In honor of Earth Day and of the show opening tonight at Studio B in Boyertown, PA, Local by Local, this gallery focuses on trees and other vegetation — including crabgrass — the stuff on which animal life depends. Included in several images are bits of trash left in forested areas.
I’ve included information with each picture about the camera used to capture the picture and the software used to develop it including the company that converted my Pentax K10D into an infrared camera — Kolari Vision. Most of the other outfits that convert cameras that I found, or were recommended to me, only deal with Canikon cameras.
For those interested in understanding better understanding Infrared photography, false colors, and the surreal effects it produces read my 2009 article here. The article, which includes a basic summary of the physics of light, should be read by all landscape artists whatever their medium. I hope readers won’t get lost in the science, but it’s what makes me appreciate the magic of it all.
Much of the content is based on my early experiments using an old point and shoot that I converted myself in addition to using IR filters on other cameras. The article has been slightly updated with a cursory look at processing IR files shot in camera RAW and channel swapping to produce the blue sky effect. I recommend Laurie Klein’s Infrared Photography: Artistic Techniques for Brilliant Images for a more in-depth (and less technical) look at the art form.
At the beginning of this year, I changed this blog to “52 Weeks: Sights and Insights” with the intention of commenting on art and photography in addition to showing a few new pictures each week. Late last month a transformative event occurred in the world of digital processing, which I’ll discuss below.
Making pictures involves far more than choosing or setting up a scene, snapping the shutter, and then printing or sharing what the camera delivers.
Every digital capture needs to be developed just as film does.
Of course, every competent photographer needs to know the ins and outs of their camera and have some idea of how to translate what they see in the world or want to convey into a photograph. What comes out of the camera isn’t a finished product no matter how attentive the photographer, how good the camera, or how perfect the settings.
For maximum impact every digital capture — whether snapped on a phone, point & shoot, or DSLR — needs to be developed, just as exposed film needs to be developed.
The biggest advances in digital photography are being made in mobile devices. Manufacturers are packing them with higher megapixel chips, the capacity to accept bigger storage devices, cloud-sharing and storage, and in, a very few cases, even the ability to capture RAW (uncompressed TIFF) images. In-phone developing tools have also given mobile photography a leg up. Among the dozens of mobile processing tools, the best is probably Google’s free Snapseed app. Photoshop Express, also free, likewise is a very good app. Both Android and iPhone compatible versions are available.
By default, most digital cameras shoot compressed jpegs. Part of the secret to compressing the image files is that the camera’s computer decides to discard huge amounts of information based on the broad array of available settings. As a consequence, big constraints are placed on what can be accomplished in the development stage.
All professional and serious amateur photographers capture their images in an uncompressed RAW format because RAW files give the photographer total control. Adobe’s DNG (digital negative) option is the most universally compatible RAW format. RAW files are much larger than compressed JPEGs because, even though their initial display appears the same as JPEGS, they retain all the information gathered by the sensor. Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) are powerful tools for the first steps to develop photos from RAW files. ACR comes bundled with both Photoshop Essentials and Photoshop Elements. ACR tools are easy to use and nondestructive and nearly the same as the built-in tools on Lightroom’s Develop module. Since these tools are nondestructive you can revert to the original RAW file at any time.
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Susan Sontag
Lightroom has many useful preset filters for refining photos including very powerful HDR and panorama tools. While I do use these last two frequently, I seldom use the other presets. After making basic adjustments in Lightroom I’ll take an image over to Photoshop for final editing where I’ll save it as a PSD (native, uncompressed Photoshop) file. JPEGs of various sizes and uses are derived from that original. Because of the compression algorithms used to produce them, JPEGs are progressively degraded every time a change is made and the picture resaved.
Here’s where Google’s March 24 announcement comes in. For years I’ve used the Nik Collection for the final stage of developing pictures. A friend gave me an early version to test, which I managed to use for years. Finally I bought the full suite when Google distributed it at a price I could afford. A few days ago Om Malik wrote in The New Yorker:
“This photo-editing software is as beloved among photographers as, say, Katz’s Deli is among those who dream of pastrami sandwiches.”
Late last month Google announced that the Nik collection, which it purchased in 2012, mainly to gobble up Snapseed developed by Nik, will be available for free from now on.
Nik is as beloved among photographers as Katz’s Deli is among pastrami lovers.
In making this announcement Google also said there will be no further development of the software. The Nik Collection works with Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, even GIMP, and other software. I highly recommend it if you want to take your photos to the next level.
Get the collection here. (At the same time Tim Grey made his learning package for the Nic Collection free. Get it here.)
The question many are asking in light of this and other developments is this: Does this move signal the death of the photograph as a physical thing?
Call me prehistoric, but somehow I doubt that the physical paintings decorating the cave wall has completely given way to the ephemera of the worldwide web or ever will.
Recent infrared photographs. The bottom two are from before the recent snow storm. The reflected infrared from the snow on the trees and the bright white outhouse was so intense the sky appears black because of the fast shutter speed required to capture details in the small building.
This week on his Red Dot Blog, Jason Horejs of the Xanadu Gallery posted an item entitled “Collective Wisdon: Creating Titles for Your Artwork” addressed a question dear to my heart. Anyone who as followed my work knows that I title all my photographs. To my way of thinking artists who exhibit artworks as “Untitled” send a message that they are interested in process but not in ideas, in telling a story, or in explaining their motivation.
Horejs makes a good case that not titling work is a bad business practice, but I think titling work is as much a part of doing art as process.
Blue Sky, Blue IceBlue Sky, Blue SnowBlue SnowBlue Sky, Barn, and House
Continuing my experiments with developing infrared photographs with a false color scheme I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The first photo of a patch of ice in a wheat field (before the snow when the wheat sprouts were still bright green) illustrates this best. Not only does the sky appear blue when the red and blue channels are switched, but so does ice and snow, reflecting the color of the sky. In the last photo with the barn and house, there is only a bit of snow in the scene, in the immediate foreground. I decided to desaturate it in this case.
For five years I’ve published a daily blog of my photography under the heading “Jay M. Ressler Imaging 365: A daily log of my artistic journey,” which was linked to my personal Facebook page. Beginning with this posting, I’m publishing the blog under a different moniker, “Jay M. Ressler 52 Weeks: Sights and Insights.”
During the first year of my 365 blog, 2011, I posted 663 pictures beginning in early April. Starting January 1, 2012, I organized it around one photograph a day.
In may respects the 365 project has been beneficial. It’s demanding and good discipline. On the downside, however, more than a fair number of pedestrian photographs ended up being published, while some real gems got overlooked. But isn’t that in the nature of the beast?
With this posting, marking the beginning of the second half of the second decade, I am changing direction with this blog. This will no longer be a daily blog, nor will it be strictly a venue for posting my own photographs. In addition, to my own photography, I hope with a more leisurely schedule to be able to examine the history of photography, the work of other photographers, questions of theory and practice in the medium.
This won’t be a “how to” blog (for my “how to” column refer to the bimonthly newsletter of the Berks Art Alliance, The Pallette). I hope to make this more project-centered—a halfway step between what appears on the blog and what I actually show in the real world. I also hope to include occasional video.
Part of the reason for making this change is to allocate more of my time to showing work on paper and to marketing.
This is new territory for me; we’ll see how it goes. My goal is to post once a week, on Thursday mornings.
In the process of preparing to make some needed changes on both my main we site and this blog, I introduced a fatal corruption to blog’s database. For that reason, I’ve had to start from scratch without the planned archives. A fresh start may prove to be a good thing, perhaps some archival pages can be partially reconstructed.
A New Direction
