peripheral vision

I sure know how to live it up on a Saturday night. I spent most of last night poring over the flash photography tips on this site. Everyone knows about Strobist, which I also like (I loved his interview with Rembrandt a while back), but I need a more basic education right now, and planetneil provides it.

I also spent considerable time discovering the down side of having a brilliant new monitor: I’m becoming a pixel peeper! And my pixels aren’t measuring up. For one thing, I discovered that some of the pictures from my new camera have horrible noise in the shadows, even at low ISOs.

During my obsessive research about the D700, I learned that Nikon’s RAW converter, Capture NX2 sometimes gets better results than Adobe Lightroom on Nikon RAW files. Luckily, Nikon thoughtfully provided a 60-day trial of Capture NX2 with my camera (I’m being sarcastic, since the price tag on the full software is about $200 – couldn’t they just throw it in when you buy a crazy expensive camera???). Anyways, I opened up some of the troublesome files in Capture NX2, and sure enough they’re better. It seems like Lightroom tried to lighten the shadow areas, which introduced noise, whereas Capture NX2 left those areas darker, as I intended, but still with some detail and very little noise. Unfortunately, now that I’m so familiar with Lightroom, Capture’s interface is just confusing and frustrating.

As well, when I produced jpgs from the files in Capture NX2, I discovered they’re much darker and have less detail when viewed through my Windows explorer and web browsers than they do in Capture, which kind of negates the whole thing. See how a new monitor can drive you crazy? Or maybe it’s just me.

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Other things I’m thinking about:

I can’t get Alec Soth’s NIAGARA out of my mind. It started when I kept seeing quotes from him all over the place, quotes that really spoke to me. I wondered who was this Alec Soth (I’m horribly ignorant about contemporary photographers)? (Answer: established Magnum photographer.) When I went through the first few photos of NIAGARA, I thought I had it sussed out: a study of cheap motels around Niagara Falls. But then we see couples, love letters full of creases, a soaked and muddy newspaper, and we go into the hotel rooms. And the series becomes a meditation on our culture’s ideas of love and its end. I think it’s my first experience of a series of images with all kinds of different subjects, individually, but a single theme or statement, collectively.

JM Colberg mentioned a while back that he’d like to see fewer typologies in 2009, among other things. Given that I’ve only worked on one typology (Parking Meters in Lunenburg), and it was only for an afternoon, I think I still have some exploring to do on that front. But Soth’s NIAGARA has really started me thinking about other ways of working.

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A few weeks ago, David duChemin suggested developing a plan for 2009. And I always do what David says — well, except for calibrating my monitor. I only did that last weekend because my pictures looked overexposed on the new one.

At the start of 2008, I decided to start a website from which to sell my prints and raise money for charity. My passion for the medium exploded, and I found myself just hoping the momentum would keep up for just a bit longer. Whenever I started to feel discouraged, I just told myself to never mind, just keep shooting. No matter what, keep shooting. Now here I am at the end of the year, and the momentum hasn’t really slowed. I do alternate between extremes of optimism and my work totally sucks so what’s the point negativity, but I just to observe those shifts, and keep shooting.

For 2009, I have a few more specific goals. I may not have a hardcore plan, but I have a vision and a direction. I want to focus on more project-oriented work, and I have lots of ideas. I just need to start putting them into action. I also want to learn how to use my new SB-900 to balance flash with ambient light.

Putting my ideas for projects into action will require that I get over myself and my analysis paralysis. I’m starting to wonder if I read Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida way too early in my explorations of the medium, and it’s just fucked me up. Which is funny, because I can’t actually remember anything specific from either of those books. Maybe that makes it even more dangerous for me; I’ve just adopted the ideas wholesale with no awareness of where they came from. The only reason I’m suspicious is because I watched part of this video last night, and I recognized a lot of Sontag’s ideas in many of my own hang-ups.

One of my ideas is to photograph some of my neighbours in their homes. I’d like to find some who are the original owners of their50s-built house, to see what things have remained from that era and what have been replaced. It might also be interesting to photograph other neighbours, like the university students in their rentals, or the few younger families around to contrast the different demographics. This project could also help me get to know our neighbours, which is something I’m not particularly good at. This project would also be well-shot in winter, since I can shoot it indoors, and the lower-angled winter sun could be nice if my neighbours have windows like mine.

Ok, I think that’s enough for a Sunday morning…

On Christmas morning, my husband totally surprised me with a new monitor. Not just any monitor either: a 24-inch monitor! I had been planning to get a new monitor, because my old one was so scratched up and muddy I could have used it as a photoshop texture, but I never would have chosen one so big. It’s pretty nice being able to see my photos all big and unscratched like this. Unfortunately, having such a great monitor really shows up the limitations of my camera. I’m noticing noise at ISO 400 that I never noticed before.

About a month ago, someone suggested I get a new camera when I complained about the noise at high ISO ratings. They said the newer cameras are much better at high ISOs, especially full-frame cameras (for the non-geeks in the crowd: most digital cameras have sensors that are smaller than old 35 mm film but now they make digital sensors that are the same size as 35 mm film, which hold more detail with more sensitivity to light). Since that seed was planted, I’ve been researching Nikon’s dslr line-up obsessively. I figured I still had a few more months of saving and rationalizing to do before I bought the D700. Until Christmas morning. Seeing my images on the new monitor really jump-started my rationalization and accelerated my obsessive researching until I couldn’t stand myself anymore.

So I just did it.

And I gotta say, that D700 is SWEET! I would say the noise of the D700 at ISO 1000 compares with the noise of my old D70s at ISO 400. Plus, D700’s noise is finer, more like film grain, with a lot less chromatic noise, even above ISO 1600. I’ve also noticed that I can hand-hold at much slower shutter speeds than I could with my old camera, and my new flash, the SB-900, is A LOT more responsive. As much as I was enjoying the results of my explorations into flash photography with it, with my old camera the flash created a shutter lag of at least five seconds. And I haven’t even mentioned the auto-focus that’s like a hot knife on butter, the bigger dynamic range, or how much nicer my 50 mm f1.8 lens is on it (AND I learned a new word from all this: bokeh).

I’m feeling decidedly bloated from all this consumerism. I’ve never felt so materialistic. But the bottom line is that I’ll be starting the New Year with new gear: new flash, new monitor, and new camera. Yeehaw!

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I spent the last few days at my parents’ place hanging out with my family and playing with bouncing flash off the ceiling. Here are a few of the results (these are all from my old camera – I’ll share stuff from the new camera later):