I’ve seen so many photographers with oodles of potential sign up on a photography forum and have their spirits broken by people who do not know how to say things nicely or in some cases say things to deliberately break someone’s spirit. There are so many great photographers out there on forums who are more than eager to give of their time and help someone grow and improve, but there are also (quite sadly) some not so nice people who cannot stand the slightest hint of competition and will dig into their toolboxes of nasty comments to try and break someone’s progress.

You need some thick skin to be a photographer and to display your work online but not everybody possesses this. You need to be able to take a meaningful comment and use it to improve yourself and you need to know when someone is simply trying to get under your skin and simply delete their comment or just ignore it.

Now when I say meaningful critique, I mean a lot more than what I call the 3-H-Salute (Three H Salute). The three H salute is simply Halo – Hotspot – Horizon. This is a common tool in the arsenal of forumites who live, eat and breathe forum life, mostly on their employer’s time. Seldom do these type of critiquers ever deliver meaningful comment other than pointing out the blatantly obvious stuff like a) your horizon is slightly off level b) you have a hot spot in the sky or c) you have a halo in your image caused by oversharpening the image or something else that caused a halo effect. Make no mistake, these 3 elements of a photograph are essential to and often unseen by beginners as it is easy to miss these problems in an image when you’re just starting out. But these are not the be-all and end-all of a great image. In fact most great images have some type of flaw in them and most people would never notice that your horizon is slightly off level when there is enough wow factor in the image to keep your eyes peeled elsewhere. Some of the greatest photographers in history could post their work online today and have their work ripped to shreds by intermediate photographers.

Horizon:
Having a level horizon in an image is an important factor especially with seascapes where your horizon is actually a straight line. When it comes to landscapes in the interior of a country however, horizons are often not level by any means and only those who do a lot of photography away from the seaside will know this. Most camera’s today have levelling devices built in or photographers with older digital camera’s can purchase a hot-shoe

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bubble level which will help them level the camera. That said, when it comes to shooting around mountain ranges you may have your camera perfectly level but the image horizon looks off-level due to the way the land is shaped.

Posting such images online will always attract a comment about your horizon and you trying to explain it to the person commenting on it is often just futile because the next image you post will have the same person saying the exact same thing. So, for those starting out, learn to level your camera and trust it regardless of what others are saying. Some forumites go to extreme, often insane levels to prove your horizon is off-level, they’ll take your image into photoshop and draw a level horizontal line and then come back with comments that your horizon is 0.2 degrees off level, do yourself a favour and ignore ignoramuses like this.

Not all horizon's are level. This image shot from a perfectly levelled camera, this is the way the scene appears to the natural eye. Also notice the hot spot which is also perfectly natural. This image would attract numerous horizon and hot spot comments on a forum. Click image for a larger view.

Hot spots occur naturally even to the human eye. There are times when the sun is naturally illuminating clouds so much that they lose all detail. Put your camera down and look at such scenes with your naked eye and you will see for yourself.

Hotspot’s:
A hot spot, normally in the sky section of an image, happens mostly with sunset and sunrise images when you are trying to expose your foreground more and as a result you overexpose the brighter sky section. This causes areas of the sky to lose all detail and have a very noticeable white or “hot” spot. Using filters to control exposure of the sky can eliminate hot spots but there really is far too much fuss about hot spots on forums. Many images from the world’s leading photographers will contain hot spots, I know because I’ve seen it repeatedly. I’ve even seen images that would be ripped apart of a photography forum, take first place in an international photographic competition. Clearly judges who are trained and experienced enough in judging photography can see an image for what it is and do not spend that much time looking for tiny technical flaws in an image. If an image comes in front of a judge and his immediate reaction is “WOW,I wish it were mine”, your image will progress further in the competition without the judges sitting there trying to discredit you on something like a hot spot. Hot spots in all reality are natural occurences that exist to the human eye. Those preaching HDR photography techniques, seem to have convinced themselves that hot spots are foopah and do not exist in real life but seldom do I ever see HDR fanatics ever spending time WITHOUT a camera truly surveying scenes with their eyes, noting down all the tiniest details. If they did, they would notice that even to human eye hot spots DO exist. As I say, those with enough experience like judges of photography competitions, seem to know this and will not kick your image out due to it having a hot spot. So by all means be aware of hot spots, try to expose as best as you can but don’t beat yourself up when you post an image on a forum and you get 15 parrot comments about a hot-spot.

Halo’s:

Extreme Over-Sharpening can cause very visible halo effects on your image. Some halo effects however are natural occurences. This image has been deliberately over-sharpened to illustrate the effect.

Halo’s are a tricky issue. Some halo’s in an image occur naturally due to the way light is bouncing around your scene, other’s are however introduced while processing the image often when sharpening the image. Learn to identify what a halo is, whether it occurred naturally or whether you created it in your post processing. When you receive comments about halo’s in your image, go back to your original frame and look carefully at that section of the image and decipher if you are the one that created the halo or whether it exists in your original frame. If you introduced it, go back to step 1 of your processing and figure out at what stage you introduced a halo. If the halo exists naturally, which it quite often does, due to the way light was bouncing around, simply ignore the comments or if you feel up to it try explaining it to the commenter’s but don’t think they won’t be back saying the same thing about other images from the same shoot where this same anomaly exists.

Forumites will often comment on this as a halo, it's NOT. It's a natural effect caused by contrasting light conditions. This is an unedited image, straight from camera.

While the above 3 elements are important aspects to pay attention to, they are NOT the be-all and end-all of photography. There are much more important factors of an image that go completely ignored because forumites get fixated on the 3-H’s. Critiques on aspects like composition, colour accuracy, tonal range, shadow detail and a host of other things are often in short supply on forums. Mostly it’s because those who like to comment all day long have a fixation with clocking up their post count to make themselves appear as major contributors to the forum, this often results in them trying to comment too much on a daily basis and they literally do not even LOOK at an image but instead just look for the 3 H factors mentioned above.

By all means if you are a budding photographer, eager to improve your game, make no mistake that a forum is a place where you will learn the quickest and the knowledge you will gain from other photographers is invaluable. So don’t think I am knocking photography forums. I am trying to help you not get fixated, upset or have your spirit broken by people who only seem to concentrate on the 3-H’s and never actually look at your image for what it is.

You will learn quickly enough who are the troublemakers on a forum and who are the ones who never have anything good to say. If you find yourself being constantly harassed by someone, report it to the moderators of that forum or just ignore the person or block them from commenting if the forum you are on permits that functionality. Search out the members of the forum who do take time to deliver meaningful critique and send them a private message asking them to comment on your work, you’ll be surprised how many of them will be more than eager to assist you in growing as a photographer and always remember your good manners by saying thank you to those who take the time to help you and give credit where credit is due.

Everybody at some point in their life will experience the awful feeling of data loss. This normally happens on a day when you least expect it, when out of the blue your perfectly functioning computer system crashes and dies. You take the system to a technical person who then tells you the bad news, all your data is gone. What do you do other than nearly have a nervous breakdown?

First off there are data recovery labs that in many cases can get your data back, some of them are so good they can even take a hard drive that has been smashed into pieces and get data back bit by bit. This however is an extremely costly scenario, for the most part the charges are by the hour and it can literally run into hundreds of hours and there is no guarantee’s offered whatsoever.

“Oh why didn’t I backup my images” starts to play over and over in your head even haunting you in your dreams.

The answer is to avoid this scenario altogether, it’s not pleasant and I speak from experience. Once you’ve lost data once you spend the rest of your life making sure everything is securely backed up and sadly many people only learn this the hard way.

So what are your options for backing up your images?

Many people with a smaller image collection can get away using CD-roms for their backups. They are one of the most affordable forms of media around and this allows you to make multiple copies to store in different locations. But how safe are CD-roms? Many people mistakenly assume that a CD-rom will last for ever. This is a picture painted into people’s minds in the early days when CD-roms first came onto the market, they were marketed as indestructable. Well quite simply they are not. Simply dropping a CD-rom from a desk can damage the disc badly if it contacts the ground wrong. A CD-rom is nothing more than a plastic disc with a microscopically thin layer of foil material which is the recording surface. If you took a sharp knife and ran it quickly over the recording surface you’d see silver flakes (and data) come flying off. In modern times CD-roms are in mass production and the materials used to manufacture them are cheaper resulting in lower quality products. You can buy CD-rom discs for less than a Rand a disc and you can buyCD-rom discs for a few Rand a disc and there is indeed quite a difference. Cheap no name brand discs will become your worst enemy, they seem fine and seem no different than their more expensive counterparts but there will come a time when you take data written onto a cheap disc, put it into your Cd-rom drive and discover your drive cannot read the disc. You try in a friend’s drive to find the same problem and you eventually discover that disc no longer works ….. what happened …. your data is GONE? “This can’t be happening” you say to yourself. Well uh yes it can. There is major differences in the price of CD-roms due to the quality of the foil recording surface. Cheap CD-roms may only last 1-5 years, more expensive ones may last 5-10 years and then you can get what we call medical grade CD-roms which have a “claimed” lifespan of 100 years. The price between them is remarkably different, the cheap discs can cost R1.00 a disc, the more expensive “name” brands could cost you about R2.50 per disc and medical grade discs could cost you abour R20-R25 each. So depending on just how important that data is, the choice is yours. If you choose to use cheap CD-roms then every year you will need to re-record them and discard the old ones. Trust me this ends up being a tedious process and once your image collection starts requiring several discs at a time it’s time to look at another solution.

The next best solution which works very well is to use external hard drives to back up your image data. Having been personally involved in the high-tech industry for nearly 20 years I have been through just about every brand of hard drive and above all Seagate drives seem to have the longest lifespan and the least chance of failing. I have Seagate external hard drives that are nearly 5 years old and still functioning perfectly so I have standardised on Seagate as a trusted name. Seagate produces a variety of external hard drive solutions called FreeAgent ranging from 250GB drives upwards to 2TB. They also have a range called FreeAgent “Go” which are small enough to fit in your pocket. Using an external hard drive for your backups is quick and easy. You get yourself a program like Super Flexible File Synchroniser and set it up to mirror your images and other data and you can run it daily or once a week. Simply having one external backup is not enough. If you buy yourself one 500Gb external drive you actually need to purchase two and every time you do backups you do it onto both hard drives. One hard drive you can store in your safe (hopefully fire proof) and the other you should store off site at a friend or family member’s house, and preferably in their safe too. Having everything in triplicate stored in 3 different locations guarantees you that should trouble strike you have one totally safe backup. The cost of external hard drives have come down dramatically and they are by far the most cost effective form of storage around but you really need to refrain from saving yourself a few bucks considering cheaper external drives, stick with Seagate (no I do NOT work for them) do your backups in duplicate and store one off site and you’ll be good to go for many years.

When your image collection grows beyond the confines of a 2TB external hard drive it may be time to start looking for a more serious back solution. For this photographers are turning to the Drobo system because of it’s great offerings. Drobo has essentially taken very expensive RAID technologies which were out of the reach of the average Joe for many years and brought out a fully redundant raid product with a more affordable price tag. A basic Drobo which can house 4 hard drives could cost you around R12-14000 or thereabouts. Then you could move onto a Drobo Pro system which is a lot more expensive but can house 8 drives, it all depends on how much cash you wish to part ways with and just how serious you are about your data. Again, having one Drobo storing all your data, even though it has full redundancy, is no guarantee your data is safe. I know of several people whose Drobo’s have crashed on them so essentially like above with external hard drives, if you buy one Drobo, you actually buy two and one gets locked away very safely, preferably off site.

When it comes to data backups you need to have a plan, something you’ve invested some thought into and you need to stick to it religiously. It’s no good storing a backup off site and never updating it. If you formulate a backup plan you will thank yourself one day when things do go wrong, you will rest assured knowing your data and images are securely backed up. I’ll revisit this topic again one day. For now, get backing up.

We’ll no longer be feeding articles from other sources into this site but if, like many of our subscribers, you’ve come to rely on this site as your one stop source of information on what’s going on in the photo world, do not fret. you can continue getting all that info at http://www.photography-blog.co.za

Behind the scenes there’s lots going on and we hope you enjoy what’s in store for you in the coming weeks and months. We welcome guest contributions so if you have something you’d like to share simply email it to us on submit@africanphotographyblog.com

Just doing one image blend with 7 exposures with some fine tuning and manual blending included you can easily spend 1-2 hours to get the image perfect. In some cases it might be worth it to take a very special moment you captured on film and to spend that time working the image to perfection. While this can and does produce some very special effects within images I still find HDR, no matter how well executed, to lack something truly special, an ambience that only a single shot exposure carries.

One exposure requires finding the perfect moment to capture the image.

While some may argue that we’re now in the digital world and we must all move to new and wonderful ways of processing images I say yes and no to that argument. I will use HDR when I find it necessary and with many shoots I will bracket exposures regardless but my primary goal is always to get it right with one exposure. I find simply bracketing exposures on every shoot with the intention of later blending and “fixing” it in photoshop makes one a rather lazy photographer because you tend to find a recipe, set up, compose, bracket and go home to fix. Guilty as charged.

While this approach may be perfectly okay for some I enjoy photography because it challenges my mind. I myself got into a trap for a short while of merely relying on bracketed exposures for nearly all shoots. There were many days when I was too lazy to get out filters and do it properly so it was much easier to just bracket my exposures and do the hard work later in Photoshop.

In the end I was just finding HDR was totally lacking something very special, HDR just looked too perfect and NOT at all how the eye saw it. HDR fanatics (myself included) continually fool themselves into believing that the end product they produce through HDR and image blending is a faithful representation of what they saw, but of the many many photographers I know only a few ever take real notice of what the scene really looks like. The others have their eyes stuck permanently behind the viewfinder relying solely on the camera to capture all the necessary bits of information. I make a point of studying very carefully the scene’s I record and do my best to etch them in my mind, right down to the tiniest details and by doing so I manage to find some very special elements of an image that HDR tends to over-produce and in most cases actually ruin. Shadow areas of an image, for example, are crucial to the depth and feel of an image yet HDR fanatics tend to, what I call rape the shadow areas, lightening them up much more than they appeared to the human eye and it’s so easy to fall into this trap with HDR. Again .. guilty as charged

In the last year I have slowly forced myself back to basics, getting exposures perfect with a single exposure, without filters and without bracketing. It’s not always easy depending on light conditions but actually a lot of the time it is and it all comes down to timing, planning and using all available and natural elements to control the flow of light into the camera.

I’ve enjoyed my journey with HDR and I do know I will still use HDR methods for certain work but with landscape, nature and some other forms of photography I’m finding the step back to basics to be producing very special images like none other and it’s made my photography all that more interesting and challenging again. The mental challenge has always been my driving force and it’s good to have that old friend back at my side.

MK

"Mercury Down II" The sun sets and the mercury indicator starts to drop after a very hot day in Namibia - Copyright Mitchell Krog / Living Canvas Photography. All Rights Reserved.

For the budding and professional landscape photographer there is virtually endless landscape photographic opportunities in Africa and Southern Africa. South African photographer Mitchell Krog is no stranger to the African landscape and spends many months a year exploring, discovering and capturing breathtaking images of the beautiful African landscapes. Mitchell chooses to completely avoid re-capturing images which have been captured a million times or more, “I just don’t see the point in photographing things that have are captured 100 times a day when there is just so much that has NOT even been photographed yet” he says.

"Drakensberg Sunrise" - The sun rises over the beautiful and majestic mountainous region of the Drakensberg of South Africa. Copyright Mitchell Krog / Living Canvas Photography. All Rights Reserved.

The greatest parts of the undiscovered African landscape are only accessible via foot and often many kilometers of walking can be involved simply to capture one image. As Mitchell Krog says, “This is the game unfortunately and quite simply if you’re not willing to go the extra “mile”, excuse the pun, you will not return home with any new or unique images that have not been captured already. The Drakensberg region of South Africa, of which the greatest area lies within the province of Kwazulu Natal, is a good example. Photographers seeking to cover this area really need to go many extra miles to get to unique locations and in the Drakensberg there literally is endless locations on offer. The Drakensberg is so diverse and the landscape is ever changing, the light is so dramatic that you could sit and photograph the same scene every day for 365 days and not one image would be the same, it is for this very reason that I can say the landscape opportunities of the Drakensberg are endless.”

"Table Mountain at Dusk" - One of the most photographed mountains in the world, Table Mountain. Copyright Mitchell Krog / Living Canvas Photography. All Rights Reserved.

Similarly the Western Cape region of South Africa is also very mountainous and has some very dramatic landscapes. The Cape weather is rather unpredictable but this coupled with dramatic light seems to make for a good recipe for excellent landscape photography opportunities. The Cape is one of the most photographically covered regions of South Africa but this does ot mean that there is not still many landscape photography opportunities in store for the visiting photographer. No doubt South Africa will see many international photographers visiting our shores as the World Cup Soccer draws closer and it will be interesting to see how fresh eyes portray our beautiful landscapes.

Danger Written In The Sky. Multiple Lightning Strikes Light Up The Summer Night Sky. If Only Man Could Learn To Harness This Energy. From Mitchell Krog's Lightning Photography Collections. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved)

For many years SA photographer Mitchell Krog has watched and studied electrical storms and to this day still stands in utter amazement at this incredible force of nature. In recent years he acquired the equipment and skills to finally capture them on film and he has produced an endless array of breathtaking images. For Mitchell it is not about simply capturing a lightning strike on film but more importantly capturing the entire scene and telling a story through his images. “With any form of photography if you can captivate a viewers attention, draw them into an image, tell them a story and have them study it for more than just a few seconds you have imprinted an ever lasting memory” says Mitchell. Lightning photography can be a very lonely passtime, only those with enough dedication, patience and endurance to be out at strange hours of the night will stand a chance of capturing unique, sometimes once in a lifetime images.

The Big Detour. A passenger aircraft destined for Lanseria airport bypasses a massive storm cell. Missing dinner and spending many lonesome hours outside comes with the job of photographing lightning storms. From Mitchell Krog's Lightning Photography Portfolio. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved)

As with any form of photography, timing is of the essence. If you are unprepared, unwilling or unable to drop whatever you are doing at a moments notice you will miss opportunities. “I cannot tell you how many evenings I have rushed out of the house just minutes before dinner was ready only to return home several hours later, but nature waits for no man and if you are quick to seize the opportunity you will reap the rewards” says Mitchell. Mitchell’s Fire and Ice series, capturing a grassland fire which was started by lightning strikes  was one such occasion. He explains – “I was cooking dinner when I heard thunder approaching, I took a quick look outside and saw the sky glowing red from a grass fire, I dropped everything, rushed outside and managed to capture a few frames of this scene before the storm extinguished the fire it had started. This entire window of opportunity lasted a mere 20-30 minutes and was at it’s best stage for around 5-10 minutes.”

Fire and Ice. An early Spring lightning storm starts a grass fire and is captured here with strikes falling around and into the fire. Minutes later the storm extinguishes the fire it started and the moment is gone. From Mitchell Krog's Fire and Ice Lightning Photography Series. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved)

Safety is an important part of watching and photographing lightning storms. Finding a safe location with a good view is of the essence, you need to be able to see the storm approaching and be able to determine if you are in any way in the path of danger. “If your view is in any way blocked a storm can sneak up right behind you so a 360 degree view is preferrable, you also need somewhere safe to escape to. I’ve often been watching a storm in one direction when right behind me another one is brewing, so I always keep a watch all around me. Standing outside with a metal tripod and an electrically charged camera when strikes are falling too close is asking for trouble” says Mitchell. Mitchell insists that climbing on the roof of your house or any metal structure is a big no-no and could quickly cost you your life and he always promotes safe lightning photography. “There is just no image worth losing your life over” he adds.

Killer Storm. On the 23rd of November 2007 this mammoth supercell emitting lightning strikes up and out of it's core was captured by Mitchell Krog. The strikes emanating from the centre of this storm cell were kilometres in length and streaked across the night sky. This same evening several massive storm cells circulated through Gauteng and claimed lives in their path. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved)

More articles and images in this series on Lightning Photography will follow in the coming months.

Theme: Free theme

Categories:

• MP – Monochrome photography
• CP – Color photography
• CPP – Computer processed photography

Awards:

• The Big Award for total achievements – statuette of the Salon, honorary diploma, object and cash prize

Awards in each category:

1. gold FIAP medal, honorary diploma, cash prize
2. silver FIAP medal, honorary diploma, cash prize
3. Third award for monochrome photography - bronze FIAP medal, honorary diploma, cash prize

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Gone Fishin': I hate leaving TOP alone for as much as a day, much less a week, but I'm taking some time off to recharge my batteries and, cliché of clichés, work on my novel. I've given myself a deadline of one year to finish my attempt at a thriller, and, despite being a preposterously front-loaded work project with a ludicrously low prospect of ever paying off, I've decided to do it, just for the experience. Like seeing the Grand Canyon. Which I have also never done, unless seeing it from 28,000 feet on the way to L.A. counts.

It's possible that when I get to the second draft I'll post it here, chapter by chapter, so I can get feedback. (That presumes I'll get the first draft draft done, though, which is a big presumption. As we used to say when I was a kid, don't hold your breath or you'll turn blue and die.)

So, anyway, TOP will be quiet for a week. But, like some sort of Socialist-Internationalist-Environmentalist* MacArthur**, "I shall return."

Note that comments will not be posted in the interim. I have to go cold turkey, albeit temporarily.

Photo by Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship: Regular readers might recall that Vanessa Winship is one of my favorite contemporary photographers (based mainly on her book Schwarzes Meer [Black Sea], which still can't be purchased in the U.S. but is now available in the U.K. and can mostly be seen online [see "Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction" parts 1 and 2]). Amazingly, she's having her very first U.S. show in the city right next door to me, Milwaukee, at Deb Brehmer's Portrait Society gallery. The opening is on Friday, July 23rd, from 6 to 9 p.m. I understand Vanessa will not be there, although she might come for a visit during the run of the show.

The Portrait Society is located in Milwaukee’s Third Ward on the fifth floor of the Marshall Building, 207 E. Buffalo Street, Milwaukee, Wis., 53202. Call 414/870-9930 for information, or see the gallery's blog.

Also opening the same night is John Shimon and Julie Lindemann's "Real Photo Postcard Survey." I don't really know a great deal about this interesting pair of artistic collaborators, but I own, and like, their quirky, thoughtful little book of portraiture, Unmasked and Anonymous (available in the U.S. and in the U.K.).

BP Propaganda: AmericaBlog has been following the dispiriting but oddly entertaining saga of BP's hamhanded attempts to create plausible propaganda photographs to illustrate its narrative of the "American Chernobyl" it created in the Gulf of Mexico. I could do a better job of Photoshop than this, and I'm no good at all with photo illustration techniques.

Quick, how many submarines in Idaho? Did you know Stan Banos got an Amex Grant?

Photo by Phil Davis

Phil Davis online: Fred Newman, who is truly a nice man, has put up a small portfolio by our late mutual friend Phil Davis, of a selection of the environmental portraits Phil did in and around the town of Dexter, Michigan, mostly in the '70s. Phil was mainly known as an educator, textbook author, and the developer of Beyond the Zone System, which takes Ansel Adams and Fred Archer's fairly crude Zone System to a much more rigorous level as sensitometry. But he was also quite a talented and certainly an accomplished photographer, a fact that is too little known because his philosophical stance was that the pleasure in photography was in the process rather than the result. His commercial advertising photographs of Detroit automobiles from the 1950s and 1960s were wonderful.

Quite coincidentally, as a professor of photography at the University of Michigan he taught Peter and David Turnley.

Piff Paff Puff: I saw a really nice little movie a few nights ago, streamed from Netflix. The title in English is "Everlasting Moments," a phrase which refers to photographs. Photography plays a very prominent part in the story, although it's really a feminist film in the best sense. It recounts the true story told by Maja Larsson, an elderly and distant relative of the director, about her parents, especially her mother, Maria, who, despite heavy domestic responsibilities and an abusive husband, attempted to "find herself" as both a creative and an independent individual by learning and practicing photography.

Stories that are true can have a bracing effect on movies, because reality is a bad writer. Revenge is never quite satisfying, bad characters have their good sides, longed-for events never come about, characters persist in not doing what we can very plainly see they should do, latent romances are never fulfilled, and the wrong people die in the end. Any screenwriter worth his union card wouldn't have been able to resist torquing this story around into sentimentalist piffle. Reality insists on throwing wrench after wrench into the plotline. It keeps the film from falling into formula, gives the narrative a useful awkwardness. I like that.

"Everlasting Moments" (the original title is "Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick") is a 2008 film by the Swedish director Jan Troell, in Swedish, with subtitles. It will seem European to people used to Hollywood—especially Hollywood lately. One internet troglodyte I encountered called it a "mopefest," which presumably means that although it has explosions, carnality, and violence against women, it doesn't have enough explosions, carnality, and violence against women. It does indeed move at a slowish pace, though, and takes time to linger on the purely photographically beautiful, which many directors would dare not do these days. The film was shot on 16mm converted to 35mm to heighten the period feeling, but I think it adds to the photographic interest of the cinematography.

Anyway, assuming you typically don't lack patience for langorously-paced movies with subtitles, warmly recommended. It would probably make most anybody's list of the top ten movies about photography or for photographers.

László Kovács

Addie and Mose, one more time: And finally, speaking of cinematography...purely on a whim, I watched Peter Bogdanovitch's "Paper Moon" again last night. It remains a curious movie, a genre-bender, but I've always liked the fact that it is sentimental, humorous, lyrical, and elegiac while at the same time remaining resolutely amoral. (Such a movie today might be the opposite—harder, more bitter, much more graphic, but sanctimonious.) The combination is just as odd—and as oddly satisfying—as it ever was. A highly structured meander, it never resolves half its story lines, never relinquishes its McGuffins (we never do find out for sure whether Addie is Mose's illegitimate child), and never implies a well-adjusted transition to adulthood in store for Addie, who is, really, a harder criminal at nine than her guardian has the stones to be.

It's also as amazing as it ever was to see an entire movie carried by the virtuoso acting performance of such a young child. To this day Tatum O'Neal remains the youngest-ever winner of a major acting Oscar—and one of the most deserving.

(If you want to read more, there's an informative review at DVD Verdict—although, naturally, it talks about the no-longer-current Paramount DVD.)

I might insert something here like "I wish they still made movies like this," but of course they never did. Even Bogdanovitch's other movies most like this one—"The Last Picture Show" and his attempted reprise with the O'Neals, "Nickelodeon"—are nothing like it.

The reason for photographers to watch it? For the cinematography of the great László Kovács. (Himself the subject of a movie I want to see, called "No Subtitles Necessary.") Although a trifle overlit in spots—possibly the result of the director's intent to mimic the look of real '30s films—generally it is coolly elegant, influenced more by Dorothea Lange and the FSA than by the excesses of film noire. If you have any fondness for the great American interior or harbor any nostalgia for the 1930s, "Paper Moon" is surely one of the prettiest movies ever put on film.

See you in a week, and thank you for reading my site.

Mike
(Thanks to Oren Grad, Bob Burnett, and Art Elkon)

*John Camp's fond (?) epithet for me.
**Only without the shades, cool hat, and corncob pipe.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Theme: San Francisco or the Bay Area.

Photographs may include landscape, locales, activities, people and/or animals, but must convey the allure of San Francisco.

Prizes:

• One Grand Prize Winner will have his/her photograph prominently featured on sfTravel.com and receive $100 USD.
• Three Runner-Up Winners will have their photographs featured on pages of sfTravel.com and will win $25 USD each.

How to enter this photo contest

If you like this web site about photo contests, please help us spread the word about it!
We greatly appreciate if you add a link to www.photocompete.com in your blog or MySpace. Thanks!

Many years ago, a young man from Fort Wayne, Indiana followed his muse to Paris, and stayed for a quarter of a century. Paris became home base for Peter Turnley's worldwide travels as a top-echelon photojournalist. But even at home, he never stopped working—for three decades, Peter has photographed in the streets, bistros, and bars of his adopted city, along the banks of the Seine, from high windows, wherever he found himself. He photographed rooftop vistas, forgotten details, and, always, the people—friends and strangers, the famous and the unknown—people working, playing, traveling. And, everywhere, lovers—keeping company, flirting, kissing, holding hands, walking together, drinking together, laughing.

A portion of his extensive body of black-and-white work from Paris was published in 2000 in the book Parisians, with forewords by Robert Doisneau and Edouard Boubat. Recently, Peter's been planning a second book from this large body of work.

I'm really hugely pleased to tell you that three of the most famous and most romantic of Peter Turnley's pictures of Paris will comprise TOP's last 2010 Collector Print sale, this coming fall.

The master printer
But that's not even all. Decades ago, when I first learned that Henri Cartier-Bresson didn't print his own photographs, I heard that his prints were made by a master printer living in Paris. When Josef Koudelka began exhibiting and selling prints, the same man was chosen to make the prints. The man was Voja Mitrovic. Apart from being Cartier-Bresson's printer for very close to thirty years and the main printer of Koudelka's work, Voja (the "j" is pronounced like a "y") printed for, among many others, Rene Burri, the Eugene Atget archive, Sebastiao Salgado, Marc Riboud, Edouard Boubat...

...And Peter Turnley. It turns out that Voja is one of Peter's oldest friends in Paris. How they first met is a great story, but I'll let Peter tell that story himself at a later time—in fact, we'll publish a couple of posts about Voja before the print sale starts.

Voja retired in the late 1990s (Peter also has a wonderful picture of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka begging Voja not to retire, and we'll publish that here too, eventually).

The good news for us is that, as a special favor to Peter, Voja Mitrovic has agreed to make the prints for the TOP fall Collector Print sale.

Voja Mitrovic and Peter Turnley

Peter himself is a living link to the great photographers of the city. He's known or befriended a great many of the most famous names in French 20th-century photography. He started out as an assistant to the lyrical Paris photographer Robert Doisneau; he knew Cartier-Bresson, and was great friends with Edouard Boubat. Although his eye is distinctly his own, his work is very consciously part of the grand tradition of the photography of Paris.

The exact pictures we've chosen won't be revealed until the sale starts, and I'll give you all the details at a later date. The important thing to say here, now, is that the pictures represent the very best of Peter's long photographic love affair with Paris. They'll be archival fiber-based black-and-white silver prints in the standard European collector size, signed on the front by Peter and on the reverse by both Voja and Peter.

And in their own way, they'll be every bit as much of a bargain as our past sales have been—not quite as inexpensive in absolute dollars, but still very significantly less expensive than you could buy them for any other way.

We're currently planning the posts about Voja for mid-August (and you should look forward to those), and the "Peter Turnley's Paris" print sale will start sometime in the middle third of September, and run for the usual five days.

I'll keep you posted, of course.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

TOP reader Mark Muse's portrait of Benita, the subject of Patricia Dalzell's portrait that we talked about in this post. (No one has ever told me Benita's last name—maybe she has just the one, like Cher or Ctein?)

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Mark Muse: "Keller."

Previously in this series:
Part I
Part II

The other day I went to the optometrist for my final post-operation follow up. I was disappointed to discover that my vision had changed during the healing process. I knew that I would need glasses for reading since the procedure would not rectify that, however, I expected that I would not need glasses for any other purpose. Unfortunately, I am still left with a double astigmatism which keeps me from having the perfect vision that I want. There are lenses that could have been implanted that would have corrected that problem; however, my co-pay would have been $1,500 per eye. The insurance company's reasoning is that you can always continue wearing glasses.

...And so I will. While my vision is good enough to have the restriction removed from my driver’s license, it is not what I anticipated. When I saw the difference a prescription could make and the minimal expense, I chose to continue wearing glasses. Just a cautionary tale for all of you: many doctors will hint that the surgery will leave you with 20/20 vision; just be aware that your mileage may vary. Lens implantation is, regrettably, not a "magic bullet."

Chris

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by R. Edelman [responding to "se" in the comments]: "Optometrists do not perform eye surgery. They are not physicians. Cataract surgery is done by ophthalmologists. Ophthalmologists are graduates of medical school. Look for the 'MD' (Medical Doctor) or 'DO' (Doctor of Osteopathy) after their names. Ophthalmologists are physicians who specialize in the eyes and the visual sensory system.

"While I am on the topic, there are some ophthalmologists who are also very talented photographers. Off the top of my head I can think of two. One is James Brandt, M.D., who is Director of the Glaucoma Service at the University of California at Davis. Dr. Brandt's photograph of a brown pelican is featured on a United States postage stamp. The other is Howard Schatz, M.D., who was a highly regarded retina specialist before he became a highly regarded professional photographer. My apologies to all of the others that I did not mention."