Sarah Harmer and the mega quarry

Please sign the petition to stop the mega quarry. This quarry is Ontario's Tar Sands without the spin-off benefits!

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_the_quarry/?rc=fb&pv=35

She'll also be performing at a Stop the Mega Quarry rally in Honeywood, Ontario, along with Ron Sexsmith, Jim Cuddy, Cuff the Duke, Hayden, etc. on Oct 16th.

http://www.volunteerforfoodstock.com/

Electricity and its apps, Facebook, deer with guns.

(I thought the blog entry title would peak your curiosity)
I attended (photographed) a conference yesterday on Marketing in the Digital World and I learned (or confirmed, with facts and statistics, things which were intuitively logical to me) a thing or two.

I learned, by way of comparison, that electricity was a tool that didn't "take off" immediately; most people didn't know what to do with until its first apps were invented: incandescent bulb, oven, toaster.

We've always had newfangled tools at our disposal; they don't become popular until human behaviour is altered in favour of using those tools.
Facebook is replaceable; as a social medium, it has outlived others such as GeoCities, MySpace. It's longevity has to do with the emotional cost of moving to another media. Whereas moving to another email service merely involves informing everyone on your contact list of your new email address, moving from Facebook involves, potentially, breaking off "friendships".
In today's digital market, where supermarket customers can scan QR codes on the spot for price/quality comparisons, the customer has become the "deer with guns in the woods".

Just some of many that I learned yesterday.

Better B&W from colour digital files

Original colour file. On a country road in the Philippines, July 2011. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Grayscale conversion in Photoshop. Skin tones have the same value as green vegetation and the bluish-gray mountains in the background. Low contrast results in a "blaah" image. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Grayscale conversion in ACR. Skin tones are now differentiated from the vegetation and the mountains. Global changes; no localized burning and dodging.  Greater tonal range for a more dramatic look. Click on the photo to enlarge.

Needless to say, a "successful" image is not so much technique as it is a blend of technique and composition. Composition in B&W involves pre-visualization, taking the time (speeded up in the brain, of course, as the decisive moment(s)  are split-second occurence(s), to think through the scene and imagining what the final image is meant to look in its final form, and more critically, all the steps that the image will go through to produce that final image. This is very important because the end result, this "previsualized image", will determine how the image will be shot (which camera, lens and settings to use, flash, filter options, from which point of view, how Photoshop and/or ACR is used, etc). 

Nothing happens by chance; if it seems it does (did), it only seems that way.

My "aha!" moment in Photoshop

At the risk of sounding boastful, I used to (still think I can, with the right tools) "make a B&W negative sing in the darkroom", to paraphrase Ansel Adams' famous quote: "the negative is the score, the print is the performance". With the advent of digital cameras and printers, I couldn't duplicate or replicate my darkroom expertise, until yesterday! The early digital cameras, in my case the pro quality Nikon D100, did not have sensors and processing engines with a decent dynamic range. When the full frame Canon 5D finally got it right, printer technology could not deliver black Blacks, white Whites, and everything in-between.

When Epson introduced two-black pigment printers (the state of the art is now three-blacks, two-cyans, two-magentas), it seemed that the final hurdle to classic B&W had been achieved. Well, it has been, but not for me, until yesterday.

I envy, and admire, B&W prints that have that Adams-Weston-Paul Caponigro-John Sexton look and feel to them. And I could never achieve them, until yesterday.

Suffice to say that my processing technique involves the principles of channel mixing, and highlight/shadow adjustments in ACR, followed by, if need be, manipulation in Photoshop. The good news is, and this was a surprise to me, is that ACR is sufficient, most of the time.

Of course, processing technique is insufficient; the image itself has to have been exposed with a view to prioritizing tonal values (sadly, the push/pull, pull/push available in film is not available). AND, OF COURSE, composition remains the heart of an image.

I will post samples when I get to my laptop (I'm writing this on an iPhone).
AND, I will revisit some of the thousands of images and mine them for their potential, once again.

(not my) iPhone Diary

for the first time on my blog, I am entering an iPhone diary that is not of my making. "Budapest" is by Michael Prince, shot and edited entirely on an iPhone4.

http://vimeo.com/18922768