circle-of-confusion.net

This week (December 1-6) both Tuesday and Thursday will be open Labs. Final critiques are at 1:45 pm on December 8 for the afternoon class, and 6:30 pm on December 9 for the evening class.

Fall Quarter has begun.

We need one or two more technicians to work in the lab. We prefer to have work study eligible students for this job, but often cannot find enough work study eligible students to fill our needs, so if you are interested in the job, please contact me, Larry Bullis, at 416-7812. It is best for the technicians to have had the course, but we often need to hire people whom we must train from scratch, so you really don’t need to have a knowledge of photography to begin with in order to do the job.

Also, we are working on the lab schedule. Please let me know your scheduling needs. I will be spending some of my own time as a lab tech, probably on Wednesday, although this quarter is going to be a little tight because I am having to move my studio. If you have a preference of hours for my time there (for example mornings/afternoons) it would be helpful if you would inform me. Lab hours are entirely dependent upon our being able to hire technicians.

Aperture Club access to the lab: See Beth Oshiro in A 32. She will give you a form which you will take to the cashier’s office. See me if you need a signature.

L.

Read London and Stone about Depth of Field.

The content is as always quite informative but, typically, lacks a bit of depth because the book is intentionally condensed. Please consider these notes:

Remember that only one plane is actually focused. Any other distance is NOT in focus. It may more or less blurred, but only the plane that is set to be focused is truly focused. Increasing the depth of field by stopping the aperture down does not increase the range of distances “in focus” but instead, it increases the range of distance that appear to be sharp. As the circle of confusion size decreases, our eyes lose the ability to distinguish between the appearance of sharpness and the sharpness at the plane of focus. Also, there is still a circle of confusion at the plane of focus; that circle of confusion is as small as it can be given the limitations of that particular lens. Some lenses are able to resolve finer detail than others.

On page 42, in the paragraph headed Focal length, it says that “Using a shorter-focal-length lens … increases depth of field at any given aperture”. This is only accurate if the image is not enlarged to a size equal to that of the larger focal length lens the short one replaces. In other words, the picture is not at all the same picture. If it is enlarged so that the objects included are the same sizes as in the image made with the longer lens, the depth of field will appear exactly the same with both lenses.

In the paragraph (also on page 42) headed Lens-to-subject distance, be aware that moving farther away from the subject does indeed increase the depth of field, but in its doing so, the picture again becomes different. If you were to change the focal length to enlarge the central part of the image, the depth of field so gained would be lost.

In the examples on page 43, the only one where the content of the image remains the same is the top one, which shows results of the aperture size. In the “Long Lens/Short Lens” and in the “Up Close/Farther Back” examples, you can’t help but see that the pictures are not at all the same.

These are areas of common confusion. Circles-of-Confusion!

Be sure that you understand the portions on pp. 44 and 45 headed Zone focusing for action and Focusing for the greatest depth of field. Those of you fortunate enough to have the older style lens mountings with the depth of field scales will need to know how to use them. Those not having those scales must understand the material just as well. You will probably wish you had an older camera. It is beyond me why manufacturers would replace such a wonderfully intuitive function with one that is virtually incomprehensible to the majority of users. As the tools become smarter and less understandable, the people using them usually just don’t use those functions. Smarter tools = Dumber users.

I have found these sites helpful for understanding the concept of depth of field and how to use the controls:

• http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm#calculator
  Here, use the image at the top, the diagram, and the image of the scale on the lens mount. Also, the example images showing greater or lesser depth.
• http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/MTF6.html#DOFsharpness
  This one has an excellent image of the depth of field scale on a normal lens of the older style.

In the illustrations below (which we will discuss further at a later date) you can see how the restriction of the aperture to a smaller diameter reduces the size of the circles of confusion in all positions except the plane of actual focus. Imagine how this would appear on film that moved forward or backward. The size of the circles of confusion would grow much more rapidly as the film moved with the larger aperture than with the smaller.

Left — Large aperture
Right — Large aperture compared with smaller Of course, when stopped down, the brightness is much diminished.

You can download the syllabus for my basic photography course at:

181/2 syllabus, out of date but not a lot has changed

It will open with Acrobat Reader.

October, 2006

Several hundred high school students from around the region showed up on campus here at Skagit Valley College. Not wishing to miss the fun, we transformed the finishing room in the photo lab in Hodson Hall into a camera obscura. Here it is. Thanks to Djinnifer Stonecastle for the great assistance in setting up, and to Erin Ralph for her presence and keeping the room up and running.

As of this quarter, so far at least, anyone can read this blog. I presume, when the word gets out, everyone will, and I am looking forward to it. The group may not be as enthusiastic about this as I am, and that’s understandable. If you have misgivings, please say so. We can negociate, and if there are disagreements, we need to discuss them.

I happen to like this a lot, because the web makes communication so easy. It used to be really hard. As an example: There are workers in archaic photo processes such as platinum, gravure, gum-bichromate prints, cyanotype, etc. These processes enjoyed a lot of popularity in the latter half of the 19th century into the 1920s and some even a bit longer. Then, they fell victim to the easy and plentiful silver-based processes that most of us know. Black and white photographs are made of clumps of silver atoms distributed within a matrix of gelatin. Color prints made through the wet processes (from film) contain no silver themselves, but the materials used in the prints depend upon the light sensitivity of silver compounds to activate the color dyes. The silver is then removed. Silver was convenient, but the older processes had other qualities which provided other visual possibilities. Some artists were attracted to these media because they found them attractive, historically fascinating, or whatever.

It must have been around 1993; I was participating in a mailing list group online called “alternative photographic processes”. This was a small group of very congenial folk who kept up a lively conversation about what they were doing. We all appreciated the opportunity to talk things over. Prior to the formation of this group, for which we had to thank the new “internet”, each of us had felt pretty isolated. We never dreamed there were so many others doing these strange and abandoned processes. People we had only known through rumor suddenly appeared and were amazingly available.

We weren’t really prepared for what was about to happen. AOL joined the internet. Suddenly, there were hundreds of people communicating on our list. They were all over the world. People in Singapore doing Bromoil? Platinum in Hong Kong? And the nature of the group changed, overnight, from a highly cooperative and congenial community, to one that was highly competitive and even hostile. Fights broke out online. People who were overly aggressive were expelled by popular vote. Sometimes it got downright nasty. On the other side, though, there were lots of people now, and they started getting together, in Bath, England, in Lisbon, Portugal, in New Mexico. It got so unpleasant that I dropped; not that it wasn’t still interesting and worthwhile, but I was too busy to give time to something that involved so much politics. I haven’t been back, but some of the old group are still there, and despite the rivalries, a lot of good has come from it. I learned a great deal from this experience. One thing I learned was how important it is to be courteous online.

So, we have here a very powerful tool, and in using it, the fact that what we do here is wide open to the view of the entire wired world must affect the way we present ourselves. It raises the stakes. When you feel inclined to post a picture of your dog, for example, it might give pause… Who’s going to see this? Well, possibly native people above the arctic circle may see it, for whom the dog, historically, has a very different meaning (even though, today, they are more likely to get around on a snowmobile).

The Bb is not a public forum. The blog, however, is public to the extent that outsiders can read it. On Flickr, people can see the images. There are no people on the Bb who are not enrolled, except that from time to time, I have former students participate. It is very helpful when they do participate because they can help direct and encourage the conversation. The way I do this is a lot of work for me, and I need all the help I can get.

I suppose that you have some company in not understanding the goals of the course even though I have stated them both in the syllabus and other documents as well as in discussion. I will try to make them more clear. As is typical with me, there will be some background to illustrate what I mean. Some of this you may find quite unfamiliar. That’s why we need it.

In the past, what has happened in this class is that people post something, as I ask them to do, and a conversation ensues which helps the students really begin to understand the point of it and helps me understand what they need. It is different every time. People generally come in with the idea that they want to “learn to take better pictures” etc., and they have no experience in looking at pictures without rules, without expecting criticism, etc. I think they expect me to tell them what “good” pictures are. I don’t know your academic background, so I don’t know what experiences you may have had; what I find these days, more and more, is that students rely on the teachers to provide them with answers, with a way to evaluate their own work and the work of others, which usually is entirely subjective and based upon criteria which are either simply improvised or drawn from the conventions that we find around us.

I am not at all interested in answers. I am interested in questions.

Students do not have any particular experience, normally, in critical thinking. They are often quite lost when they need to think for themselves. It is not their fault. In the world we are living in now, I’m afraid that despite the lip service it gets in college mission statements, etc., the ability to think critically is generally thought to be a liability, and is systematically discouraged. Employers want to have employees who do what they are told; thinking tends to get in the way. Schools think that their function is to service industry by training employees. Success is measured in most realms by the degree one is able to conform, to have a positive attitude regardless of whether it is really appropriate to have one, and not complain no matter how one is used or abused. This isn’t education. It is quite the opposite. I see this nation and the world we live in today in an extremely difficult crisis situation, and I see that the institutions are working hard to keep us from developing the capacity to deal with it at all.

This is an art course. As such, it is supposed to be in the region of what is called “creative”. “Creative” is a word that has come to be used without anyone really knowing what it means. We have tv programs that show people how to do little tricks to make a horsey with paint that looks like a horsey. This is supposed to be “creative”. There is a lot of scrap-booking, rubber stamping, tole painting, what used to be called “macrame” etc. out there, and there is nothing wrong with that. Is it really creative, or is it just recreation? (look at the words: creation; recreation). Generally speaking, people are simply copying an image that they have in the mind, that they have already seen somewhere. Maybe lots of somewheres. Maybe everywhere. This is not creative in any sense. Sure, it is enjoyable, and keeps people out of trouble, but it is generally simply going through the motions and making things that have certain highly conventionalized meanings. One may be quite proud of something that s/he has done, but if you look at the vast output of such materials across the land, it is very hard to tell what the difference might be between one and another. For the PERSON who makes it, sure, because of the subject matter, but it fails to communicate. Art communicates, and at best, touches upon universals.

Photography. Good pictures. People want to “take good pictures”. Well, I have worked in color labs as a printer, and a lot of “good pictures” come through. Millions. Very rarely does one stand out in any way whatsoever. They repeat over and over the same cliche’s. People are proud of them but Holy Moly! The sense I used to have when a bit discouraged was that we could simply back the processor up to the landfill and pump miles and miles of prints right out there. That would take care of the intent of the industry. Once in a while, there would be something that was a bit unusual for some reason. Seldom.

The entire field is driven by the economic factors; Kodak literally encourages waste. I will, one of these days, write a story about that as a blog page. I have one that pretty much lays it out. The manufacturers of equipment and materials, make no mistake about it, have no interest in your doing work that has any merit. They would just as well see you all photograph the very same dog ten million times a day. They are interested solely in the money you spend. This is the story of photography at least since George Eastman introduced the original roll film camera in 1888 under the marketing slogan “You push the button, we do the rest”.

In a writing course, one would expect to be encouraged, I hope, to perform original work. In writing, one needs a pencil and paper, at least. There is not as much promotion of uniform mediocrity as there is in photography, where people think that the more expensive equipment they have, the better the photographs they will make. Thus, making a photograph tends to be seen as a mechanical function, technical, dependent upon knowledge and cleverness. I hope we can get past that.

——————————————–

When I began teaching this course, I tried to teach it with a strong dimension of design and working with the editing software. I quickly ran into a problem. I could see that what was coming out was the kind of thing that we see around us all the time. I should say, instead, that it was the kind of things that we don’t see. We are blind to them. They are imprinted upon our psyches so deeply that they “R” us. And what are they? Mostly advertising knockoffs, with some scenic calendar images thrown in. Pictures of dogs. Snapshots. I very soon learned that MY STUDENTS CAN’T SEE!

I studied with some remarkable teachers; one, Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College, gave us an assignment to go to the Portland Art Museum and see a very old wooden horse sculpture from around 700 AD. We were to write a paper about it. We did. Lloyd came in the following week and bellowed (he could be pretty darned gruff, but he was a sweetheart underneath): These Papers are Terrible! Go back down there and JUST LOOK AT IT! Well, you can imagine. Everyone was trying to snow him with highfalutin analysis, big art-official-critical words, and he wasn’t buying it. He encouraged us to look at art, or anything else, for that matter, with what he called “serene, open awareness”. By the way, Lloyd was largely responsible, though he didn’t know it, for the wonderful typefaces we have on our computers. He was a calligrapher, and had brought the Italic hand from the Renaissance into the 20th Century. Steve Jobs studied with him, as did Peter Norton (Peter is a very accomplished calligrapher, as well as software genius). Other students of his are the originators of the Lucida typefaces, Apple Chancery and other Apple typefaces, and many, many others. He taught us to see the spaces around the letters, the shapes of the spaces between the letters, proportion and legibility. He didn’t dwell so much on “good” or “bad”. He dwelt upon how well the type does the job it is there to do.

That is art.

Then, I met Minor White and worked with him very closely for a couple of years. Minor, for those who don’t know, was a legendary photographer and teacher. He didn’t tell us how to make “good” pictures. Instead, he encouraged us to let the picture find us. We looked at images that were placed on music stands in a state of heightened concentration. It was pretty much the same thing that Lloyd had us doing. The message was very clear; people go around looking for “good” pictures, but they can’t SEE. They are generally looking for something to click into a template in the brain. Oh, there is a “scenic”. I want to do a “nude”. I want to get a “wildlife” picture.

There is nothing at all wrong with “collecting” as he called it, and people just starting out do collect images that fit the familiar catagories. However, I don’t think that it is a suitable subject for a college course. I want my students to be able to SEE. In order to see, they must break through the conventions to see the contents of the cave. The walls, the darkness, the glorious labyrinth of textures. If they can’t, they see only the inside of the envelope that they bring with them; they see only what the coleman lantern lights up. It is gray and boring. They see the same misery that they have left at home. It is a habit; a habit of keeping things out. Of not being open. We are all like that. I’m like that, too. If there is a difference, it is that I’m fascinated with it, and study it. I study my own unawareness. And I study the unawareness of others, because in theirs, I can better understand my own.

I don’t know why it took so long for me to recognize that my own students, somehow, couldn’t see, but it did; I think I wanted very much for them to be different from that. That was my own blindness. Well, a while back, I happened to ask “What is Real?”, and the answer I got amazed me. “We get to make up what is real for us”. “Is war real?” I asked. “Yes, war is real. It is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Well, blow me away! That is truly bizarre. Orrin (who, by the way, is not contributing now because his internet connection is impossible, his camera doesn’t work any more, and he is too busy shooting at people with something that isn’t a camera — he and I will decide later how to deal with it but it certainly isn’t working over there in Afghanistan) — is fighting in a war, and he knows what a war is. Death, bondage, and misery is more like it. Why do we see things so utterly backwards?

Well, I know about that, too. I was a whistleblower, and I saw how vigorously people push their heads into the sand to keep from seeing the obvious, how they will lie under oath and testify falsely in order to pretend that nothing is wrong.

—————————————————————

So, Goals:

1) SEEING, and 2) CRITICAL THINKING.

These relate to what is real, to ones’ capacity to see clearly, think clearly, and understand the world. It is a fabulous opportunity for photography — a great tool for discovery — and now that we have digital imaging, the technique is at our convenience. So, use it.

and 3) ART AS PROCESS.

“Taking pictures” — there is something materialistic about that, isn’t there? We have a lot of pictures, we are rich in pictures. Pictures as things, as nouns. Art is a commodity for the market, the galleries. My wife and I just noticed at the Edison Eye gallery that Joel Brock, who usually sells his stuff really quickly, he’s so popular — has not been able to sell his new painting made specially for this show. The painting is called “Fat Skunk”. Joel makes these beautiful soft landscapes, that people just are wild over; he’s a very successful artist. His wife and his friends have been encouraging him to take some risks and do things that are a bit different than his “signature” work. So, he’s been doing some still lifes, and other things sort of unusual for him. We bought a glorious halibut painting and also one of a swallow, drunk, on the ground, clutching a fermented berry (birds get drunk on them, quite common). We love these. “Fat Skunk” shows a skunk eating what appears to be a chicken. Joel and his family have chickens. I’m sure it was taken from life.

So what? Well, Joel’s work is high commodity for Lisa Harris Gallery, and he sells everything he can paint, and his prices are going up, fast. He’s great. But, his “commodified” work sells, what people see as a “Joel Brock”. When he does something that is out of his mold (which he does because he is really a process artist; he’s always growing), people don’t buy. They want what is familiar. They won’t buy “Fat Skunk”. It doesn’t look like “Joel Brock”.

So, this third goal is to introduce ART AS PROCESS and counteract the idea that photography is just “picture taking”. I wish to encourage a continuous flow of work, and also, to encourage working on pieces through a series of actions, which the digital medium does so wonderfully well.

Maybe you can see what is going on here. I am not teaching the “subject matter” of the course as much as I am the process of the work. The outcome is not as important as the doing of it.

Have you noticed that I don’t often express judgments? This is because I want to take everything as it is, and when appropriate talk about what it does; how does this, or that, function? What the work DOES has nothing whatever to do with what you ARE, and certainly not with how good or how bad you are. That was the point of the business of putting the subject directly in the center as people tend to do. You see, our eyes isolate, but a picture is a surface, or a field.

To judge a work is to apply a standard to it; standards don’t exist in reality, they express conventions. They are imposed upon our brains by the culture we live in. I would rather just LOOK AT IT. Oddly, it seems to me that people must be afraid I’m going to be critical of them. Fat Skunk. Ooops, I mean FAT CHANCE. I guess I am critical when you leave the data thing on and the date appears in the picture. Sorry, I’ll try to be more accepting.

Now, to bring it back to the present circumstances:

My teaching is not didactic, it is discursive. This is unusual in today’s world. I will not tell you what to believe, but I want to know what you see. I even told you all that, in the syllabus.

I can’t teach discursively, which is what works for me, if nobody will discurse! I mean, discuss! If this is to work, we all have to BE THERE! BE THERE! BE THERE!

Is that too much to ask?

I’ve actually lowered the high white some. See how the curve is steepest in the shadow areas, stretching the tones there. The middle tones are elevated considerably, and the slope of the curve in the highlights is “flatter”. It is important not to allow the highlights to go higher.

High Divide 4 B, originally uploaded by Rachel Mattern.

Improvement? I played around with brightness, hue, saturation, and the histogram and came up with these two images. What does everyone think?