

To be in the presence of the object. Some people place great store in observing the actual physical object created by the artist. This probably is more important if the objects are singular, as is the case with painting and some sculptures, rather than if the objects are one of a set, as is the case with photographs, etchings, woodcuts, cast sculptures, etc. it’s hard to imagine people placing great stock in viewing the original image if the objects are produced by a purely mechanical process such as ink jet printing.

To enjoy the environment. At some museums, the architecture is as big a draw as what’s on the walls. It is exhilarating to be a in an inspired and inspiring space, especially if it’s not crowded.

To see large images. Images in books are limited in their size. You can observe the book from a closer distance than an image on the wall of a museum, which compensates on a purely optical measure. However, there is something striking about being in the presence of a large object.

To participate in social interaction. Openings, parties, and walk-around lectures enrich people’s lives.

To be educated. To the lectures mentioned above, add docent-led tours, seminars, and artists talking about their work.

To save money, if the comparison is buying a book. One or two visits to a museum will be cheaper than purchasing a high quality art book, if you don’t consider travel and lodging. In addition, visiting a museum will allow a greater variety of images to be viewed that could be presented in a book. However, the fair comparison is between a museum going experience and going to a facility, say a library, and viewing the works in a book.

Of these reasons, only the first one is affected negatively by the decision to exhibit a copy rather than an original photograph. So, from a social and psychological perspective, the hard-to-pin-down human desire for eyeball-to-object contact with an original work of art is the only remaining reason to forgo the better appreciation of the work that would be available from a well-lit copy.

There is one legal impediment to exhibiting copies. Owning the physical image doesn’t mean that you own the right to reproduce that image. Unless otherwise specified, the photographer almost always retains that right. Usually, artists give up the rights to reproduce images for catalogs and advertisements, but not for exhibition. So, even though the photographers would benefit from having their work displayed to better aesthetic advantage, museums would have to convince each one individually of this. In the case of dead photographers, museums would have to find and convince whoever owns the rights, and that may not be such an easy sell.

One way for museums to get started with exhibiting copies might be for them to show the reproductions in addition to, rather than instead of, the originals. Say there’s an important, beautiful, small, old, rare, unstable print that a museum wants to show the public. They could go ahead and show it as usual, under glass, lit with yellowish light with the intensity of two candles. At the same time, nearby they could show a large (but not so large that the size won’t support the level of detail present in the original) well-lit high-quality reproduction of the same work, and pay attention to how many people go to each print, how long they stay, and what they have to say about the two experiences.

Even that small step will require a change in the way that most curators look at the world. I’m not holding my breath.

What has to happen before large numbers of people view mechanically reproduced images in preference to seeing the actual images on the walls of museums? In this post, I’ll talk about technology, and next time I’ll work on the social/business/legal issues. I expect the technical part to be easier.

From a technical perspective, in order to get audiences preferring the copies, we need to make the experience of viewing mechanically-reproduced images unequivocally better than today’s museum experience of traditional photography. What needs to change to get that to happen? Before we talk about that, we need to pick a standard against which to measure the new processes. Of all the traditional photographic processes, silver prints have the greatest acuity and dynamic range. Now that Cibachrome and dye transfer have all but disappeared, of the current color chemical photographic processes, chromogenic prints have the highest quality. Second, we have to take into consideration the different viewing conditions; the reproductions, free from the burden of striving for permanence, can be illuminated much more brightly, which means that they’ll look better even if the quality is not quite the equal of the originals. So let’s rephrase our question: what has to happen before mechanically-reproduced images have nearly the same quality as today’s traditional silver and chromogenic prints?

For the first part of this discussion, I’ll assume that the source document is an image on paper, and that what is desired is as close a replica of that image as possible, either in a book, in a poster, or hanging on the wall of a museum. At the end of the post, I’ll consider a different tack that can yield even better results.

Better offset printing technology. I think Jensen covered this very well for black and white. Because of his focus on black and white reproduction, he didn’t mention that the black-and-white printing technology he described was invented for color printing, and the current improvements in printing technology apply equally as well to the color world. In addition, offset printing, like inkjet printing, is moving in the direction of using more than three color inks. I’m not talking about various dilutions of the same hues, as in light cyan, or my favorite printing oxymoron, light black. What I mean is the addition of colors like red, orange, and green to the standard set of cyan, magenta, and yellow, the objective being to increase the color gamut. At its best, offset printing can produce a far greater color gamut than that obtainable from a chromogenic print, and can reproduce any color in a C-print (which uses only three dye colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow – no black). To enjoy the benefits of the technology Jensen describes, we merely have to wait until today’s state-of-the-art printing technology becomes widespread and inexpensive.

Better low-volume printing technology. Posters and books can enjoy high enough volumes to make offset printing economically attractive, but using a standard offset press to get one or two prints is horrifically inefficient. There are offset presses manufactured for the print-on-demand market; they are economical for short runs, but don’t produce the ultimate quality. I think that the most likely candidate for photographic-quality prints is the familiar drop-on-demand inkjet printer. It’s already better than a color C print; we can get a Dmax of better than 2.3, a sufficient range of colors (way more than sufficient with the printers that use red, orange, green, or blue inks), and minimal bronzing. When compared to a silver print, we’re close, but not quite there; Dmax is better than we need, but resolution and smoothness won’t match a contact print, and bronzing is still a problem (the viewer is more sensitive to bronzing on a monochromatic print than a color one), although it’s gotten much better recently with the introduction of papers that emulate the surface of a non-ferrotyped glossy silver print. Bronzing is not as visible when prints are displayed under glass, which is the way museums normally handle photographs (but maybe they wouldn’t need the glass with copy prints that they consider sacrificial, providing a more-intimate viewing experience), and I expect bronzing will be sufficiently well-controlled soon. If it’s not, coatings can be used to hide it. Illuminant metamerism (change in color of an object when lit by light of different spectra) is much less of a problem now that printer drivers are creating most of the tonal range with the grey and black inks, rather than counting on cyan, magenta and yellow together adding up to a neutral black.

Color-managed capture. Usually, museums already have photographs of most of the works in their collection. That doesn’t mean that they could make credible copies from those photographs. There are three technical problems with the reproductions that museums typically make. First, they are usually film transparencies, which by their nature cannot store the entire gamut of colors of a photographic print (although they can store many colors that cannot be reproduced in a photographic print, and anyone who’s printed a ‘chrome knows). Second, because the museum’s purpose is to represent the object in databases and low-resolution catalogs, they don’t use sufficient resolution to capture all of the detail in the original photograph. Third, since the images weren’t captured in a color managed workflow, there’s no way to tell the colors of the original print from the capture. For all these reasons, museums interested in making high-accuracy copies of photographs in their collections will probably need to re-photograph all of their images.

Once a museum has signed up to re-photograph their collection, their color-management problems don’t instantly go away. Where reproduction of color is paramount, the standard filters of color scanners and cameras are inadequate; for color-accurate reproduction scanning needs to be done with special filters that can, with some math, replicate the response of the human eye. The illumination needs attention, too, but that is usually less of a problem.

Color management applies not only to color images, but also to toned black-and-white silver photographs, as well as alternative processes with distinctive color casts, such as palladium or cyanotype. Black-and-white images do allow a great deal of simplification; if we ignore split-toned (deliberately or not) prints, the color of the print can be described in three numbers that apply to a monochromatic image.

All in all, color-accurate capture can be a daunting challenge to any museum, and an almost-insurmountable one to a small institution with no expertise in the subject. Perhaps it is better to take small steps at first, and start with black and white images. Careful monochromatic captures and colorimetric or visual chromaticity matches should be adequate. Even black and white is not without its pitfalls. If the dynamic range of the copy medium is greater than that of the original, which will be the case for some contemporary and almost all older prints, should we use the increased range of tones, or should we faithfully reproduce the limitations of the original? If we do decide to use the entire range of the copy medium, what tone mapping algorithm should we use? There’s no easy answer to either of these questions.

Color-managed printing. Having a color-managed file doesn’t necessarily mean the right colors in the printed output. Industrial-strength versions of the same sorts of color management techniques that you use with an inkjet printer work just fine on an offset press. However, in spite of at least 15 years of effort by color-science-driven companies, these techniques are not the norm in the pressroom. Using specially calibrated proofing printers can go a long way to closing the gap. For inkjet printing, color-managed workflows are the rule rather than the exception, and today’s state of the art in color management is adequate for color images.

Standard color management techniques don’t work very well for producing duotones or tritones of nearly-monochromatic images. There are several reasons for this situation. The market for high-quality monochromatic images is substantially smaller than the color market. Human color vision is more sensitive near the neutral axis. There are a wide variety of inks used for duotones, so it’s harder to characterize these inks than the smaller set used for color reproduction. As with color, the situation is better for inkjet printing, although the present standard way of generating subtle shifts in image tone, using small amounts of highly-chromatic ink (the same ink used for full-range color reproduction), presents potential permanence problems.

In either offset lithography or inkjet printing of black and white images we can start with the colorimetric or visual chromaticity matches that we discussed for monochromatic capture.

What if we don’t start with a print?

Most of the photographic prints in museum collections were produced using traditional chemical processes, and embody subtle and difficult-to-reproduce adjustments – dodging, burning, bleaching, etc. — made by the photographer or a trusted assistant during the printing process. For those images, it makes sense to start with the photographic print. However, a growing number of museum images either started out as a digital file, or were scanned to that form on the way to becoming finished prints. The best way to get a high-quality copy of a digital image is not to print it, scan the print, edit the scan, and then print it again; it makes a lot more sense to start with the artist’s digital file and avoid the quality losses that inevitably occur with extra printing and scanning steps.

Since most artists don’t use color-managed workflows exclusively, they won’t be able to just ship off a disk and have that be the end of it. For artists, the final result is almost always the print, and even if they use color management to get the print close to what they want, they will almost always tweak the files to get the prints right, even if the tweaks make the images look worse on the monitor and throw off the colors embedded in the files. As an aside, I note that the UPDIG file interchange standards go a long way to achieving truly device-independent printing, and are a genuinely Good Thing. However, the present state of the art in color management—good but not perfect—and the way artists work means that digital files should be accompanied by proof prints that reflect the artists’ intentions. Or maybe artists should just go ahead and make the sacrificial prints themselves. Hit print once to make the “real” print; hit it again to make the one that’s going to see the bright lights. This has the wondrous effect of creating a copy that is precisely identical to the reference image.

In the November/December 2007 issue of Lenswork, Brooks Jensen wrote an essay on the implications of “the ongoing revolution in commercial printing technologies.” Jensen asserts, and justifies the position, that the best commercial printing processes can produce images equaling or exceeding the quality of photographic prints. He compares the rapid quality improvements in the commercial printing world with the stagnation of the technology for producing traditional silver prints (He’s being generous; a recurring lament among old-timers is the decline in quality of printing paper, and the complaining isn’t all nostalgia). He draws the conclusion that the quality of offset-printed images will soon surpass that of photographic prints. The implications are significant and widespread. This is an important piece and I commend it to you.

For a long time, I’ve had misgivings about the way photographs are displayed in museums. In this post, I’d like to take Jensen’s idea and run with it; considering how the exhibition of photography might change in light of coming advances in offset lithography. You could generalize much of what have to say from the display of photographs in a museum to the display of other works of art. However, much of it doesn’t generalize; I mean to apply what I say only to photographs.

The situation today

When you go to a working art photographer’s house, the walls are covered with their prints. Usually, they look gorgeous. One of the reasons is that photographers throw a lot of light on them. The longevity of the print is not their principal concern; if the print fades they can always make another.

In a museum, exhibited prints are not nearly so brightly lit. That’s being kind; if you’re interested in appreciating the full power of the images, the lighting is usually terrible. The dynamic range is compressed, brilliance disappears, and delicacy of shading is obscured. Sometimes things are so murky that it’s difficult to see any shadow detail, even with modern prints in good shape. Older prints have lower maximum density and dimmer highlights. The reduced contrast of these images cries out for bright illumination. However, because older prints are often especially fragile, they often get even dimmer lighting.

In addition to being too dim, museum illumination is usually too yellow. Standard white illumination is 5000°K, which gives a neutral appearance. I’m not sure why museums don’t use neutral lighting, but I suspect the reason is also related to permanence, since running the light filaments at a higher temperature causes them to emit greater energy in the more-damaging blue part of the spectrum.

It’s not that museums want the prints to look bad. They know they’d look better if they put more light on them, but their priorities are somewhere else. Museums are always conscious of their custodial role, and having the image last as long as possible trumps having it look good. They are afraid of damaging prints they own, and even more frightened of harming prints they’ve borrowed. Ignorance plays a part here, too. Curators don’t know how much light will cause damage to any particular print, and they err on the side of caution. Were I in their shoes, I’d probably do the same thing, but it all adds up to a fairly dismal experience for museum goers, at least when compared to what they would see with the prints brightly and whitely lit.

How to make it better

Before I read Jensen’s article, I had been thinking that, in some exhibitions, I would have gotten a better experience from a book. Now I think that I was being too cautious; in a few years we’ll have the technology to provide a better viewing experience in all cases. Let’s assume that we have inexpensive offset printing or other technology that is capable of exceeding the quality of traditional photographic prints. Let’s go a step further than Jensen, and assumed that we can make the images relatively cheaply even in small volume (I’ll justify this assumption in a later post). What are some practical ways to connect eyeballs to high-quality photographic art in the most visually pleasing manner?

Videocassette recordings, and, later, DVDs, allowed people to enjoy in their home much of the experience of a motion picture in a theater. By analogy, books could replace (or supplement – the movie house hasn’t disappeared) museum shows. Instead of picking work to hang on the walls, curators could construct collections of work to be published in book form. The amount of explanatory material could be greatly expanded over what’s possible in a museum environment. A reasonably sized high-quality photographic book would probably have to sell for about $50. The ratio of that price to the cost of admission to a large museum is about the same as the ratio of the price of the DVD to the price of a single admission to the same movie in a theater (although the museum ticket will usually give you access to several exhibitions).

Another alternative would be to allow people to create their own shows. The first thing they would need is sufficient wall space, then they ‘d need a source of low-cost high-quality large-format images. There’s a precedent with posters, which as Jensen mentioned, has formed the economic base for some photographers print sales. However posters as they are sold today usually display prominent text and have a different feel than matted prints. If museums or photographers issued offset-printed portfolios, the view would be cleaner and less cluttered, and a grouping of prints would allow curatorial creativity. Then wall space limitations and framing costs probably would be the most significant limitations to the number of prints you could put up. Frames that made it easy to swap prints in and out could help here.

Here’s a more radical idea: rather than provide an alternative to the museum experience, we could make the museum experience better by changing what is displayed. To provide the best possible viewing experience in a gallery setting while minimizing light damage, museums could scan their photographs, lock them away in dark vaults and display high-quality reproductions under bright, white lights. To many, this idea is probably aesthetic heresy. In order for this approach to be successful, museum boards, staff, and art lovers will have to rethink the purpose of the museum experience.

A lot has to change to make these approaches successful. I’ll examine the issues in subsequent posts.

In the last post, I considered the photographic process as linear, with a camera simply a tool that the photographer uses to make real a predefined vision. Most of the time it doesn’t actually work that way. Photographic visions don’t usually arrive fully formed and perfect, like the Kubla Khan did to Coleridge. We photographers struggle to perfect our vision through a process of trial and error. It’s mostly error, and every little mistake is valuable if we can learn from it.

We get an idea. We try it out. It doesn’t work. We try something else. It doesn’t work either, but it’s better in some way. That gives us a new idea. We try that out. And so it goes, a photographic feedback loop. The camera is an obvious part of that loop in aspects of the camera that directly influence the final photograph. If the lens has some flare, we may notice that and figure out a way to use what some might consider a flaw to artistic effect. A light source or specular reflection within the image may reflect off the diaphragm to produce highlights whose shape is nearly round with many view or rangefinder camera lenses, but pentagonal with some single lens reflex lenses. If the lens is particularly sharp, we may emphasize crispness and definition in the picture; if it’s not so sharp we may go for an atmospheric effect.

The format of the camera itself can have a huge effect on our pictures. I once purchased a 6×12cm roll film back for 4 x 5 camera which I was using for semi-industrial landscapes. It came with a little plastic device that clipped onto the ground glass to indicate the format. I used it for a while, and realized that, while I liked the look, I wasn’t making enough panoramic pictures to justify the weight of the back in my pack. So I stopped carrying the back, but I kept on using the plastic format indicator whenever I wanted to make a panorama. I found it useful; it forced me to look at the world differently than looking at the full 4 x 5 frame. Somehow, knowing I could crop the full negative to a panorama wasn’t at all the same as looking at the cropped image on the ground glass. This is an example of a counterintuitive effect that happens often in photography. Introducing a constraint, in this case the format indicator, made the pictures better. If the camera were simply a tool to arrive at a predefined vision, the best camera would be the one with the fewest constraints.

Last spring I took a trip to Italy. I was just a tourist, had few photographic ambitions, and wanted to travel light. I took along a 35mm-sized digital rangefinder camera and a 24 mm lens (equivalent to a 32 mm lens on 35mm film camera). I found myself alone in Siena one afternoon, and for a few hours attempted some street photography. I hadn’t done much work with a rangefinder camera in almost 20 years, but it was amazing to me how quickly I fell into habits appropriate to that instrument. Without thinking about it, I started prefocusing (or zonefocusing) and relying heavily on the depth of field indicator. Freed of worries about mirror slap, I used slower shutter speeds than I would’ve used with a single lens reflex, which allowed smaller apertures. I didn’t miss autofocus at all. The quiet shutter allowed me to get close, and the camera’s small size made it less obvious than a single lens reflex would have been. The photographs ended up looking substantially different than they would have had I used a single lens reflex. Thinking back on it now, it all makes sense, and on one level appears obvious, but I was surprised that it changed my photography so greatly, and even more surprised that the changes took place with little conscious thought.

Physical aspects of the camera affect the image in non-obvious, highly-personal ways. If a camera is highly evolved mechanically and a pleasure to hold, it may influence our frame of mind while we are making pictures. Different cameras facilitate different handling, and that could influence the pictures as well.

To be successful photographers, we need to be open to feedback, and the feedback we get is moderated by our tools. Therefore I am willing to believe that hard-to-quantify qualities in a camera affect the results to some extent. I doubt that the effect is great, but I’m bringing it up as a topic worthy of discussion.

Our carried-over topic is the relationship between the greatness of a camera and the quality of the photographs produced by that camera. In his essay, Lane attributes to the Leica M-series line of cameras near-magical powers to produce great photographs. At a gut level, I don’t buy that. I think that the M-series Leicas are only appropriate for a certain breed of photographer making a certain kind of picture. I further believe that, even for those photographers making that sort of picture, that results of equal quality could be achieved with other cameras. Let me work through my logic and see if you agree.

Today I’m going to assume that art photography works like this: the photographer has a vision of the world that is consistent with the laws of optics, and the camera assists in capturing that vision. In a subsequent post I’ll consider a more complex model.

Horses for courses

Except for pure appreciation of well-designed and exquisitely-manufactured machinery, cameras are not great in some abstract sense. From a utilitarian perspective, cameras exist simply to produce images. From the same perspective, great cameras allow photographers to realize something virtually identical to their vision with as little distraction as possible. Viewed in this light, a camera can’t do anything positive for the artist’s vision, it can just impede it. The best camera is the one that interferes the least. An ideal camera would be small, light, and cheap; would work well in extremes of heat, cold, dampness, vibration, and dust; would operate intuitively, rapidly, and silently; would offer a bright, accurate viewfinder that worked equally well with all lenses; would offer flexible perspective and plane-of-focus control; would accept sharp, fast lenses that allow rapid changes of focal length over a large range; would focus on close subjects as well as far ones; would accept large pieces of film or other light sensors, and on and on.

You can see the internal conflict here. Big pieces of film mean big cameras and big lenses. Fast lenses are heavy. Big fast lenses are exceedingly heavy. Really fast lenses aren’t very sharp, at least wide open. Camera movements add weight and complexity of operation, and slow things down. The ability to rapidly create a sequence of exposures adds acoustic noise. There is nothing close to an ideal camera. In designing and building an actual camera, there are many tradeoffs that must be made, so many that there are no cameras that excel in making all kinds of photographs. Thus, the first step in picking a camera is choosing the kind of photograph that you want, which will dictate what things are and aren’t important. If results are the criterion, the quality of a camera boils down to its suitability to the task at hand.

There might not be one right camera, but there sure can be a wrong camera

As I said, I am suspicious of the contention that, for a given type of photography, there’s only one camera that will do the job well. However, I enthusiastically support the position that picking the wrong camera can doom a photographic project. I have made several poor camera choices. One in particular stands out. In the eighties I decided that I wanted to do some 4×5 landscape photography. I had owned a Speed Graphic in the 50s, and remembered that I found the limited movements constraining. Sinar had just introduced a camera they called the F, which they advertised as being aimed at field, as opposed to studio, photography. It was a monorail camera like their studio cameras, but it had greatly simplified front and rear standards, was fairly lightweight, and was, for a Sinar, attractively priced. I bought the camera and the field case.

After a week or so, it began to dawn on me that maybe it wasn’t such a smart purchase. My big problem with the camera was how long it took to set it up.

In order to put the camera in the case, the bellows had to be removed from the standards. I’d find something that looked like it might be a photograph, set up the tripod, open up the camera case, and grab the monorail and mount it on the tripod. Then I’d twist the standards so they were pointed in roughly the right direction and mount first the bellows and then the lens. I’d find the cable release (this was before I had the idea to buy a lot of cable releases and attach them permanently to the lenses) and screw it into the lens. I’d then zero out all the movements, which slipped when the camera was handled. I’d open the shutter and the diaphragm, grab the dark cloth, and take a look at my subject. Finding that the light had changed or the clouds would have moved and the photograph had disappeared, I’d say a few four-letter words and take everything down.

I figured that I would get faster as time went by, and I actually did, but after a year of fighting the camera I realized that I was never going to be able to set it up rapidly. I sold it and bought a metal folding 4×5, which gave me great results. For me, the Sinar F was a bad choice, bad enough that I got poor pictures or no pictures in many of my favorite photographic situations. Although the Sinar F was the wrong camera for someone with my purposes and my working style, it might have been an excellent selection for someone else, say, a photographer who had a Sinar P in his studio and wanted to do interior architectural photography and thus needed extreme movements.

About the same time I bought the Sinar for landscapes, I decided that I wanted higher print quality in the street photography project that I had been doing in parallel using a Nikon S2. I bought a Plaubel Makina 6×7, and found it to be highly satisfactory for my purposes. While it was visually more imposing than a 35mm RF camera, it folded fairly flat and didn’t take up much room in my travel bag. The built-in light meter meant one less thing to carry. The between-the-lens leaf shutter was quieter than the Nikon’s focal-plane shutter. The larger negative was a big step up in quality. I used the camera contentedly for several years. Then my street photography started to change. I became more interested in motion blur, which meant I needed a tripod, or at least something to use to brace the camera against walls and posts. I also became more concerned with the positional relationship between objects in the foreground and the background. When I started working that way, my pictures didn’t come out quite the way I’d envisioned them. It took me a couple of months, but I finally figured out why: the slight parallax between the finder and the lens meant that I was composing the picture from a slightly difference angle than the image on the negative, and that difference was enough to throw off my composition. I switched to a medium-format single lens reflex, and that solved the problem.

After several years of productive use of the SLR, the pictures began to develop an architectural quality, and I decided that I wanted to gain control of the perspective. I started using a 6×9 monorail view camera with a 6×8 roll film back. The camera was not much bigger than the medium-format SLR. It had a reflex ground glass viewer that meant that I didn’t have to get under a dark cloth in public places, and also meant that I could use a shorter, lighter tripod than I would have needed to get the camera to eye level. A 47mm lens on a 6×8 negative gave me about the same angle of view I’d had with a 40mm lens on a 6×6. I’d already started using a tripod for all these pictures anyway, so the view camera didn’t slow me down much. Unlike the Sinar F, I could stick the camera in my bag all set up, with even the lens in place.

After a few years of using the view camera, my vision changed again, in the direction of grittier, less “pretty” images. I started working in low light with a 35mm SLR, a 15mm lens, and very fast film. The golf-ball-sized grain worked with the new kind of images.

You can see that as my work changed direction, a camera that had previously been perfectly satisfactory had to go. I can now write about how the work changed and how the camera had to do the same, but at the time it wasn’t obvious what was happening. I gradually came to realize that something was wrong; I was doing pretty close to what I had been doing, but it wasn’t working for me anymore. I had to figure out what I had changed. Once I did so, in each case it became obvious that I needed new equipment. Each of the changes was necessary to correct what had become a fundamental equipment defect; in no case did I change cameras within a category.

It’s not critical to understanding how my work changed, but you can see much of the extended series at http://www.kasson.com/Blackstone/AloneInACrowd.pdf. Since I had moved away from straight street photography by the time I started the work in this catalog, only two of the images were captured with the Makina.

First, pick the right class of camera, but even that’s highly personal

An axiom in investing is that the first and most important decision you can make is asset allocation. Doing a good job with that makes picking the individual investments less important while it makes the job easier. Picking a camera has some similarities. The most important decision is selecting the category of camera for the job. For film cameras, common categories are 4×5 view and rangefinder, 8×10 view, medium-format SLR, medium format rangefinder, 35mm SLR, 35mm rangefinder. There are other, rarer categories: banquet camera, 5×7 view and rangefinder, 4×5 SLR, medium format TLR, subminiature. Digital cameras span a broad range as well. After the photographer selects a category, picking the right make and model is much simpler.

Picking the camera type is a decision with few hard-and-fast rules. You probably don’t want to do f/64-style black-and-white landscapes with a 35mm camera, although some have made it work. A view camera is not usually the best tool for sports photography, but many mid-20^th-century and at least one recent photographer (David Burnett, at the Athens Olympics with a Speed Graphic) have produced impressive work that way. Doing informal available-light portraits with an 8×10 would frustrate most people, but Sally Mann and Nicholas Nixon both have gotten incredible results with a big view camera. Most people would select a single-lens reflex for macro work, but some have done such work with a rangefinder camera, or even, using a shifting camera mount, with a twin-lens reflex.

Photographers have a wide variety of working styles, and as a result value different qualities in a camera. Thus the neat categories of photograph – landscapes, studio portraits, street photography, etc. – don’t imply particular categories of camera – view camera, medium-format SLR, 35mm RF, etc. – in order to make great photographs.

Picking a camera within a class

Once you’ve settled on a class, picking a camera may be easy. If you’ve decided you want a new 4×5 rangefinder camera, there’s only one possibility, Linhof Master Technika classic. If you want a new 35mm rangefinder camera, you can buy either the Leica M7 or MP. However, if you want a new 35mm or medium-format SLR, or a digital SLR with near-35mm-size or near-medium-format-size sensors, you have wide array of choices. If you have a clear purpose in mind, there will almost always be some difference between the choices within a class that is important to you, so much so that it drives the decision. There may be a particular lens that suits your purposes. You may wear eyeglasses and want a finder that makes it easy to see the whole frame with your glasses on. You might want a certain set of markings and just the right amount of grain on the ground glass. Maybe you need to flip the mirror up manually before every picture, and it’s easy to do that in one camera that you’re considering. Practicality may be the dominant factor in the decision. Compatibility with lenses you already own may be important to you. Price may be an overriding concern.

If you are working within a popular photographic genre, and your working style is typical, you will probably find that there are several cameras that suit you just fine. Then use must use second-order differences to help you choose. You might want the camera your friends use so you can borrow lenses or so you’ll have someone to go to for advice. You may want a camera that’s stocked locally. You might want a camera that’s part of a prestigious line so that your ego can bask in the reflected glory.

If photographer’s preferences and styles influence the class of camera they pick for a project, they influence the selection of the particular camera even more. Part of picking a camera for a job is inertia; photographers don’t want to spend the money on purchasing new equipment, or spend the time and experience the discomfort of learning how to use new gear when using the old equipment is second nature. Thus, the first choice for a new project is often the camera that served well in an old project.

The decision is usually fairly easy for me. If it’s not for you, you can take comfort in Eugene Kleiner’s observation that the harder it is to make a decision, the less it matters what you pick.

What if you pick almost the right camera?

We’ve seen that the wrong camera can make a project a lot harder, and maybe even doom it. What’s the effect of a smaller error? Let’s try a couple of thought experiments.

Let’s say you are doing some relatively unspecialized project, say, film-based, moderately-wide-angle, black-and-white street photography in the Winogrand tradition. Let’s further say that your first choice is a new Leica MP with the Elmarit 28mm f/2.8 lens. Now I tell you that you can’t use that camera; or any M-series Leica. What’s your second choice, and how will using your second choice influence the resultant pictures?

One way to go would be to get a used Nikon SP (try to get one of the ones from the 2005 re-production run, if you’re feeling flush) with a modern Cosina Voigtlander 28mmf/3.5 lens. You’re giving up two-thirds of a stop, but you can’t use wide openings when you’re zone focusing , so there won’t be much difference in handling or lens performance. The Cosina won’t be quite as sharp as the Leica lens, but will be sharper and more contrasty than a vintage Nikkor lens or the Leica lenses that Garry used to such advantage. The finder won’t be quite as bright as the Leica finder, but it will be bright enough to see what you’re doing, and you will be able to see the 28mm lines while wearing glasses. Will your pictures be different with the two setups? Not in any significant way.

Another alternative would be the Contax G2 with the Zeiss Biogen 28mm f/2.8. You’d get a 4 fps motor drive, automatic exposure, and autofocus, which would change your pictures: now you could use the lens wide open in fast-moving situations where the Nikon or the Leica would be too slow. The noisier camera would attract unwanted attention in some situations where the MP or SP would go unnoticed.

As an aside, considering the way that Winogrand went through film, if you wanted to emulate his prolificacy as well as his style, you would probably be better off going digital with an M8 and the 21mm Elmarit (you need a shorter focal length than 28mm to compensate for the difference between the M8’s sensor and a 35mm frame).

Lane talks a lot about Cartier-Bresson and his love for his Leicas. What if you had the chutzpah to attempt street photography in the footsteps of the great man? Your first choice would probably be a Leica M7 or MP with a 50 mm lens – the f/1.4 if you were mostly interested in working in dim light, the f/2.8 if you wanted something very compact, or the f/2.0 for a compromise. Now I tell you that you can’t have that equipment. Your second choice could be the Nikon SP, but if you’re not going wide, the S3 might suit you just as well. Like the SP, you can buy a modern S3, the S3 2000, which was produced in black and chrome a few years ago and is sadly no longer in production. You can also get a modern 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens. Both the Nikon and Leica lenses are far superior to the lenses that Henri used. Except for superior finder brightness in the Leicas and the option of focusing with your right index finger in the Nikons, the cameras are quite similar.

Cartier-Bresson used Leica cameras for more than twenty years before the M3 was invented. Lane talks about his love for Leicas in general, not in specifics. I think this blurs differences among the various generations of Leicas. A Leica II or III (pick any model), with their separate range- and view-finders and their knurled winging knobs, delivers a picture-taking experience that’s quite different from a M3. Indeed, the M3 has more in common with the Nikon S2, S3, and SP than it does with the earlier Leicas.

Summing up

You can see where I’m going with this. I think almost all the great pictures taken with a Rolleiflex could have been made with a Mamiya TLR or a Minolta Autocord; most of them could have been made with a Yashicamat. If bellows extension and movement range were not a factor, a Speed or Crown Graphic could do an adequate job of reproducing great Linhof Technika images.

It’s always nice to be able to employ the best instrument for the job. In photography, that’s a great lens on a great camera. There are visual and tactile pleasures in owning and operating a superbly-designed, painstakingly-constructed device. But the photographic equipment business is sufficiently competitive that, given a photographic assignment, there is more than one camera that will do the job.

Consider all the wonderful photographs made with lenses that would be considered junk were they produced today. Think about the great photojournalism done with a 4×5. In their effect on the results, the photographer is far more important than the camera. For all except those looking for a magic feather, there is comfort in that thought.