[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… [Read More]
Multicore chips: clever or cop-out?
[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… [Read More]
How well do you need to know your camera?
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: don’t change cameras often don’t use many cameras (one is a… [Read More]
Why photography projects keep getting harder
[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…. [Read More]
When good pictures turn bad
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… [Read More]