Did I mention I couldn’t sleep? Understanding HDR still images, though it seems easy, is hard. We’ve spent many years looking at SDR images, agonizing over SDR images. We pondered the colors, the sharpness, all manner of subtleties, but we didn’t give much thought to brightness levels, to the idea…
I can’t sleep at night, I have trouble concentrating during the day. It’s on my mind, the voice in my head (or, more accurately, the voices, though they all sound like me) can’t stop going on and on about it. It's distracting. The cause of all of this inner tumult?…
Egypt and the Holy Land in Historic Photographs. 77 Views by Francis Frith.Introduction by Julia Van Haaften, Selection and Commentary by Jon E Manic WhitePublished by Dover Publications, 1980 Frith was an English photographer in the 1850s who made images of the Middle East, scenic views of the day that,…
What if you made landscape images and put owls at their center, in fact, what if you let the owl, by its location, more or less determine the framing of the image? You’d be making landscape images, yes, but messy ones, ones that reflect more how nature really is rather…
Public service announcement: Get rid of your rugs. On April 18, as I was about to leave the house to photograph two owl chicks that my wife had spotted near the elementary school in our neighborhood, my right foot caught the edge of a rug in my family room. Immediately…
We need a name for this new thing, this new way of generating photo-realistic images. That name sure isn’t “photography.” There is a great outcry amongst the Twittering masses over this question, every photographer now a philosopher, ontology replacing cryptocurrency as the consuming topic of both those who sense photography’s…
From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry LopezPublished in 2023 by the Sheldon Museum of Art (at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment Review written during the rainstorms of early 2023. I’m writing this review by headlamp, the vignetted illumination…
Now that the photography portion of my project, The Black and White Forest, is done all I have to do is sift through the thousands of images to find a few that are worthy of being the Chosen Ones. I hate this part. Stanley Kubrick once called the process of…
There is nothing that computers can do that humans can’t do themselves, with pencil and paper, if only we were given enough time. At a low enough level computation is mind-numbingly dumb. There’s no ghost-in-the-machine hiding down there. But there is a ghost. It is hiding somewhere high above, up…
When I was a teenager I had the flu and I woke up during the night, right about two in the morning, and I went downstairs to watch a little TV. I thought I’d sit there for a bit and then go back to bed. My brother, whose bedroom was…