“I bought it for the frame”

DO YOU THINK that your photography is good? Do other people — people that aren't your friends or family  — think that it is good? How would you feel if one of your photographs found its way into a junk shop or a flea market, and someone purchased it only because of its frame?

Ultimately, we must be humble enough to realize that no matter how much artistic vision and effort we put into something, a buyer simply might like our photograph only because it is nicely framed.

When I did a Google search for the phrase “I bought it for the frame,” I got over ten million search results, with many people telling of some print or painting they found at a junk shop, but which they discarded, simply because they liked the frame. Now we mustn't jump to the conclusion that the frame-buyers are ignorant, tasteless philistines. Perhaps your photograph isn't all that good. Perhaps the frame is really good. [NOTICE: I must admit to having a bit of anxiety whenever I go to a book fair or used book store, thinking that I might find one of my own books being sold cheap.]

Apparently, according to the same Google search, lots of people also buy bicycles only for their frame. They plan to strip the frame of all the seemingly more critically important stuff that actually makes the bicycle work, such as the wheels, gears, and chain. Certainly these working components are more important than the frame? Doesn't the frame just sit there? The answer is that in many respects these components are more important, and the components that just happen to be attached to the frame may not be all that good or fitting for the purchaser. The brakes and tires on a bicycle become gradually worn with use and slowly become less effective over time, and a bicycle rider can choose to replace them whenever it is convenient. But a bicycle frame must be perfectly durable, and it must not ever fail during use, for it cannot be repaired in the field: a frame does not slowly lose its functionality over time, for the welded joints on a frame are either rigid or are broken with no significant intermediate state. A frame, of course, can be repainted as needed.

So what kind of framed photograph would be more valuable to most any given person: an excellent portrait of someone else's child, or a cheap snapshot of their own child? We ought to realize that prints and paintings are more important than a frame, but they tend to be more personally important. If someone buys a framed print at a flea market and then discards the original print, that is because their print is more important than the original. Likewise, someone may purchase a used bicycle, but they might replace the seat for one that is more comfortable for them; they might replace the brakes because they are worn, but if the frame isn't good, they won't buy the bicycle.

A photograph or painting may be chosen because of a particular style of a room, or because of a particular mood expressed, or its use of particular coordinating colors. The subject matter may spark the imagination of the buyer, or the subject may invoke particular memories or devotions. An image may be discarded because it no longer fits the decor of the room, or it may invoke unpleasant memories: maybe it is faded or worn, or it is no longer interesting, or it is out of style.

Now, there are some artists, particularly in the past, who strove to make images that have a more universal, timeless character, that expressed objective beauty and the sublime. This is rare today because modernity rejects the eternal and universal in favor of that which is transitory and cheap. This means, perhaps, that contemporary works are more prone to being quickly discarded.

People may buy a print because of its frame, but the frame is not bought for its own sake, no matter how well it is made or decorated, but because it is ultimately intended to enclose a print or a painting. I know of no museum or gallery that is dedicated to the presentation of frames as objects of art (although this might be an exception), but there are vast numbers of merchants — including art galleries — that sell frames in a wide variety, and the cost of these frames may equal or exceed the cost of the image that is presented within it.

Frames are works of art in themselves (as is anything intentionally well-made by man's intellect), but their purpose is mainly in relationship to the fine art contained within them. The word ‘fine’ in ‘fine art’ is related to Aristotle's understanding of the “final cause” or ultimate purpose of a thing. The final cause of a frame is to support, display, protect, enhance, and delineate the work of art contained within it, as well as provide a visual transition between the work of art and its location. The buck stops at the image contained in the frame, as it is the final cause of the art: the job of art is complete and the viewer's job of looking at the image begins. But this does not mean that the frame is unimportant, for it has important functions, but it is subservient to those things, the images, which are greater. Even though we have differing opinions on what makes a good print or painting, we should not be surprised that most of us would largely agree on what what makes a good frame, for frames have a more definite purpose.

Getting a good understanding of composition is difficult, because it involves human psychology. The many proposed rules of composition seem to rest on shaky theoretical ground, and many of the supposed examples of the use of the rules are unconvincing. However, one element of composition is concrete and objective, that being the framing or the specific crop of the image. See the article Composition, Part 1 - the Frame for a more in-depth discussion of this. The objective framing of an image, due to a specific crop, can be be a powerful tool of composition if used well, and bad framing can certainly harm an image.

As the vast majority of images are rectangles, this suggests the good use of harmonic proportions between the length and width of the image with the proportions of the matting and size of the frame. The common standard print, matte, and frame sizes do express proportions that harmonize well with each other. Attempts at making custom frames and mattes for a non-standard print size will generally be expensive and error-prone. Custom sizes may also look awkward if the maker does not apply the mathematics of proportion ahead of time: for example, it may be possible to harmonize an image with a large aspect ratio within a frame with a smaller aspect ratio if the margins or matting are well-chosen, but if the ratios are not chosen well, the final object may look ridiculous, cheap, or inartistic.

For all these reasons, I think that it would be prudent if photographers give serious consideration to framing, since, after all, nearly every print that will be displayed on a wall needs a frame, and for the simple fact that a purchaser may buy your print because they like its frame.

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Ancient Wisdom about Photography

SOME PHILOSOPHY, often paradoxical, for your enjoyment…

A bad camera can be the best tool for making a good photographer.

The best photographers can make the best photographs with even poor cameras. For this reason, the best photographers use the best cameras.

A poor photographer blames his camera; a good photographer blames himself. For this reason, good photographers use cameras they cannot blame.

Many good photographs are due to luck. Good photographers are luckier than poor ones.

You must not care what master photographers think of your photography, for they are prone to envy. You achieve this by carefully following the advice of master photographers.

Any person with minimal aptitude can become a good photographer if they spend thousands of hours learning. Some people have a natural talent for photography; they develop this talent by spending thousands of hours learning.

If you desire to be creative above all else, then your photographs will have a boring sameness. Do what has been done thousands of times before, but strive to do it better, then you will find yourself to be creative.

A bird song may be pretty, but the song is not art. Find inspiration in the work of the masters, but strive to be a master in your own right.

The business of photography is not the art of photography, for the art of selling a photograph is different from the art of making a photograph.

You have mastered photography when it is graceful, effortless, and joyful. Your tools ought to appear to be a natural extension of yourself.

Cameras change and technologies change, but art never changes, for art is inside and flows from above.

Being a good photographer does not mean that you are a good person. It simply means that your photographs are good.
—

[Post-processing is the work done on digital images using a computer image processing program such as Photoshop; also, this will include traditional darkroom work for photographic film.]

All photographs are post-processed; one just has to understand the meaning of post-processing.

If you capture a good image in the camera, then that image needs no post-processing. In order to do good post-processing, you need to capture a good image in the camera.

To master photography, you must master post-processing. You have mastered post-processing when it appears as if you did not use post-processing.

You must master Photoshop by mastering its functions. You master Photoshop’s functions by never using most of them. Likewise, the worst Photoshop books are those that explain all of its functions, and the best are those that explain only a few.

In order to post-process a photograph of a subject, you must bring out the subjectness that the photograph failed to capture.

To sharpen a photograph in Photoshop, you should not use the Sharpen function, but rather use the Unsharp function.

To achieve utter freedom and creativity in post-processing, you must enslave yourself to the logic and mathematics underlying post-processing.

The sRGB color space is worst color space because it represents the narrowest range of colors of any standard RGB color space. For this reason, sRGB is the best color space to use in post processing.

Do not trust your eyes, for they deceive you, and so you must measure the color numbers to ensure that they are good. But you must trust your eyes, for if the image does not look good, then the color numbers must not be good.

You must spend thousands of hours post-processing images in order to post-process images quickly.

If you must ask if Photoshop is the right post processing software for you, then Photoshop is the wrong software for you.

Composition in Landscapes and the Photography of Marcin Sobas

SOME INSPIRATIONAL LANDSCAPE photography, from Polish photographer Marcin Sobas, can be found here.

Ruins by Marcin Sobas

Sobas has lately gained a lot of positive attention for his remarkable landscapes of Moravia and Tuscany.

A while back, I made an effort to learn why some landscape photography has great appeal, and I attempted to identify the common characteristics of great landscape images. Now, there is no end to advice that can be found on the subject of landscapes, but I desire to discover those characteristics that are more certain and definite. Some of my observations can be found in the article Composition, Part 2 - Composition and Subject in Landscape Photography.

From my analysis of highly-regarded landscape images, I found some characteristics that nearly all of them share. These ought not be considered unbreakable rules, nor should this list be considered exhaustive, for they are not the only things that photographers consider; rather this is simply what I saw, and there could be great landscapes that are otherwise.

1. Almost by definition, a landscape ought to have a superhuman scale. Good landscapes depict scenes that dwarf the human person, and so have the characteristic of sublimity. The sublime describes “a sense of awe, grandeur, or greatness, something that is lofty to an extreme degree, so much so that it dwarfs the human person in insignificance.” See the article On the Sublime for more details. A sublime scene may or may not be a beautiful scene, but it certainly has to be big, and Sobas’ images show rather big scenes that are sublime and beautiful.

Imagine taking a photograph of a small garden; the flowers may be beautiful, but the scene will likely lack sublimity, because the garden is of human scale. This problem of scale concerned the designers of the Victorian-era Tower Grove Park in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, and they knew that the sublime would not be possible in their park. The results are pretty, but not lofty, as I show in the article here.

2. Unusual use of lenses can make for better landscape photos. Beginning landscape photographers often desire ultra-wide angle lenses so as to “get the whole scene in.” But consider that wide angle lenses not only get in the whole scene, but at the same time they make distant objects recede in size and scale, taking away the impression of sublimity. Wide angle lenses instead emphasize the foreground, which may include objects of a more human scale, while reducing the grand vistas of the background.

Instead, Sobas often uses a telephoto lens, a Canon 70-200mm f/4 L-series lens, which gives a horizontal angle of view of 18.2 to 6.4 degrees on his Canon 40D camera. This narrow angle of view provides foreshortening — making distant objects appear closer to each other — as we see with the hills in the photograph above. The use of a telephoto exaggerates the vertical dimension at the expense of perceived depth. Would the scenes have appeared as sublime if he had stood closer, and had used a wide-angle lens?

You may, however, consider the final size of your image and how close you will view it: if you are creating a panorama that will cover the wall of a room, then small detail becomes more prominent, and so a wider angle of view may not decrease the impression of sublimity.

Also note that Sobas often uses a high camera angle. Instead of just seeing one line of ridges, we can see multiple lines of ridges and hilltops, one behind the other, which increases the grandeur of the scenes.

3. Good landscapes are almost always taken around sunrise or sunset, or at night. I’m not saying that good landscapes can’t be taken at midday, I’m just saying that they typically aren’t. The lighting angle during the extremities of the day is low, and so shadows thrown are long, and serve to model the undulating terrain. In this way, early or late landscape photography is like using Rembrandt lighting for portraiture, which models the human face with shadow. Harsh lighting, like we find at midday, will often underexpose shadows or overexpose highlights; on the contrary, with the sun at a low angle, the sky acts as a great fill-in light. The attenuated orange light from the sun provides a good contrasting color with the blue of the sky, giving us far more color during the preferred times of day.

Autumn ... by Marcin Sobas

According to this interview, Sobas prefers cloudless mornings for his shooting. I’ve noticed that while sunsets are often pretty, the sky at sunrise is usually dull, but this makes for a better, more uniform light for this kind of work.

4. Unusual weather can help improve a landscape photo. Dramatic stormy skies and snow on the ground can turn an ordinary landscape into something more special. Sorbas likes foggy mornings to make his photos more interesting:

Rays by Marcin Sobas

He recommends getting some knowledge of weather so as to predict the best times for taking photos. The Lawrenceville Weather website includes a fog forecast map for the lower 48 United States; I refer to this map frequently to find interesting shooting conditions. Also of use is The Photographer's Ephemeris, an application that calculates the angle of the sun; this can help to predict the direction of shadows, which may lead to better compositions.

5. Good landscapes usually have a full range of tones or color. Sobas subtly post-processes his images, and the final results do have a broad range of tones. The simple use of the levels tool, and saturation or vibrance — not done too strongly — can enhance a landscape photo without making it look overprocessed. Choosing the right subject, exposure, white balance, time of day, time of year, and weather conditions all contribute to getting good color.

6. Good landscapes typically have a unity and harmony, and avoid distracting details. A certain measure of abstraction works well. Again, many of Sorbos’images are so abstract that they, at first glance, appear to be paintings, but instead they are almost undoubtedly straight camera images with some mild postprocessing.

This is perhaps the most difficult part of landscape photography: what subject, what camera position, and what lens and cropping best suit the image? A good photographer ought to be able to view a scene, taking in both the subject as well as potentially distracting elements, instead of merely doing the same back home on the computer. Especially when an image is to be displayed at a small size on a computer screen, a large measure of abstraction is needed, more so than if the final image is larger.

7. Remember that photographs are made to be viewed by human beings, and adding a bit of human interest to an image may make a photograph more interesting to your viewers. Having a human in a landscape can draw attention to it, and in the best examples, can transform an ordinary landscape photograph into a dreamscape, deepening its emotional impact. From what I've seen, Sobas does not often include humans in his photos, but we do see buildings, boats, roads, and sometimes animals. I might add that most or all of these images depict landscapes that have been heavily altered by humans, perhaps over thousands of years, but in a harmonious way, and so they have an organic look to them.

8. Good landscape photos are usually made with good equipment and good technique. Because landscapes may not be as intrinsically interesting as a human figure, it takes extra effort to attract the eye. Journalistic style images can be rough, and that does not distract from them; indeed, a rough image may have a feeling of immediacy about it. Landscapes, on the other hand, are more timeless, and seem to call for more perfection.

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There are any number of rules or principles used in landscape painting and photography, and the brief list above are merely my observations of what most good landscapes definitely seem to share. I haven’t mentioned commonly-cited principles such as the use of diagonals, leading lines, the rule of thirds, balance, avoiding subjects leaving the scene, the use of S curves, having a definite center of attention, and so forth, simply because these principles, in my mind, aren’t certain, or perhaps I simply don’t understand them well enough. Human psychology is complex, but some things are more certain than others; getting the basics right is more important than the subtleties. After knowledge, experience, and inspiration, comes more perfection.

Sensor Size and the Total Quantity of Light

IT IS SOMETIMES SURPRISING that even inexpensive cameras can take good quality images in the bright mid-day sun. I've seen many photos from cell-phones and from ridiculously cheap point-and-shoot cameras that have more than adequate image quality. Maybe these images aren't particularly optically sharp, but even low-end cameras can produce images in full sunlight that have a low amount of digital noise. They are “good enough.”

But one of the overarching rules of thumb in photography is that the larger the sensor size (or film size), generally speaking, the better the image quality of the final photograph. A bigger sensor makes it easier to have a lower noise image, a bigger sensor makes it easier to make matching quality optics, a bigger sensor makes it easier (up to a point) to make an ergonomic camera, and so forth. Now, I'm not saying that quality photos can’t be taken with a tiny image sensor, rather, it is easier to take an image with higher technical image quality by using a larger sensor. See the article One Easy Rule for Quality Images for more details.



A comparison of camera sensor sizes. [Source and attribution]

As noted, even low-end digital cameras can produce good images in broad daylight. The problem is that their image quality tends to sharply decline as the light gets dimmer. These cameras, taking photos under dim incandescent lighting, produce images that are a noisy mess, with terrible color rendition and digital grain ruining the sharpness of the image. Now, perhaps a tripod could help, but certainly these kinds of cameras are very disappointing for hand-held images.

Our eyesight doesn’t work as we might naïvely think. One scene, which to our eyes appears to be slightly dimmer than another, might in fact have half of the total amount of light falling on it. Likewise, a scene that appears to be only somewhat brighter than another might in reality be twice as bright.  In particular, where I live, in the mid-lattitudes of the northern hemisphere, we get to enjoy long periods of dusk in mid-summer; the fading daylight seems to last for hours, until we finally notice that it is very dark out. Our eyes valiantly attempt to see in the dimming light, until the laws of physics and biology finally conspire against our vision, and we are plunged into darkness. Our eyes attempt to flatten out the huge range of brightness that we experience.

A hazy day may be objectively half as bright as a sunny day, although it certainly seems to be only slightly dimmer. A cloudy day may be one fourth as bright, while an overcast day may be one eighth as bright. At sunset, it may be one sixteenth as bright as a bright sunny day, and a bright day may be thirty two times as bright as what we find at dusk. On ground covered with snow or white sand, a scene may be twice as bright as what we are accustomed to, and there is a real risk of contracting snow blindness due to the excessive amount of light.

Cameras, like eyes, are designed to work over a large range of brightness. Camera lenses have adjustable apertures to vary the amount of light hitting the sensor, and the shutter speed can be varied over a large ranges of values. The sensors also have varying amounts of sensitivity to light. But a sensor with twice the surface area of another collects twice the total amount of light, and we could assume (all things otherwise being equal) that it can operate similarly in light that is half as bright.

Now I've taken decent photos in dark places with a cheap point-and-shoot camera, but that was only when the camera was sitting on a tripod and its shutter was open for a long time. I certainly could not hand-hold the camera and expect to get anything else except digital noise. However, I can and do often take fairly decent hand-held shots at dusk with my Nikon DSLR. The major difference between these two cameras is simply the size of the sensor: the Nikon lets in a far larger total amount of light.



Same scene taken with a newer cell phone camera on top, and an older DSLR camera on the bottom.

We know that cheap point-and-shoot cameras, selling for less than US$50, and having tiny sensors, can take good images in broad daylight with little digital noise. Let us take this quality as our baseline, and determine what size of a sensor we need if we want to take images of similar quality and with similar camera settings under dimmer lighting. This table shows standard digital sensor sizes, along with the lighting conditions that would be equivalent to typical cell phone cameras in bright daylight:

Sensor size	Use	Sensor area in square millimeters	Lighting condition
1/4”	Cell phones and toy digital cameras.	7.68	Bright daylight
1/3.2”	Premium cell phone cameras.	15.5	Hazy sunlight
1/2.3”	Compact digital cameras.	28	Cloudy bright
1/1.7”	Premium compact cameras.	43	Light overcast
2/3”	Some bridge cameras.	58	Heavy overcast
CX or 1”	Nikon 1 series.	116	Sunset
Micro 4/3rds	Olympus and Panasonic mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras.	225	Dusk
APS-C	Most Nikon, Pentax, and Sony DSLRs; lower-end Canon sensors are slightly smaller at 329 square mm. Also found in some premium rangefinder cameras.	370	Indoor sports, stage shows
35mm, “Full frame”	High-end cameras from Nikon, Pentax, Sony, Canon, and Leica.	864	Bright street lighting at night

A camera sensor that has twice the surface area ought to produce an image with a similar amount of digital noise when the lighting is half as bright, all things else being equal. Certainly there are more factors involved, but sensor size is one of the most significant when it comes to image noise.

Photojournalists tend to use the cameras near the bottom of the list, especially if they need to capture a scene in dim lighting without the use of a flash. Note that the Micro 4/3rds cameras are fairly close in sensor size to the APS-C sized cameras, and their discrete size and noiseless operation make them viable for some work under dim lighting. Manufacturers have recently been putting the larger APS-C and 35mm sensors into compact cameras, which many photographers find highly desirable.

For more information, along with some of the data I used to make the table above, see these Wikipedia articles:

• Image sensor format
• Exposure value

“Clayton, Missouri: An Urban Story”

The latest book of my photography can now be pre-ordered here.

Two-Color (Or One-Axis) Color Systems

RESEARCH INTO COLOR motion pictures started soon after cinematography itself was invented in the late 19^th century. While color photography at that time was already well-established in the laboratory and by intrepid amateurs, cinema had its own problems, notably the need to project multiple frames per second in order to give the illusion of motion.

The main method of making color photographs was suggested in 1855 by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. By exposing three photographic plates separately through red, green, and blue filters, and then projecting those images, overlapping, through the same filters, would then produce a color image on a screen. Or the same images could be printed on paper using various colored inks.

The main problem was determining how to do the same thing with cinematography. Any method devised would have to be visually impressive, relatively inexpensive, and would have to be extremely reliable, especially during projection at the theater. Using three cameras with three color filters was out of the question, due to parallax problems, and worse was the great expense and difficulty of aligning three separate projectors.

Compromises had to be made, and one such compromise was using only two colors: some color, perhaps, is better than no color. Film stock is transparent and has two sides, and many methods were devised so that one side would be sensitive to one range of colors, with the other side being sensitive to another range of colors. The film would be developed, producing an image on both sides, which were then dyed to the appropriate colors. The film could then be projected through standard projectors with no additional equipment needed. Surprisingly, very many films were created with the two-color method, starting in 1908, becoming common in the 1920s, and this was still used until the 1950s. But few of these color films remain with us today, and many of those survivors are now only available in monochrome versions specially made for early television.

While the two-color method died out in favor of three-color cinematography, by no means should we think that these kinds of methods are completely obsolete, being only temporary solutions limited to a particular place and time in history. Instead, I think that these methods, reinvented with digital technology, are interesting in their own right and can be used by contemporary photographers for artistic purpose. My related research on imitating Autochrome, an early color photographic process with a more limited color palette than is now standard, can be found here.