Room Setup for Great Pictures

Okay, so your group has accomplished that big milestone and you're celebrating and commemorating. You decide to hire a photographer/videographer to record the event, and you want everything to be perfect. Naturally!

Whether it's a promotion, retirement, new product announcement, or anything that you want to publicize or even just to send out in the annual newsletter, there are some fairly easy and simple and **FREE** things which will make your promotional material of that live event more attractive and representative of the actual event than if you didn't plan at all.

Big companies can spend thousands, if not millions, on getting everything right for their big events. Although this can be simply a reflection of how extravagant they want it to be, it's also a reflection of how complex things can get when you want everything to be "just right."

Think about what you want to spotlight... Do you want to hand off awards, sing songs, kiss the bride/groom, announce your new doodad via a live-streamed presentation to the whole world? A good photographer will help you get the most out of your location and what you have on hand.

Want to know more?? Click here to go to the next page of a horrendously tedious slideshow! Just kidding, I'm not going to break up the page. Those sites suck.

Props. You have Props. 

Whether you're considering it or not, you have objects in the scene which you may or may not want to be the subject of scrutiny when your pictures/video go out to the world. These range from the extremely embarrassing (say, itch cream) to the simply awkward (the support pillar which is in every shot).

We've all seen pictures which were composed awkwardly; the Eiffel tower worn as a hat, or a hand in the foreground which seems to be picking the nose of someone in the background. A photographer's job is to minimize these as much as possible. You can help, though. A lot.

Plan where everything should go. If you would like a handshake and plaque tradeoff during the program, be aware that a photographer will need to be about 10 feet away (~2m) and that the lighting should be even unless the photographer can use a flash. But be aware that flash photography is usually intensely distracting and can detract from the dignity of an event.

The table you're sitting at during the panel discussion is actually a prop as well. Is it covered with Pepsi cans? Do you advertise Pepsi? Is there a privacy panel?

One other suggestion: avoid can lights above the presenters if at all possible! They do a great job of showing off your vase collection, but they do terrible things to a person's forehead in a photo.

Some Example Questions to ask yourself:

These are just a few questions; the idea is to be aware of the objects which a photographer will have to work with during a shoot (and this is to remind myself to straighten flagpoles and move dead plants out of the Field of View whenever possible).

1. What is behind the action? 
1. The "action" is the person making the presentation, the handshake, the puppet show, what have you. 
2. What's in between the action and the audience? 
1. Is there a podium? 
1. Is there something on the podium?
1. Are you being paid to advertise it? 
1. Yes? Leave it there. 
2. No? Put it down beneath the podium. 
3. Are the things behind and in front of the action things what you want to include in the photos? 
1. Can those things realistically be included in a photo?
1. Hint: ask the professional about it. They will tell you. 
2. Is that thing too big? Too small? Too wide? 
2. Do you even want them (that object, or that presenter) in the photo? 
4. Where can the action happen where you have control over what's in front, what's behind, and in a way you can live with being memorialized forever? 
5. If there are problems, can they be fixed?
1. Hint: ask the photographer.

More examples, and some stuff to think about. 

In the milieu I shoot, it's pretty common for a presenter to have a slide show being projected behind them so that they can posit some main points and elaborate while engaging with the audience. This behavior dates back to the invention of chalkboards, but the modern twist is that a projector is actually quite a bit brighter than a chalkboard.

That's a great way to lay out information, but it presents some real challenges to a photographer. I'm not complaining, I'm 'splaining. :)

The difficulty lies in the brightness difference which is usually present between the projector and the presenter. Projectors are often used in darkened or dimmed rooms, as well. The projected image is much brighter than the surroundings (the presenter could be considered a surrounding object) and that means trouble.

For the human eye, that brightness difference usually doesn't make much difference, and might not even be noticeable. A camera, on the other hand, is not as good at dealing with wide ranging differences in brightness. If a photo is exposed for the presenter the slideshow will be blank, or blown out at least. If it's exposed for the slideshow, the presenter will be enveloped in darkness.

On one recent shoot, a group was live-streaming an event while using a projector on a screen behind the presenter. The projector was almost directly in front of the action, and a laptop sat on top of the cart the projector was mounted on, and that laptop screen is present in many of the wider shots. There was just no way to avoid it.

This situation also demonstrates the projector rectangle problem. On that shoot, in order to expedite processing photos, and because the screen seldom changed, there is an embarrassingly blank light rectangle above the presenters. I could pull that data back into the image, but it didn't change for 45 minutes.

The way around that would is to light the presenters at least a little bit, but that can be difficult as well. If you're not dealing with someone amenable to direction, you're stuck.

Anyway, thank goodness for the new Camera Raw tools. They're very good.

One last example:

I once shot a couple hundred "action" photos of people at a podium --sometimes your timing is just off, and most of them have the subject with the eyes closed, or the hand awkward, etc. It took longer to get good shots than I liked, but by the end of the evening I thought I had some good ones and I was happy with that.

I had noticed a hand sanitizer bottle before the shoot, and doubtless could have moved it down to the shelf under the podium without offending anyone, but I didn't want to disrupt anything. That reluctance was a mistake. It was only when I got back into post-production that I realized the hand sanitizer bottle on top of the podium was framed in just such a way as it became impossible to crop out of almost every shot. Oops. Clone time.

Anyway, that's what I've got for today. I'll see if I can post a few solar eclipse shots in the next week, and sometime in the coming weeks I will get into the wonderful question of "Gray" and "Why isn't that gray, it's black ink, after all!"

Take care!!

Hidden "Gems" in Printable Files

The ability to undo changes, the maintenance of as detailed a "history" as possible within software, is an integral element in today's User Friendly applications.

While this is a useful and often absolutely essential part of any software environment's design, when it comes to software which has to maintain a high level of control in order to perform a precise operation, the way the software maintains this hidden back end can cause some problems.

Case in point: PDF files created by Microsoft PowerPoint.

From a printing standpoint, printers would much rather have files created using software built for creating files which will ultimately be printed. Color management, font embedding, precise relationships between elements, and the rendering of transparency are only a few of the issues which these industry-standard applications are tailored to address. Digital printing is a complex process with almost endless variables, a fact which can be belied to the novice or casual user by the ease with which a person can hit "Print" on their computer and receive a decent looking printout from their office printer.

Like it or not, PowerPoint is the go-to software used to create posters for novices and students and people who have no access to, nor general need of, something like the Adobe Creative suite--although it would be wise for printers to convince clients who continually submit files from PowerPoint to upgrade to a professional solution, because it will produce files which will make both client and printer happier in the long run.

PowerPoint, and the history buffer issue.

One thing we have noticed in our shop is that the PowerPoint history buffer is persistent; this is a good thing for their software and for their users, as it means that elements of the file are preserved well. But it's a bad thing during preflight conversion, particularly during the font embedding phase.

When I tell you the history buffer is persistent, what I mean is that sometimes elements the user believed were deleted are still present, and are rendered during preflight. This causes hidden elements to appear on the page--elements the user didn't even know were there. This presents a definite conflict for the printer, in that the preflight introduces elements the client did not approve, and it causes a bump in the workflow, which wastes time. If the error isn't caught during preflight, it can result in the necessity to reprint.

The lesson here is that the preflighting should be done with the client present, or at the very least the preflight should occur and then the final, preflighted file should be delivered, electronically or physically, to the customer for final approval. Sometimes in a lower volume shop, though, with fewer staff and a more constant workload, that's not always going to be easy to accomplish. It's worth it though.

In PowerPoint, what we believe happens (we're not Microsoft engineers, by the way) involves a user deleting an element, particularly a text element. There are two ways to do this: one can either delete the text inside a text box, or delete the text box itself. The problem we see at the font embedding stage relates to the text within the box being deleted but the box itself still residing on the page.

If the box itself gets deleted, we don't have an issue.

When the box doesn't get deleted but the content inside does, PowerPoint tries to maintain the states of that box, i.e., before and after deletion so that an "undo" can return the content if desired. Because the box element the text resides in is invisible, the element gets hidden, visually at least. When Acrobat Pro preflights it, PowerPoint doesn't/can't tell Acrobat that that element is a history state, not an actual printable object, so Acrobat renders it as a visible element.

This phenomenon looks like the following examples (blurred to protect any possible proprietary information of the client). The document appears correct before embedding fonts, like so:

After embedding fonts, the hidden (history buffer) content appears as a normal element. In this case, it would have been "Diagram B."

You can see in the above example that a little bit of text, and an additional "B," have appeared in the lower half of the document. Voilà! The History Buffer has won. Or, rather, Acrobat and PowerPoint got together on this one, and decided that no information may be discarded without the express operation of the user.

What's the solution?

Well, a lot of times we just send the file back to the customer. However, if we're dealing with a novice, we will often walk the client through the process of deleting the element from within Adobe Acrobat. If we have access to the original PowerPoint file, we will open it, show them that the element in question does, in fact, exist, and then delete it and resave.

In most cases where the client sees this, they just say "Get rid of it." In that case we will go in to Acrobat and select and delete the offending element, resave, re-preflight, and rerun. Unfortunately, if the preflight and proofing were not done in the presence of the customer, if we printed in error we can't recapture that lost time and material cost, so it is always a good idea to preflight in the presence of the client.

Hope this helps point a finger at a question which bugged us for quite some time. It always recurs at our shop, and we've grown patient in dealing with it, but if you're encountering it for the first time, hope this provides a good starting point.

We'll deal with transparency at a later date, when we've figured out a decent preflight which catches 95% of the errors we deal with.

Thanks!

SunPak MS-4000 Pro System

I got a new set of lights a few months back. By new I mean new to me; they date back to the 1980s, as far as I can tell.

They're good lights. The flash tubes are fine and they can run at 100, 200, or 400 watts. They were originally designed to be portable, so they have hookups for batteries as well as A/C power and they have HH sync ports (household) which is good because the built-in slave sensors don't work any more. 

A SunPak MS-4000 is heavy, though, for a "portable" monolight, and there isn't a lot of documentation out there--like none, that I could find off eBay, and I'm not about to pay $40US for a "user manual" which might just be a slip of paper with a picture on it, so what I did is just hook them up and start trying ways to get them to run using modern DSLR equipment. Here's the process I went through. If you just want the gear solutions, skip to the bottom. 

First thing I did was to hook them up to power and turn them on and leave them on for about 4 hours without testing the tubes or flipping switches or anything. Just let them sit there with the power on. From what I've read, this allows the capacitors inside the hulking things to "reform" or "recondition" themselves, which means that putting current through them helps them to kind of internally repair themselves, as long as you don't discharge the capacitors during the process. 

After they'd been on without discharging for about 4 hours, maybe 5, I went ahead and hit the 'test' button on the back to see if the flash tubes worked. They did, on each output level, so that was great. The modeling lamps didn't work, though, and from what I'd found on the interwebs they were expensive, so I decided I could probably do without them. I can buy a desk lamp for $10US from the thrift store, so why pay $125 for something with a SunPak logo on it from 30 years ago? 

I run Canon 5D mark II cameras, which have low hotshoe voltage and they can be damaged by voltage which is too high, so I slotted a sync cable and hooked up a multimeter to the contacts. The voltage wasn't too high... somewhere around 8.3-8.5 volts, which is pretty low for a mechanical era light. 

I hooked them up to a Vello hotshoe converter for Canon cameras, and tried them out. Nothing. Well, it's not the first time I've had some issues with DSLRs and strobes. I had a Vivitar 283 which just wouldn't die, but it wouldn't run off anything but a mechanical SLR camera until I found Wein Digital  Peanuts (and took out the thyristor), so I thought that's probably where I'd end up. 

So, after fiddling a little bit, I hooked the sync cable up to my Pentax K1000 and BOOM!!! There was light! 

Knowing that they worked (this is when I found out the built in slaves didn't work) I decided to spend a little bit more time and money (maybe it's all money, since time is supposed to be a rough equivalent to money, even though mine never has been) finding a way to get them to work. After all, the price was right and the power was right, and a good 600W setup would set me back a lot more money than I have right now. Someday I'd love to get a good variable power setup, maybe a 5-light set just for fun, but I don't need it right now. I also figured I could add fills with speedlites, so wireless would be the way to go. 

Knowing I needed wireless, or at least some photo slaves to make a full portrait system work, I looked around pretty hard for a few weeks to find any information from anyone who had set up these lights and gotten them to work. Couldn't find a dang thing. I did find out that Paul C. Buff, Pocket Wizard, and Cactus triggers all had voltage max threshold ratings in excess of what was going through the monolight's sync port, so I went ahead and bought the Cactus V5 set. I like them. More on them as I get a chance to experiment more.

Tried several online resources, including chats with a few bigger online retailers, and didn't find out anything useful. They knew that whatever product I used should be insulated from a potentially high trigger voltage, but as far as dealing with retrofitting anything that old, what worked could be anyone's guess. 

Well, the Cactus V5 wouldn't trigger the SunPak either. Sometimes the receiving unit would just turn itself off, as well, so it didn't like something about the setup.

It was around this time that my wife reminded me there is a camera store in our town, and so I dropped in there and made an appointment to try out some of their equipment to see if anything would fire these monsters. Nothing worked there either, although they wouldn't risk a PocketWizard for testing purposes. I guess I don't blame them, but dang. Went home sad, but not defeated. Remember the Vivitar!

Well, I figured I didn't neeeeeeeed them right away, and I knew they worked, and I had some faith in Wein even though their website is only in Japanese now and seems to offer mostly bath products and ED cures. So I went ahead and looked on B&HPhotoVideo.com for a HH plug solution, and found a couple Wein candidates. 

First Wein I tried didn't work. Disappointing as hell. I was starting to think maybe there was something wrong with the sync port(s), or that maybe I had to have a battery hooked up to send the right voltage snap to the light, but the sync port voltage matched a table on the only website I'd seen which offered anything helpful on SunPak monolights.... Also thought that maybe the modeling lamp had to be in-circuit for the slave circuit to fire, so I bought a modeling lamp--Broncolor lamp for Pulso/Primo heads. Those theories turned out to be incorrect, but I found out that B&H offers some very affordable modeling bulbs which fit. Score!

Anyway, in a last ditch attempt, I ordered a different Wein slave. I was nearing my $50US threshold, and if I went past it I'd decided I'd give the lights away to someone who still shoots only film. Can't go spending months on a money pit when I could just save up and buy something cheapish which would get me by. 

Bingo!! The Wein L8 triggered them, from a modern Canon 600EX-RT no less. That was perfect. The modeling lamps didn't have to be present for the light to fire, so I was set, but I still bought a second modeling lamp, because they're nice to have during setup, etc. 

Next order of business was to get stands. It turned out to be a little bit more challenging than I thought it would be. As I mentioned, the MS-4000 light itself is Heavy; about 20 lbs. Any stand needed to be able to hold on to that as well as take the added weight of modifiers. After a bit of searching I did find a few good stands on B&H's used section which had the right size studs and a high enough weight rating. The studs, it turns out, are not that hard to change out on other stands, and a lot of them come with 1/2" studs on one side and 5/8" studs on the other side of a removable unit. 

The sad part about this is I don't have space to put them up and I haven't taken any photos with them yet. I have to trigger them via flash, and it's been too cold to go outside (don't want to shock the flash tubes in any way if I can help it). So I know they work but I haven't yet used them. I'll try to post some pictures soonish. 

Gear List:

The following stuff works. Ignore the stuff up above unless you need it for reference or you like a good mystery. The links go to B&H Photo Video; if I keep them updated, they'll work. Otherwise just search for those products. You can use any retailer you want, but B&H has always treated me right and I always go to them first.

• Wein L8 940-050 Micro Slave with HouseHold (HH) plug connection
• Broncolor Modeling Lamp for Pulso/Primo heads
• 250W/100V
• E11 Minican screw base
• Code on B&H Photo Video: EHT
• Giottos LC325 air cushioned light stand (10') with 5/8 stud

PDF-A is where it's at... for now

It's easy to look around at the world and see the fruit of professional graphic designers.

(I'm not one, just fyi)

It's also interesting to look around and see the number of different approaches to digital graphics problems. There are a lot of ways to bag your groceries, so to speak.

I work for a printer. It's common for novices to bring us posters to print which were made in Microsoft PowerPoint and which were converted to PDF. When someone says to me "I made it in PowerPoint" I wince inside a little bit and get prepared for things to shift around.

PDFs are not the "Portable Document Format" they want to be. They get better from time to time (also worse sometimes, but it's the same with everything) but the trouble with a standard is that not everyone will adopt it. Therefore Apple computers have one way of interpreting a PDF and Windows computers have a different way.

So? Fonts? I have them!

The big deal here is mostly with fonts (there are other things too, and that comes in a minute).

The first issue is that you might have a font on your computer which we don't have in the printshop. If that's the case, our computers either try to find that font or to substitute another one which might look similar. That's a kind of built in feature these days. Sometimes the computer will just assume you want to substitute a font, and so if it does that we will never know that you wanted SkagWorks Bold, because when we see it it will just be Arial.

For example, Times New Roman (TNR) looks basically the same whether it's on a Mac or on a PC, but the way it's coded in the OS is different. For that reason saving a PDF on one machine doesn't mean it will work correctly on the opposite architecture. It may be perfect, close, or totally wrong.

For a printer, hitting "SAVE" and walking away won't get you where you need to go. It might be close and that might be fine, or it might be just enough off that it ruins your day. Sometimes it will just print as an empty square. If my computer doesn't have the piece of code which properly renders a cedilla (ç) then it will just print a box, or nothing.

There's some history here, which is kind of interesting; why won't a font just get saved into your file? Why doesn't it just say, here are some pixels, put them in the right place?

Well, there are a couple reasons. One, fonts are big groups of code. They make a file bigger. One way computer geniuses have figured out to reduce file size (bloat) is to leave out the font. Many fonts already reside on your computer. 

The second reason is because someone probably owns that font. They own the code that displays that font. They may own also the visual depiction of the font set. So, in essence, a long time ago software companies basically agreed that they would not include the actual code for the font in the file they created unless they were sure someone paid a licensing fee for that font. 

A third reason is that Windows and Apple computers actually have different ways to coding the fonts and so it's a lot easier to just say "Use TNR Here" than it is to include a shunt to get the Apple computer to read a Windows font code line and vice versa. See reason one: reduce bloat by reducing unnecessary code. Just include a reference! ...and make it a short reference, or else we might as well just include the font set! :D

So, we're back to the reference, and your computer will read that reference and stick a font from your system into the appropriate place. The only time you can use that font is if you have paid for it (or stolen it, but please don't--the paycheck you save may be your own). You're leasing the use of it. You bought your computer, or maybe you didn't, but either way the OS includes some fonts. Most of the time this substitution will happen without anyone being the wiser. If you don't have that font on your system, it makes a substitution, sometimes by asking, and sometimes just on the fly. 

It's not quite that simple, naturally, but that's the gist of it. Not including the font code in your PDF makes it smaller, and more "portable," while getting around the licensing issue. Printers and media people probably license their fonts, or they pay for software which includes a font license. My grandpa, who just wants a recipe off the internet to print correctly and really doesn't care whether Tahoma Grande Oblique prints with or without flourishes, just wants to be able to use the document. So his system substitutes a font with that name, or if that name isn't available, another font which might look close to that one. His problem is solved, but ours is just beginning.

So, unless you're trying to get exactly what you designed on your screen on to a sheet of paper or canvas, you're done. Here is where we encounter the intersection of widespread usability and tailored/custom/professional tool and outcome intent. If you're being particular though, there are some things you can do to get exactly what you intend out of your print system.

Now what? 

Well, you can either just save your document as an image or you can save your document as a format which includes the fonts, or at least the reference set which allows any suitable computing system to tell exactly what you meant and where all the elements are going to go.

Images...

Saving as an image is kind of a last resort. Images are big, size wise, and saving an image so that it doesn't lose detail is kind of an art. However, it works if you do it right, because at least on a large-format latex printer, what you are getting at the end is a bunch of dots. They're very close to each other and maybe as high a resolution as 1200 dpi, but they're just dots and it's difficult to see anything but a nice, crisp line from any distance past a foot or so. If you have problems with fonts, or maybe there's just something in the file which doesn't work, save as an image.

If you're going to save as an image, don't use a JPEG unless you have serious bandwidth or printer throttling issues; use a TIFF or PSD, and leave the image uncompressed. Compression will always degrade quality, and while you might not notice that degradation on screen, you will almost certainly notice it on a print.

You can also use a PNG or BMP if you have to, because they are pretty close to the output format of the printer, but they tend to be big for no reason, and they also don't really carry color information very well. If in doubt, save as a TIFF.


Packaged Adobe InDesign files...


We LOVE packaged InDesign files. They include all the stuff we need. They have the pictures at their full resolution and they have the actual files the fonts are rendered from. In a perfect world, that is all we would get to print, and it's all we would accept. We could save a PDF or image to print from using our InDesign and our print settings and give you exactly, perfectly, what you are looking for.

PDFs

Of course, not everyone has InDesign. So, if you can, just always save as a PDF. PDFs retain vector information, color manage well, and are usually the smallest. The problem though, is that they're not just a picture, so some parts of the files need to be licensed or included.

PDFs have their own problems, mostly still related to program and OS architectures. See the PowerPoint section below for some more information, but in particular the ways the OS renders transparencies can be problematic. We need to save a PDF in a way which maintains the visual and content appearances of the document, and believe it or not, software designers are on top of it, at least as much as they can be.

We want either a PDF-A ("Archive quality"), or ideally a PDF-X (which is designed for being printed). Some software will let you save it this way, and some will not.

Saving as a PDF-A is a kind of good thing even if you won't have your PDF printed. It saves everything in the file in a way that is intended to make all of the information work even if you are running a stripped down computer with minimal resources. The "Archive" designation means that it tries to make the PDF as complete as possible, and unreliant on the vagaries of future machines (or contemporary machines which don't match your own machine's configuration).

What PDF-A does, in essence, is it saves everything that a guest computer will need to render that PDF document correctly in, say, ideally, 20 years. It saves pertinent information in architecture-independent forms and it saves the photos you inserted in the highest possible resolution. It tries to make your file last, and to be perfect when it gets to its recipient.

Either way, a PDF-A is a good way to get all your information from one place to another, pretty much regardless what kind of computer it gets used on last.

For printing, this is a good thing.

Why, Powerpoint? Oh Why? 

Why does PowerPoint not convert happily into a PDF like other programs (sometimes) do? You'd have to ask Microsoft, because in the end it's complicated. But not complicated in other ways.

PowerPoint basically draws like an old traditional CRT screen draws. It draws in lines, from the top down. It's designed for use on projectors and screens, so it does everything based on proportion of the whole screen. That way it doesn't look too funky if you go from a square projector to a rectangular projector on your sales route. (PowerPoint engineers could correct me on this, but from my deduction, this is how it works)

Printing something doesn't map the entire space and then squeeze something into it. Your printer, your RIP software, wants to know where to put a dot of ink. It's measuring out exact spatial places. Saying 40% of 60" horizontal and 14.355567" of 19.445% vertical is an inefficient way to map out coordinates on a printer. Imagine Jackson Pollack in an alternate universe as a pointillist; a very careful, very fast pointillist. 

Then we get back to fonts. Most newer versions of PowerPoint have an options button which pops up when you select Save As PDF. In that options panel it will sometimes mention PDF-A and sometimes just mention something about making a PDF archivable. Absent this option, you are tossing a bunch of element salad into a pretty big container and hoping that it doesn't get scrambled too much between your computer and our printer. 

Well, I still want to use PowerPoint (or It's All I Have)...

There are some things to look out for when you save your PowerPoint document as a poster.

1. Did you make it the right size to begin with? 
1. Every month someone comes in with an 8.5x11" poster and asks if we can blow it up to 56x20. The answer is no. No, we can't do that. And now you have to go back in and resize all your elements manually, because you started off so small. Check your document size in the beginning. 
1. Also, proportion is not magic. If we stretch it (we won't) it would look weird, our business would look sloppy, and repeat business would dwindle. Not happening. 
2. Did you insert pictures at the largest sizes possible? 
3. Did you cover anything up when you thought of a better design? 
1. Better go back and delete it now, because the PDF doesn't know that what's in front of it isn't supposed to be a transparency. We once had a poster on which a graph was superimposed on a repeating series of carats and the letter "c." The person was really wondering why CTRL+C wasn't copying something... well, somehow they were capturing the keyboard instead of operating a command. Dunno how. Anyway.
4. Did you check your PDF after you saved it to make sure there are no errors? 

This is a Long Post...

It's true. It's a lot to read. And there's a lot more to all of this. If you have questions, I'd like to encourage you to Google "Color Management" and "PDF Standards" and have a read. You'll quickly realize how MUCH information is out there, and how even small details can have a big impact on your finished product. 

You might also give Adobe a call, and tell them that Photoshop and InDesign are a little bit too high powered for users who just want to toss things onto a sheet and make a poster out of it. If they hear enough feedback in that regard, you might end up with a piece of software which prints great and also works on a projector in your boardroom. 

Toodles!

The Heavens, close to the Earth... Even this Earth.

The Heavens, close to the Earth... Even this Earth., originally uploaded by Loren Rye Photo.

Photos present very complex problems. Anyone who thinks a machine can do the job of a colorist is not an artist. People who just run their photos through Photoshop or who just say "SOOC" all the time are, equivalently, not necessarily artists. Call them purists, call them what you will. Art is, to me, an act of rearranging to suit a temperament.

Not to say they can't become an artist or can't discover an artistic temperament, but that's how I see it right now.

I'm not saying data movement isn't necessarily art. In fact, I've said in the past all life is poetry. I'm not acting like it right now, am I?

Well, those're the breaks. Someone who doesn't have a stake in something might not have the art to do it right. Bottom line: if you don't care about it, you won't do a great job at it.

Now through the gateless gate

Lighted, originally uploaded by Loren Rye Photo.

It isn't hard to see
I guess I was born to love you



Come on and take my hand

Something weird about pictures...

Something for today., originally uploaded by Loren Rye Photo.

There's something strange about pictures I noticed tonight.

After cooling off from a rant about how TV-cum-Internet video stations try to sell video without using the strengths of video at all and make you sit through an ad or two followed by inane chatter about whatever issue they think is the most broadly relevant... Actually, I'm bridging into that rant again. Suffice it to say, what can be transmitted in a few sentences is often, despite video's inherent strength in transmission of information, often completely neglected in video.

But as I was trying to transmit before being sidetracked, there is something about pictures; photographs in particular seem to slow down time. There are many other pictures which accomplish the same thing, but for now I'm focusing on photographs.

Video in contrast is centered on the movement of the universe. It can make time seem fast or slow but it is always about movement.



I'd rather not expound lengthily on the difference between the timeless and the movement in time or the slowing of it. I don't believe photos stop time any more than wanting to stop time stops time. In fact it seems more than pointless to believe anything. But I've written about that before.

What I'm writing about here is that in a photo the observer is implicitly invited to examine the photo, whereas in a video the viewer is implicitly expected to follow the movement of the imagery, of the story, of the video.

Not that there's anything bad about either one, it's just something I've noticed. Happy December! :)