My Short-Lived Acting Career

1976

Once upon a time, in my youth, I was a magician.  Hold onto that factoid for a moment.

10 Things you Can't Do with a Smartphone

This was the final image seen in the movie, "The Shining".  It was taken with something called a Banquet Camera.  Read on for why I'm even showing this to you.

Also in this Issue:

• 10 Things You Can't Do with a Smartphone
• Sony A7R V - Little-Discussed Features of Note (youtube video)
• Announcements / Next Time in Cameracraft Magazine
• Adding Detail to Old Photos

10 Things You Can’t Do with a Smartphone

Smartphones are taking over, and the gap in image quality continues to shrink.  (See my lecture about Computational Photography given to the Royal Photographic Society for more on this topic.)  But there are still areas where the big cameras are essential.  Below is a short list (click on any image to view larger and sharper):

1.  Olympic Sports / Nature Photography / Horseback Riding

This is the first example most people think of.  Anything requiring a telephoto lens and subject tracking will remain the domain of mirrorless cameras (and to some extent DSLRs, although the mirrorless camera bodies have eclipsed the DSLR's legendary tracking abilities).

AI - Why Humans will Need a Label

Also In This Edition:

• Can ChatGPT write code?

Humans Need a Label

Since last month's diatribe it seems that AI has exploded onto the scene (at least all the tech news outlets), some of them positive ("ChatGPT can find case law faster and easier than using conventional keyword searches") (oh wait, that's a lie!), but most of them negative ("Look at all of these factual errors it's confidently spitting out!!", or "This can be used to easily create malware!").  Then I read that some people have empathy for these things, and some have been using chatbots to write books with little to no effort and self-publish them on Amazon, with the promise of exponentially amplifying the amount of crap out there.  As they proliferate, we'll need some humans to sort through what's factually correct to increase the value of its output.  Back in my day, those people were called "editors".  

It then occurred to me that there will soon be a need for certification - similar to what the farmers' associations came up with to let consumers know whether their crops were organic, or whether a food product contained preservatives.  There will be a need for people who don't want to double-check every fact spit out by a chatbot, to know that what they're consuming has had some human quality control on it to weed out demonstrable falsehoods (Flat Earth?  5G towers cause COVID?), label rumors appropriately ("Climate Change is a hoax from China"), and to give proper historical context.  Plus, it's been demonstrated that those tools that can allegedly detect if ChatGPT had been used to create something are about as reliable as the chatbot output they're trying to authenticate.

AI: The Alarmists are Worried about the Wrong Thing

AI-generated imagery from the series "Poverty's Got Talent" by Lulian Barbulescu

(Click on any image to view larger and sharper.)

Last month I took a deep dive into the emerging field of AI Image Generation tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2 for an article in Cameracraft Magazine.  (Here's a downloadable copy of that issue.  You're welcome. :-) )  At the end of the article I concluded that these tools are in their infancy, and the following things need to be fixed before they can be truly useful: 

How to shoot Milky Way Nighttime Landscapes

In this Issue

• How to Shoot Milky Way Nighttime Landscapes
• New Product Announcements (Fujifilm X-H2, Best of Blog 4)
• In the Pipeline (Fujfilm X-T5, Sony A7R V)
• Noteworthy Factoids about the A7R V
• Three fascinating Cameracraft articles
• The photographer who Ansel Adams referred to as "The anti-Christ"
• AI Image Generators - what they may mean for society
• A portrait of Michael Colin Campbell - Kodak color chemistry pioneer

How to Shoot Milky Way Nighttime Landscapes

The Friedman Archives welcomes guest blogger Erik Quimby to explain how he gets these incredible Milky Way images.  (Spoiler alert: you can get results like this too!)

Taking amazing Milky Way photos is not very difficult if the right preparations have been made. Location, time of the year, day of the month, and gear selection all make or break a great Milky Way shot.  (Click on any image to make it larger and sharper.)

There are several websites, darkskymap.com and cleardarksky.com, and apps, PhotoPills and DarkSky for IOS [Editor's note: DarkSky for iOS will no longer be available after 12/31/22]  that will give you dark sky / light pollution information for a specific location. After choosing a good dark sky location with a clear view of the Southern sky (for Northern hemisphere), now it’s time to plan when to go. The 2 to 3 days before, during, and after the new moon are the best times of the month. March to October (again for Northern hemisphere) are the best months to plan the shot.

The Shrinking Market for Photographers...

These AI-generated images were created by feeding a textural description into a program called Midjourney v4.  They were posted to Facebook's AI Art Universe page by Giuliano Golfieri.

In this issue:

• The Shrinking Market for Photographers
• In the Pipeline
• Tethering to your Laptop via your phone's Wi-Fi hot spot
• RV Life / Our New Home

The Shrinking Market for Photographers...

When you're a work-for-hire photographer and you move to a new city, you have to establish your client base all over again.  But things are different now - in the age of smartphones, everyone's a photographer.  In fact, photographers are slowly suffering the same kind of career fate as audiologists (the ones that outfit you for expensive hearing aids, which are becoming more affordable thanks to the self-testing possible with bluetooth-enabled smartphones) or a Knocker-Upper.  (And don't get me started about the new wave of AI-generated photo-realistic images which are amazing but will no doubt put a lot of photo illustrators out of work.)

So where is the market for the skills the traditional photographer brings to the table?  Let me rank what the most common options used to be.  Many of these insights come from personal experience and also many interviews of photographers for Cameracraft magazine over the years:

A Trick for Better B&W Photography

 

In this issue:

• A Trick for Better B&W Photography
• It’s Cameracraft Magazine’s 10-year Anniversary!
• OM-1 Ebook - All Formats Now Available
•  Living in a Van Down by the River
• My Next Zoom Lecture

A Trick for Better B&W Photography 

Want to get impressive B&W images?  Want to train your photographic eye to explore texture, light, and composition?  Black-and-White photography has historically been the training ground of all the great photographers.  But unlike them, you don’t have to learn things like film selection, development variables, the zone system, darkroom techniques, choosing a contrast grade paper for printing, or coating your lungs with chemical vapors.  Rightly or wrongly, the general population tends to label black-and-white images as being more “artistic”, so here’s your chance to jump-start your reputation.

Geeking with Gary

[Editor's Note: This has (almost) nothing to do with photography.  I do this from time to time.] 

In this issue:

• A STEM Program on Steroids
• Sony's new Image Authentication System
• Grandpa's Inventions

A STEM Program on Steroids

For the past year I’ve been volunteering at an organization called Beaver Works Summer Institute, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It’s an extraordinary program which challenges high school students to tackle subjects you wouldn’t expect high school students to tackle: Learning to program a quantum computer.  Building an AI-based personal assistant.  Building an autonomous vehicle.  Learning to hack into Internet Of Things devices (so when they grow up and become programmers they can know how to defend against these common techniques).  Things like that.  The program makes use of gifted expert volunteers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory to create and teach courses that high school students can clearly understand. 

The challenge I participated in had them building a prototype CubeSat.  And it was a remarkably thorough course; it included learning to program in Python, and introduced the students to orbital dynamics, the space environment, communications, power engineering, propulsion, thermal management, control systems, systems engineering, CAD software, and satellite development tools.  At a HIGH SCHOOL level!!  (As I said, gifted educators!)

How to be the Best-Looking Square in your next Zoom Call

In this issue:

• How to be the Best-Looking Square in your next Zoom Call
• New Ebook on the OM System OM-1!
• Next Time in Cameracraft
• Black Background with No Backdrop
• We're moving again...

How to be the Best Looking Square in your next Zoom Call

Have a look at the screen grab from a zoom call above.  Notice how few of them are well lit, and almost all are looking up at the user using unflattering wide angle lenses.  (Click on any image in this blog to see it larger.)

Now look at the top center square circled in red.  That's me and my wife.  We're well lit and it looks like we were shot with a professional portrait lens. :-)  Every time I give a Zoom lecture to a photography club I've had someone compliment me on how I look, and asked how I did it.  Well, it's actually not hard, and chances are you already have everything you need!  Three things are required:

Focus Stacking on Sony, Olympus, and Fujifilm cameras

Left image - f/32.  Right image: Focus Stacking.

Also in this issue:

• Focus Stacking
• The ethical question of photographing Amazon tribes
• In the Pipeline

Focus stacking for Olympus, Fujifilm, and Sony cameras

If you're shooting macro images for catalogs (jewelry photography, for example), you can't just use a small f/stop and hope to get everything in focus.  Most of the time the depth-of-field won't be great enough, plus at the smallest f/stops something called diffraction kicks in, where the image actually gets a little bit fuzzier.  (That's why so many lens experts recommend shooting at the lens' "sweet spot" which is usually in the middle of it's f/stop range for sharpest results (but not the greatest depth-of-field).

Have a look at the close-up images of the top jewelry shot below: both were shot with a Minolta 100mm macro lens with the same lighting setup.  The left image was shot at f/32 (the smallest that lens can go), and the right image used a common technique called Focus Stacking.  Notice how the left image isn't all that sharp even in the area toward the front (the lens was focused 1/3rd of the way between the closest part and the furthest part, which is considered best practice for depth-of-field), whereas the right image  is sharp from the front to the back.  (Click on the image to see it larger; better yet download the original to compare them for yourself.)  

Left image - f/32.  Right image: Focus Stacking.

Using a Grey Card to Nail Exposure and White Balance

In this issue:

• Grey card techniques
• Computational Photography Talk for the Royal Photographic Society
• Real Letters from Real Readers - Back Button Focusing (BBF)
• In the Pipeline
• Next time in Cameracraft Magazine
• Parting Shots

Using a Grey Card to Nail Exposure and White Balance

A long time ago, photographers used film and were literally “shooting blind” – they weren’t sure if their built-in reflective light meters were metering for non-average subjects properly (like brides with white dresses, or grooms with black tuxes).  Nor were they ever sure if the color balance was “correct” when it came time to make prints from negatives in the darkroom.  In both of these cases, serious photographers would use a grey card to nail the exposure and the white balance – and it would be perfect every time.

Meter off the grey card to nail the exposure in photos that have non-average subjects.  You can also use the grey card as a neutral surface from which to set your white balance accurately.

Today we have digital cameras with Live View, which makes things easier but in extreme circumstances (like really bad or non-white light, or really non-average subjects like brides in white dresses or grooms in black tuxes) the grey card will still nail it.  Here’s how to use this ancient technique: