Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: Comments Commentary

The timeline on this is getting stretched out. I started about the time I was making the selections for IotY, when one of my regular commenters got caught up and sent in several thoughtful comments, and I commented about them in a letter. Then the other of my regular commenters sent lots of comments, as he got caught up on blog reading. He's been distracted with some of his own projects for a while.

And since I was writing while the Christmas tree was up, here's a photo of it. We'll be taking it down today.

That will make Celina unhappy, because she thinks we put it up so she has a comfortable little cave.

Oh, and now that I'm reviewing and not writing, this got long. Take a moment and get your favourite tipple.

Plus there are periodic private comments coming in by email. I make the assumption these are generally not for public consumption, otherwise they would have commented that way. Then again, maybe Blogger gives them a hard time about commenting. I know commenting doesn't work from mobile platforms, or hasn't in the past. I've given up on using Safari for anything blog related, so Chrome is pretty well my go to browser these days. If you're burning to join the commenting crowd, because you have things to say and want to say it right then, and you'll lose it if you don't do so, might I suggest you try Chrome. Has anyone tried to comment on my blog via Chrome on their mobile device?

I love hearing comments from my readers, a small but loyal group. Thank you all for your comments, keep those cards and letters coming!

What I think I'll do is start somewhere, and respond to some of the comments. Where to start? Which has led me to quite a bit of a digression, scrolling back through comments and posts. Oh, and the 2023 IotY is now published, in case you missed it.

January a year ago, Jan said "What on earth is the first "oddball" image? I can't figure it out. Really like them all - but especially #8 for some reason (I can't explain - the light maybe?) Another wonderful Tombstone image! And the shot of the plane is great fun too! That's a lovely portrait of Michelle but think it might have been more effective if she'd been gazing towards the light in order to highlight her face."

It's actually a close up photo of my favourite glass paperweight. I was taking a glass blowing course, and the specific concept was to take a blob of hot glass, roll it into a bar, roll the bar in coloured crushed glass, heat it up, work the bar into a knot, then cover it with another layer of glass, roll that into a sphere, detach from the punty and put it in the kiln to slowly cool down. It all went really well till I got to the roll into a sphere part. Spherical is really hard, and it got all elongated and I had to squooge it down again, then taper it to get it off the punty. It's sort of an oblong shape, and the knot of coloured glass turned to marmalade.

Michelle and I were walking in Fish Creek when we found that patch of grass. I wanted a photo of her emerging from the grass but it didn't work out, even though I was on my tummy trying to get low enough for the grass to be more prominent. I'm always mindful that she poses because I ask nice, and I think it interests her to see how the photos turn out, but she is not a paid model, so I respect her time and patience.

February Sean said "I miss the sea. I kept returning to 7 as there is much to like about. I wonder though if there was a slightly different angle that would have placed the long pointy finger a little further to the right, which would have put the image more in balance. 12 - wonderful location. 13 - I like the amount of movement here. These is some in the sky and clouds, and the house lights add a nice touch."

I often wonder why I don't live closer to the ocean. That could easily lead into a discussion of real estate values, the trials of moving and establishing new roots in another community, but that would be a massive digression.

Composition is a tricky thing and I'm certainly not an expert. Someone looking at a photo can only see what is in the photo. They don't know what is outside the photo, although sometimes it's pretty obvious. There have been many occasions where something has intruded into the frame of my desired photo that was not in my view finder. My choices are then to live with it, use a tool to remove the intrusion, which might or might not be easy or produce acceptable results, or to crop in, which sometimes does not work. I went back to look at the original, and it turns out this is an uncropped image. For whatever reason I chose that vantage point and composition. I no longer remember what was to the left of that driftwood, or why I didn't angle more to the left. I suspect I was thinking about leading lines from the bottom of the photo going up and to the right expansive space.

June Jan said "I'm glad you're still blogging, albeit less frequently. I'm going to try to write one today for the first time in a long while. I think it gets harder when you write less often. How do you pick just a topic or two when you've had so many floating around in your head over weeks or months? Lots of great photos here. I especially like the aurora, the second driftwood, and the long exposure. Your technical skills have really improved overtime. It's hard to imagine you were ever satisfied with just using a cell phone camera. Are you still using an iPhone?"

I think writing is like many other things. The more you do it, the easier it is. Part of it is the technical skill of typing. The faster you type, the quicker you can catch the words and get on to the next thing. More importantly, I think there's something to the idea of being on a roll. You get in the groove of doing something, and it can become easier to keep doing it than to stop.

As for the multitude of topics the advice is simple. Pick one, and write. Make a note of the other topics and promise you'll get to them. And then when you're done writing the first topic, pick a second. Repeat. I believe that the idea fairy brings ideas to those who use the earlier ideas. Don't use them, and they stop coming.

I still use the iphone camera, mainly for taking a photo that I need to send to someone, like a document. Or if it's the camera to hand when the photo is right now, like a cute cat lap photo. But the problem is that while in many ways the cell phone cameras are getting better, it's at the price of producing actual photographs. It used to be that light bounced off things, went through a simple lens system, and was captured on a sensor of some kind, which until recently was film. It was further edited during the developing and printing process, of course.

But now the light goes onto the cell phone sensor, and the computer decides what is being photographed, applying computations to make it "better". Except it's no longer a photograph. It might or might not be digital art. It might or might not represent reality. Then there's whatever filters the user applies, and whatever compressions the hosting software applies when it's posted on line.

I used to like Apple's photo software, but it's become a monster. I can no longer tell if I have the actual bits and bytes that make up the photo on my hard drive, or if they are on the cloud somewhere and what I have are directions to get there. There are several different version of old iphone photo collections taking up space, and I can't tell how they overlap or not, and what will happen if I delete them. I fear that deleting the photos folder off one computer will apply that deletion to all the other computers this one is connected to.

In some ways I've come to dislike the Apple ecosystem, and have considered the idea of buying a Windows box. I have seriously thought about the project of creating another Lightroom catalogue and migrating photos from the Apple photo software into it. At some point I'll run into the format issue and I'll have to figure out how to cope with that. Then when I'm done, deleting the Apple app photos where ever they might be. I think there's only something like 13,000 photos to consider, so how bad could it be? Hmmmm, as it happens Adobe has actual instructions for migrating to Lightroom, so I suppose it's possible. It looks like there's a lot of prep work though. Maybe that's a project for the long cold dark Alberta winter.

Three related comments on the same post. (My 2023 books)

December Jan said "I'm super impressed with how quickly you got the books done. I promised myself I'd have two done this fall but haven't managed even one. sigh. A project for January."

And Sean said "I appreciate your experimental approach to book making. Do it quickly - learn - move on to the next. My various real and imagined neuroses sometimes gets in my way. Cheers, Sean"

And Janet said "Very nice, Keith. My cousin has been doing a yearly photo 'album' with Blurb for a long time and I love the idea - a yearbook of the best photos of family, friends, holidays, etc. The spine has the year on it, so if she wants to reminisce, she just pulls that book. I also did 2 photo books for my mom, on our trips to Scotland, and she loves them."

Plus a private comment asking for clarification between photo size and container size.

In one sense, the books are like writing, the more you do the easier it is. The first one was a bit of a struggle, figuring out the finer points of the interface, and trying to decide which photos to use. I kept telling myself, "it's a test book. A TEST!"

For the next ones I had already figured out some stuff so the dithering was more about which photos and where they went. The second and third lay flat books were easy because I used exactly the same layout. Typography is an arcane art unto itself, and I ignored it. I pick a readable font and move along. Nobody, and I mean nobody at all, will care what font I used.

BookWright offers many page layouts for photos, text, and both. Some don't seem practical to me, but you don't have to use them. I spent some time playing with layouts and dropping photos into them. That part is really easy, but there are two related complications.

1. If the photo isn't the same aspect ratio as the container, the beautiful layout you selected will look odd in the preview, because you'll only see the photo, not the container. So, an example. Coming out of Lightroom, many of my photos will be a multiple of 3 wide x 2 high. (Because 35mm cameras frame size is 36mm wide by 24mm high.) Mine will be 6240 x 4160 pixels.

Now imagine you have drawn a container that is 10 wide x 8 high to be the perfect design for that particular page, and you drop one of those photos into it. It doesn't fit evenly. There's a button that lets you fit to frame, which will leave extra space around two sides of the photo, or fill to frame, which will chop off some of your photo. In either case, that probably isn't the result you want.

My solution is to ignore the containers, making the assumption I edited the photo to a particular aspect ratio for whatever reasons seemed good to me at the time. I just drag the photo onto the BookWright page. It automatically creates a container for it that is exactly the right size. Now you can grab a corner and tweak the size and drag it to where you want it on the page. Which leads to complication 2.

But before we get there, a slight digression. There have been several times I needed to consider photos as a group, and how they fit together on a page. I've gone back into Lightroom, created a virtual copy of the photo, and cropped it to the size or aspect ratio I needed for that page. There's an example of that in my 2023 image of the year post.

2. Original photo resolution. Modern cameras and lenses are amazingly sharp. For every square mm on my camera sensor, it captures about 173 by 173 pixels of information. That's why camera files are so big, it has to define what colour each one of those tiny little spots is. (It's more technical than that, but bear with me.) Now think about leaving the number of pixels the same, but making the size of the frame bigger. Each pixel has to get bigger. At first that isn't a problem. Human vision isn't good enough to see the individual pixels, so they still all blend together. But as the pixels get bigger we can start to see the square edges. Diagonal lines start to look jagged.

BookWright will tell you if you're trying to stretch a photo to be too big. The general rule of thumb for print is 300 dpi. So for my camera, that image could be printed out almost 21 inches wide (6420 / 300 = 20.8) and almost 14 inches high, and still look good (from a technical print perspective). That's more than big enough for most books, although not the ginormous layflat books I sometimes get. If I try to make the photo bigger than that, I'll get jagged lines and a warning. It will fix that for you by resizing at the click of a button.

So in the book I did for Michelle, I knew there was a photo of our first meeting in a coffee shop after a race. I wanted to include it, but I didn't take the photo. It was a 2013 or earlier era cell phone in the selfie mode. Then the photo went onto Facebook, which does further compression. By the time I was trying to fit that photo into BookWright, it was about 1.5 inches square. I included it anyway for the historical record.

Generally I export photos from Lightroom going to BookWright by selecting 300 dpi, and the long edge being the full width or height of a single page. It makes for a bigger file, but who cares. Once the photo is in the book you can delete that exported file. Then when I drop it into BookWright, it takes up most of the whole page, which is fine. I can make it smaller and BookWright tweaks the image. The rule is you can make things smaller by removing what is essentially invisible information, but you can't make things bigger by adding information that wasn't there. Yes, there are apps that claim to be able to do that, but I am dubious about the results.

Of course, all that has been from the perspective of someone working with digital camera files in Lightroom, on a fairly capable computer. BookWright can accept JPG, JPEG, or PNG files, but not the new iphone file format HEIC or HEIF. Converting those adds another step, and watch your sizing.

Doing the books is fun! Not least is the opportunity to look at older photos again, and contemplate your growth as a photographer. Some of the writing advice also applies to creating a book. Writing is different than editing. When writing you barf everything out onto the page. Don't stop to fix spelling mistakes, grammar, plot holes, whatever. Write it all out. Write alternative scenes. Put your characters into a stalled cable car high above the ground; what do they talk about? Do they await escape, or do they undress and tie all their clothing together to make a rope long enough to get into the top of a tree and escape that way? Once you have written, you edit. That's where you fix things, but the important concept is that you cannot edit till you have words to work with. I trust that translating that concept to a photo book is not difficult.

Oh, and a bonus secret. If you have an obvious cover image that goes with your title, then do it first. But if you don't, leave the cover till last. Edit the contents and find out what book you have actually done, as opposed to whatever your ideas were before starting. Once you know what the book is, it's much easier to pick a cover. For many authors, that opening paragraph is the last thing they write.

July Sean said "I find bookmaking another journey of learning, experimenting, and refining. Welcome to the road. Speaking of refinement, as we have discussed before photography is hard. Though as I wrote the other day, I think a better phrase is photography is slow. The 1/125th of a second is only a part of the process."

Ah, the deep mysteries of shutter speed. Photography the way we are doing it, or trying to do it, is hard and slow. Thinking about what makes a good image, and setting the camera to capture that is usually not a fast process. I always knew that the camera and human eyes "see" the world quite differently. The difficulty is seeing the world the way the camera does, or can. A 1/125 second exposure will almost certainly look quite different than a 1 second exposure.

Which is why I I have to repress my annoyance when I hear anyone beyond a brand new photographer learning to use the M setting on their camera, ask, "What settings should I use?" There are usually a number of settings that will produce nearly indistinguishable results. Knowing what the settings were when looking at a photo typically won't tell you anything interesting about the photo.

My usual advice is to tell them, "You have a digital camera. Take a photo with the settings you have now, then look at the back of the camera. There are only 3 variables, so if the photo doesn't look right, tweak the settings accordingly. Repeat till you get an image you're happy with. Then look at something else and do it again. Do it 100 times and you ought to get the hang of it."

I think I've only taken a few photos in aperture or shutter priority modes, mainly to see how it worked. There's been a bunch in bulb mode, like doing dark sky photos, but the overwhelming majority have been in manual mode. My camera mode dial has B, M, Av, Tv, P, A+, CA, SCN, C2, and C1. To be honest I don't have a clue what anything after the Tv is, what it does, or how it works. It's almost certainly in the manual, and I could reach out and touch that manual right now, but I don't care enough to look. I'd be happy to buy a camera that had only M and B modes.

Even walking into a triathlon in challenging early dawn light, the first photo will be nearly right. ISO 800, aperture wide open or nearly so, and shutter is probably around 1/500. Tweak shutter as required for each photo depending on the exact lighting conditions. Shutter speed will gradually be getting faster as the day gets brighter. Drop ISO accordingly. Sometimes the day gets so bright I need to close down the aperture a bit to keep the shutter slower than 1/4000, which is the fastest that camera can work. This all sounds more complicated than it is. I don't even think about it any more.

July Sean said "No surprise on the IoTM. The 1st runner up is one that grows on me, even if there has been some detail loss in the screen version.. The top left corner appears a little hot, and might benefit from being dialed back with a linear gradient. Cheers, Sean"

No surprise that the owl was a finalist for IotY indeed. That's one where a digital camera has it hands down over a film camera. I probably wouldn't have had any photos if I'd had the medium format camera in hand. I might have one if I'd had the Canon 7 in my hands.

The top left corner is a white gravel beach in strong sun. I never really thought about trying to dial it down. Maybe I don't have the right touch, but I don't think I've ever done a linear gradient where I liked the results. Even using a brush to select the area and playing with the settings usually makes things worse, in my eyes.

November Jan said "Shooting water is hard, and doing it handheld is ever harder. Well done! I can see why you put #8 on Vero. It's mesmerizing."

Water is another example of where our eyes see the world very differently than a camera. Many photographers have spent lots of time working on settings for moving water to get the image they want, in the lighting they have. I'm not a fan of the river of milk school of water photography, but I love the mist over water and rocks effect. Which explains IotY. It's much easier using a tripod, or putting the camera on a stable surface, but carrying around a tripod is a pain in the shoulder.

December Sean said "Most of my images don't merit much editing, but there are some though that say "I have good bones" and "I could be much better with a bit of TLC". So when inanimate objects and artifacts start talking, I am inclined to listen.

The digital world sometimes feels a lot like an addictive drug, and therefore controlling consumption is difficult. I like the idea of deciding on consumption based on values. In truth though, my behaviour is rarely that considered. Cheers, Sean"

I've never really had that experience of an image saying "I could be better with some TLC." I think I come from a more documentary perspective, where the image is the image. As we have discussed, there is no such thing as an unedited image. The question is, how much editing and what is the intent behind the editing? Where is the line between a photographic image, and digital art? Most people would say that removing sensor or lens spots is fair game, but what about that distracting white rock off to the side, or the pop can someone dropped?

Some people say that removing distracting things from a photograph is fine, but adding things that weren't there is not. Except I think a photograph is a balance between the subject and the background that gives meaning or context to the subject.

Dealing with the digital world is an ongoing struggle. It's proving harder than I thought to look at Facebook only once a day. My thinking was that whenever I was minded to look, I'd ask myself what else I could be doing that would be more productive. Since just about anything is more productive than looking at Facebook, that means I continue doing what I was doing, which might be being a fuzzy blanket substrate for Celina. Or getting up off my butt and actually doing something.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)