ABOUT THE PHOTOS

All photos were taken on either a Minolta Maxxum 7D digital camera, or a Maxxum 5 film camera loaded with either Fuji Velvia 50 or Fuji Superia Reala films.  The cameras were usually tripod mounted and the 7D used mirror pre-fire to minimize vibrations from shutter movement for the sharpest possible pictures given my lens.

     While there are digital cameras today with far better resolution that then Maxxum 7d, there is to date no camera that is better in terms of ease of use.  It is a photographer’s camera, with everything you need on external controls instead of buried in endless layers of menus and submenus.  If you can afford it, Minolta (now purchased by Sony) has some of the best glass available.  As a beginning photographer, I cannot afford any of these excellent lenses and am using 3rd party lenses by Tamron, and cheaper Minolta glass.

 

My Lenses:

        •Tamron 24-135 mm f/3.5-5.6

        •Minolta Maxxum AF 50mm f/1.7

        •Minolta Maxxum AF 80-200mm f/4.5-5.6

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER

I am a 35 year old Emergency Medicine physician from the Pacific Northwest, living happily in Seattle.  I graduated from the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma Washington, and after that lived for 2 years in The People’s Republic of China.  I worked for 4 years at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before starting medical school at the University of Washington.  I finished residency in Emergency Medicine in Brooklyn, NY, and now am back in Seattle, where I work in one of the hospitals.

    I have been taking pictures since I was a small boy, but only recently started to take the hobby seriously.  I started using only the highest quality films, taking a tripod everywhere, and most importantly, waking up early in the morning to catch the best light of the day.  My photography has improved, but still has a way to go.  Some more of my work can be found at http://www.geosnapper.com/kshuler/user.html which includes the GPS locations of the pictures.  When I first saw this site I thought it held a lot of promise to aspiring photographers to find good photo locations, but it turns out that it has been hijacked by people who use their cell phones to take boring pictures of blurry subjects that never should have been photographed in the first place.

IS PHOTOSHOP CHEATING?

In a word, No.

    In order to really answer this question, one needs to delve into the history of photography as well as having an understanding of what a sensor or film can and cannot do, as well as some understanding of how the eye works.

    Photographers have been manipulating their images for a long time.  Prior to digital, this was all done with analogue methods, which took a large amount of skill, artistry, time and expense.  From the negative (the development  of which is manipulated with the Zone system of Ansel Adams, pushing or pulling film, and even in the selection of film) to the print, images are manipulated at almost every step.  Some films, like Velvia, Kodak 100VS are used for their intense color renditions, that do not represent reality, but rather are a choice for how you choose to present reality.  And then there is the choice of filters used on the enlarger for your average person, or the professional, who may do extensive dodging and burning, do contrast masking to print to Ilfochrome, or multitudes of other techniques.  The difference is this: to do these you have to be a master photographer, and moreover, these things are generally done to improve the image, rather than to make it more real.  Many of the techniques done in photoshop are the same as are done in film photography.  Contrast masking, unsharp masking, dodging and burning, airbrushing-  all of these have digital and film equivalents.  Part of the reason people have problems with Photoshop, I believe, is that it makes it much easier to change pictures, such that amateurs now have the same tools, much easier to use, that professionals always did.  Of course, Photoshop in the wrong hands can turn what was once a nice picture into a piece of trash, and it is not that hard to do.  And of course, photoshop can be abused-  it IS possible to intentionally change a color, or move a person, or mask out something you don’t like, or add in something that is missing... things that truly are NOT meant to make the picture appear more like how you perceived it.

 

    The truth is, there is no way to make an image with film that looks exactly like it does in nature- and in most cases digital similarly cannot (although it MAY be possible with a super intense monitor, HDR images, and very very thorough documentation of conditions when you took the picture).  That being said, the question of how to make your image look the most “real” was summed up very well in the movie “the Matrix” in a speech by Morpheus:

 

                                    What is “real?”  How do you define “real?”  If you’re talking about what you can feel,

                                    and what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then “real” is simply electrical

                                    signals interpreted by your brain...

 

The point, then, is how to trick your mind into thinking the low contrast image you are printing looks just like the high contrast scene you actually visualized.  The eye can see about 10-14 stops of light (contrast ratio of between 1000:1 and 16:000:1), slide film can capture about 6 stops of light (contrast ratio of around 64:1), print film 8-9 stops of light (contrast of around 500:1), and print paper at best a measly 5-6 stops of light (contrast of up to 100:1).  This just illustrates that the eye sees MUCH more than film can capture, and there is really no way to make a print exactly what we see.  What we therefore make is a representation, based on condensing what we see down into a much less contrasty medium than real life.  How do we do this?  We condense the colors, brightness, etc into a smaller gamut, then manipulate the lights and darks such that they “look right.”  Remember, “look right” is a SUBJECTIVE thing.

 

    The eye is an amazing piece of machinery that has built in many of the things that we do in photoshop.  While film takes, within the limits of its chemical rendering of colors, a “true representation” of the scene, the eye does not, and this is why the eye has such amazing ability to see bright and dark at the same time.  Film records the colors and brightness ranges of the scene, and may enhance global contrast or inhibit global contrast, but it does NOT manipulate local contrast.  The Eye does.  Similarly, film does not automatically brighten or darken areas to decrease dynamic range of a scene.  The Eye does.  Film cannot automatically sharpen edges that it sees.  The Eye does.  Film cannot adjust for different color balances to make white look white in almost any situation, and everywhere in the film.  They eye does.  The eye has evolved in such a way that we “photoshop” everything we see, every second, both with mechanisms built in the eye itself, as well as mechanisms in the brain.  This is why there are so many optical illusions out there... they take advantage of these mechanisms that your eye and brain have built in.  If you are interested, please see the illusions section of this website.



LINKS

seamless.usgs.gov       <-- high res topo maps and digital elevation models.  Get your USGS topo maps for FREE.  And if you want to make a

                                                REALLY nice map, get the DEM, then using microdem (PC only), change the reflectance map to the time of day you

                                                will be at a place, overlay the map, and you have a nice shaded map.

Luminous Landscape    <-- an excellent resource for photographic information

Geosnapper                    <-- my section of Geosnapper, a way for people to integrate GPS coordinates with photo locations.  I had hoped this

                                                would allow people to find great places to take pictures, but most people use it to show blurry cell phone pictures

                                                of random conference rooms, or someone sitting in front of a computer, etc.

Photoshop                      <-- The best photo editing software around

Steve’s Digicams           <-- An excellent resource for buying digital cameras

Popular Photography    <-- A great magazine for photo enthusiasts.  Lots of good tests of new equipment, lens tests, etc

GORP                              <-- Great Outdoor Recreation Pages.  An excellent resource for planning your next trip/hike.

Greenhybrid                    <-- A resource for knowledge about hybrid cars.  For more info on new Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs), see

                                                calcars, hymotion, and edrive, all of whom are manufacturers of PHEV conversion kits for the Toyota Prius.

dealnews, dealmac        <-- EXCELLENT sites for finding cheap computer hardware.  Before buying anything, I check here first.

An Inconvenient Truth    <-- The most important movie ever made.  If you love the Outdoors, if you care about your children, if you want to make

                                                a difference in the world, you must see this movie.  Some people consider the movie so important that they have

                                                spent their own money to BUY people their own copy of this movie (available here).  You can also view a complete

                                                slideshow on global warming by Al Gore here.

Norman Koren                <--  An excellent landscape photographer, and one of the better photography tutorial sites on the web