Apostrophe Abuse

Hanging on the front of our local Ford dealer is a large sign advertising a sale. It reads:

2005 Falcon’s $21,000

It involved time to prepare, make and hang it and it would have cost a reasonable sum of money. A number of people would have been involved in its production.

At some stage when the wording was being discussed, someone added a totally useless apostrophe. During the whole process of making this sign, didn’t someone question if it was correct?

What thought process was involved in putting that apostrophe there? It had to be a conscious decision because time and money were involved. Why go to so much trouble and expense to advertise the fact you don’t know jack about apostrophes?

To all the folks at Westpoint Ford at Hoppers Crossing, here’s a hint. It’s just plural; the Falcon doesn’t own anything.

Down the rabbit hole...

My local supermarket has a display of Easter eggs. It is January 23rd.

I think this might be a record.

It's easely done...

Over on The Online Photographer, there is a nice post by Barry F. Margolius about using an extremely low-tech piece of equipment; an easel.

In his words: "…it became clear that it was very hard to evaluate/enjoy these prints. One day they looked great, the next day they looked very flawed. In a moment of inspiration, I walked down the block to the art store and bought an artist's easel: black aluminum, not ugly but not particularly attractive. I just stood it up in the corner of my living room. Now I can easily (no pun intended) display my latest print du jour. Then I could live with it for a few days and decide if I liked it—and sometimes even why I liked it. The time allows me to decide if I like a print enough to frame it, and how I want to frame it, and even where I might want to hang it."

This is an issue that has plagued me (and I am sure many other photographers) for some time. Do I hang up my work? Which ones? Can I justify the cost of framing something that I might not like in a few days/weeks/months time?

Some time back I did a series of portraits of friends who visited my home (this was in the days of ‘wet’ photography). I printed everyone exactly the same and also had access to a retired family friend who did picture framing as a hobby. I was able to get a series of frames exactly the same to do a mass hanging.

The down side is that these frames, or certainly not the matts, are not re-usable, having been built for a specific purpose.

Since moving to my current place, I have wanted a method by which I can put my new digital prints up on the wall cheaply and easily so I can change them regularly. After reading about and rejecting several methods as being too expensive or cumbersome, I hit upon the idea of using artist’s canvasses. The low quality ones can be purchased in a range of sizes for not a lot of money (about $20 each for the ones I settled on).

I bought several in different sizes before deciding on the one that A3 prints looked fine in both portrait and landscape mode. A trial run also showed that, although the canvasses were off-white, they were still too stark for the prints. A quick trip to the local hardware shop and a sample point of a neutral grey paint fixed that. I now have five canvasses hanging on a long wall.

To display a new print, I just line it up and pin it through the corners with white map pins; quick and easy to do. This is not an ideal method. From certain angles the light reflects badly off the prints and it does show that the prints aren't fixed firmly and flat against the canvas. But it is quick, cheap, simple and it will do until I find one or two that I want to frame and hang more permanently.

Interface update...

I have added a new section to the Interface Publications website. It is named "Projects" and I will use it to display projects I am working on, series of photographs that don’t fit into the other galleries and temporary exhibitions.

Currently it contains a new gallery: "Night Lights". This features eight images I took, as the name suggests, at night. Most were taken in a moving car. One was taken of a neighbour’s house.

The method was quite simple. I turned off auto focus and set the lens to be extremely out of focus. Then it was just a matter of pointing the camera and pressing the shutter.

After a couple of shots that featured heavily over-exposed highlights, I set the aperture to under-expose by two stops.

I tried to hold the camera steady, but the car movement and the very slow shutter speeds added motion blur to the out-of-focus effect.

I then used image-processing software to examine and select the ones that had interesting features. At this point I have to confess to digital manipulation. I am sorry, but I succumbed to temptation. I committed colour saturation, contrast enhancement, hue shifts, noise introduction and, on one occasion, I even resorted to curves.

I will probably not pursue this type of photography much further. The taking is too easy. After a couple of experimental shots and adjusting the controls, it is just point and shoot.

A lot of the results are similar. Any skill comes from examining the results and looking for pleasing shapes and colours that will respond to manipulation. I am learning to "read" a representation of the RAW file and work out what sort of image I can get from it. Much the way I used to "read" a negative in the darkroom to work out what sort of a print it would produce.

Not digitally manipulated, take 2

You might remember an earlier post, Not Digitally Manipulated, in which I discussed a quote from a newspaper review of the Sam Haskins exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

The reviewer said: “but none of the images is manipulated, digitally or otherwise”. I went on to discuss this and give my views.

However, I just came across this question and answer in an interview with Sam Haskins, posted on the pop photo website. Sam is being interviewed about the re-issued book, Cowboy Kate and Other Stories.

Didn't you do the restoration digitally?
"The images were printed from digital files, retouched in Photoshop. I scanned the original negatives on an Imacon scanner. And I feel I get better images out of old transparencies than I ever managed before in a wet darkroom. Because in one photo, you can have 20 areas each with a different contrast ratio. You can tweak the whole image bit by bit like you could never do in a darkroom. And listen, to stand all day in a stinking darkroom is not my idea of fun! I'd rather sit in a nice easy chair in front of a monitor."

So, good old Sam scanned the images using a good quality scanner and then retouched and cleaned up the images in Photoshop to get the most out of each one.

I knew Sam wasn’t a wanker.

It is about getting the most out of each shot, not about being able to boast about some form of imagined purity. Why put artificial restrictions on creativity?