Ten Quick Things

New Years' in Boston.  There's one fundamental thing even experienced photographers forget...

My wife and I got Covid just before Thanksgiving (then I got it again), so we were down for a month and that's why you haven't heard much from me lately.  In the meantime there's so much to share that I'm just going to do a huge data dump this month.  I'll keep it all short.  Here we go.  (As always, click on any image to make it larger and sharper!)

1) Sometimes the Old Ways are Best

Look at the green focusing square.  The camera focused
on something reasonably close, not the face.

I've been friends with one of my readers for many years.  He takes pictures of his town's annual Christmas parade.  He owns an OM Digital (Olympus) OM-1 and a Sony A7R V, and this year he wrote to me with a few complaints.

Complaint 1: Facial Recognition doesn't recognize Santa Claus.  Sure, we all recognize Santa, but the camera can't always see a mouth or recognize a full face.  And it's pretty apparent that the machine learning algorithms weren't trained on a data set that included Santa.

Solution 1: Rather than relying on automation, you can fall back to the time-honored technique we used back in the olden days: Switch to spot focusing mode, then Focus Lock -> Recompose > Shoot.  Nails it every time.

Yes, he shot in RAW and was able to recover from
 this poor exposure, but that's not the point.

Complaint 2: Center-weighted metering wasn't handling bad light properly.

Solution 2: Even matrix metering may work great under a greater set of non-ideal conditions, but when conditions are really awful the old ways are best.  Switch to Spot Metering mode, lock the exposure with AEL, recompose and shoot.

With many cameras it's possible to combine both of those things in one ridiculously fast operation.  I've been using these techniques for more years than I care to admit, they work every time.  No more blaming my equipment! :-) 

2) New Year's in Boston and the Importance of This One Essential Tool

We attended Boston's famous New Year's celebration called First Night.  Lots of free concerts and events.  And lots of decorative lights.  The best time to take such shots is called the "Blue Hour" (about an hour after sunset), but most cameras of any manufacturer will get the exposure for such shots wrong.

Keep in mind that if there's no face present in the shot, your camera's default metering method is to pretend there's no color information and then render what's left so it averages out to 18% grey.  (This is tied to the legendary 18% grey card, which you may have learned about in your anthropology class. :-) )  For shots like this, and also for fireworks (which always seem to be blown out when in AUTO mode), your secret weapon is the old Exposure Compensation control.  Usually underexposing by -1.3 stops (for lights) or -2 stops (fireworks) will override the camera's tendency to wash everything out and make it look like the way your eye and brain remember seeing them.

(Yeah, it's kind of basic, but even experienced photographers need reminders of when the camera will get it wrong and what to do about it.)

Exposure Compensation is my most-used camera control.

3) Marie's story

In a Catholic church in the Vietnamese city of Hue, there stands a statue of Phaolô Tong Viet Buong.  When Emperor Ming Mang began a new round of persecutions of Christians, he ordered the apostasy of Christian soldiers; Phaolô refused. He was arrested in 1832, spent a year in prison being tortured, interrogated for the names of other Christians, and ordered to renounce his faith; Phaolô refused. He was finally convicted of being a Christian, kicked out of the army and was beheaded.  Pope John Paul II later made him a Saint.

His great great great great granddaughter, now 87 years old and living in Southern California, saw this image I took of his monument when I was there in 2018 and started to cry.  She grew up in Hue (pronounced, "Whey") just before the Vietnam war; spent two years in a labor camp before escaping to the Philippines.   She got married in this church.  And she's never returned to her home country because there was no family left, and it would bring back too many negative memories.  She told me this story before I embarked on the trip, and I went out of my way to bring home these pictures to her.

Every artist wants their work to invoke an emotional reaction when viewed.  I'm lucky to have witnessed it a handful of times in my life.

4) Updates

The Spanish version of the Sony A6700 book has been released!

The .epub and .azw3 versions of the English A6700 book have been released!

A Spanish translation of the A7CR / A7C II ebook is in the works.

And yes, I'll be writing a book on the upcoming Sony A9 III.  I'm especially anxious to try shooting flash outdoors at 1/10,000th of a second and have the background come out black. :-)  (Also looking forward to shooting in theaters without shutter noise and without banding.)  

5) Seminars

Remember, only four seminars per year.  Here's how the schedule for 2024 is shaping up:

Plymouth, MA                         April 27-28, 2024         Sign Up Here!

Florence, AL                                 Sept. 14-15, 2024         Sign Up Here!

Kansas City, Kansas                         Sept. 21-22, 2024         Sign Up Here!

Kiawah Island, South Carolina Sept.28-29, 2024         Email for waiting list

(Scholarly note: Plymouth is an hour South of Boston.  Florence, AL is an hour away from Huntsville, Alabama and two hours away from Nashville, Tennessee.)  Most of these cities were chosen because a photo club brought me there for the benefit of their members.  I can do this for your photo club too!  Get in touch with me at Gary at Friedman Archives dot com to learn more.

The Friedman Archives Seminars have been called the best approach to teaching how to get "Wow!" images, regardless of the kind of camera you have.  More info about what you'll learn can be found here.

6) First Thursday Gallery Walk

For those of you who are still willing to compromise your mental health by remaining on Facebook, there's an online art group called First Thursday Gallery Walk to which I'm a contributor.  Come join the group, gaze at a stream of member-curated art, and contribute your favorite pieces!  The group home page is here.  Every time I see something I like (not all of it photography) I share it there.  

7) Safari Update

One third of the available seats are already taken, and it's only January!  Come participate in an African safari designed specifically for the unique needs of photographers, taking place November, 2024.  Learn more and join us at https://FriedmanArchives.com/safari !

8) Charles Bronson - Man with a Camera

How did I not know about this??  Back in the 1950's, action hero Charles Bronson starred in his own TV show called "Man with a Camera".  IMDb describes the series as, "Former combat cameraman Mike Kovac is now a freelance photographer in New York City, specializing in difficult and dangerous assignments where he can get the kinds of pictures that other photographers can't, or won't take.  By often acting as a private eye, Kovac gets himself into plenty of trouble involving criminals of every kind, helping with cases the police could not handle."  

Wikipedia adds, "Besides an array of cameras for normal use, for surreptitious work Kovac employs cameras hidden in a radio, cigarette lighter and even his necktie. He also has a phone in his car, and a portable darkroom in the trunk where he could develop his negatives on the spot."

This was Charles Bronson's only lead in a TV series.  And ironically, the B&W work on that show was good but not great.  The American TV show Rawhide (starring a young Clint Eastwood) easily surpassed it with its technical superiority - perfect lighting and zone system-like placement of greys and skin tones.  All of the B&W TV shows in the 1960's were like that.  It's as if all the TV cinematographers had an epiphany all at once or something.

You can view the entire series on youtube.  

9) Next Time in Cameracraft Magazine

The older I get, the more difficulty I have finding old pictures.  I often see other people’s images come across via text, of snapshots that are old but over time have taken on increased sentimental value.  Where is the high-resolution version of that image?  I want to share it!

There are lots of online image similarity detectors.  Google Images lets you upload an image and in a split second it will show you where it exists on the internet.  Tineye.com does the same thing.  But these tools only work for images that are online.  I want a tool that allows me to give it a picture and it will show me where on my local hard drives that image exists.  Better yet, I need a program that finds images that are close to what I feed it – perhaps the one before I rotated and did some editing or cropping or resizing in Photoshop.  

So I set out to find the right tool – most were awful and just crashed while indexing my hard drives.  And in the current issue of Cameracraft magazine, I share what I discovered; what worked and what didn't.  Subscribe to Cameracraft magazine today to read about what I learned!  

(My new official slogan is, "I beat my head against the wall so you don't have to!" (tm))

10) Best Phone App Ever Invented

(Warning: this has little to do with photography.)

Every time I see a product that has been brushed with genius, I like to tell the world about it.  For example, back in the mid-1980's I was amazed by a program called Creator/Notator, a music notation and MIDI sequencing program that ran on the Atari 1040ST computer.  It could capture what you played, quantize it to any required degree, and print it out like a music publisher.  It had a graphical user interface and could update the musical score in real time as you played.  It had a 16-track MIDI sequencer that could accompany your playing and even track you if you sped up or slowed down.  It could handle SMPTE time code so it could accompany your other tracks on your multi-track recorder.  And so much more.  I'll admit that my description doesn't do its capabilities justice (this web page does it better), but perhaps even more impressive is that the whole program fit onto a single 720kb low-density floppy disk, making it obvious it was all written in assembly language.  (Compare that to all the Microsoft software available at that time, which would be distributed on perhaps 10 or 14 high-density floppies and not nearly as sophisticated!).  Pure genius.

That was impressive back then.  Here's what's impressing me now:  Let's say you're a Lego enthusiast (you know, the plastic bricks that you inevitably step on with bare feet when you're a parent) and you have a LOT of Legos lying around.  Spread them all out on the floor and take a picture of it, and use the BrickIt app (iOS or Android) and it will analyze what you have and suggest different figures you can build using the bricks in your collection, including step-by-step directions.  All from a phone-resolution image!!  Check out this YouTube video showing it in action.

Are you impressed, or what? :-)

Okay, that's enough for one blog post.  Happy new year!

Until next time,

Yours Truly, Gary Friedman

I'm still doing grantwriting for the MIT program mentioned here.  As part of our mission of turning good engineering students into great systems engineers, we also want to attract new talent from groups other than white males.   Contributions accepted! :-)