Man oh man, things are changing! Hard to imagine what will come in five or ten years as there has been so much in the past five or ten. December 2003, ten years ago? Think where photography was. We didn't even have digital capture that was very good yet. I was working in a hybrid way 100%: shooting film (either 120mm or 8 x 10 inches), developing the black and white negatives myself and sending the color out to be processed, scanning the negatives and making my own inkjet prints. I  believe I was printing on my first 44 inch inkjet printer by then: an Epson 9600. A pretty good printer but a far cry from where we are now. I remember we were having  discussions (and arguments) about metamerism, print longevity and pigment verses dye inks. We were also having real issues with color profiles as they were unreliable from paper manufacturers and the papers themselves were all over the place due to batch inconsistencies.

Of course, we now think of inkjet printing as being a mature technology. There are a great range of papers of different qualities and surfaces, inks are very stable, and prints can be truly lustrous and detailed. In 2003 most black and white inkjet prints were terrible and we were in the era of printers set up to just print black and white with dedicated ink sets. OMG! About then I took a summer workshop at Cone Editions Press in Vermont to learn to use his system of printing black and white with inks he and his team had developed. Good prints from a painful process. Now I often print my black and white imagery as RGB files with no color cast at all.

But on the shooting end, real change is right around the corner as it is looking like the concept of big camera for best image is going to go away soon. The sooner the better as far as I am concerned. Sony is looking like the company for innovation as the new Sony A7r has set the industry buzzing. A smaller camera with a very large sensor (at 36 mp) this flies in the face of conventional wisdom that says a camera with a large file size has to be big and heavy. Not so. Indeed, for most with no need to make really big prints, a 36 mp large sensor camera is overkill. Sony thought so too as it made mostly the same camera, called the A7, with a 24 mp sensor. Cheaper too.  Smart. But think twice about rushing out to buy one of these as Sony came out with the cameras before making many lenses to fit them. That should improve over 2014.

Any other big changes in photography? I thought you'd never ask. Big changes are afoot in image processing and perhaps have been for a while now. It's not clear that Photoshop reigns supreme anymore. Old style digital: shoot RAW, load the file into Camera Raw, convert the file to a TIFF, load it into Photoshop, work the file using layers and smart objects and output it through Adobe and printer drivers. New style digital workflow: load the RAW file into Lightroom or Aperture, color correct and adjust contrast, work the file in some plug-in like On One's Perfect Enhance or Nik's Viveza 2, finish up with Nik's Perfect Sharpener and then export the file to Photoshop for final sizing, then, optionally,  to a RIP like Colorbyte's Image Print for output. Sounds more complicated but it isn't really and it sure beats bloated files with 20 or more layers. Plus the process never touches the original. Coming next? More automation, less hands on, picking the image you want from a menu of thumbnails that give you the look you want and avoid the heavy lifting. That isn't exactly my idea of paradise, having some software company determine how my image is going to look. But, so far at least, all those canned looks are flexible with sliders that control how much, how contrasty, how much color is added, etc. 

Confused about formats? It is a very confusing time. Michael Reichmann works at trying to clarify the issue and weighs in on large verses smaller sensors at: Luminous Landscape.

Good luck.

This post will delve into teaching a little but more into the politics behind teaching different disciplines in one department in a university. Prepare for intrigue, mystery, subterfuge and even back stabbing (metaphorically speaking, of course).

Put a picture next to a picture and all of a sudden you are making a comparative statement. In adding more than two you are diminishing the importance of each picture a little bit with each added picture. Frustrated with a single picture as a print on a piece of paper? Grids are your answer. But keep in mind that a grid forms a pattern and patterns very quickly reduce the importance of your individual pictures to a graphic. Add type to your pictures and all of a sudden you are in the design business. I learned this very quickly when I played with placing a title on the same big print where I'd made a grid. What had I just done? Made a poster.

What are the implications of this? I had just stepped into a very different discipline. Posters are not a photographer's domain. As an artist/photographer I deal with design every day in my work but have no training in combining type with an image. This is what graphic designers do.

Know this: Danger! Danger! Danger! Have no training in graphic design? Tread lightly, my friends. Graphic Designers can be a militant group of people. For good reason as many live in the world of poster design. Many have been to graduate school and have MFA's in GD. Some have even gone on to receive PHD's. OMG!

The story:

In fairly early digital days at the school I taught at I we were teaching classes using scanners, early digital capture and inkjet printers capable of 44 inch prints by however long we wanted. If students had the funds, they could print massive images. And some did. At one point in an intermediate class I gave my students an assignment to make a large print with a title on it. The results were mixed but a few were very good. I decided to display them in a hallway gallery we had. This is where Danger! comes into play. It seems this offended many of the graphic designer professors in our department as we had crossed over the line and my students were making truly egregious errors with their posters. A colleague and friend of mine was teaching animation and it seems his students had committed a similar error in displaying their storyboards, this being the way an animator or film maker will plan out the sequences in their film.

We were told to report the next week to a meeting to discuss this. Two tenured professors being called in to receive some "justice", presumably.

My colleague and I huddled before the meeting as we knew all too well we were going to be told not to ever do that again, meaning make a poster. We had stepped on many toes and offended sensibilities and were going to be given a talking to. So, we developed a plan.

The day of the meeting came, a Friday after morning classes were over. We entered, sat down, faced our colleagues across the table and were told why they wanted to meet with us. They wanted us to explain our actions. We asked if we could read a couple of prepared statements.They said all right and so we did. First my friend read his and then I read mine. In it we explained the rights and privileges of tenured professors, that what they taught in the classroom was sacred and untouchable, that what tenure conferred on a professor was: job security and freedom from outside constraint or intervention. I looked at my colleagues across the table as my friend read his statement. Their faces were now locked and frozen, tolerating this unplanned for line drawn in the sand with no room for negotiation. I then read mine, which duplicated my friend's tone and substance. In effect, we were saying "Hands off my classroom!" This, of course, came as a complete shock to them. We weren't allowing them to take on the issue of bad design or whether we were qualified, we were saying that no matter what we did, that our classes were hands off.

When I finished my statement we both stood up and walked out, with cries from the professors back in the conference room pleading with us not to leave. We both left the building, walked out to the parking lot, got in our cars and drove away.

What was the result of this dramatic move? The meeting and the issue about posters was never discussed again. My friend and I continued to teach as we saw fit and occasionally, yes, there were bad posters made by students that were not graphic designers in our classes. 

I've always wanted to make bigger prints. Maybe this comes from starting out as a spray painter of large canvasses but I was always frustrated at photography's smallness and preciousness. I remember my first years of working in the 8 x 10 format, how I hated making contact prints, always wanting to enlarge the big negatives to make large prints of unsurpassed quality. (In case you don't know, getting into enlarging an 8 x 10 negative to make bigger prints was not a project to be taken lightly. It took me years to get this together. This required a massive enlarger, a high ceiling, an extremely stable floor, and so on.)

Perhaps that's why I was so excited when Bruce Ployer, who was in charge of art on campus at Northeastern, came to me several years ago with a plan to make one of my photographs very large. It seemed the new president announced that he wanted more art on campus, that he believed art shouldn't be hidden away, that it should be in public spaces for all to see. This was something new on campus and even rarer, he allocated funds to make this happen. I met with Bruce and we agreed to make a large print from a color 8 x 10  inch transparency of a picture I'd made of wheat earlier the year before.

When I say large here I don't mean 5 x 4 feet or even 10 x 8 feet. This print was to be 40 x 30 feet across!

Here it is installed on the brick face of a building facing one of the school's quads:

The transparency was scanned (making a 3 GB file!) and then printed in panels by a billboard company on a flexible vinyl material. The panels were seamlessly bonded together and the print was held up with a system of grommets around the perimeter, stretched tight and smooth.

Imagine going to work each day, parking my car in the nearby garage and walking to my office right by this print. The photograph was up for two years and when taken down was cut up and made into tote bags to give to alumni donors.

By far my biggest print. Man, I loved that! Seeing that print up there every time I went to work.

In one of my recent posts I wrote about the Ansel Adams Zone System , the system designed to improve control over the negative's density and its subsequent development to produce excellent prints. 

While somewhat critical of vanity plates for automobiles I couldn't resist the chance to order these plates last year when I bought a new car:

Zone II is a black with no detail, just one zone up from D Max, Zone I. You guessed it: my car is black. If you see this plate around Boston, give a honk. That'd be me, hopefully headed off on another photo adventure.

                                                           • • •

I don't know about you but I have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. One of those is that I appreciate you, my readers. I wish you the best of possible days this Thanksgiving.

In the 1930's Ansel Adams and Fred Archer devised a system for more precise control over both the exposure and the contrast of the negative. This then led to better prints. They were working with large format black and white negatives but the principles developed almost 70 years ago for film still hold true today.

I spent much of my career teaching the Zone System, from testing and calibrating lenses and shutters, to performing what were called "parametrics" (by Arnold Gassan), shooting tests to verify what various under and overexposure settings would do to the film, conducting shooting and developing tests and even making up a diabolically difficult midterm exam that asked my students in an intermediate view camera course to shoot eight zones and make prints that were accurate in these simple tonalities. I got so that I knew they would all fail the first week it was due. I showed them where they blew it and would have them go out and start over. If they failed the midterm again after the second week I would fail them for the class and allow them to take the course over another semester. This was a demanding  class and some would just do better taking it twice.

I still think of under and over exposure in "zones" and will often reference an area in my photograph in shadow zones (called "placing") to set the overall exposure for that frame. Of course, this is only half the equation as the Zone System was as much about what you did with developing the film back in the darkroom as it was what you did in the field. But luckily for us, our present day sensors have more dynamic range than our films did back then. I said to my two Three Amigos friends the other day when we were framing John's prints, that I seldom get into trouble any more with blown exposures. This is probably more due to the fact that our camera's meters are very good and the sensor has more latitude than film did than it is anything to do with my abilities.

Minor White became well known for being a proponent of the Zone System and wrote a manual on its use, which many of us who were in this particular "religion" thought of as being a classically difficult and confusing way to handle the material.  I know I never used it as a text. Later, after Minor died, Peter Lorenz took a stab at rewriting the book and called his " The New Zone System Manual", co- authored with Richard Zakia, a sensitometry expert from RIT. Minor's name was listed as a co-author but the project was really Lorenz's. Peter was a good friend and I respected his effort although I'm not sure this new book truly brought clarity to the concept of the Zone System.

Why would this technical concept of control over exposure and contrast become a "religion"? Largely thanks to Minor, who mystified it, treated it like something way up there on the unobtainable summit of the highest mountain, a goal to aspire to but never something fully achieved. This was bullshit, of course.

I was a product from the "other shop", the RI School of Design in Providence. My primary teacher was Harry Callahan (I had 2 years of undergrad and two years of graduate with Harry). Compared to MIT, where Minor White was, Harry's approach to teaching the art of photography was much more pragmatic and hard boiled: teach skills and teach design. I remember discussions with him over the years about what was taught at MIT and his impression was that it was all about mysticism and meditation as vehicles for enlightenment through photography. It was ironic that in the early seventies many students who had studied undergraduate with Minor in Boston, came to RISD an hour away to get their graduate degrees as no schools in Boston offered an MFA in photography in those days.

Was it a good thing that I taught the Zone System all those years? Yes, as it taught discipline, instilled a work ethic and helped students make first rate prints, something it was very difficult to do. Were there tears? Yes. Was I known as something of a hard-ass? Yes. Would I do it differently? No.