Author: Joseph T. Sinclair

Photographer since 1950.

Be Prepared

by Joseph T. Sinclair

I was driving toward Delta, Utah on Highway 50 from Ely, Nevada. I was in the middle of nowhere many miles from anywhere. There are 152 miles of nothing between Ely and Delta. I had my camera on the front seat next to me to take photos of the interesting rugged mountains and canyons along the way. So, I was prepared. Sort of.

Coming the other way was a chap walking along the highway and carrying a wooden cross seven feet high made from 4x4s. He was towing a little red wagon with his camping gear on it. I was stunned and drove right by him without taking a photo.

Was he a Jesus impersonator on his way to Vegas? Was he a self-flagellating penitente on a pilgrimage to Las Cruces? Was he a lumber salesman carrying a sample for repairs on someone’s Sevier River salt flat shack? I’ll never know. I was dumbfounded. My camera was ready to shoot, but my brain was in full drain.

How can you tell a story like this and have anyone believe it? You can’t. Unless you have a photo. So, if you miss the photo, you can’t even tell the story. If you want to be a photographer, you have to be mentally prepared as well as have a camera in hand.

Which one are you?

  1. Poor little Jimmy. That mountain lion bit him before I could scare the big cat off.
  2. Poor little Jimmy. That mountain lion chewed on his leg for several minutes before Jimmy beat the big cat off with a stick. I got a dozen great photos of it all happening.

If you choose 1, you’re just a tourist taking snapshots. If you choose 2, you have great potential to be the next Ansel Adams. You have to be ready to do your job if you’re a photographer. No one is going to fault you for utter disregard of someone else’s safety so long as the photos are good. In any event, safety isn’t usually the issue that might be a distraction. It could be anything beyond the bounds of reasonable expectations.

For example, who could have predicted that I would see a guy carrying a big wooden cross along the pavement pulling a little red wagon in the middle of a vast desert penetrated by only by a lonely highway? No one. Nonetheless, I should have gotten the photo. Only my mental sloppiness caused me to miss the photo-op.

Therein lies the lesson. You need to be aware. Having the equipment ready isn’t enough. This is particularly important today because you carry a competent camera with you wherever you go. At 10MP a digital camera is the equivalent of a 35mm film camera. And smartphones typically have cameras between 12MP and 20MP. Thus, you have a camera in-pocket that’s more than adequate. If you can keep your mind in-gear, you’ll get those great photos.

Don’t let the heat of the moment overwhelm your cool photographic persona. Be prepared.

Gift Photograph

by Joseph T. Sinclair

It seems like a good idea that a fine art photograph makes a good present (Christmas, birthday, wedding, anniversary, or special occasion). But it may not be a good idea without qualifications. Why not?

  1. Most people (except young people just starting their adult lives) don’t have vacant wall space. If you give them a medium-size or large photograph as a present, they may have no wall space to hang it.
  2. Unless you put a frame around it, the recipient may never use it. Framing is expensive.
  3. Art is enjoyed according to taste, which is very personal. The recipient may not appreciate your photographic art.

A photograph that answers the above concerns, however, may be an appropriate gift. And a small metal print answers such concerns.

  1. It’s small. People can always find a place to hang a small print.
  2. It doesn’t need a frame. Thus, it can be less expensive than a framed paper print.
  3. If the recipient doesn’t like it, it’s not a lot of wasted money.

A photograph that you purposely take to be a small photograph (rather than just any photography you shrink down) can be a great photograph. Small is not necessarily lower quality.

Accordingly, giving a fine art photograph as a present isn’t inherently a bad idea. It’s just an idea that requires a little common sense.

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The Half-Million Dollar Darkroom

by Joseph T Sinclair

Photography has two hemispheres: the shooting of a photo with a camera and the manipulating of the image into its final form. If the photographer is a commercial photographer, the purpose of postprocessing is to fine-tune the photo to a commercial standard. If the photographer is a fine art photographer, the purpose of postprocessing is, well, almost anything that suits the aesthetic whims of the artist. The point is that postprocessing is an integral part of photography.

It used to be that photographers were crippled. That is, they couldn’t or didn’t do thoroughgoing postprocessing. Some photographers had an impoverished darkroom in their closet, a half measure. Others had a studio darkroom that provided a broader range of image manipulation but not the robust facility of a commercial photo lab. Many photographers left postprocessing to photo labs, and the best labs were ones that did the best job of catering to the whims of good photographers. But catering and doing it oneself are decidedly different activities. And the chemical process itself is severely limited not only in scope but by the huge amount of time and expense involved. Consequently, postprocessing in the film days was despair for most and at best an arduous opportunity for just a few.

Although that was true for black and white, it was also typical of color postprocessing but more so. More variables, more chemicals, more equipment, more technology, more of everything. It was, indeed, overwhelming. It was a hemisphere seldom emancipated from its severe chemical limitations.

Adobe Photoshop is the half-million-dollar darkroom we never had. But it’s more. It’s a darkroom unchained from the limitations of the film era. The good news is that it’s dirt cheap, much faster, much more convenient, and with a robust capability unimagined before the digital age. The dark side is that it has a steep and inconvenient learning curve. It’s not for the lazy. It’s for the complete photographer.

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By “Photoshop,” I mean any one of the categories of full-bodied photo processing software now available to everyone, such as Lightroom, Corel, DxO, Phase One, etc. And, of course, Photoshop itself. No messy, expensive, lung-mauling, eye-maiming chemicals. Instead, instant results all in the space of a computer, anywhere. It’s hard to imagine going from such an archaically inconvenient system to such an insanely convenient one. But it has happened. Isn’t it bizarre that photographers bitch and moan about paying $9/month for Photoshop when their film/processing/chemical expenses per month during the film era might have been ten or fifty or a hundred times as much.

Ah, but it’s the learning curve. Photoshop is too difficult to learn. One doesn’t need all that capability. One can get by with Microsoft Paint, which is free. Swinewash! In one Photoshop community college course, you can learn to do more postprocessing than Ansel Adams ever dreamed. And why wouldn’t you?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with getting the best possible photo you can in the first place. We spent hundreds or even thousands on equipment to do so. And postprocessing can’t turn a lousy photo into an acceptable one. But there are so many ways to take a photo inadvertently imperfect, even if slightly so, that postprocessing is valuable for almost every shot you’ll ever take. And for many shots, it’s the difference between life and death (of the photograph, not the photographer). Thus, in the digital age, Photoshop has become essential to be a proficient postprocessor. No excuses. No half-baked software. No shirking widely available training. It’s what you do as a photographer.

The difference between the very good and excellence in almost every human activity is marginal. That is, it’s the result of the little extra bit of talent and hard work that goes into the completion of a project or activity. For photographers, this means that knowing and using first-rate software for postprocessing is the edge that generates excellence. That assumes, of course, that one has done an excellent job of shooting the photos in the first place. But it’s hard to imagine an excellent photographer today who’s not an expert in using Photoshop. It’s inexpensive, and the training is no more demanding than a trade school or college course (for a solid postprocessing foundation).

For commercial photographers, it’s a path to excellence. For fine art photographers, it’s a creativity bonanza. For those photographers who abstain, it means being forever stuck in the yesterday of the photographic craft unable to handle fresh possibilities.

But what about amateurs (enthusiasts), some of whom are more competent than career photographers? If amateurs do anything besides take snapshots, they invariably follow a commercial model or a fine art model in their photographic activities. Consequently, they are in the same boat as commercial and fine art photographers. They need to do their own postprocessing and use full-bodied photo editing software (e.g., Photoshop).

To reach your full potential as a photographer, you need to do your own postprocessing and do it in the most competent manner possible. The half-million-dollar darkroom is with us for the foreseeable future, and the savvy photographer will embrace it.

Inspire Yourself

by Joseph T Sinclair

It seems to me that modern art museums are more historical collections than aesthetic collections. If so, where do you go today to see really good art (including good photographs)? Galleries whether online or offline are uneven quality. Some good artists but mostly average artists.

Back in the good old days when I was a writer attending digital industry trade shows on a press pass, I was always thrilled to see the annual Adobe collection. Adobe featured about 50 works of digital art (including photographs) at its trade shows, albeit in physical form. The art was stunning. Much more great art in one place than anywhere else I’ve ever seen.

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My attempt at art, not from Adobe

Alas, today Adobe charges over $1,000 for entry to its trade shows, and I don’t have a press pass. I don’t know whether they still feature their annual art collection. If they do, it’s almost worth $1,000 to see it.

Fortunately, Adobe recently started Create, an online magazine. It’s wonderful. It’s free. And it’s an inspiration. I’m amazed at the high quality of the art. It’s one of those publications you don’t want to miss viewing.

https://create.adobe.com/

Think about it. Today the US population is triple what it was 100 years ago. Back then you could know most of the leading artists if you were an art aficionado. Today people have more leisure time. And artists find it easier to stay alive on a small income (although not to live a middle-class life) than ever before.

Today there are simply too many great artists. Even if you’re an aesthete, you just don’t know or have never heard of most of the great artists among us. Our descendants will still be discovering them many decades from now. But what’s a good way to gain some access to some of our great photographers today? I believe Create is one way. Not all the featured artists are great. But enough are in order for the magazine to stretch your imagination.

Print Sharpness

It’s difficult to discuss sharpness without making some assumptions. The photograph itself has to be sharp. That means a good camera and lens, correct focus, steady platform, etc. This discussion assumes that you start with a sharp photograph. And then you print.

As an example, let’s use the Sony A7 II, a 24MP (megapixel) camera, which has a frame of 6000 x 4000 pixels.

Commercial printing (e.g. magazines) is done at 240 dpi. Fine art printing is done at 300 dpi. (Most people can’t see much more than 300 dpi.) At 240 dpi the Sony 24MP camera generates a physical print 25 x 16.7 inches. At 300 dpi the print is 20 x 13.3 inches. (length in pixels ÷ dpi). When you consider viewing distance, however, the further you get away from a photograph, the less dpi you need to create the same illusion of sharpness.

The distance/sharpness is difficult to calculate due to so many variables. But the chart at this website gives you something to go by:

http://resources.printhandbook.com/pages/viewing-distance-dpi.php.

It indicates that at a 24-inch viewing distance, you need 300 dpi to get the maximum sharpness. Yet at a 40-inch distance, you need only 180 dpi to get the maximum sharpness. Think of 24 inches as being about the distance you view a photography book or look at a computer monitor. Think of 40 inches as being about the typical distance you look at a photograph hanging on the wall in a museum, gallery, office, or home.

Using the 40-inch viewing distance, you can generate a 33.3 x 22.2 inch print of a 6000 x 4000 pixel photograph at 180 dpi, and it will look as sharp as can be. But if someone sticks their nose into it (gets closer than 40 inches), it will not look its maximum sharpness.

Another means of determining distance/sharpness is to calculate the maximum viewing distance according to the diagonal measurement of the printed photograph. Some experts say the viewing distance should be 2x, some 1.5x, and some 1x (of the diagonal).

Calculate the diagonal with the formula: c = √(a2 + b2) where a and b are the frame dimensions and c is the frame diagonal. Thus, for a 20 x 13.3 inch print, the diagonal is 24 inches. At the conservative 1x, the viewing distance is 24 inches for maximum sharpness (300 dpi). At 1.5x, the viewing distance is 36 inches. And at 2x the viewing distance is 48 inches. Thus, for these last two distances, you would need only a dpi well under 300 to provide maximum sharpness for viewers.

It’s all very subjective. But one thing is certain. The first consideration of sharpness is how the viewer will see the print. And distance matters.

The next consideration is whether you can improve the sharping because it’s a digital photograph and not a film photograph? For many digital photographs the answer is a modest yes. For some photographs the answer is an absolute yes. Sharping digital photographs is beyond the scope of this article and is also subjective. But you may be able to enlarge a photograph 10%, 20%, or 30% and still retain its inherent sharpness by applying sharping in postprocessing. (However, you can’t take an unsharp photograph and make it sharp with postprocessing.) In other words, just by sharping in postprocessing, you may be able to enlarge a photograph a little without the loss of sharpness.

Another consideration is general enlarging. How much can you enlarge a photograph without noticeably losing sharpness? One of the original guidelines was that you could enlarge about 30% by doing 10% at a time, without noticeably losing sharpness. Today the algorithms are better, but the experts’ opinions are subjective. Some say 50% enlargement. Some as high as 400%. But this is something that depends on the characteristics of the photograph, your enlarging experimentation, and the software you use. You might want to do your experimenting with a small portion of your photograph first before committing to printing the whole enlargement.

You will want to remember that enlarging 2x does not double the frame dimensions. It doubles the area of the photograph. If you double the frame dimensions, you enlarge the area 4x.

Finally, consider the medium. Metal prints can be printed at 300 dpi, although 240 dpi is a typical default for metal printing services. The dpi of inkjet printers is virtually impossible to calculate without a lot of specifications you probably can’t easily get. The dpi for inkjet and laser printers is based on advertising, not on the traditional printing dpi. In other words, a 1200-dpi inkjet printer may print only at 280 dpi according to traditional printing specifications. If you buy a printer, you may want to ascertain the actual traditional print specification first, if available. Likewise, if a photographic service provider uses an ink et printer, you will want to likewise ascertain the actual traditional print specifications.

A word of warning. You can order a 12000 x 8000 print of your 6000 x 4000 pixel photograph, and no one at a photographic service will give it a second thought. They will simply automatically enlarge it 4x as part of their processing. Although they usually have good enlarging software, it raises the question of whether you would rather enlarge it yourself knowing that your photograph will otherwise be automatically enlarged. In other words, just because you can order something, doesn’t mean that it will retain its sharpness to the degree you require for your viewers. You may want to have more control.

What’s my practice? I don’t enlarge anything and don’t worry about sharpness. With my 25 MP camera, this is a practical point of view. Nonetheless, there are always those situations where I need a large print, and enlargement is required. In such cases (rare for me because I print few photographs), I decide how to enlarge based on the factors outlined in this article; that is, I handle each photograph on a custom basis. But if you find yourself enlarging your photographs all the time, you may want to get a camera with more MPs thus enabling you to forgo enlarging so much of the time. The new Sony A7R IV has 61 MPs (35mm type camera) with a 9504 x 6336 pixel frame, and its brand competitors are comparable.

Finally, if you typically crop much of a digital photograph away, you may have a need to enlarge what you have left. In that case, a camera with plenty of MPs is doubly useful to your photography efforts.

Cropping

by Joseph T Sinclair

This is a simple postprocessing technique but requires an in-depth look as to how it can fit into your photography. I will use Sony cameras as examples, but of course other camera systems are similar. And the focus of this discussion will be on resolution (inherent in 35mm film), which is one of the most important characteristics of good photography except in cases when you forego the sharpness of high resolution for other photographic effects.

Most experts tell us that a 10-12 MP (megapixel) camera is the equivalent for resolution of a 35mm film camera. Indeed, Sony’s original top-of-the-line fast-action camera (A7S – made to maximize multiple frame shooting rather than large frame size) had only 12 MP and cost 20% more than Sony’s then current top-of-the-line general purpose camera (A7R) with 36 MP. With a 36MP camera you can get about three times the area of a film-equivalent photograph and still have the resolution of 35mm film for each third. That means you can crop 67% away and still have a full size 35mm-film equivalent photograph (and 35mm-film sharpness). In other words, the more MPs the merrier. MPs matter for cropping.

For starters, let’s dispose of the Haiku philosophy of photographic art. It goes something like this. Photographs must be traditional rectangles (with unequal adjacent sides and a limited selection of aspect ratios) so as to impose the proper aesthetic discipline for creating fine art. That’s like saying a poem must be a Haiku poem in order to be considered fine art. A Haiku poem has three sentences with 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables respectively. And it’s a traditional form. But I don’t think Haiku defines poetry. And likewise, traditional rectangles (frames) don’t define fine art photography.

Indeed, cropping is the new aesthetic freedom. Cropping used to be done in the darkroom, which made it somewhat limited and generally unavailable to most photographers. Now it’s done in digital postprocessing and is quite easy for anyone to do. Even fun. Beyond just cropping and adjusting the sides of a rectangle, one can even create a photograph of any shape in postprocessing using various software techniques.

What are the considerations for cropping?

  • You don’t have to be so careful framing your photos. In fact, if you overshoot a photograph (take a photograph larger than the frame you seek), you can easily crop it to your specifications more precisely in postprocessing.
  • If hurried, you can simply point and shoot; and crop later.
  • If something is in the photo you don’t want, you may be able to crop it out.
  • Upon review, you may find a photograph within the photograph that you find more aesthetically appealing than the overall. You can crop it out.

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  • You can create various shapes of photographs in postprocessing, such as circles, ovals, triangles, and custom forms.
  • If you crop to an odd shape, you can have a metal print service provider cut the print into the shape (e.g., MagnaChrome, Concord, California has a computer-guided metal cutter that can do so).
  • With enough MPs, you can crop away a substantial portion of a photograph and still have enough left for a resulting sharp film-equivalent photograph.
  • You can crop away the upper third and the lower third of a one wide-angle landscape photograph to make a panorama.

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  • You can make different versions of the same photograph (different crops).
  • You can set a crop to a certain preset aspect ratio and print a photo that will fit into a certain size off-the-shelf (prebuilt) frame.
  • You can set a crop to a certain preset aspect ratio and create a photo that will fit snuggly into a photo collage.
  • You can use any lens as a non-optical telephoto lens by cropping away all but the small portion of a photo.
  • You can often crop to correct mistakes that you make. There are so many ways to make mistakes, even for the best photographers, that cropping capability becomes quite valuable.

How about a practical example. Sony now has a 61 MP 35mm-type camera (A7R IV). Is that too many MPs for ordinary use? No. How about using this Sony camera with a super sharp 50mm lens (e.g., Sony-Zeiss 55mm f1.8). Do you also need a telephoto lens? Or can you crop out a one-sixth portion of a 50mm-lens digital photograph and use it as a film-equivalent photograph? Something to think about.

Digital cropping brings a bonanza of new techniques to use to create all sorts of appealing photographs and to help define new opportunities in photography. That’s why MPs are important. The more MPs your camera sensor has, the more flexibility you have for cropping.

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