door 3rd attempt
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

I thought that I'd just point out this scan. Its a first, and hopefully just a really odd glitch. I'll think about it later.

There may even be a way to process this into some kind of reasonable shape. Its obviously got the information in there, but in a really mangled form.

This second image shows the more common scan line problem, which I can do nothing about. Perhaps I should just make sure I prescan the scene before every 30 minute scan, even, as in this case I don't alter anything...

Another basement photograph. Heck, I'm still happy taking them, and the camera's got the range to deal with the situation - unlike my SLR. In fact it doesn't even exploit the full dynamic range.

Its strange how you relate to the world through something as laborious as this - I went up three stories to my apartment window to check on what the clouds were likely to do - and consequently what kind of variations were likely in the light; I cursed the helicopters flying too close - the vibrations of the blades could be clearly felt on my skin, and I was unnerved that they were likely to wobble the slightly rickety camera that I'm using; the wind has a strong effect on the rendering of the foliage; the shape of the lens' viewpoint was clearly innured in my sensorium, I could see the cone shape and what was going to fall within and without of the lens' purview.

In these regards the photograph is the centre of a process, the pulpit around which the dialogue revolves in symbolic and other visual linguistic ways but also in terms of the reality of the shooting circumstances. In this sense the photograph opens up a world, demarcating and revering, recording in spite of itself, in spite of its impotence.

Beyond the image there is also a clear relation between the technology and, in this image, in the rendering of the penumbra on the floor, the rich way with which it handles the transition, and the discreet clarity of various elements in the image. I don't want to talk about that 'though. 'Art and technology' is an old old argument - look up techne and heidegger - and I can't do it justice, although the first link's a pretty good summary of techne, but suffice it to say that old mr contentious' philosophical position is very useful for artists, as it rearranges an old problem by giving the total artwork primacy and not fragmenting and relegating the artwork to other questions: 'what is it about', 'what is it a picture of' and so on.

I'm afraid its the inevitably of producing the same sort of thing, but in a different context. I'm perfectly aware that I seem to gravitate towards images of a form of transcendence, or more readily of the failure to transcend. Its unfortunate, but that seems to be the lot that I've granted myself. So:



It might be just what I read into this though... You know: glowing gates hidden behind other gates...?

On a more prosaic note, as I'm scanning these images straight from reality in 16 bits, or rather a 12-bit image wrapped unneatly in a 16-bit file format, photoshop seems to get confused. Don't get me wrong, photoshop does a good job of handling most things that you throw at it, and handles this well enough too. As the images aren't colour space nor bit depth processed - and are in that sense raw - but aren't RAW data, just raw data, which everyone knows isn't so fashionable. It also means that because the data is 16-bit, and your screen is 8-bit, its having to make some fairly blunt decisions about which data to represent. Normally this isn't a problem, photoshop handles 16-bit RAW with a degree of aplomb, if not a degree in aplomb (i.e. it stinks in most areas, but mostly in the areas that you have quite happily lived without for quite a while and will hand over cash for later on), but when dealing with some of the curve processing (see gamma) that is necessary with the dicomed's 12-bit in 16-bit data photoshop doesn't render on the fly so well. If you apply those curves to the base data through flattening the layers of an image, then no problem, no posterising, no weird generalised guesses. However, you lose the flexiblility of a curves adjustment layer. A nice an' quick go around to this (which is useful for other reasons too) is the athletic keyboard shortcut of command/control + shift + option/alt + 'e' when you have an empty layer targeted, which merges visible layers and pastes the result into the empty layer leaving the original data free but the rendering engine seems to prefer it. And you'll prefer to, if for no other reason than it gives more concentration on the 'um, why did i take this shot' aspects of an image, and less on the 'what is the computer doing again?' aspects. Its a small battle won against the leering hordes of disorder but worthwhile I assure you...

Another new image, from the scanback, from the apartment block. I love the shape of the building and its light, its quite seductive and gentle, and the mixed daylight/flourescent lighting gives interesting colour. Apart from that and the typical compositional 'escape!?' conceit (up the stairs and, boom!, you're thrown out the picture top right, only to be dragged back in through one of the closed doors dammit), I've yet to discover what these images are for or about. Maybe its just that.

Throwing meaning aside, technically, this one was a bit of a disaster. I took three scans but the dicomed crashed at the very end of the third - it often sort of crashes giving a 'serial communication error' box, but retains the image anyway, but on this occasion, confirming to tradition, its lost the data. The image is still the composite, or averaging, of two images, the idea being that you get better information in combining the two images. Within any photograph there is information and there is noise. Noise is principally increased when you increase the ISO, and inversely with the tonal value - there's more noise in the shadows. (This is a much bigger problem with digital cameras than film, but present nonetheless.) However, noise is transient - noise will vary from image to image, and sometimes usefully, if you're taking pictures of the same thing. So, with an utterley static image, if you take the image twice and combine the two images you get an increase of 1.4 of the information to noise ratio and with four images you get double the information.

Unfortunately, I think that I must need at least 4 images to get the image that I would like. I'm not talking about the information to noise ratio particularly, that is just a bonus for me, but the banding problems that are happening because I'm shooting in flourescent light. Flourescent lights vary in their brightness and in their colour temperature - and they are particularly bad in the blues. Consequently, I'm getting massive colour variation in horizontal strips across the image, which get better - or more realistically less worse - with each successive scan that you add into the mix.

Finally, here's a concise and clear tutorial on noise reduction through averaging in photoshop.

The first image from the new scanback of the basement of my apartment block.

Formally, the dicomed gives wonderful detail - through having one pixel scanned by each of three channels rather than interpolated as it normally is, and through the fact the it can register eight stops of light in tonal latitude. (This is compared to seven for regular negative film, five for digital cameras and four for slide film.) Because of this there is more sensitivity in high contrast scenes, for example when you are pointing the lens at a light source. Unfortunately, the sensor - I think - doesn't have any anti-blooming gates on it, which means that when the sensor gets far too much light, the excess of light 'pours' into the next pixel contributing to the colour and value that. The result, which I've doctored out, is a big smear across the image from goes from the light source to the right.

Handling the camera is a very beautiful experience. Large format photography slows the photographer down to a crawl, the investment in time then reflects in the consideration of the image, in the subtle nuances that can be played. Also, the size of the image, and the nature of the lens give a very different play between the focus and the depth of field. There isn't the same dramatic jump from one to the other as there is in 35mm wide aperture photography (nor the inconsequentional depth of closed down apertures in 35mm), its more of a gentle almost invisible shift, it slowly, genteely but quite inexorably guides you around the various parts of the picture. Through it, everything seems more and less real. The detail begs you to believe in the particles of the world, a world built from atoms up but the subtle shifts which seem slightly different from and alien to our own natural vision question this and question overly simplistic empirical veracity.

The process of taking the shot becomes illusionary: as you look through the ground glass screen compares with the psychological experience of being in a camera obscura. The image floats in the glass, upside down, dim and very quickly fades away from the centre whilst you hide underneath a dark cloth. You need to continuously adjust your position to see different parts of the image, and to an extent composite them in your mind more consciously than with other types of camera. After basic composition, and whilst looking through a lupe this effect is intensified - you're dragged into a tiny fraction of the image, laterally scanning the flat tenuous image captured on the glass of a supposedly four dimensional world, hunting for the image.

Along with the eye moving the body engages with the scale of equipment, the continuous changes in environment - under the cloth, in plato's cave, and at the moment sweating in the horrendous heat - out of the cloth in the reality that looks similar but is disconcertingly distinct - and disembodying most of yourself to narrowly concentrate in the digital realm of taking the scan. After only a few adjustments the process of taking another 30 second 'polaroid' prescan becomes a symbol of the investment into the image - this shot took 30 minutes of setting up, 'exposure adjustments', colour balancing, recomposing, and digitally checking the focus before commencing on a 20-30 minute exposure.

Another day, another portfolio to look at, this time from a student of mine who is striving to find his voice and succeeding often enough for me to feel that I'm saying at least something right. Ivan Asin has been following people like Wolfgang Tillmans and has a similar sense of colour and levity of touch which I feel will bode him well.

However, please bookmark, or del.icio.us, his URL (or URI if you are so inclined) because his address is almost as cryptic as the DaVinci Code, and unfortunately about as memorable...

On occasion, some stranger gets in touch with me, from the real world. Gerard Bertrand was one such soul. He wrote to me asking that we reciprocate links, as there are parities between the work here on my site, and on his.

In what is, I think, his most recent series, he offers a dreamt tribute to some of C20th literature's greats. Kafka gets a counter factual photographic album which shows his alongside his 'friends', and other luminaries of literature and music.
Reminiscent of ernst's collages and at times aiming at a more photographic synthesis, he offers whimsical layers of referencing for the literati.

google and weather
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

more google map fun following housing maps the über-hack that dragged together google maps and craiglists' rent prices together. Beyond being natty, a vastly underrated quality, and overdue for reappraisal in the same way that decorative was some years ago, there's also a interesting process of the spatialisation of information that is happening. Of course, this is nothing at all new, but having an open API allowing people that tinker to tinker all they like, its encouraging the tuftefication of the internet, and of written languages.

(please excuse the hyperbole, but I think that culturally it has a lot of potential ramifications, and these sorts of things will get a large user base as time goes on).

my (sort of) new (kinda) camera (um well...)
Originally uploaded by blind sam.

I've bought myself a dicomed scanback ca.1998 (now incarnated as betterlight). A scanback differs from a contemporary camera in that the exposures are of the order of ten minutes, more like a C19th camera than anything that could be understood as a camera now. Similarly, the detail is more comparable to a C19th negative than a digital neg or even most films.

To put it in terms of misleading and blunt metrics, the dicomed scans at 45 megapixels each channel meaning that if one should choose to be pedantic, it could compare to a 135 megapixel bayer grid (aka Colour Filter Array).

More significant, is the nature and mode of engaging with the equipment and how that forces certain types of relationship of photographer to subject to camera to experience, precipitating a gamut of work; a style of composure; a different epistemology and ontology of time; a significance in transience and permanance; a presumption of stillness; some conditions of lighting; an always larger degree of dedication; a focus upon the whole, the details and the Bach like relations of internal communication, that creates a self sustaining poetry; and, amongst an infinite world of other atomic qualities better viewed holistically, the mechanics of the the poetry of the technological image.

From NewScientist. Gotta to love those false colour images and NASAs keen eye for publicity.

In 2001, Philip Lorca diCorcia set up an 'x' on spot on the floor in Times Square, rigged up a strobe on scaffolding pointing to the 'x' and took pictures of people's heads as they trudged about their business. In 2005, one of the now famous head image's subjects decided to sue diCorcia on the grounds of "severe mental anguish" (registration required, use bugmenot) and because it is outrageous to sell pictures of someone's face without telling and asking there permission.

These photographs apparently sell for $20,000, plus are reproduced in books and so on and have by artworld standards been financially sucesssful. I suspect because of this, Erno Nussenzweig, the plaintiff, would like to think of taking a photograph without someone's consent as "outrageous and unfair" (same link as above). This rationale, apart from often being one of the most puerile arguments against something, is something that I wither at the sound of. (I've yet to find any vested party using the word to mean anything other than 'to my advantage, speaking objectively'. Its not that I don't believe in fairness, I do, but I do believe that vested interests usually speak inordinately louder, with much greater frequency, and with the motivation that only an unbridled ego can provide. As such, I think the only way that fairness could be guaranteed to speak is without a speaker.)

Nussenzweig is also suing the gallery, the publisher and anybody else who might sold the prints of books.

So, apart from the possibly dubious motivations of the plaintif and the vultures under his employ, the question remains - what exactly has been done wrong here? I dont' know the law - and being bound by something that I'm ignorant of, surrounded by other who in the vast majority are in the same situation, doesn't sound like a great set up - and so I can't viably comment on the legality of the charges. But, surely the US justice system isn't so nuts as to allow this to become a precedent? As far as I know, the US legal system uses the constitution as the basic framework for legality, followed by court precendent if the constitution isn't relevent. (The British system is basically all precedent, I think, and the EU a frappuccinno mix of both). However, that doesn't stop the usual tabloid speculation that this could have massive impact on the rights of photographers, and I could be naive and/or stupid but I don't think that'll happen.

Here's what all the fuss is about.