what we've got

Up at five, we leave the house for Lake Geneva for the sunrise concert. We’re all tired and share a sense of unreality that being awake so early brings. To keep us going, we pack flasks of coffee and ‘l’escargot’, those delicious snail-shaped breakfast pastries.

When we arrive, there are already dozens of people there. The concert is free, but it’s still a surprise to see so many people. The conductor taps his baton on the music stand. The audience settles down. We wait…

This has to be one of the most serene moments I’ve spent amongst a (albeit smallish) crowd of people. The bains des paquis, on Lake Geneva’s rive droite, is usually quite lovely but this morning it was more tranquil than ever. We had promised that one day we’d see the sun come up over the lake. Now here we were.

At first the lights of Geneva and the moon were still visible on the left bank.

But soon the sun began to rise and swimmers took to the lake.

After an hour or so, the sun had risen completely and set that dazzling column of light in the still water.

The concerts take place most weekends during the summer; there’s no doubt we will be back next year. Like Le Tour de France, and the various beer and cheese fêtes, these concerts will remind us of the long sunny days we’ve spent here.

For some, photography isn’t quite art because it simply captures reality. There is no artifice in many shots, no craft: the world comes together in a moment of specific configuration, more or less outside of an artist’s intent, and a photographer simply points the camera and – click! Art is made. Or isn’t, since the artist has very little to do. There isn’t the sheer hard work that goes in to, say, a painting or a novel. We might feel – ‘I could have done that!’ And indeed we could, if all photography means is to point and click.

Diane Arbus‘ photo ‘Identical Twins‘ shows us in a very immediate way that photography can do more than that. On one level we have a photo of two very similar girls. However, despite their clear resemblance we quickly notice differences: one girl is frowning a little while the other smiles; one pair of eyes is hooded, the other clear and open; the hands are slightly different, the hair; and so on. And as we notice those differences, we interpret those them as significant and meaningful: we might say that one child is happy; one less prim and proper than the other; one more dominant, and so on. We might then go on to think about the nature of identity, of how uniqueness triumphs uniformity. We find meaning in gaps, the differences between the two girls.

This process of finding ‘meaning in the gaps’ also lends itself to discovering the ‘art’ in photography. In this way of thinking, the similarity is not between two subjects but between the photograph and the reality it represents. The gaps are those elements where the photographer has introduced an element of creativity, artifice, illusion, call it what you will. In the above example, there are many examples. First, the photographer has assembled the two girls in a certain pose, emphasising the same hairstyle, clothes and so on. This helps us in seeing the differences – and finding the meanings – between the two subjects. It’s clearly not just a slice of life, although it might include that.

But note the junction between wall and floor: it is at an angle, higher on the left compared to the right. This is deliberate. We might interpret this as saying: what seems a balanced portrait is actually askew; although seemingly identical, our immediate perceptions are upset by the uncertainty that their differences bring; that the photograph wants to destabilise our preconceptions about what it means to be the same and yet not the same; that ultimately what seems to be a simple capturing of reality is really the product of the artist-photographer intent.

Reading photographs like this is underpinned by two central ideas. The first is that there is no such as thing as an ‘innocent’ photograph, that is, one taken without any kind of artifice or creativity. Even when taking holidays snaps we don’t just point and click: we might frame the face so the top of the head of our subject is not cut off; we’re told to put the main subject to one side to promote a sense of harmony, create some interest. The second central idea, following from the first, is that even the smallest details are often there deliberately. In ‘Identical Twins’, the slant of the junction between the wall and floor is deliberately significant, as we’ve seen.

What we have in this photo is a metaphor for the relationship between art and reality. Where two very similar images (ideas, symbols, techniques) are placed in close proximity it is likely that we will find differences between them. It is in those differences that the meaning lie. ‘Identical Twins’ (it’s title at once both plainly descriptive but, as we’ve seen, highly charged with meaning) by Diane Arbus is one of those key photographs that tell us more about the relationship between photography and reality, and between photography and art.

Postscript
If you find this image a little unsettling there are good reasons for it. Our minds are programmed to identify the human face. When we see slight discrepancies between the real and the near-real, as we might most often in Japanese ‘humanoid’ robots or ultra-realistic computer games, we enter the ‘uncanny valley’, that phase of interpretation where an image appears strange,   Here, the differences between two ‘identical’ twins remind us of that disjunct. It is also the starkness of the black and white; the unfussy background which focusses our attention; the confrontational quality implied by the pose and gaze direct to the viewer. The film director Stanley Kubrick would later use a similar image for the murdered twins in his ‘The Shining’.

My wife Jennie recently told me a anecdote about a stint working as a waitress in Canada, a period in which she made ends meet whilst she studied. In the restaurant, there used to be a box passed around into which the patrons could drop their tip, hidden from the rest of the group. One tip would reappear with wearying familiarity and that tip would be a scrap of paper upon which was written: don’t eat the yellow snow.

No doubt suffering from l’esprit de l’escalier I suggested that my tip would be a perhaps more serious, even pompous one: ‘stop being offended’. I think, like irony and innocence (which are another matter), that being offended has become a real blight on the relationships in our everyday and cultural life and at its worst threatens one of humanity’s greatest achievements, free speech. Or rather, as the writer Philip Pullman reminds us with his pithy, eloquent and beautifully pitched response, you don’t have the right to live without taking offence:

Just as we have the right to publish our thoughts and feelings – and we do, now that we blog, and Tweet and share so keenly – we are equally subject to those thoughts and feelings being criticised, from which offence might arise. We show our strength through our reaction to criticism, where it falls on the right side of a law that embraces free speech.

Watched the news lately, picked up a newspaper? Then it’s likely you’ll be at least tempted into being afraid, if not downright hide-behind-the-sofa, peek-from-under-the-cushion terrified.

Here’s what you do to overcome the fear in the media. The first is listen to Doug Stanhope. He seems to know something about fear (the audio is not suitable for work so put your headphones on).

When you’re done with Doug read this analysis of how fear works by Tom Engelhardt, along with some statistical analysis (especially if you’re American – I’m not – but the principle applies elsewhere, too).

And if you’re still a little unconvinced, then watch Adam Curtis’ superb dissection of the ways that governments and organisations use fear to try to control me and you, in his documentary The Power of Nightmares.

And by then – well, you may have stopped worrying and learn to love the calm.

When Don Draper, head of ‘Creative’ in the advertising firm at the centre of the hit TV series ‘Mad Men, rolls his eyes when someone tells him that ‘sex sells’ we know advertising is failing. When he suggests to a client that ‘If you don’t like the conversation, change the topic’ we know that PR is replacing it.

The reason why Draper is so successful and highly esteemed is that he recognises the importance of public relations. What he sells is the brand, the entire set of practices and beliefs that underpins the product, whether it be toothpaste, a bra, or an airline. Advertising is visual; public relations is verbal. The image of the woman draped across a car won’t sell anything; but the conversation, and the aspiration that is carried upon it, just might.

It’s no coincidence that Don Draper used to be a car salesman. That racket was the embodiment of an early, ‘hard’ approach to advertising: drown the client in details; appeal to base impulses; pressurise through conformity, and so on. There’s an example in the show where Draper’s creative team want to sell a Kodak carousel on its technical innovations; for Draper, it’s more about the memories that the projector helps relive. In ‘The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR’, Al and Laura Ries tell us: “The harder the sell the harder the prospect resists the sales message.” Hard selling didn’t work anymore for Draper in the car dealership; and now it won’t work for him at Sterling Cooper.

Advertising was then, PR is now. Only the ‘now’ of Mad Men is the early 1960s. As a result, Don Draper’s trajectory from car salesman to head of Creative at an advertising firm represents the beginnings of the movement from advertising to PR as the preferred approach to persuading the client.

I started to get many views on a particular photo in my Flickr photostream, consistently, over a period of about a week. That can only mean one thing: my photo has made it to the 0.05 per cent of photos that appear on Flickr by becoming part of the coveted ‘Explore‘ group. I checked my referrals and using other tools, and there it was: it made it into Explore. In other words, it’s got a high ‘interestingness’ rating – thought to be a complex equation based on how many views, comments, faves, etc a photo has. Here it is, and as it appears on Flickr (click on image below for full size).

I quite like the way Flickr approach the idea of ‘interestingness’. No one really knows completely how it works, it’s like a secret recipe, an alchemy. As a result, Flickr’s forums and some groups are full of speculation on how it’s calculated and what you must do to get your photo included in Explore. Looking through Explore photos, you quickly realise it’s not the best photos, so let’s not get carried away. All I can do is say I had none of this in mind when I took the photo. I just wanted to do the best I can. And I might add that I had to do very little on the day; nature did it all for me.

More important to me than the Explore thing was that my nephew said, quite out of the blue, that he was using my photo as his desktop background on his PC. Now that’s all the ‘fame’ I need.

I’m going to take one seemingly independent observation, then another, and then make an obvious one of my own (I call it iSynthesis).

Apple is likely to announce the launch of a new tablet-based Mac, probably called (if you are to believe the hype) either the iPad or the iTablet. No real news there – you knew this already. But the thought preoccupying everyone is: no one knows what we’re meant to be doing with it. Charles Arthur in The Guardian echoes the sentiment:

Here’s a story from the near future. It’s been a long day. Finally throwing aside the cares of work, you slump down on your sofa and pick up that shiny new device you bought the other day. […] it’s Apple’s stylish new iPad (iTablet? iSlate?) – a smooth 10in screen with no keyboard, like an iPhone on steroids. You pick it up, turn it on with one swipe of a finger, and begin to . . .

At this point, the picture goes hazy and freezes. The reason: […] still no one is certain what the hell their creation is actually going to be for…

There, that’s the first of the observations. Many people will want one, many will buy one, but if we’re going to justify the price – thought to be around £1000 – we better know how we’re going to use it.

Now for the second, seemingly unrelated observation. In another section of The Guardian, (the wonderfully-named) Mercedes Bunz tells us how iTunes might save the publishing world through simplifying the ‘micropayments’ approach for buying newspaper content:

Payment has to be simple and elegant. Click and run, and don’t think about it. Apple can offer that: there are more than 100 million iTunes accounts with credit cards already. If the transactions are batched so that the fixed cost is amortised across multiple articles, iTunes can offer readers a simple and elegant way to pay, and readers like that.

Now, for the third and final observation, my own. No doubt you’ve already guessed it: what we’re going to do on the iTablet is subscribe and purchase electronically-published content through iTunes.

The signs are there: The New York Times is considering switching to a micro-payment system; I understand from Bunz’s article that various publishers have been in talks with Apple about distributing their content; some newspapers are already using alternative methods of creating revenue through such approaches as the aforementioned The Guardian‘s iPhone app.

I’m not the first to put two-and-two together and I won’t be the last. iTunes might be the future, whether you like it or not, of some types of publishing.

This is my take on how to create a HDR-type image using a single photo. It’s written for beginners, and will take you through the process from beginning to end. It’s likely to take 30 minutes or so first time, but you’ll get quicker as you repeat it. If you want to know what a HDR image is, there’s an excellent demonstration over at Wikipedia.

First of all, so you have an idea of the kind of thing that can be achieved, here’s the image I made earlier today, followed by the original.

This is the original photo, a JPEG of a round 3Mb in size, taken with a Canon Ixus 80 point-and-shoot:

I think this illustrates the first rule of HDR processing – start with a decent photo! It won’t transform a bad photo into a good one, but it might make a good one even better. (Bear in my that these images are downsized and saved into different formats so I can add them to this blog: trust me when I say they look better in their original, high-definition formats!)

What you’ll need

This isn’t a completely automated process, but it doesn’t take very long. You will need the following:

• A photo you’re happy with. It can be in almost any format. If you’ve already seen some HDR images, you’ll know the kinds of things that work well – high contrast landscapes, with dramatic skies and water are common – but try different images, see how well they work.
• Adobe Photoshop CS2. I understand the latest versions of Photoshop cannot generate HDR images out of the box. There are other HDR rendering software out there: many use and enjoy Photomatix, for example.
• I used iPhoto to adjust the exposure settings for the images, since it’s quick and easy and I’m familiar with it. Photoshop will do it too.
• A bit of time, since – depending on your computer’s processing power – these images can take a little while to render. I’m using an iMac running Photoshop through VMWare and it only took a couple of minutes.

Getting started

First you’ll need to generate three copies of a single photo with three different exposures (different levels of light and dark).

• If you’re using iPhoto this is easy. Open the photo in iPhoto and duplicate it twice so you have three photos in total. I prefer to make a new album or new event and put them in that so it’s clear what I’m doing.
• Now click on ‘Edit’ then bring up the ‘Adjust’ set of histograms (the graphs which show the different levels of exposure, contrast and so on).
• Set exposure for the first photo to -3; leave the second photo at 0; set the third one to +3. That is:  the first one is dark (-3); second one is normal (0); third one is light (3).

Now you’re going to need to start Photoshop for the next bit.

• Open Photoshop and open each image all together (select them all from the File / Open menu). They should by default cascade (organise) themselves onto the screen.
• With the photo open, choose File / Save for Web (it doesn’t matter where you start, just use the first one that you see).
• When you’re done with the first one, close it and start on the second. As you close it, Photoshop will ask you to save it: don’t: click ‘No’. You should have already saved it as ‘Save for web’. Save each each in turn like this.
• I make a new folder for ‘Save for web’ images, so I know what I’m doing – I usually add ‘_HDR’ to the end of the folder name and/or photos, so I can differentiate them from the originals.

If you want to know why we had to save them for the web, read the section ”Why save the files for web?’ below.

But for now -  you’re ready to make a HDR!

Using Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR’ to create your image

• With Photoshop open, choose File / Automate / Merge to HDR in the menu.
• It will ask you to find the images you wish to merge. Add the three that you have saved above. You don’t need to check the ‘Alignment’ checkbox since all images are the same.
• A dialogue box may appear which says ‘Manually set EV’. If it does, you’re going to need to set the levels for each photo manually in the ‘EV’ value box.
• To manually set levels, click on the ‘EV’ button. It will be active, ready for you to enter the levels. For the under exposed / dark photo, enter ‘-3′; for the normal photo, enter ’0′ (zero); for the over exposed / bright photo, enter ’3′.

When you’ve done that, hit enter. The dialogue box will disappear and another new one will appear in the top right.

• You can just hit enter here – don’t be disappointed with the image since it might not look much different – we’re not done yet!
• Now, go to the pull down menu and choose Image / Mode and then adjust the bit rate to 16.
• A histogram should appear, in a box titled ‘HDR Conversion’ (if it doesn’t, click the down arrow to open the part of the box). Now you’ll need to make some adjustments – this is the fun bit, and you’re getting nearer to the end result.
• From the pull down menu , choose ‘Local Adaptation’. The image will likely go very bright at this point.
• There is a point at the bottom left-hand corner of the histogram. Drag this point until it it meets the first of the major ‘spikes’ on the graph. As you move the point from left to right the image should become darker. Adjust the image to find the best balance of light and dark.

When you’re done, click ‘Ok’. The image will run through a final, brief conversion and voila – there it is.

Hopefully you’ll be overwhelmed with the result!

What to do next: improving and sharing your images

If you’re less than overwhelmed, this might be for a number of reasons. One is that the photos do not have sufficient levels of dark and light. To change these levels, go through the process from ‘Using Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR’ to create your image’ above, and choose a broader range for your values. So, rather than choose -3, 0, 3 try choosing -5, 0, 5 instead.

You might also try more photos at different exposures, to see if this improves the overall effect. You can make adjustments in Photoshop, including some of the automated ones if you’re uncertain what you’re looking for: use the Image / Adjustments menu and choose an automated adjustment there.

Experiment with different images. Some lend themselves better to this treatment than others. Try ones with quite a bit of contrast, natural scenes outdoors, perhaps some city lighting at night.

Look for subtle changes. Not all HDR images have to look completely different – sometimes the additional changes in texture can really improve a photo. Have a look here, first at the HDR image and then the original:

The image above has subtle changes in vibrancy, as well as major changes in the texture, giving it a more full-bodied feel when compared to the original, below:

When you’ve tried this, why not share your experiences below in the comments and add links to your images – I would be really interested to see how you’ve used this process, or tailored it to your needs and resources.

Follow me on Flickr (click here). I post often, including HDR images. This is one of the best ways of getting to see what other people are doing and asking questions, as well as sharing your work.

Why use this method?

We’re not creating a true HDR image using the technique I’ve outlined above but one that approximates its effects. The best way to take a true HDR image is to set up your camera on a tripod and take three or more shots of an identical image with different exposures. Even better – use a DSLR camera and set the file type to ‘RAW’. Only then will you achieve some of the amazing results you’ve probably seen online.

However, that is not always possible or even desirable. Sometimes we want to take shots with movement – perhaps they’ve got people in them, or traffic – and so using three or more images will be problematic, since we need them to be the same. What’s more, you can convert some of those old favourites you took before you knew anything about HDR!

Why save files for the web?

The problem we have is that Photoshop uses the EXIF data – the camera settings, date and time it was taken, etc – to help it decide how to automatically render the images to HDR. If you don’t strip out the EXIF data it will return an error, telling you there’s not enough range to create a ‘useful’ image. That’s because you’ve simply duplicated the photo and therefore all its EXIF data, and manually changed its exposure: each photo, although they look very different, will have identical EXIF data. So, we need to strip that out. There are several ways of doing this: I used Photoshop to do it.

Outline of this approach

If you know how to use Photoshop and iPhoto or just want a reminder, this is what I did in outline:

• Used iPhoto to adjust the exposure of three different images, from -3 to +3
• Save these three photos in ‘For the web’ format using Photoshop CS2, stripping out the EXIF data
• Rendered using Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR’ automated process
• Saved to 16 / 8 bit and adjusted the ‘Local Adaptation’ to improve the image.

Acknowledgments

Two websites were especially useful when going through this process: this one and this one. Without them, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Thanks!

We had snow in the mountains here this morning, a light dusting on the trees at the top. It was cold and grey and I expected more later.

But when I went out walking this afternoon I noticed that the snow in trees had melted, and the sky was blue again.

I watch the meteo for signs of snow here and elsewhere. Wintersports enthusiasts following the weather religiously, of course – there is great cachet being the first to snowboard or ski.

We’ve seen the trouble that newspapers are in, but unlike the recording industry who appear to be in more or less in the same boat, newspapers and their journalists seem to be doing something positive about it. Or at least they would do if their ideas were taken up. I spotted this article by Dan Gillmour in The Guardian which gets to grips with the real problems of fitting journalism into the post-social media landscape, in which he outlines 22 ideas that he would employ if he was in charge. We all think we can run the organisation that we love better. This is Gillmour’s version.

It does not (nor does it aim to) pose a complete solution to the problems that newspapers face since sales were challenged by the availability of news online and the changes in the ways that information is accessed and distributed. But some of it clearly takes on the influence of social media (or new media, if you prefer to underscore the opposition between the old and new). His second point, for example, incorporates crowd journalism into Gilmour’s idealised newspaper; later in Point 5, there is an emphasis on ‘conversation’ between writers and readers, that golden rule of contemporary social networking tools like Twitter:

5. We’d make conversation an essential element of our mission. Among other things:

- If we were a local newspaper, the editorial pages would publish the best of, and be a guide to, conversation the community was having with itself online and in other public forums, whether hosted by the news organization or someone else.

- Editorials would appear in blog format, as would letters to the editor.

- We would encourage comments and forums, but in moderated spaces that encouraged the use of real names and insisted on (and enforced) civility.

- Comments from people using verified real names would be listed first.

There is still an element of ‘interference’ rather than a wholesale laissez faire approach – someone has to judge the most valuable conversations, moderate forums, and so on – so some might feel it doesn’t go far enough. But this utopian view of post-social media newspapers represents a step in the right direction, even if its ideas remain, for now at least, just that.