#603. The Monday Post (05 June 2017) – Fast-photo

jean pierre (pete) guaron says:

Sigh – the international clock has given me the poll position on Comments, once again. When I’m behaving, I deliberately put DS aside for several days, to give the rest of the readers a chance to get in first. But no matter – the prize I win, each time, is that my comments disappear down to the bottom and are never seen again – buried alive by more erudite comments from everyone else.

So – for what it’s worth – I’ve just snuck through France with my wife and, as Pascal can tell you, come home with a small piece of France in my pocket. My wife shoots on a totally automatic Olympus god-knows-what, it’s too old to be any catalogues any longer, and I imagine the sensor is about 3/4 of an MP, the colour gamut is deplorable, and she dumps the task of PP on me, when we return from one of these outings.

I, on the other hand, am a died-in-the-wool (LOL – very Australian, that description!) incurable impenitent MF DD, shooting FF with fixed focal length Otuses because I love the accuracy of the tonal range. Occasionally while at home, I fool around with a Canon PowerShot, which does NOT have an equally accurate tonal range, but makes up for it in the shots I use it for, with a slightly richer colour gamut.

Then comes PP. And here there’s one of those Mars/Venus divides, between us.

These days, shooting FF/RAW/MF/Otus, PP is usually perfunctory. “She” has a hangup about wrinkles, so shots of my wife get a bit of “treatment” in PS. Mostly, the biggest “fixes” I need to make are fine tuning the horizon line, fixing verticals on buildings etc in DxO ViewPoint and some cropping. Occasionally, when I have been pushing my luck, I need to get in there and lighten something in a particular shot – sometimes I use LR/PS to convert a couple of shots into a panorama – and if I take a particular dislike to some of the stage prop human figures or whatever, I remove them. But PP is no longer a chore.

Until the shots from the Olympus turn up. That said, I love my wife – we met at a time when we were on opposite sides of the fence, in business – became “best friends” – and then I discovered I had fallen in love with my best friend, so we shot across to France and married in Paris, with the wedding photos using the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadero Fountain as the backdrop. I used my one free “un-destination exemption card” for that, because in the circumstances I found it impossible to resist using tourist icons as stage props in all the photos.

So I roll up my shirt sleeves, turn on the computer, the EIZO monitor, and the full range of PP software, to convert pigs ears into silk purses, and make “photos” out of the material that downloads from the Olympus. While you all tear this topic apart, I am facing months of YIN and YANG, of PP-free output from my gear and PP-drowning-up-to-the-eyeballs output from her beloved Olympus. Which I do willingly and cheerfully, without complaining – because I love her so much, nothing is too much trouble. If it was me and they were my photos, I am damned if I’d do it – I’d leave the camera responsible for it in a St Vincent de Paul bin for the less fortunate and go get a decent camera, instead.

There is one PS to all of this rant. It is ONLY when you print your photos that you really see them for what they are. You can do whatever you like on a screen – but the light transmission characteristics of every screen you do it on will differ from every other screen on the planet. When you finish PP or whatever, and ship your work around the net, or email or SMS it to your friends or great-aunt Matilde, the screens on which it is viewed by the next person will likely differ markedly from what you imagine you were sending, and sometimes the difference is so great that it’s a complete waste of time. Plus one – if the disc drive goes, or technology changes mean you can’t open the files you created 10 years back, you get the chance to start over, with NO photos at all.

Had you printed them, none of the previous paragraph has any further relevance. So I have added printing all my photos to my job description as a DD – at my age it is far simpler to retain my status as a dinosaur than pole vault into the murky world inhabited by people brandishing cellphones on telescopic selfie sticks, and stand around photographing themselves when, if they looked over their should, they would have found something like the Taj Mahal bathed in the pink light of a rich sunset, that they could have photographed instead – and leaning against a lamp post tapping SMS’s to people they are no longer capable of talking to because they spend their entire lives tapping SMS’s to people they never speak to – or straying in front of traffic, doing the same thing – producing zillions of “photographs” that never emerge from their eerie electronic universe, never see the light of day, and will cease to exist in a few years time (like 5 inch floppy discs did – and 3.5 inch floppies – and 8 track tapes – and VHS – and now, seemingly, CDs). So that in another 50 years, there will be almost no surviving record of civilization in western countries, for the first time in the whole of human history.

When I finish breakfast tomorrow, I’m off to my camera store for more ink and paper. 🙂

Philippe Berend says:

Steffen, John, my intent wasn’t that “goodPP is fast PP”. Merely that that is the growing trend. And that, like AF today dwarfs MF, auto-PP (amusingly the acronym is APP) could soon dwarf MPP…. In my case, I am one of the DDs i refer to (Diehard Dinosaur), so I am a lost cause…:-)