Sepia Blues

Almost two years ago I wrote an entry about in-camera sepia, wondering if in fact a sepia transofrmation could provide a photo with more tonalities than a tyical 8-bit black and white.

At the time, I assumed that the crucial yes or no part of that answer would involve the B&W conversion -- if it was done before the sepia rotation of the color space, or after -- that is, if the # of B&W values was fixed to 256 and then rotated, or if it was in a higher precision RAW format, rotated, and then quantized to eight bit. In the latter case, you'd have more tones.

I was half right, and it was the poor half. Looking closely at LX2 sepia images like the one above, it's become clear that the B&W is converted and quantized first. And the part I was wrong about I didn't expect -- that the LX2 crates sepia images not through a matrix transform in RGB color space, but simply by adding a color to the B&W image. The color appears to be (+30R,-18G,-38B). That is, raise red, and drop green and blue, by a simple addition.

Since the values are already clipped to 8-bit, this means a loss of highlights in the red channel and a loss of shadow detail for green and blue. Since all three are made from the same B&W original, it's possible to rebuild that original B&W 8-bit picture by adding (-30R,+18G,+38B) and then selectively using the shadow detail from the red channel and the highlights from the green or blue channels. The result, in Photoshop, is the same as if the pic had just been shot in B&W to start with (barring JPEG artifacts).

So why does it seem to have more tonality? I'm guessing that it simply looks better on the small, contrasty camera LCD.

It's a tragedy that the B&W image is already clipped to 8-bit before sepia conversion. If the image was unclipped, the sepia conversion realy would be better, with and increased number of shadow tones in red and highlights in blue and green. It is what it is, though.

At least for web use, this is suggesting to me the following work approach for high quality B&W from JPEGs (when time demands preclude shooting in RAW):

• count on spatial resolution as a stand-in for pixel depth detail. Given some level of pixel noise, 4x4 8-bit pixels should be better than one 12-bit pixel. For a reduction from a 4K image down to a 500-pixel web snap, there are a lot of input pixels for every final output pixel.

• with this in mind, set the camera to a low-contrast image, to compact as much of the original RAW range into the 8-bit jpeg, and then feel free to beat on it using levels and curves later on -- knowing that even if precision is lost per-pixel, a lot of it will be made up in the size reduction step.

I'll report on some results soon.

P1010577

P1010333, Alameda

New and Contemporary

There is little that can lead you to treasure good photography than to look at a lot of bad photography, interspesed with an occasional gem. Which is exactly what I was doing a few weeks ago on (where else?) flickr, where I was editing group pools.

When I started the New Black and White group, back in flickr's early pre-yahoo fog, there were no editing or moderation tools, it was slow and painstaking to remove each and every pic I felt didn't belong. And at first that was fine, as there were very few pics submitted. Two or three a day. I stopped messing with it, left it fallow -- came back to find a thousand pictures.

Edited those down to a few dozen, watched it fill up quickly again. Eventually the flood was far more than I could manage as anything less than a full-time job, so I ignored it for months until there were more than 55,000 photos in the pool, most of them "flickr noise" of the cute kitten variety.

Rather than even try to deal with all that, I started another group, Contemporary Black and White, and invited a few select members. I thought: at least I don't need to edit them (and I don't -- they've been contributing good stuff). But then I started wondering about the old one.....

...could I realistically edit-down the 50,000+ photos to a little kernel, throwing away 90% or more of them? Only one way to find out....

So I did. It took time, it took special tools, it took regular attacks. I worked in blocks of from 1000 to 3000 photos. As time passed, it was quick enough to see how many really endlessly-repeating tropes there were, each trotted out over and again and usually accompanied by plenty of enthusiastic flickr badges and boosting comments (especially if the photo involved a pretty girl).

As soon as I started deleting, of course, the hate emails started coming in. What was interesting, if not surprising, was that some of the worst "offenders" -- by that I mean people whose "NB&W" photos were dull, often not even black and white, and massively spam-posted all over flickr -- were the most strident of the protesters. A handful of them diffidently pulled their photos (by the hundreds) from the pool. Thank you for saving me so much time! I thought, but also couldn't help but believe that they genuinely thought they were doling-out a punishment, as if I would somehow be harmed by no longer being able to view (and congratulate) their hundreds of bare-tree-on-the-plains snaps ("Don't bother replying back as I'm blocking you." too).

Photography, especially as practiced socially on the internet, is as vulnerable as any craft to the curious backwards-expectation principle: that is, for any skill, the very best people are constantly self-critical and pushing, always knowing that they could do better -- while the weakest practitioners are quite securely smug in their belief that they've got everything licked, under control, no need to reflect or review except to roll in adulations.

In internet-style photography, this is reinforced to a staggering degree, if only because so much of photography, as generally practiced, is about flattery -- just like most online social networks.

In the aforementioned 1951 Berenice Abbott article, places the blame for photography's emphasis on flattery on proto-pictorialist Henry Peach Robinson, the creator of the famous Victorian melodrama photo "Fading Away," and most especially his book Pictorial Photography (A sample: "It is an old canon of art, that every scene worth painting must have something of the sublime, the beautiful, or the picturesque. By its nature, photography can make no pretensions to represent the first, but beauty can be represented by its means and picturesqueness has never had so perfect an interpreter."). Personally I don't think he can quite be credited for human vanity, but the gun's still a little smoky.

It doesn't really matter where it came from, but the belief is rampant that "good" photography equals "flattering" (this was exactly the criterion given to me a recent local photo class, a class which also extolled the works of Yousef Karsh as expressing the highest of all photographic virtues). It's a flattery that aims both ways: if your pic is flattering, then it is "good" which flatters the photographer.

The cycle starts there: the photos are flattering, and deserving therefore of flattery, and flattery leads to flattery leads to flickr badges and group invitations and should a tiny shred of actual daylight get into the party the guests will be in a ruinous uproar over its harsh direct brightness.

Not that the angry messages bothered me after the first thousand photos. I stopped informing, just went at it deleting. Didn't look at the names, didn't look at anything but the pics. And saw the same two dozen shots over, and over, and over...

I started to catalog them for a while: "...cute cats, adorable soft-toned children, footprints in the sand at the beach, misty time exposures of water, streets and railroads stretching off into the distance, casual snapshots, rusting cars, ruined castles, silhouetted trees, tele shots of resting seabirds, trees and unidentifiable silhouetted figures in fog, photos of backs of heads, (abandoned) factories, tourist destinations, parked bicycles, wide-angle upshots of skyscrapers, cathedral ceilings and windows, photos of camera collections, geometric airport ceilings, exterior stairways, wistful old statues, people looking bored while drinking coffee, interesting architectural details in closeup, sunlit spiderwebs..." it was actually a relief to leave in at least a few flattering model shots, if only because they weren't another empty craggy landscape.

For the sake of completeness (no, just to be random) I kept some in place, throwing away the OTHER photos just to keep runs of clichéd ones: say, thirty black trees on white (URL approximate), or twenty men with hats, or 30 shots of animals -- in order. Moderators can't rearrange the photos, I could only do this by eliminating the pix between how many runs of shots were just the same, same, same.

What none of the protesters did is what would have redeemed them. Despite repeated patient invitations in the face of their ad hominem vitriol, not one of them was willing to say why their photo deserved consideration, why it was special or worth anyone's time to view. Not one.

I can't help but feel the person who has benefited most from the exercise, though the obvious result is a much better pool of photos, is me -- seeing in a deep way, night after night for weeks, just how many "gorgeous!!" photos are really not worth a second glance and how many of them are in the same narrow predictable range that have been little-changed since the 1860's. Now the real challenge: remembering to avoid them myself while still making photos. At least photos I'd bother putting on the web.

Caveat eyeball.

Ten RAW Images

High speed ftw! A quick $12.99 sale price later, and the LX2 is somewhere between 25-30% faster on RAW capture. Thank you OCZ and thanks Gary for the hint!

To my surprise, shooting time for ten "high quality" JPEG images remained about the same -- around 20 seconds -- indicating to me that for compressed pix, the limiting factor is the speed of the "Venus Engine" processor itself.

Addedum: yesterday saw the publication of dpreview's test of the Sigma DP-1 which is probably the closest competitor to the LX-2 and considered by many, in anticipation of it, as the compact streetphoto heir apparent. To my great surprise, the Sigma is significantly slower than the LX-2 -- the only got a little over 7 seconds per frame in RAW while the LX-2 turnaround was only 4.5 seconds (even faster than what I was getting). The Sigma does have a three-frame buffer, though it's not clear to me if you can use it in regular shooting mode. And a hotshoe for Martin Parr & Bruce Gilden fans.

Addendum #2: And on the heels of that, another review lamenting the DP-1's lack of speed, this time by Edward Taylor on The Online Photographer -- "My main complaint about the camera then was that it was painfully slow. It was and it is...." Hmmm.

LX2 Part 2

As I expected, I've gotten more used to the LX2.

In the clichéd and time-honored tradition of pointing Leicas at brick walls to prove that their lenses are top-notch, here's a closer sample of an in-camera-sepia JPEG. The right-hand area shows a detail from the picture on the left -- pixels at one-to-one size (if anything, the image here is degraded just because it's a web-compressed pic. It was also hand-held).

As long as I'm willing to put my thumb on the monitor, it's fine in the hand. During the past week I've been shooting with it at the ION Conference, using it as a notepad to keep track of presentation slides. In the hand for an hour at a time and I've gotten used to the idea. No hand strain. In JPEG, it's also plenty fast.

Tomorrow I'm taking Gary's advice and trying a much faster SD card for shooting in RAW mode. If it can get the differentials indicated on Rob Galbraith's benchmark site, there might be as much as a 4x acceleration, which will keep me quite happy (even a modest improvement might be enough).

LX2

After returning from China I gave myself a few weeks to see if Panasonic would announce a new LX3 at February's camera-business trade show. No dice, so I promptly ordered a new LX2 to replace the stolen LX1. Here are a few notes, comparing the two.

Only the LX1 camera, one card & one battery were pickpocketed -- my case & charger, 2nd battery & backup card were still in my luggage. Not surprisingly, everything fits perfectly, equipment-wise. Perhaps with time I'll also learn to adjust as smoothly.

The lens is the same killer Leica 28-105-ish. I have been impressed with the improved color renditions, and I don't mind the slightly different character of the in-camera JPEGs (I also don't buy the notion, proposed by some bloggers and others on photo.net, that the LX2's "Venus III" chip does pre-processing on its RAW data -- an assertion that makes no sense to me).

The higher ISOs (two extra stops, from 400 to 1600 as the top end) are a very welcome addition, regardless of how noisy the highest ones may be. A sharp grainy photo is better than an unreadable blur or no photo at all.

I might yet tape the back of the camera for grip as I did the LX1 -- but not the front. The LX2's front finger grip is much-improved in providing your middle finger purchase. Simple, and well-done -- but it needs to counter a downside change, hands-wise: to accommodate the larger LCD screen, the LX2's designers have cramped the rear-side controls. It's harder to shift your (my) thumb around and hit the correct thing in that smaller space.

If I want to hold the camera firmly, one-handed, I end up with my thumb on the screen (and away from the buttons). I am pretty sure that I only rarely used the LX1 one-handed, so this difference may feel like a bigger deal than it is.

Overall, the narrower thumb space means that my hand is significantly less comfortable when holding the camera "at rest," and that in turn creates the (false) impression that the LX2 is heavier.

The controls themselves have been subtly improved, mainly by Panasonic's UI designers realizing that people confuse the joystick with the directional buttons -- so, whenever sensible, you can use either control to accomplish the same task. This is good usability design, thinking about what the user wants to accomplish and letting them get there in the way most natural for them. A+

The biggest impression of difference between the LX1 and LX2, however, has been speed of operation -- or rather, the lack of it. The LX2 is slower between shots. I would have guessed about 25% slower, which matches change in the pixel count. dpreview's test shows a 32% slowdown on RAW writes, as well as a slowdown in burst mode. Those percentages feel like a lot, given the rhythm I'd already developed with the LX1. This is frustrating given that the camera's operations are otherwise responsive and the AF is even a tiny bit quicker. That extra second and a half of write time can be tough.

Token LX1 sighting: I saw Sylvia Plachy using one on Ovation's televison bio Close Up. She was switching back and forth during the same session between an LX1, a Leica M, a Rolleiflex, and a Hasselblad 500 of some sort (SWC?).