I was disappointed with the video. I liked Merchant’s songs, but the video felt like she wasn’t really trying: It’s shot in black-and-white, and it just shows Merchant lip-syncing the song while walking the streets New York City. I thought it was the sort of thing an artist would throw together when the record company wants a video and the artist doesn’t really care.

Twenty-four years later I just caught the “Carnival” video by accident when YouTube automatically played it after something else. And I discovered it was wonderful. The video hadn’t changed a bit, of course. But I have.

About twelve years ago I got seriously interested in photography, and in the process of learning how to take pictures, I read about famous photographers. I was especially interested in the street photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Walker Evans, and Lee Friedlander. Familiarity with their work gave me a better artistic context in which to view the “Carnival” video.

What first caught my eye was that Merchant was taking pictures of people and things on the streets:

And the video would sometimes show the still photos that could have resulted:

That…looked a lot like she was doing street photography. And then just seconds after that, the video showed this image of a man standing the the deep shadows, with just a bit of light hitting his face:

That’s a classic street photography technique.

I had to restart the video and watch it a lot more closely. Not only is Natalie Merchant doing street photography in the video, but many of the scenes in the video itself are shot in the distinctive style of street photography. It’s four and a half minutes of artistically harsh shadows, strong angular lines, interesting people, strange reflections, unusual poses, and careful juxtapositions.

Heck, she’s even using a Leica camera, preferred by many street photographers:

It was clear that someone on this video knew their way around street photography. It turns out the video was directed by Melodie McDaniel, who is a professional photographer when she’s not making music videos and commercials. The photos on her website (especially in the archival section) show some definite street influence.

If you want to see more of that lovely street composition, here’s the full “Carnival” video:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Carnival of Street Photography

The other lens, however, is the original Nikon DX super-zoom (AF-S 18-200mm f3.5/5.6 VR). It’s not a high-end pro lens, especially in low light, but it has a very versatile focal range. Under most common conditions it replaces a whole bagful of interchangeable lenses. I used it all the time.

It’s amazing how we can become attached to things. I’m not talking about the kind of attachment that leads to gaudy levels of conspicuous consumption. I mean the way we become attached to the useful objects in our lives.

Probably the most common example we are likely to share is our first car. Mine was a Plymouth Volaré, a car that so spectacularly failed to live up to expectations that its production caused the downfall of Chrysler Corporation in the 1970s and ultimately helped destroy the reputation of the entire American auto industry. It was not a fun car to drive or maintain, but it was my car. It gave me freedom and control that I had never had before. I never loved it, but I have fond memories of the places I went and the things that I did and the people who road with me. I felt bad about getting rid of that car.

I felt the same way about the first computer I ever learned to use, a VAX 11/780 at college. I eventually got the job of running it for the school, and it became my job to sell it when we upgraded to newer computers. I remember when it was waiting to ship out — 4 or 5 refrigerator-sized racks of electronics standing in the hallway — and I remember feeling like a piece of my life was going with it.

I’m feeling that way now about that 18-200 street zoom. I own a few other lenses, but I don’t use them nearly as much as I used that lens. Almost every photo I shot with my D200 was through that lens — maybe 35,000 images altogether. I carried that lens everywhere, and I used it to do cool things. It’s not a feeling I’ll ever quite experience again.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Requiem For a Lens

The bag itself is a Tamrac Velocity 8 sling bag. I like it because I can throw it over my shoulder for easy carrying, but when I need to get something out of it, I can swing it around to the front and it hangs with the top up for easy access. I tried a few other solutions, but this was the one that has worked best for me, and I’ve been happy with it for years. It’s out of production now, but Tamrac appears to have replaced it with an updated model.

The bag has side mounting straps for accessories, and you can see a small filter bag mounted on the right. I also sometimes bring a spare lens bag, shown separately on the left here.

Inside the main bag, the one indispensable part of my day kit sits right on top:

That’s a Nikon D200 DSLR. It has a DX-size imaging sensor, which is about the size of a small postage stamp. It’s about 1/3 smaller than the FX-sized sensor, which is the size of a traditional frame of 35-mm film, but it’s several times larger than the sensor in the compact point-and-shoot camera I upgraded from, and much larger than the sensor in my iPhone. The sensor is 10 megapixels, which isn’t much by today’s standards — compact cameras have 12 to 20 MP, and the new iPhones are 8MP — but it was pretty good at the time, and the larger pixels allow each photosite to collect more light, which makes the sensor more sensitive than a compact camera and better able to take photos in low light. Also, for the kinds of shooting I do, 10 MP is more than enough.

The D200 was what’s sometimes called a “prosumer” camera — filling the gap between the entry-level DSLR cameras and the high-end professional gear. Generally speaking, the more professional cameras don’t produce better pictures, but they allow photographers to get good pictures in a broader range of conditions. Among other things, they operate more quickly allowing photographers to time photos better, and since everything that moves under electric power involves magnets, faster cameras have bigger magnets, mostly in motors, meaning professional cameras are heavier. They’re also more durable, with weather sealing and hard metal cases, adding to the weight. The D200 was not Nikon’s largest camera, but it’s pretty hefty.

You might think all those buttons would be intimidating, but they’re just another way to speed up photography. Most of them don’t do anything you can’t do with all but the cheapest cameras, but when I want to change a setting, I just push a button and turn a dial instead of hunting through several layers of menus. Not that the D200 doesn’t have a lot of menus for customization. If a photographer knows he’s going to be shooting one kind of photo for a while, he can set the camera up to make it easier and faster.

Although DSLR cameras allow you to swap lenses, I took almost all of my photos with the lens you see here, Nikon’s AF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 G ED VR lens. It’s not a high-quality pro lens, but it sure has a versatile focal length — it’s a “street zoom,” intended for unplanned photography where you might take wide shots and telephoto shots one after another, and it would be inconvenient to change lenses. It does occasionally creep the focal length in and out from the weight of the elements when I tilt it far off the horizontal. Nevertheless, I’ve really put it to work, and if you want a great all-in-one lens for DX format, I highly recommend it. I’ve heard that the modern version is just as good, and it fixes the lens creep problem.

This photo also shows my Op/Tech Pro neck strap and a separate Tamrac hand strap. I’m paranoid about fumbling the camera. It’s tough, but a 4- or 5-foot drop onto concrete would probably break it.

All those big motors and fancy electronics use a lot of power, so I keep several recently charged Nikon EN-EL3 batteries in the bag. I see one of these is actually a knock-off battery from the late great ill-fated Calumet Photographic. They were located in Chicago, and I live a few miles from their Cherry Avenue store.

I also carry a pack of memory cards, in addition to the one that’s always in the camera. At the time, professional photographers overwhelmingly used the Compact Flash format cards, which are rather large. I didn’t think to put something in there for scale, but to give you an idea, the folded-up case is just a little smaller than an iPhone 4.

These cards are made by Lexar, which at the time was considered one of the few brands reliable enough for professional photographers. Note that each card was a whopping 2 Gigabytes. Shooting high quality JPEGs, I could put about 425 images on each one, and I have on occasion filled all of them (burning through several batteries in the process). Cards that small are dirt cheap these days, but you don’t want to know how much I paid back then.

Next to the camera and lens, the most important item in my kit is the external flash, a Nikon SB-800 speedlight. I almost never use the camera’s built-in flash. It’s comparatively weak, and since it’s located so close to the lens it tends to flatten images and when shooting people it exacerbates red eye. Having the flash head a little higher seems to help. The head also tilts and swivels, allowing me to bounce light off parts of the room to light the subject broadly from an angle that makes the 3D shape stand out more in a 2D image.

Like all of Nikon’s modern flash units, the SB-800 participates in the Creative Lighting System, which means that the units can be controlled remotely by other flash units, including the built-in flash on Nikon cameras. When configured correctly, they participate in Through-The-Lens metering and can be programmed to provide different levels of exposure in the image. I have a few more of these speedlights that I can bring along in a separate bag if I need to.

The flash is pictured here with its built-in bounce card extended. The bounce card is handy when I’m photographing a person and I’m bouncing the light off the ceiling. It catches some of the light right at the flash head and throws it directly at the subject, giving their eyes a bit of a sparkle.

Also in the picture is the diffusion dome, which can be used to scatter light around the room, so the subject picks up natural looking light from all directions.

The flash uses a lot of power, so I always carry emergency batteries that will allow me to keep shooting if I use up the batteries inside. Although these are Alkaline batteries, I normally operate the flash on rechargeable batteries to keep costs down. I use Alkaline batteries as spares, however, because the rechargeable battery chemistry of the day did not allow for batteries that could keep their charge for months of sitting in a camera bag.

The bulge on the left is an attachment to hold a fifth battery, which makes the speedlight capacitor charge faster between flashes, at the expense of bulk and weight. I can’t help noticing, however, that the number of batteries I’ve been carry around lately is not a multiple of 5.

I also carry a stand for the flash in case I want to set it up somewhere and trigger it remotely from the camera. I almost never do that with this unit, although I do sometime use additional standing flash units to add more light.

I also carry a folding miniature LumiQuest soft box to soften the harsh shadows caused by direct flash. It greatly reduces the distance at which the flash is effective, so I only use it in special cases.

I carry around this cable so I can take the flash off the hot shoe on the camera. I mostly use it with the flash bracket (coming next), but I can also use it to hand-hold the flash further away from the camera.

Here are the parts of the flash bracket assembly, consisting of the round flash bracket itself, the orbiting tilt mount used to hold the flash, and the nodal slide rail used to mount the bracket to the camera. Disassembled like this, the bracket ring fits in the side pocket of the bag, and the other two parts fit into one of the internal compartments.

That photo shows the L-bracket I keep permanently attached to the bottom of my camera. I can use it to quickly mount the camera in my tripod, but most of the time it serves as a place to attach the flash bracket, as seen in the next shot.

Here’s the complete flash bracket attached to the camera and ready for shooting. At the very least, it raises the flash up a bit more, which reduces red eye and throws the subject’s shadow further down behind them, where it’s less visible. But it also allows me to rotate the camera to portrait orientation while still keeping the flash above the camera:

This bracket is especially helpful when I want to bounce the flash off the ceiling, because it allows me to quickly rotate the camera between landscape and portrait orientation while keeping the flash head aimed in the right direction.

As I said, I rarely switch lenses, but I do sometimes clip on my extra lens bag to carry this trick lens that allows me to take super-wide-angle pictures. Because of that, I wasn’t too concerned with the quality of the image — it’s necessarily distorted by the nature of fisheye lenses — so I saved myself a bunch of money and bought this Sigma 10-20 mm D f/4-5.6 instead of a more expensive Nikon lens. It’s worked out just fine.

If I’m bringing the extra lens bag (the weight hanging off the side throws off the balance of the bag more than you’d think, or I’d carry it all the time) I usually also throw in one of my two cheap fast prime lenses. These only have a single focal length — they don’t zoom — but they have a larger aperture so the can work in much less light without a flash. Usually I take the 35mm f/2 D, which has a very natural look with a DX sensor, but the 50mm f/1.4 D is also nice.

I bought these lenses new, but they’re based on a design that is almost 25 years old, so they might not produce quite the high-quality images a modern lens does. They are both, however, awesome for the price. The pro-glass Nikon 35mm f/1.4 G prime is $1600, which is more than twice what I paid to get both of these lenses.

Inside the external filter pack I have three filters. I don’t carry color adjustment or special effects filters, because in most cases I could do the same thing in Photoshop or Lightroom. I carry filters for things that can’t be done in post.

On the left is a polarizing filter. Light reflecting off of shiny surfaces is polarized, so by rotating this filter to match the polarization of the reflected light, I can reduce glare. That’s nice when shooting water or shiny metal objects, but even things you wouldn’t think of as shiny, such as leaves and flowers, often have a subtle amount of glare. Since glare generally doesn’t pick up the color of the surface it reflects from, it tends to wash out colors in images. A polarizing filter puts it back, at the cost of absorbing some of the light, requiring more exposure. Polarization is not recorded by a camera sensor, so I’d have no way to remove it in post. It has to be done at the time the image is captured.

The standing filter is a neutral graduated filter, shading into darkness on the top end. I got it when I was shooting landscapes so I could keep the sky from washing out. It’s turned out to be a little weak, and if I do more of that kind of shooting, I’ll probably want to get one that darkens the upper half more. I could darken the sky in Photoshop, but if the sky is completely washed out, there’s no color information for Photoshop to recover, so I have to use a filter to keep the sky color.

The bottom filter is a neutral density filter, which simply reduces the amount of light getting in the lens for any given aperture. I got it because…well, to be honest, I don’t remember. I must have had an application. There must have been something I wanted to shoot in bright daylight with the aperture wide open for dramatic effect, and I wanted the exposure to be long enough to get some motion blur. Since this is all about camera operation, Photoshop can’t help, so I’d need this filter.

My main 18-200 lens has a 72mm filter ring, but I have an adapter so I can use 77mm filters, which is a standard size. You can see the adapter attached to the polarizing filter.

I also keep this mini-tripod in the case. It’s come in hand a few times when I wanted to take a steady shot (or a selfie) and didn’t have my main tripod.

This was an infrared remote that I got for use with the tripod, so I could easily include myself in group pictures or avoid touching the camera to trigger the shutter. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work from more than a few feet from the camera, even indoors. It’s basically useless, and I shouldn’t have been carrying it around so long.

This is a dual-use item from PhotoVision that I use for shooting in natural light. On one side, it’s an exposure and white balance calibration target I can put into a scene when I want an accurate read of the light temperature. (Although I have my doubts that that’s really 18% grey in the center like it’s supposed to be.) On the other side, it’s a reflective panel that I can use to fill in shadows on sunlit scenes. I haven’t used it much lately.

This is for cleaning the DSLR sensor in the field. Just squeeze to get a gentle stream of air. It seemed like a good idea, but I never use it. For one thing, since my main lens is so versatile, I hardly ever swap lenses, so there’s little chance for dust to get in. Also, I rarely review images on a computer in the field, and the monitor on the back of the camera is too small for dust specs to show up unless I zoom in to look for them, so I don’t ever notice dust on the sensor until I get it back home. And at that point I can use a proper cleaning kit on the sensor.

The Compact Flash memory card format is so old that nothing else supports it. I use an adapter at home, but if I want to get images off the camera in the field, I have to use a USB cable connecting the camera to a PC.

That’s about it. About 90% of all the photos I’ve taken with this camera required nothing more than the gear in this bag.

If any of you have suggestions, or want to tell me about photographic gear you find useful enough to keep with you all the time, I’d love to hear about it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at My Photography Day Bag

And since I’m changing all this stuff anyway, I decided it’s time for some new author photos. I liked the dark, high-contrast look when I created it, but I’m tired of using it now. 

I want a photo that is more friendly, or least less brooding. And I have this vague idea of maybe using several different photos for different sections.

The thing is, I really didn’t want to have to take pictues of myself. It’s a pain in the ass. I have to setup the camera on a tripod with a remote control cable, then walk out in front, take the picture, walk back to look at it, discover I wasn’t standing in the right location, walk back out…over and over until I get something I like. Or until I get tired and declare what I’ve got good enough.

It would be a lot easier if I got someone else to take the pictures. Ideally, someone with real studio lighting instead of a bunch of speedlights, and nice white studio backdrop so I could get full-body isolated cutouts.

I ended up going with Jim Jurica, Editor in Chief of BeautyLook Magazine and an accomplished stock photographer with over 150,000 sales through iStockphoto. I picked Jim because I knew that with his background, he had the technical skills and equipment to produce a nice image, the experience to understand what kind of photo art I’d need for a blog, and most importantly, the ability to direct inexperienced people standing in front of a camera.

Normally, Jim takes pictures of beautiful young women, such as the lovely Jax, pictured above on the cover of the first edition of BeautyLook. However, he does occasionally take pictures of male models and, more importantly, is used to working with completely inexperienced models.

Like me.

It was fun. And I think I have a few pictures I can use.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Photos By Jim Jurica

That’s not to say there aren’t any actual differences in digital image quality, but unless you know how to look for them, they only make a difference in extreme photographic situations. For an amateur like me, the biggest photographic limitation is not the quality of the camera but my own skill and experience.

Still, every once in a while one of those extreme situations comes along. A couple of days ago I went out with a bunch of my coworkers on what we’re calling a “team-building exercise.” It looked something like this:

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I decided to see how good a picture I could get of one of the clay pigeons being hit by the pellets from the shotgun, and when I got home and loaded everything into Lightroom, I found this:

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I think that’s a pretty good picture. It could be better, but it does a nice enough job of capturing the violence of the shotgun blast blowing apart the clay pigeon.

Probably the trickiest part of getting a shot like this is the timing. If you’re shooting a basketball game, you can see the ball heading for the hoop, and with a little practice you can time your shots to catch the ball as it hits the net. But in this case, I had no control over when the shooter pulled the trigger, and once he or she did, the shot reached the clay in less than a tenth of a second, far too quick for me to react.

The only way I could get a well-timed shot is to put the camera in automatic mode and fire off a burst of photos as the clay neared the top of its arc (which is where people tend to shoot it) in hope of getting lucky and catching it at the right moment. Since my D200 camera body can take 5 shots per second, I figured I had a fair chance of one of the images catching something good.

The clays are about the diameter of a DVD disk, and this one was about 80 feet away from me when it got hit. This is a close-up crop with only about a 2-to-1 sensor-to-image pixel ratio at this size. If my camera had less resolution, the image wouldn’t be this clear.

In order to freeze the action this way, I needed an exposure of about a thousandth of a second. That comes with a trade-off in tolarance for distance errors in focus. At a slower shutter speed, my focus wouldn’t have to be as accurate. That’s a problem because the clay was such a small target against the background that the autofocus couldn’t find it quickly. Fortunately, my camera can autofocus in a locking mode, so I can press a button to set the autofocus on the grass where all the clay debris is landing. Then I just follow the clay up from the thrower and hold the shutter button to take a bunch of pictures at that distance.

If I’d had a lesser camera, such as a compact pocket camera, I still might have been able to get that image, but it would have been grainier, I would have had a much harder time setting up manual focus, and it would have taken the photos a lot slower, meaning it might miss getting one like this. On the other hand if I had a better camera, such as the new Nikon D4 body (I want) with the latest 70-200 f/2.8 VR lens (I want, I want, I want) it could have taken that photo at a higher resolution, with less grain, at twice the frame rate. And I think the D4 autofocus is fast and accurate enough to follow the clays up into the sky as they leave the thrower, so I wouldn’t have had to fiddle with the manual focus.

On the other hand, reading back over this post, I realized I have inadvertently concealed one pro-tip which I used to make that picture, and which you can use to get better pictures too, regardless of which camera you use: Take a ton of photos. I have about 120 boring images of clay targets in the sky, and maybe 20 slightly less boringimages of tiny little bits of debris scattered all over the frame. The photo above is the only image that gives a real sense of the moment of impact.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at When the Camera Matters

It’s totally legal and entirely creepy. A gaggle of gentlemen, armed with cameras and an absence of shame, have taken residence in Boston’s Downtown Crossing snapping what they claim are artful “street photography” pictures of everyday people.

Right off, I love the way he puts scare quotes around “street photography” to suggest it’s somehow not legitimate, when in fact it’s one of photography’s most dynamic and original forms. After all, you can paint a landscape or do a charcoal sketch portrait, but you need a camera to capture something as dynamic as a city street scene.

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Robert Frank’s book The Americans is arguably the single most influencial work of American photography, and it’s all street photography. Other influencial street photographers include Eugène Atget, Robert Doisneau, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand.

Oh, and upskirts.

Only in his imagination.

Again, it’s totally legal, but apparently the difference between what’s legal and what’s pervy is about as gray an area as you’re going to find in the public photography world. In a WBZ News tipster’s video, for example, one of these totally normal gents bends over behind a group of young women and snaps a picture of what the reporter describes as areas of bare skin. So, just some good clean wholesome photography fun going on in my state capital, is what it is.

Actually, as you can see in the video here, a couple of the photographers do bend over to take pictures, and the reporter speculates that it’s to take pictures of their bare legs, but to me it just looks like a photographer trying to get a low-angle shot of something. It’s basic photogrphy. If you are taking pictures of subjects that are low to the ground (such as children or pets), you will get much better pictures by getting your camera down to their level.

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In fact, even if you’re taking pictures of an adult-sized subject, you’ll get a subtly better picture if you lower the camera to avoid the slight distortion that comes from having someone’s head slightly closer to the camera than the rest of their body. Alternatively, if you want a photo to look just a little unusual, you need to use an unusual angle.

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(Not actually a street photograph.)

Hypocritically, many of the men…did not appreciate having their pictures taken, nor WBZ video being made of them, and asked repeatedly for the cameras to be turned off. Which doesn’t make them look creepier or ashamed in the least.

I gotta admit, that does seem a little goofy. If you’re going to take people’s pictures, you really ought to tolerate other people taking pictures of you. After all, part of the fun of street photography is catching other street photographers. It’s like when a sniper shoots another sniper.

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On the other hand, if you watch the video, one of the photographers points out that the reporter has been repeatedly asking them if they are taking pictures of women and children. There’s a clear implication that this is something creepy rather than an art form that is as old as portable cameras. Perhaps the request to turn off the camera came after a rude accusation.

I’ve done a little street photography, and that part gets tricky sometimes. I’ve been careful not to take pictures near playgrounds or swimming pools, and I don’t talk to anybody’s children. Still, several people have accused me of “taking pictures of children.” I find that a frustrating accusation: I’m taking pictures in a public place, and there are children around. Of course I’m going to get a few of them in my photos. It doesn’t make me a perv.

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But that’s a long way from what they’re worried about. I’ve only been questioned by a cop once, and I had no real trouble explaining myself. I could have fallen back on my right to remain silent, I could have pointed out that taking pictures is not a crime, and I could have refused to let him see my photos without a court order. Instead, I just let him look at that photos while I explained that I like to take a few pictures while I’m walking for exercise. He was a decent guy. It ended well.

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He had stopped me because one of the parents in the park had complained that I was taking pictures around children. Prudence kept me from saying anything, but I wanted to point out that I’d lived near that park for fifteen years, and before that I’d gone to high school just a quarter mile away, and before that my mother used to take me to the public swimming pool. All in all, I’d been coming to this park for 30 years. If those parents didn’t want me around their children, they should get the hell out of my park.

Anyway, the news story is really pretty bad journalism. If you pay attention, you’ll realize that the story is almost entirely about what other people suspect these photographers are doing, along with some commentary from the on-air personalities that it’s all so strange. There’s very little attempt to figure out what’s really going on. And it’s kind of ironic that the frickin’ news media would get upset about people taking pictures in a public place.

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I don’t want to sound like an anti-TV-news snob, but I’d like to think that a newspaper reporter would not have done a story like this. Not because newspaper reporters are smarter or better, but because a newspaper reporter would have brought a photographer, who would have recognized street photography. After all, photojournalists and street photographers use almost exactly the same techniques, and many street photographers were also photojournalists. I’m thinking here of guys like Weegee or the entire Magnum photo agency.

And listen, I’m all for street photography and the art of that practice. The Sartorialist, one of my favorite photo/fashion sites, has made a name and a business out of it. But, if you’ve ever seen the behind the scenes of how that site works, he’ll always ask permission and identify himself to subjects, whether he’s already snapped the pic or it’s a staged one.

Well, that’s how he works, but that’s not how all street photographers work. If you ask people for permission to take their picture, many people will pose for you, and that’s not going to be the candid photo that so many street photographers want.

Also, when you’re doing this kind of photography, you end up taking a lot of pictures just for the heck of it. The scene is changing so fast that if you stop to think “Is this a picture I should take?” the opportunity will be gone. To get good street photographs you pretty much have to take the picture the moment you even suspect there might be something worth photographing.

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Broadly speaking, there are two basic approaches to getting candid pictures of people in public. One approach is to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible and use a small camera to sneak pictures when they don’t notice. Garry Winogrand used a relatively compact Leica film camera to take something like a half-million pictures this way. Modern stealthy street photographers just use small digital cameras.

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The unobtrusive approach doesn’t work for me. I’m a big guy, so sneakiness is not a possibility. My approach has always been to just blatantly walk around taking pictures. After working an area for a few minutes, people just start ignoring me and I can get some natural photos.

In fact, the more obvious I get, the less people are bothered by me. Hardly anybody seems to care what I’m doing now that I have a rather professional-looking Nikon D200 camera, and I make a point to have a lens hood, a flash, and a bag full of gear. If I tried to be sneaky with a compact camera, I’d get questioned by the cops every few weeks. But with all that gear, people just assume I must be there for a good reason.

On the other hand, some street photographers would spit at my pictures because I’m using a long lens. They believe in getting in people’s faces with a wide-angle lens, because the reaction to the intrusion is part of the image they want. It’s not my style, but I have to admit, sometimes the reaction to being photographed is half the picture.

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Women street photographers have it especially easy in this sense, because hardly anyone ever questions them. Heck, when I bring my wife along, people offer to pose their children for me. If these guys in Boston had brought along a couple of women, the story would probably have morphed into a friendly lifestyle piece about a fun photographic hobby.

So, on that note my fellow Bostonians, I propose this fun social experiment: Descend on Downtown Crossing yourselves, armed with cameras, and complete my next social photography art project. I call it “Pervature: The Lost Art of Capturing Horny Old Men Taking Pictures of Girl’s Naughty Bits, 2011.” We should probably set up a Tumblr or something.

Yeah. Do that. Really, it’s a great idea that’s truly in the spirit of the artform. Except for the bit where you lie about them taking pictures of naughty bits. As I pointed out at the top of this post, there’s nothing like that anywhere in the story.

What they’re doing is all totally legal. Did I say that yet?

Yes, it’s all legal because of this obscure piece of law called the First Amendment to the Constitution. Check it out sometime.

(Hat tip: Rick Horowitz)

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This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Sketchy “Writer” Posts Dumb Commentary

(Hat tip, Mark Clayson via Rick Horowitz)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Photography of Public Buildings Still Legal

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Lightning Photo

I agree with my friend’s assesment:

I remember stories about such things in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, thinking how lucky I was to live in America…

I too remember being told about how in Russia the police would stop you if you tried to take pictures of certain buildings. I was glad we didn’t have that here.

As we say, 9/11 changed everything. Suddenly, police got jumpy if they saw someone taking pictures of things like transportation infrastructure and power plants. And they weren’t real happy about having their own pictures taken either.

In one sense, the First Amendment is holding up despite the onslaught. The courts have remained pretty clear on this. Taking photographs in public places is not a crime, and I haven’t heard of anybody getting convicted for it.

On the other hand, just because there’s no law against taking pictures of whatever you want doesn’t mean you are completely free to take pictures of whatever you want. Police can still ask you what you’re doing, ask for ID, and ask to see the pictures. Except maybe for the ID, you don’t have to answer them, and you sure don’t have to let them see your pictures. Most cops are actually well-trained in the freedoms of the press, and if you can manage a professional tone, they’ll give you back a little respect.

But if they get pissed at you for some reason, they can do a lot of things to harass you, starting with detaining you and taking your (possibly very expensive) camera. They’re not supposed to take your camera without a court order, and your lawyer can get their lawyer to make them give it back, but if there are no pictures in memory, or the camera is damaged, they can say it was that way when they got it.

Actually, the cops are allowed to seize your camera without a court order if they’re in the process of arresting you, and a few photographers have found themselves arrested for some catch-all crime like disorderly conduct or interfering with police business. These charges usually don’t stick, but they’ll mess with your life and discourage you from taking those kinds of pictures again. Which is the point, and the problem.

Carlos Miller has a whole website about these kinds of incidents at Photography is Not a Crime.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Photography Is Not a Crime

I’m trying to figure out how the photo for this NY Times scare story on distracted driving was taken. I can’t really conceive of a scenario where it wasn’t staged. Which means the caption is misleading.

The picture is captioned “At 60 miles an hour on a Missouri highway, a 16-year-old driver texts with a friend as a 17-year-old takes the wheel.” It’s a view from behind and to the right of the driver, showing the him using both hands to key in a text message while another hand reaches in from the passenger side to hold the wheel.

So, how did the photographer get that shot? Did he tell them what he wanted or hint at the result? And wasn’t that a dangerous thing to be letting a couple of teenagers do while he got the picture? My guess was that this was either (a) yet another New York Times credibility scandal, or (b) a file photo.

I emailed the photographer, Dan Gill, and he responded with an explanation:

The picture went with a story I worked on last fall. The story was about social issues at a St.Louis high school; boys and girls…My assignment was to hang out with them and make pictures of how they communicated and tried to meet girls.

When discussing the story with my assigning editor we both agreed it would be…easier and better to ride with them instead of driving separately. By riding with them we could see into their world easier. The subjects were minors, however, the parents were aware we were doing the story.

As we drove around the students soon played their music and forgot I was with them. I looked back through my “raw” take; all of the pictures made on an assignment and found him driving and texting throughout the drive. He said he was texting his “girls”, girls he was interested in. I continued to make pictures of him texting, it was within the scope of the story. At one point, we were driving down an inter belt highway and he continued to text. After a few words with the front passenger, the front passenger reached over and steered the truck.

This makes sense. The picture was being used as an illustration, not as documentation of a specific incident mentioned in the story, so it’s acceptable to use a file photo.

Gill also addresses the danger issue:

Was this dangerous? Yes. Were they doing it for me? No. Was this common practice for them? Is this something they had done before? These are good questions. As a journalist I am here to describe what I witness with pictures. I am not their parent.

Not everyone is happy about that. Daryl Lang at PDN Pulse also exchanged email with Gill about the story, and one of the commenters had this to say:

you are the kind of guy who would rather sit there taking pictures of an accident or some one’s house burning down rather than lend a hand or try to help people involved in the situation. the responce you gave when asked why you didnt say something to those kids or their parents shows your selfishness. if this world is to become a better place, it is certainly not going to be helped along by someone like you, dodging any responsibility toward others, as long as it benefits your needs.

The driver was 16-years old. Does anybody really think this was the first bit of bad driving Gill saw that night? If he had spoken up the first time the kid broke the speed limit or failed to signal a lane change, he never would have gotten the picture. And you know that if Gill hadn’t been there, they still would have done this, and no one would ever know. This way, we have pictures. We know something we didn’t know.

Gill went on:

After the evening was over, I looked through my pictures and picked out 12, three were from riding in the truck and two of those were of the texting/passenger driving scene. Two were published in the Times as part of the story.

Last week a photo editor called with questions about the texting photo. They were working on a story about cell phone use and driving for the Sunday paper and he thought the picture was important.

So, it was essentially a file photo.

As a photographer, I was curious about something. The dashboard has a washed-out blue look to it, but the needles stand out in bright orange. It looks a little unnatural, and I was wondering if it was just a trick of the color balancing or if the photo had been enhanced in some way so that we could see that, yes, the car really was doing 60 at the time. 

As for the color of the needles on the dashboard and the color balance; it’s tough to properly set white balance in the evening in a moving vehicle. The driver’s hand is in direct sunlight and is a little warm color due to the time of day and the angle of the sun. The passenger’s arm and the rest of the interior was in shade and is cast blue by the blue sky. My camera was set for a manual color balance at daylight or 5500 degrees Kelvin.

As I look at the original or “raw” unedited jpeg there is not much difference. I make pictures in the “JPEG FINE” setting; there is plenty of resolution and tonal information to satisfy both newspaper and magazine clients with them. I would rather catch a moment than wait for a RAW file to write to the memory card.

As for post-processing, I don’t do much. A photographer needs to nail his or her exposure and composition the first time…there is no second take in photojournalism.

 Dan Gill’s website is here. Great shots here, here, and here,

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Story of a Photo – Texting While Driving

I’m using “hobbyist” as a shorthand term for models and photographers who work without benefit of modeling agencies and production studios. Like many hobbies—pottery, jewelry making, woodworking—you do it mostly because you like it, but there’s a chance to make a little money too.

Rachel has a new blog about this kind of modeling. (I stole the term “hobbyist” from her—I was going to write “amateur” but I knew it wan’t right.) If you’re at all interested in the Chicago modeling scene, check out the blog of Chicago model Rachel Jay.

To get an idea of the dedication that serious models put into this hobby, check out her Bring It! list of stuff she recommends models bring to every model shoot.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Meet Rachel Jay

It looks like the cover of a bad women’s makeup magazine…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Sarah Visits the Uncanny Valley

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There’s nothing wrong with being 40 years old, but Jennifer’s only 26, and glamour photography isn’t supposed to make women look older.

I have to keep reminding myself that this isn’t a glamour shoot. Another reminder of that comes from the fact that Jennifer is wearing the same clothes and striking the same casual pose in nearly all the shots. I wish I’d given her more direction. But I have to remind myself that this was about testing techniques, not getting glamour shots.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Non-Glamour

I did a couple of group model shoots last summer, and they were fun and educational, but now I wanted to try one by myself. The group shoots are a madhouse, with a bunch of photographers rotating through a bunch of models. I got a few good shots, but I need more time to think about what I’m doing.

Also, I wanted to try some experimental stuff. I’m fascinated by street photography—such as the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Robert Frank—and I wanted to try some of that style of photography, but with a model in the scenes.

(By the way, just because I know the names of some famous photographers, don’t for a moment think you’re going to see anything that good from me. I’m just using a bit of the scenery and lighting that is characteristic of the street style.)

That sort of experimental approach might get me some really interesting pictures, but it’s a bit of a problem to do in a group shoot because they are usually done on a TFCD basis. That stands for Time For CD, and it means the models are spending time posing in return for a CD of nice images for their portfolio. But if I’m screwing around with weird angles and lighting, the resulting photos may not be suitable for a portfolio.

I didn’t want to feel any pressure to get good portfolio shots, and I wanted to be able to take my time. For that reason, I decided to hire a model for two hours of shooting. I put out a casting call on one of the modeling web sites, and after a few false starts, I hired a 26-year old model named Jennifer.

After a few false starts, we got together today at 5:30 in the Six Corners shopping district on the northwest side of Chicago. It’s got some fairly old-looking buildings, and I figured that by that time of day the light would be hitting at some interesting angles.

I was planning on a very casual look, and Jennifer showed up wearing faded jeans and a white sleeveless top, which was perfect. Unless you have very dark skin, this is always an excellent choice of casual clothing for any time you know you’re getting your picture taken.

We basically spent the next hour and a half wandering around the neighborhood, with me telling Jennifer “stand over there” and “lean against that.” I was looking for interesting backgrounds with urban shapes and textures. I also tried experimenting with harsher sunlight and shadows than are normally used in glamour photography.

The Six Corners area isn’t quite a classic Chicago neighborhood, but parts of it make for an interesting background. The biggest problem was the large number of all-glass storefronts. Glass is hard for me to work with. At best, it reflects an unwanted scene from across the street, and at worst it reflects me as I take the picture.

It was fun to see how people reacted. Jennifer said she got some looks from guys passing by, and as we were shooting in an alley, some guy drove up and started talking to her. He took a picture with his cell phone and then asked her for her phone number. He wasn’t as creepy as I’m making him seem, but when Jennifer told him she was married he was gone in a flash.

Just to prove I can’t get away from legal blogging, about a minute later, a police car drove by, then stopped maybe 20 feet further on and a female officer got out of the passenger side and asked “How old is she?”

Before Jennifer could answer, the cop asked to see some ID, and asked us what we were doing.

Jennifer answered, “Model shoot.”

“In an alley?”

I shrugged, “Something different.”

Luckily, Jennifer had her ID in her pocket (no purses during the model shoot) and showed it to the cop. I had my ID out, but the cop just got back in her car without looking at it.

I don’t know what the cop was really thinking. Jennifer looks young but not child-like, and even if she was under-age, there’s nothing wrong with taking pictures of her. The cop had wandered over from a neighboring district, so I’m not even sure why she was in that area. I’m guessing the age question was just a pretext to ask us what we were doing taking pictures behind a commercial building. Cop curiousity.

(I did some location scouting with a friend, and he found a really cool place to take pictures out by the airport. It’s a special bit of open public property that gets you surprisingly close to the planes on the ground. It’s totally legal, but I now have the feeling I should bring along a defense attorney to handle the inevitable arrival of the airport cops.)

We wrapped up a few minutes later. I haven’t looked at the pictures, but I learned a few things.

For one thing, I am really out of shape. I’m overweight, and my right knee is screwed up. We barely walked half a mile during the shoot, but my legs were killing me when I got back to the car. I’ve never been an athlete, but I didn’t used to have problems just walking around. I need to get a lot more exercise.

Another thing I learned from wandering around a city neighborhood with a model and $3000 worth of camera gear is that it would be nice to have someone along for security. I got tired of carrying my camera bag everywhere, but I didn’t want to put it down where some opportunistic thief could grab it and run. I don’t usually worry about stuff like that, but photographing models attracts attention. The concentration on the photography also distracts me, unlike my photojournalism work, where I’m necessarily much more aware of my environment.

One thing I already knew is that model photography is as much about giving the models good directions as it is about photographic skill. This shoot confirmed for me that I suck at directing a model. I’m too busy taking pictures, I don’t know what I want, and…well…it just feels funny telling a young lady how to pose sexy for me.

(There’s a whole sub-breed of model photographers, derisively called GWC’s for Guy-With-Camera, who live for nothing else. They’re not in it for the pictures, they’re in it because they want pretty girls to act sexy for them. The camera is just an excuse.)

Another thing I learned is that operating a camera is hard when you’re out of practice. I haven’t been taking as many photos as I’d like to, lately. Even when I get to take pictures, they’re usually photojournalistic, meaning I just point the camera and shoot. The subject is more important than the technique.

On the model shoot, I ended up out of my normal auto-exposure modes a lot, and it was trickier than I remembered. I was worried about stuff like lighting ratios that I haven’t had to bother with lately. I need more practice.

I’ll post more about the shoot when I’ve had time to look over the pictures. It might be a while.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Model Shoot At Six Corners

Hi Mark,

I’m relatively new to photography and have a quick question that I’m hoping you might be able to help me with..

I have been using the istockphoto model release form for every photoshoot that I’ve done because the wording on it seemed very good. I haven’t put all of my photos on istockphoto, especially not the better ones which brings me to my question.

A buyer from istockphoto liked a series of photos that I had up and asked if I had any more. I have a few more that are not on istockphoto and would love to sell them but I don’t know if I’d be able to do that with an istockphoto model release form. I called a few of the other stock agencies and they say that they do not accept istockphoto release forms.. I dont’ get it! Just because there’s the istockphoto logo and address at the top of the form? So does this mean that I can’t sell my photo privately because of the release form template that I used? :(

Thanks so much,

Felipe

Caveat: There’s a lot of bad information out there about model releases, and this might be some more of it. I’ve tried my best here, but I’m not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Photography law is surprisingly complicated for something that so many people are doing these days. It touches on several major legal topics, including copyright, trademark, privacy, and defamation, each with its own logical structure and case law.

I suggest that if you can’t afford to get advice from an actual lawyer, you at least buy a good book on the subject. I’ve found Bert Krages’ Legal Handbook for Photographers: The Rights and Liabilities of Making Images to be a pretty useful source of basic information. There’s also a link to his website in the Photography section of my blogroll.

If you’re a photographer shooting a model, the photography itself is pretty simple (legally). Most of the legal issues arise later on when someone wants to publish the photo. The model has certain inherent rights to control the use of her image, and anyone who wants to use the image for commercial purposes will need her permission to do so. You get that permission in the form of a model release.

For a stock photo sale, the end user doesn’t want to have to find the model to get her permission, so usually the photographer gets the model to sign a release that gives him the right to make further grants of rights to other people. People who buy the photos will be planning to use them in a certain way, and they will want to make sure that the photographer has a release that grants the rights they need.

So, Felipe, the short answer to your question is that you can sell your photos privately if the buyer is satisfied that the release covers his intended use.

Of course, just because you complete the sale doesn’t mean you’re legally in the clear. Strange things can happen.

For example, suppose you take a photo of a thoughtful young lady in business attire sitting at desk. You then sell this photo to a stock service which re-sells it to an ad agency putting together a billboard for a drug rehabilition service. The ad agency uses the picture with the headline “Not all heroin addicts look like heroin addicts.”

One of the billboards ends up across the street from a bookstore that has just hired your model to read stories to children. Parents don’t want to leave their children with someone who might be a heroin addict, so they stop bringing their children to the store, which no longer needs her services and lays her off.

Does your model release cover this? If not, the model may be able to sue the end user for defamation, and for all I know, she can sue the photographer as well. I made up this example, and these kinds of things happen pretty rarely, but if you sell enough pictures, it could happen to you.

When a stock photo service is involved, they may want to assure purchasers that they will not face these kinds of problems, so they require the models to grant extensive rights, reeling off long lists of specific examples that end with catch-all language like “any media for any purpose” and “irrevocable, worldwide, and perpetual.”

So, Felipe, the longer answer to your question is that you need to make sure that you’re protected, and it’s good business to help your customers protect themselves.

My guess is that iStockphoto’s release probably does cover the hypothetical horror story I described. They’d be one of the deepest pockets in any lawsuit, so they’re probably pretty careful. But that doesn’t mean the release protects you or the end user as well.

As for other companies’ acceptance of the iStockphoto release, I doubt the presence of iStockphoto branding has anything to do with it. My guess is that the release doesn’t have the protective language their legal department has decided they need, or it doesn’t have the language they’ve promised to their customers.

(Actually, I just took a look at the iStockphoto standard model release and I noticed that it says the release will be “governed by the laws of Alberta, Canada.” That might be deal-killer for anybody not located in Canada.)

Just because stock services like Getty or Corbis or Comstock don’t like the release, however, doesn’t mean your private buyer won’t find it satisfactory.

Don’t forget, you can always go back to the models and ask them to sign another release for the same photos. It’s a pain, and you’ll have to pay them at least a token amount, but it might be worth it to expand your photo market.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Few Words About Model Releases

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Click here to see the whole fireworks slideshow.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Last Night’s Fireworks

A less wussy photographer.

Digital cameras capture images using a light-sensitive sensor at the point where the lens focuses the image. In compact fun cameras, it’s sealed away safely inside the camera body, so it stays clean all the time.

In a DSLR like mine, however, it can get a little dusty. That’s because I can swap the lenses on my camera, and every time I do so, a little dust can get into the area between the lens and the sensor. It still has to get past the viewfinder mirror and the shutter itself, but sooner or later dust will settle on the sensor. Since the photosites on the sensor (i.e. the pixels of the image) are less than a thousandth of an inch across, even a small dust particle can cast a shadow that shows up in the image.

(This is one area where film cameras have a huge advantage. Dust can settle on the film as easily as it can settle on the sensor, but it only leaves a shadow on the image recorded at that place on the film. Digital cameras, however, use the same sensor for every image they take, so once it gets dirty it never gets clean.)

The fix for a dirty sensor is simple: Clean the sensor. Most serious photographers do it regularly.

I never have. For one thing, I really only use one lens. Not much dust can get in if you never take the lens off. Another reason I don’t clean the sensor is that most of my images are only for publication on the web, where the resolution isn’t high enough for anyone to see the sensor is dirty. Finally, I just don’t take the kind of images that will be ruined by a few dust specs.

Then, a few weeks ago, I took some shots at a party and noticed this:

Larger ImagePhoto of Cake, With Dust Spot

My God! It’s hideous! Here, take a close-up look:

Larger ImageHideous Dust Spot

I can get rid of that in Photoshop, but it’s on every picture I take, so clearly I had to do something about. This meant I had to confront the real reason I hadn’t cleaned the sensor: I’m afraid of it.

The sensor is the most important part of the camera, and if I damage it while trying to clean it, the repair bill will be huge. In the manual for the camera, Nikon says that you should never touch the sensor with anything. If you want it cleaned, Nikon wants you to send it to their service department. I’ve never even seen the sensor.

(Nikon’s advice is crazy. Photographers who work in dirty environments, such as nature photographers, have to clean the sensor every time they use the camera. Besides, in Japan, Nikon sells a cleaning kit with an instructional video. My guess is that they’re afraid of U.S. product liability law: If they tell people how to clean the sensor, and a lot of people damage their cameras, they’re afraid they will be sued.)

Technically speaking, I wouldn’t even be cleaning the sensor. I’d be cleaning the filter that covers the sensor. That filter is supposedly made of a material that is as hard as steel.

And yet, people damage their sensor all the time while cleaning it. They grind some ultra-hard piece of microscopic dust against it, leaving a permanent scratch, or they apply too much pressure and crack it. Or maybe something goes wrong and the delicate shutter slams closed on the cleaning tool. Even just scratching the filter will require a $350 repair job.

Nevertheless, despite my trepidations, last night I finally cleaned the sensor. I plugged the camera into a power supply so the shutter wouldn’t close if the battery ran out. Then I took the lens off, revealing the inside of the mirror box. I turned the camera over and enabled Mirror Up mode in the menu.

Next, I opened up a Sensor Swab. This is a thin plastic paddle with a piece of lint-free cloth wrapped around the end. They look simple, but Photographic Solutions makes them by hand in a clean-room. The thin handle is designed to bend if you try to put too much pressure on it.

I put a couple of drops of the Eclipse cleaning fluid on the tip tip of the Sensor Swab.

Then I pressed that shutter button. Faster than I could see, the mirror snapped out of the way and the shutter locked open. In the back of the box, I could see the sensor, a shiny green rectangle surrounded by a blue area. When the light hit it right, I could even see the speck of dust that was causing the problem.

Carefully, I positioned the wet sensor swab in the blue area at the right side of the sensor. Moving slowly, I swept it to the left in one motion, being careful not to lift it off the sensor until it was in the blue zone on the other end. Then I repeated the operation in the opposite direction.

That was it. I turned the camera off and the mirror closed. I put the lens back on to seal the camera up again.

I haven’t actually tested it—by taking a picture of something smooth like the sky and looking for spots—but I think it went okay. I’m feeling virtuous.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Today I Am A Man

Check out, for example, this ad for Elizabeth Arden lipstick, where they’ve gone to the trouble to hire Catherine Zeta-Jones, and then photoshopped away all her actual facial features. Or how about this impossibly thin babe? Or this jaw-dropping horror? Or OH MY GOD! HER LEGS! HER LEGS!

Some of the best stuff is for movie posters and DVD covers. Once movie production is finished, there’s no way to get the cast back together—in costume and makeup—to photograph promotional pieces, so the promotional art has to be assembled in Photoshop from existing images. The result is often quite hideous, with actors pulled in from different scenes with different lighting, heads pasted onto bodies, faces pasted onto heads, and arms and legs slid around to impossible locations.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Photoshop Disasters

(Also, I spent about 10 minutes trying to come up with a toilet-related pun for the title before settling on the execrable result you see above.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Eight Crappy Photos Lost to History

Meanwhile, what sort of complications do you suppose might arise while trying to photograph models in an arboretum in northern Illinois during early June of 2007?

Yeah:

Larger ImageTheresa Meets Magicicada Septendecim

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Complications at the Model Shoot…

As you’d expect, if you pixel-peep, the $5000 camera is better.

If you examine the photos at a reasonable resolution, however, the cameras take similar pictures. They’d look the same in 8×10″ prints too.

The differences between the cameras are not as important as variations in how you use them. Ken is more familiar with his $150 camera than the $5000 camera, so he likes the photo from the cheaper camera better.

Ken gets all excited about stuff like this, but a few caveats are worth mentioning. The scene in the photo is a sunlit still-life. If there’s less light and more objects in motion, the $5000 camera will make it possible to capture photos that the $150 camera can’t get. For example, if you were photographing an indoor sporting event or a school play (where flash is prohibited or the subjects are far away), the $5000 camera will get beautiful photos that are impossible for the $150 camera to capture.

Still, that $150 camera takes some nice pictures, and for hundreds of dollars less than the sales tax on the $5000 camera. It’s a Canon Powershot A530, and you can buy it from my online store for slightly less than $150.

Just thought I’d mention that.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at When Your Camera Does Not Matter

Back in March of 2005 I posted a bunch of pictures I took when I went to visit some friends in Indiana, including this one I took as I came back through the Chicago Skyway toll plaza late at night:

Larger ImageSkyway Toll Platform

Last month, I got an email from a Senior Graphics Designer at an international construction-management company headquartered in London. He was putting together an edition of his company’s internal journal and wanted to buy the right to use this picture in a run of about 2500 copies. I didn’t ask why, but I assume the company had a contract to maintain some part of the Skyway.

We agreed on a price of $300, and I sent him the full-size original image. Yesterday my corporate account received a SWIFT international money transfer for $280. (There were exchange and transaction fees.)

That was my first photo sale. Just like that I am, technically (very technically), a professional photographer.

Real professional photographers are fond of telling amateurs—who are usually all hung up on what to buy—that your camera doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you decide to take a picture of.

I took that Skyway picture almost a year before I bought my way-cool D200. I took that picture with my old plastic 4 Megapixel compact camera.

As I approached the toll plaza that night, I just thought the lights might look nice. The bright car taillights, the neon “Chicago Skyway Toll Bridge” sign, the lights of the plaza. Even the light glittering off the raindrops on the window. So I held my little plastic camera up in front of me, aimed it out the window, and snapped a picture.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Going Pro

That’s Nikon’s just-announced D80 digital SLR. From what I can tell, it’s the 10 megapixel imaging technology from my D200 repackaged into a D70-style body for consumer pricing. It’s probably slower, lighter, and less rugged, but it’s definitely cheaper, with an MSRP of $999.95 for the body.

Here’s a bit of information about it from Nikon:

• Press Release
• Flash-Animated Advertising Page
• Nikon Catalog Entry

Nikon says it will be available in September. If the release of the D200 is any guide, they really mean that if you order now you’ll probably have one by Christmas.

I buy most of my stuff from Adorama Camera, and they have it listed aready:

• Nikon D80 with the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED AF-S DX kit lens.
• Nikon D80 with the 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S DX kit lens.

That 18-135mm lens is also new. Read more about it:

• Press Release.
• Nikon Catalog Entry
• Adorama listing for the 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S DX kit lens.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Nikon D80

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Diving at the Taste

Last thursday, I just queried Adorama about my order for a D200 and got this response:

Please be advised that you are at the top of our waiting list, however to this point we have only received one shipment from Nikon for very few cameras & have not gotten any since.

Unfortunately it is not in our hands we are relying on Nikon to supply us & so far they have not come through they way we were expecting.

We apologize for any delays & inconveniences & thank you for your patronage.

Sigh. I’ve never had trouble with Adorama before, and really, I’m not having trouble now. The problem is that Nikon production can’t keep up with the spike in demand for D200 bodies. Worse, Nikon isn’t committing to a delivery schedule with its dealers.

What was weird is that the major online camera stores like Adorama aren’t receiving new shipments from Nikon, but I keep hearing about people buying them from the Best Buy and Circuit City online stores. They’ll just keep checking the websites until they see D200 bodies in stock, then they’ll quickly order one. Here I was trying to buying one from a dedicated camera store, and Nikon keeps shipping new ones to the big electronics chains.

I decided that with Adorama’s honest but unsatisfying response, I might as well try to snag one from one of the big stores.

I had no luck at Circuit City, but I snared one Thursday morning at Best Buy. I ordered it with overnight delivery so that I’d get it on Friday and be able to play with my new toy all weekend. They sent me 3 emails confirming my order, and I started obsessively checking the order status on the web site to see when it would ship.

Meanwhile, I dealt with another problem. My order at Adorama included Nikon’s new 18-200mm VR lens. That wasn’t shipping either because it was also backordered. Best Buy and Circuit City don’t even sell DSLR lenses, so I had no way to get an 18-200 VR lens for the D200 body, and without a lens, it’s useless.

What I had to do was order a lens that Adorama had in stock, so that I’d have something to take photos with until the 18-200 came.

My first thought was to order one of the cheap kit lenses that Nikon ships with some of their cameras, such as their 18-55mm lens for $160. But that would be a bit of a waste, because once the 18-200 came, it would completely subsume the 18-55 and I’d never need it again.

My second thought was to order one of the other specialty lenses I’d been thinking of ordering at a later date. But which one? I could order the 12-24mm wide-angle zoom lense for $920, but that’s a lot of money to spend right now, and do I really want to do nothing but take wide-angle photos for the next few weeks? The 10.5mm fish-eye lens was cheaper at $570, but that’s a trick lens that should be used sparingly.

At the opposite end of the focal range is Nikon’s 70-200mm telephoto lens. Seeing just the numbers for the focal length, you might think this lens would also be subsumed by the 18-200 lens, but if you look at the specifications and reviews, it’s actually a professional quality lens. It also has a professional quality price of $1650 which is way too expensive for me.

My third thought was to order Nikon’s 17-55mm lens. Again, don’t let the focal length fool you. Unlike the 18-55mm kit lens, this is a piece of high-quality professional glass. It can take magnificent, sharp, beautiful pictures. As it should for $1200. It would be nice to have, but that’s a steep price.

I finally settled on a lens I hadn’t given much thought to until now: A 35mm f/2 lens for $305. That’s a prime lens, meaning it only has one focal length and cannot zoom in and out. However, because of the simplicity of the non-zoom design, it produces a high-quality image. What it lacks in flexibility, it makes up for in image quality.

Also, at 35mm, it’s what’s known as a “normal” lens: Its field of view is considered close to the field of view of the human eye. Years ago, before zoom lenses of today’s high quality were available, many beginning photographers would start out with a normal lens. I figure that working with a non-zooming normal lens will help me practice thinking about how to compose pictures.

So that’s what I ordered from Adorama, requesting overnight delivery to arrive with the camera.

Thursday evening, however, I noticed that there was a message I had missed on the answering machine. It must have come in while I was out. It was a call from Best Buy because they needed to confirm the shipping address for security purposes.

Understand, they had my email address if they wanted to reach me, and they had the Order Status page on the web site to let me know to contact them. Instead of using either of those, they left phone messages for me. By the time I returned the call, it was too late for Friday delivery.

As I sit here, UPS tracking shows that my camera left the warehouse in Ohio and is now, for some reason, in Rockford, Illinois, before its trip to Chicago tomorrow.

The lens, on the other hand, was shipped on time by Adorama and arrived on Friday. Ain’t she a beaut’?

Larger ImageNikon 35mm f/2D AF Lens

An object suitable for aesthetic contemplation. And not much else.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at D200 On the Way

I don’t have it yet. There were rumors about the new Nikon D200 well before the official announcement. So on November 1, when retailers announced they were taking pre-orders, a lot of Nikon fans place their orders immediately. I wasn’t so quick to make up my mind, but I finally decided to get in line for a D200 on November 16th.

Nikon released the first batch of D200 bodies to the world in mid-December, fulfilling the Christmas wishes of those who managed to order early on November 1. The rest of us have to wait a while. I had heard that Nikon would be shipping cameras in large batches every month, and a supervisor at Adorama told me that Nikon doesn’t commit to a particular delivery schedule, but that he expected my camera would ship in mid-January. So if all goes well, I should get it any day now.

All is not well. It’s not unexpected. Whenever a new high-tech product is released to the market, early users always uncover problems that squeaked past the quality testing. So far, people have reported four problems with the D200.

First, people reported that the battery pack ran down really fast. With a larger viewscreen, larger files, and the accompanying release of the battery-sucking 18-200 VR lens, nobody expected wonderful battery life, but some people were only getting a couple hundred pictures before running out of power.

That turned out to be no big deal. The D200 uses a the new EN-EL3e battery which seems to have a “learning curve.” After the first few charging cycles, it begins to last much longer.

Second, people were reporting “hot pixels.” That’s when one random pixel is much brighter than those around it. This is not unusual in a camera sensor. It’s a matter of yield: For every flawless sensor to roll out of the fab plant, there might be 5 sensors with one bad pixel, 15 sensors with two bad pixels, 10 with three, and so on. If you ever try to buy a high-quality CCD imaging sensor directly from the manufacturer, you’ll probably have to choose between several different levels of quality, with the flawless ones costing a lot more.

Computer hard disks are the same way: Most of them have a bunch of bad sectors. They’re tested at the factory and the list of bad sectors is written to a special place on the drive. The operating system on your computer knows how to find that list, so it simply doesn’t use the bad parts of the disk. I once worked on a project using an operating system that couldn’t do that. We had to buy a flawless disk drive for three times the price of a normal one. It’s far easier to just not use the bad sectors.

Nikon does the same thing with camera sensors: They program the camera to not use the bad pixels. The image processing software just fills in that pixel with a value that blends well with the surrounding pixels.

Sometimes Nikon doesn’t get all of them, and that’s what people are complaining about. They still have bad pixels in the image. When the image is viewed normally, filling a computer monitor or printed at 8×10, the hot pixels get combined with neighboring pixels and are pretty much invisible. You only really see them if you zoom in and look. And even then you can Photoshop them out. Or if that’s not good enough, you can send the Camera to a Nikon service center and they’ll map out the bad pixels so you don’t see them any more.

The third problem is more serious. People were reporting somewhat mysterious vertical “banding” in some of their images: Thin vertical lines of alternating light and dark tones. All hell broke lose in the on-line forums. People posted pictures of banding, other people didn’t see it and accused them of being Nikon haters, people who saw banding declared the D200 a dud, people accused them of not knowing how to take good pictures, other people accused them of being Canon partisans, people who didn’t even use Nikon equipment declared the D200 a failure because they hated Nikon users…

Amid all the noise and temper, I started to wonder if a D200 was worth waiting for. How bad was this banding? Was it a sample defect in some D200s, or was it just the way D200s took pictures? How often would it appear, and over how much of the image? Very frustrating.

Eventually, the answers started to come out. The problem was real, and tended to show up in certain extreme exposure conditions. If there was an overexposed bright patch in the picture, such as a light bulb or the open sky seen out the window of a darkened room, the nearby dark areas might show very fine banding.

Photographers being photographers, this was cause for a fight. People who had the banding problem posted 200% blow-ups showing the banding. Others who didn’t have the problem at all claimed the original banding photographs were faked. Others responded that because banding that was only visible at 200%, it wasn’t a big deal and wouldn’t show up on the web or in prints. Stock photographers pointed out that stock agencies have no idea what their customers are doing with the images, so they don’t buy images with defects that their customers might notice. This was met with the response that stock agencies also don’t buy poorly exposed images. Some photographers started posting pictures with banding all over without exposure problems. Artistic photographers pointed out that they use overexposure and other forms of technically bad photography to achieve artistic effects, but everybody ignored them. Sports photographers pointed out that they can’t always control exposure either (especially when shooting winter sports with all that bright snow) but that their photos are often used huge or tightly cropped.

While that argument was raging, Nikon engineers diagnosed the problem as something to do with the “compression module” and started repairing cameras people had sent in. The “banding” issue is apparently a quality control problem that Nikon will fix under the warranty in about a week.

For the type of photography I do, banding won’t be a problem unless it occurs on good exposures, and even then I might not care much because I don’t do big prints very often. So if my D200 has banding, I’ll just live with it (or fix it in Photoshop) until I feel like giving up the camera to Nikon for a week or so.

As I write this, a fourth D200 problem may be emerging. Because the lens on a digital SLR is removable, dust can get inside the camera. When the shutter opens to snap a picture, that dust can get on the imaging sensor where it will appear as a small spot in the image. To clean the dust off, you have to put the camera in a special cleaning mode in which it raises the internal mirror out of the way and holds the shutter open. Then you can use an air blower to remove the dust. If that doesn’t work, you have to use a cleaning pad or brush to wipe the sensor clean. (The Nikon manual says you’re never supposed to touch the sensor with anything but since the alternative is to send the camera to Nikon for cleaning, everybody does.)

I’ve read two reports of the shutter snapping shut unexpectedly while people were cleaning the sensor, in both cases causing damage to the shutter when it strikes the obstruction. Replacing the shutter is a $250 repair job. If this ever causes a scratch on the image sensor, it’s going to be a lot more. At this time, even the people who had it happen to them admit it might just be user error—accidentally hitting something that closes the shutter.

In any case, I still don’t have a D200, so it’s not a problem for me.

Note: Comments closed because this entry was turning into a spam magnet.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Nikon D200 Blues

I like his photo of a church near Milford, Nebraska better. That one would be worth printing on 8×10 matte paper just to see how it looks.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Best Marathon Pundit Photos

You can take photos any place that’s open to the public, whether or not it’s private property. A mall, for example, is open to the public. So are most office buildings (at least the lobbies). You don’t need permission; if you have permission to enter, you have permission to shoot.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve read several books and articles about photographer’s rights, and I’d add two important caveats to that statement:

1. Private property can have conditions of entry. These are conditions that the owner requires people to accept in order to receive permission to enter. It’s usually as simple as a sign at the door: No Smoking, No Food or Beverages, Shoes and Shirt Required. Some places explicitly add No Photography. This is very common at places that can profit from imagery themselves, such as theaters, ballparks, and museums, but any place can add such a restriction. If you enter a place with a “No Photography” sign, you do so on the condition that you don’t take pictures. Taking pictures anyway might be a form of trespass.
2. Mall police, building security, and any other people representing the owner’s interests can revoke your permission to enter or change the conditions. If the mall cops don’t want you taking pictures and tell you to leave, it’s trespassing if you stay.

But he’s absolutely right that these people can’t take your camera.

Of course, with the “War on Terror” going on, some people freak out about photography.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

Update: I emailed Andrew Kantor before writing this post. He responds to my assertion that you shouldn’t take pictures if the conditions of entry prohibit it:

True, you shouldn’t. But legally you can. It’s all part of the general rule, “If you can see it, you can shoot it” (with the various exceptions notes in the column/PDF).

Certainly the mall or building representative can kick you out, and many people will want to avoid that and thus will heed your advice and not take the shots. But from a legal standpoint, even with conditions of entry, the only recourse the property owner has is kicking you out.

A news photographer probably wants to balance getting a good photo with maintaining good relations with the building; he wouldn’t want to be banned from the mall, for example. But should and can are different animals here.

That’s not my understanding of the law, but it would be nice for me if it’s true. I’ll keep looking into this.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Mostly Good Advice About Photography Law

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I explained the major technical advantages of a camera like the Nikon D200 over my point-and-shoot camera. In Part 3, I explained why I thought choosing a lens system—and therefore a brand of Camera—wasn’t as important as choosing a particular camera. Now it’s time to discuss why the particular camera I chose was the Nikon D200.

Here’s a table of every current Canon and Nikon Digital SLR camera body (without lens), sorted by price. (“Current” cameras are those listed on the manufacturer’s web site, except the D70 which is omitted because the D70s replaces it. Prices are from Adorama.)

The first thing to notice is that there’s a price break right in the middle, after the D200. All the cameras on the bottom half of the list are clearly professional quality and professional cost. The recently announced Canon EOS 5D is Canon’s low-cost professional camera, and it’s still more than I can afford. Also, I don’t need a lot of the high-end professional features. They mostly don’t result in better pictures, but help professional photographers with their workflow.

So, let’s consider only the under-$2000 cameras. Here are some of the interesting features of those cameras: (Specifications are from Digital Photography Review)

MP=MegaPixels, the number of millions of pixels in the image
Constr.=Construction materials
FPS=frames per second burst rate (it will slow down when the buffer fills)
PC means it has an external sync connection for studio flash systems
MLU=Mirror Lock-Up, which reduces vibration for certain exposures

The D200 is the newest, fastest, highest resolution camera on the list. It’s made of solid materials, and it has a PC connection and Mirror Lock-Up, which are important features to me. It’s the best camera I can afford. That said, this chart still gave me pause for thought. I could get a D50 for about one-third the cost of a D200. That’s a lot of money.

But there are a lot of things that chart doesn’t show. I’ve been following DSLR technology for about a year, so I have a feeling for these cameras that’s hard to capture in a chart (especially since it would be a lot of work to look up the specs for all the other cameras). The D200 is a better camera than the others in a lot of little ways, such as its large, bright viewfinder which will be helpful in low-light shots. Also, like every other new camera, its autofocus should be better and faster than all that came before.

In the forums at Digital Photography Review a lot of professional photographers are criticizing amateurs like me for buying an expensive camera we don’t need. I responded with this list, which sums it up nicely:

I am intentionally buying a camera that is way over my head. The potential to waste a lot of my money scares me a bit. I think my reasons for this purchase are fairly sound, but since my camera hasn’t been delivered yet, I’m willing to listen to reason :-)

Here’s why I’m thinking D200:

(1) It’s cool to have the hot new toy. I never bought anything for that reason before that I recall, and it’s a little exciting. I know this the wrong reason to buy a D200 but I’d be lying if I denied it, so I wanted to admit it up front. Besides, I just turned 41 so it was either this or a sports car, and this is a lot cheaper.

(2) I have more than a few casual portraits with poorly-focused subjects in front of a very crisp background. I blame this on the camera’s autofocus and the electronic viewfinder that keeps me from seeing the problem until it’s too late. It’s not that I expect the D200 to fix this—although I do—it’s that next time this happens I won’t be able to blame the camera. All technical difficulties will be user error.

(3) I’m not afraid of the switchology. I’m a computer programmer by training and vocation, and I have a science and engineering background. Learning my way around complex systems is one of my skills. The operational complexity of the user interface doesn’t bother me, and having read through the manual, I think I understand what almost everything does, but I’m pretty fuzzy on why I’d want to do some of those things. I may not know how to take great pictures, but I can sure push the buttons. Speaking of which…

(4) I like all the buttons. Maybe I’m overcompensating for all the menu navigation I have to do on my P&S—4 or 5 steps just to get to saturation and contrast, three to change white balance, and a whopping seven steps to switch from autofocus to manual (and then it’s still motor-drive!)—but I really like the idea of having all these controls out there where I can change them so easily.

(5) I want high-ISO for indoor shots of people in available light. I’d rather have noise than blur.

(6) I want the camera to be quick to use. I’m fascinated by street photography (e.g. Frank, Winogrand, Bresson) and anything that shaves off my reaction time would be good. (With my P&S I sometimes preset the manual focus to save time, and I have to use an external battery pack clipped to my belt because the camera runs out of juice too fast when I keep it from going into standby.)

(7) Again, because of the street photography, I need to have the camera with me and ready to go. It’s going to get banged around a bit, fall off the seat of the car if I stop suddenly, and so on. There’s also going to be some snow and rain that will get on the camera despite my attempts to protect it. I want something rugged.

(8) Photography is quite possibly the only serious artistic interest I’ve ever had, and I only discovered it as I entered my 40’s. I want to push this as far as it can go. If I were starting 20 years ago, my goal would be an invitation to join Magnum. For now, maybe iStockPhoto…or a photoblog.

(9) I have two power screwdrivers, two circular saws, two wireless telephone systems, two wrench sets, and two of a lot of other things around the house: The cheap one which I thought would be good enough, and the good one I bought to replace it. I have a cheap pan-tilt tripod, and I already know I’m going to have to buy a stronger one with a ball head to replace it for night shots. I want to avoid that mistake here, especially when the cheap one is $600-$900. I prefer the risk of overbuying rather than the risk of buying twice.

(10) I expect to grow into this camera. My day job is as a software consultant, so I offen have a lot of free time between projects, and this is how I want to fill that time. Also, I have a few ideas how to make a little money at this. Presumably, some of the pro features will come in hand eventually.

So, I’m pretty sure this is the camera for me. In any case, I’ve got one on order. I had been hoping to have it by Christmas, but the D200 is a very popular camera and it’s backordered. They tell me I should have it in my hands by mid-January, possibly sooner.

If it’s too much camera, then it’s always going to be enough camera.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why I Want a Nikon D200 – Part 4

Page ii

Viewing the sun or other strong light source through the viewfinder could cause permanent visual impairment.

Should you notice smoke or an unusual smell coming from the equipment or from the AC adapter (available separately), unplug the AC adapter and remove the battery immediately, taking care to avoid burns.

Placing the camera strap around the neck of an infant or child could result in strangulation.

Page iii

The CD-ROMs on which the software and manuals are distributed should not be played back on audio CD equipment. Playing CD-ROMs on an audio CD player could cause hearing loss or damage the equipment.

Page 16

When operating the diopter adjustment control with your eye to the viewfinder, be careful not to put your fingers or fingernails in your eye.

Clearly, these professional-quality cameras are trickier than I thought.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Do Not Taunt Nikon D200 Happy Fun Camera