Why I Don't Recommend the Leica Monochrom Cameras

In This Issue

• Why I Don't Recommend the Leica Monochrom Cameras
• Photography Isn't Art
• Announcements of Upcoming Events (Seminars, Safari, Cameracraft Magazine)
• My New Competition
• Live Streaming with the Sony A7 IV
• Geeking with Gary (google URL shortener depreciation)

Let's get right to it then, shall we?

Why I Don't Recommend the Leica Monochrom Cameras

One of the attendees of the Plymouth seminar in April had one of Leica's B&W Monochrom(e) cameras, which promised much higher image quality because there was no RGB layer on top of the sensor, completely eliminating the need for the demosiacing step that adds color to the image.  He was very proud of his acquisition.  During the seminar I explained why I would never recommend one (and would never use one myself).  Sure, it takes you back to the days of shooting B&W film, and sure, the promise of better quality images is quite appealing (even if it's only a theoretical advantage), but ultimately you give up a lot of control over how your final image is rendered.

Then I showed the attendees some examples of what you can get if you start with a color image and use Photoshop's Channel Mixer to control how individual colors get rendered to specific shades of grey (click on any image to view larger and sharper):

Normally green and red will render as the same shade of grey when shot in B&W mode; using Photoshop's Channel Mixer lets you dictate how certain colors will translate to which shade of grey.

This last imagae was made in a B&W darkroom, starting with a color negative and using two different colored filters in the enlarger to influence how certain colors would render.

I actually talked about this in a previous blog post from 2012, but I feel it bears repeating.  

Photography Isn't Art

Both images generated via DALL-E 3

This is an old attitude, but its roots are understandable.  To be an artist before photography was invented you had to have a skill - painting a realistic-looking image, for example, required a great understanding of light and shadow and color and proportion and making things recognizable.  Then there's the added layer of being able to communicate emotion using these tools.  Similar thing with sculpture - it took years of practice to master these skills.

When photography came about, those traditional artists scoffed at the new medium.  "All you have to do is push a button!" they said.  I totally get that.  Rightly or wrongly, that attitude has persisted, although the photographers that have vision and technical acuity have been able to elevate that perception.  

Here's a heretical summary of how art was perceived through the ages:

• If the oil painting depicts a religious figure, it's art.
• Okay, if it's an oil painting, then it's art.  Watercolors don't count.
• Photography isn't art.
• Okay, photography can be art but only if it's taken with a large-format camera.
• Okay, B&W photography is art, but not if it's printed on resin-coated paper.
• Okay, color photos are allowed, but only Cibachromes.
• Digital images printed on inkjet printers are not art.  
• It's only art if it was shot on B&W film, processed in a darkroom, and printed on fiber-based acid-free paper.

Continuing this trend, here are my heretical predictions for art definitions in the future:

• Mobile phone pictures are not art.
• Okay, iPhone photos can be art, because Apple says so.  
• 3D-printed statues are not art.
• Holograms are not art.
• Okay, holograms can be art, but only the full-spectrum variety made with a high-intensity pulsed laser.

Now we have generative AI art like Midjourney, where all the photographers are exclaiming, "That's not art!  All you did was type a few words!"  Oh, the irony.

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I've been keeping abreast of the flood of creations in the world of AI art (and share quite a few of the noteworthy ones on the facebook group First Thursday Gallery Walk for which I'm an administrator).  I am constantly impressed by the ideas and initial creativity behind the text prompts.  For example, someone had to think of Pope Francis as Batman, the Caped Crusader from the Holy city of Vatican. 

AI artwork by Andrea Christine Bratton 

AI artwork by Mayhem's Art and Music

This genius video showing older celebrities hugging their younger selves.  AI artwork by Boomer Friki.

The thing that cuts across all of these art media is the initial idea - in my seminars I call it "Pre-visualizing the image" before you ever pick up your camera - that is the root of the art and it continues to be a requirement for great art.  Without that vision, tools like Midjourney will usually just produce meaningless output.

So, yes, generative AI images can certainly be art.  (So, too, can photography. :-) )  It all starts with the vision.

*** Announcements *** 

Seminars

The next two seminars will be happening in September:

Florence, Alabama - (Not far from Huntsville and Nashville) Sponsored by the Quad Cities Photography Club (The Shoals) - September 14-15, 2024  

Kansas City, Kansas - Sponsored by Digital Dimensions and Beyond Camera Club - September 21-22, 2024

NEW!  There’s also an optional Wireless Flash workshop, taking place at the end of Day 2 of the seminar, designed to help you overcome the intimidation that most people feel when it comes to learning Wireless Flash.  I’ve been teaching Wireless Flash for 15 years; it’s the single most important tool for adding “Wow!” to your images, and you probably already have the tools you need to put it to work!  (Examples of this technique appear in in my books - an entire chapter is devoted to this useful technique!)  It will improve your photography much more than getting a bigger camera or a more expensive lens.  

Come join us for a fun weekend!  Enroll now.

Your photo club can hire me to bring the seminars to you!  Contact me for details.

Safari Update

The photo safari is getting close (November!) and we had one family drop out, so there is now some room!  This is a tour of three game reserves designed to cater to the unique needs of photographers.  They know the importance of good light; where the animals will be, and they know how to take care of you, from airport arrival the final departure.  Join me and my wife Carol on a unique adventure, talk shop, share your images, and generally give your camera something to do!  Details at https://FriedmanArchives.com/safari . Let me know if you're even thinking about going and I'll bring you up to speed.

Next Time in Cameracraft Magazine

The next issue goes to press next week.  In it I interview Nick Brandt, the former filmmaker now using photography to illustrate the disproportionate impact that humans have had on the environment, and how he’s set out to illustrate the environmental decline.  

Wasteland with Elephant, 2015

He has created several different projects over the years, as you can see on his home page www.NickBrandt.com.  In Inherit the Dust (2016), he photographed places in East Africa where the animals used to roam. In each location, life size panels of animal portrait photographs were erected, setting the panels within a world of explosive human development.

“As with all my previous work, this series was shot on black and white medium format film. Each panorama was constructed out of six by seven negatives stitched together in Photoshop to create the final widescreen view.”  The final enlargements are truly magnificent. 

Just don’t ask him if he had just photoshopped the animal pictures into the composition.  That will unleash his silent scream. :-)

Subscribe to Cameracraft Magazine today for photographer profiles and technical insights you just won't find anywhere else!

My New Competition

Notice that this isn't even a picture of the camera.

Someone spent a whole six minutes with ChatGPT and came out with a "guide" for a Sony camera.  It's 125 pages (mine is 800+), no photo illustrations (mine contain hundreds), and overall is pretty f&%#@ useless.  But I know from experience that, unlike what they taught us in kindergarten, there's no correleation between good products and products that sell.

Have a look at some of the sample pages from this useless book.

The book got only one star and yet it appears at the top of the amazon search results list.  This author has dozens of different titles all of similar quality.   

This is just the beginning of worthless AI-generated content diluting the real stuff created by knowledgeable writers and human editors.  Of course Amazon has no incentive whatsoever to remove the content from their catalogs, relying instead on the rating and review mechanism and the voluntary labeling of the book as "AI generated" by the person who lists it.

*** Geeking with Gary ***

Live Streaming with the Sony A7 IV

Spring 2024 saw a lot of Sony cameras get a lot of firmware updates. But only the A7 IV got this new feature. It allows you to use your camera to live stream to platforms such as Youtube or Facebook through either wi-fi or your smartphone’s Wi-Fi hot spot.

I detailed the use of this new feature with my free A7 IV supplement (which covered all of the other new features as well).  I was going to make a youtube video showing step-by-step how to do this, but someone in Australia named Wonk beat me to it, and he did a reasonable job. Why reinvent the wheel?  You can see it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXH8YhxYfvI .

Google ends support for link shortener - including links to Google Photos

Google is famous for creating fresh new products and then abandoning them.  (This website documents them all - 295 products as of this writing.)  On July 19th they announced that their link shortening service, goo.gl, will disappear in a year.    

Link shorteners are services that can replace ungodly URLs like this:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipP5ToGbPdq7skb_o_grxGYawBEi8c6V5xhXbFM_jBnG6crJttizSuMUNHkgeW3uAg?key=ZGJiZkY0WGExOTc1MkltV3RXN09ydXJmM08wZU53

with something neat like 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/sVAoycznAnLDsAmf9

Of course this news is both good and bad.  Link shorteners are really useful when you're including long URLs into magazine articles and printed books (where readers can't click on it and it would be too tedious to read and re-type the URL by hand.  (Plus, l's and 1's O's and 0's all look alike!)).  On the other hand they pose a huge security risk because if one appears in an incoming email, there's usually no way of checking if it goes to a malicious site or not.  So it's a double-edged sword.

The part that impacts me the most is the fact that I use Google Photos A LOT (see my praise for this service here and here), and have been sharing albums with customers, family and friends for well over a decade via the shortened links like in the 2nd example above.  This means that after a year, those links will no longer take them to the photos I shared.  

I'm going to send an email to everyone I've ever sent photos to, telling them of the impending shutdown and if they want to keep the photos I've shared with them (it's my legacy to them, after all!), they need to search for emails from me that contain goo.gl and download all of the content I've shared.  

The silver lining in all of this is that my family will have an excuse to revisit these old photos, most of which they've no doubt forgotten about.  Old photos can be like fine wine, their value increases with age.  Especially if they're snapshots which jog a neuron in the viewer.

But the part which frustrates me and countless others is the question, "How inconvenient is it to just keep a server plugged in and move it to a corner of the server farm?"  It's not like the service requres any updates or anything.  It takes virtually nothing to keep the service going and inconveniences millions (and removes access to arbitrarily large amounts of web content) to pull the plug on it.

Next Blog Post

In the next edition, I'll be reviewing a new tool to bring proper focus bracketing to the Sony platform (that promises to work much better than Sony's current solution, which I don't care for).  Stay tuned!

Until next time,

Yours Truly, Gary Friedman