Notes

Denali's Cassin Ridge in very high resolution

2008-08-25T02:25:39Z

For anybody with an interest in attempting to climb Denali's Cassin Ridge, here's a very high resolution image I created by combining several single frames of sections of the route. Apologies for the portions that are not quite sharp. With a 400mm lens sticking out of a plane window going nearly 100mph with temps well below 0 F, I was happy to just get the frames I needed to make this image. 1/1200 of a second may not have been fast enough with that focal length, or perhaps the autofocus was fighting the fierce wind..... Enjoy!

Innovations in Journalism

2008-06-14T00:30:00Z

Fotovision was a sponsor for the May 3rd “Innovations in Journalism Expo”. The day long event, organized by the Society of Professional Journalists and Independent Arts and Media, promised to “showcase cutting-edge work that combines journalism, technology new business models and philanthropy” and to “push the envelope with fresh ideas in a time of crisis for the news industry.” Fotovision's Program Coordinator, Adrianne Koteen, Executive Director Melanie Light, and I enthusiastically carpooled to Palo Alto to glean what we could from the event. The day proved to be not only engaging, but a bit overwhelming, and certainly inspiring. The one day Innovations in Journalism Expo that we attended was simultaneously its own event, and also the final day of a 3 day symposium called “NewsTools2008/Journalism That Matters.” The Journalism That Matters events are facilitated meetings held around the country that bring journalists together in large “open space” conversations aimed at addressing the challenges and opportunities in journalism today. Journalism That Matters co-founders Peggy Holman and Stephen Silha were there to “host the conversation”. This particular Journalism That Matters meeting was in Palo Alto; the conversations were particularly infused with lofty ideas of creative ways to use the Internet to assist the dissemination and creation of quality journalism. We had arrived in the afterglow of 2 days of brainstorming and excited information sharing. Butcher paper hung from the walls with intricate “Value Network Maps” drawn expertly by Sherrin Bennett. One map graphically displayed the interrelationships people in what they termed the “Old News Story” - how people worked together in the past to produce news. This map was contrasted by another of the “Emerging News Ecology” of today where the audience is actually engaged in the creation of news, and the bloggers and “Community Weavers” arise as a necessary role from the importance of community driven websites in journalism. Some attendees expressed some boredom with the standard panel discussion format of the Innovations in Journalism Expo. One attendee of the three day conference, Hemant Bhanoo, is co-founder of the Berkeley based company Reporterist. Reporterist is creating an online marketplace for freelancing journalists. Hemant told me that he was having difficulty with the rigid format of the standard panel discussions in the Innovations in Journalism Expo after so many days of intense conversation and idea generation. But for me, having not been to the previous two days, I found the panel discussions quite engaging. One panel on “Funding and Journalism” featured David Cohn. David is working on a model he calls “Spot Reporting”. “Spot Reporting” is an online mechanism that journalists can use to get donations for their projects. Collectively, the micro-funding from small online donations becomes enough to fund the project. We have seen countless examples of independent journalists funding their projects through tip jars on blogs. David Cohen's project is working to put people that want to micro-fund journalism projects and journalist together in one online application. Like any new idea, David Cohen's idea is by no means isolated. Another attendee, Leonard Witt, has been talking quite a bit about his concept of “Representative Jounrnalism”. Leonard Witt suggests that if news organizations are to survive, they will have to begin to cater to the niche. Rather than think of circulations of hundreds of thousands, news organizations will have to begin to think of hundreds of circulations of one thousand, with the niches themselves providing the funding and demand to the news organization for the coverage. Like David Cohen's project, Leonard Witt's idea integrates the audience itself in the creation of the news. But these were just a few of the people we met at the conference. And just a couple of the compelling ideas. With sessions organized on “New Money, New Media, New Hope”, “Journalism Before Profits: The Future of Public Media”, and a career counseling session set-up like “speed-dating”, there was an abundance of exciting ideas and people. By the day's end, I felt inspired by all the work being done at the bleeding edge of innovation to help shape the direction of journalism in the US, and excited by the possibilities in photojournalism.

Digital Railroad Feed Read

2008-04-22T21:36:29Z

I enjoy working in the space where the web and photography intersect. Digital Railroad, an online asset management tool, and sales platform, helped to sponsor Mikkel Aaland's Tasmania Lightroom Adventure project that I was fortunate to be a part of.

Between the shooting I'd be doing and the eating and sleeping in Tasmania, I was there to help in getting the team's images out to the web. It proved to be an interesting task!

In the end, photographers were able to create nice web galleries in Lightroom pretty efficiently, and I made a page that simply linked to them all. But some of us who were familiar with Digital Railroad were using it to publish images to a different platform.

I wanted our collective work on Digital Railroad to be displayed on the various websites that were interested displaying the team's work in the field in various formats. So I wrote a script to read Digital Railroad's XML feeds so that I could present the new images in various ways. You can read more about the DRR Feed Read here

Copyright 2.0: Copyright in a Hyper Digital age

2008-04-18T23:34:40Z

Photographer Gerald Bybee and I pulled off organizing a very informative session last night in San Francisco. I work on the board with the local chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers. The ASMP seems a bit behind the times when it comes to the massive changes that are dramatically altering the photo industry and indeed the very fabric of our culture! So it was exciting to get the general counsel of ASMP and the VP of Creative Commons, along with some other well known lawyers to discuss the new world of Copyright 2.0 in a Hyper Digital Age. ]]> read more about the event and see some of the provocative email announcements that we cam up with on the ASMPNorCal website.

Lightroom Flash Galleries Security Issue

2007-11-30T23:35:08Z

I've been using Lightroom's Flash Galleries lately as a mechanism to get images efficiently and beautifully published on the web, and I was uncomfortable that the image files are output by Lightroom to the web as publicly downloadable jpgs in high resolution! One of the reasons photographers like to publish things on the web in flash is because the images are a little more difficult to steal. An image thief would have to do a screen shot in order to obtain the image presented in flash. Unfortunately, the Lightroom flash galleries have all the images as jpgs in directories that are easy for people to browse and steal. So the fix I implemented involves not allowing apache to give people access to those files. The flash gallery doesn't get the images through apache, so it doesn't matter. Adobe could fix this problem with an .htaccess file automatically generated for each directory. But until then, to make the jpgs in a Lightroom Flash Gallery secure, here are two approaches: 1) Do this to httpd.conf: # this is to secure the image files in the lightroom exports from lightroom Options -Indexes Deny from all Allow from all this makes it so that all the Lightroom galleries that I upload into portfolios can be viewed, but that nobody has access to any other file in there via Apache. It also makes it so that Apache doesn't show the contents of each directory. Flash doesn't have a problem reading the images, because it isn't doing it through Apache, so the flash galleries continue to work fine. 2) Another approach, though less secure, would be to disable the default Apache habit of creating an index of all the files in a particular directory for people on the web when it can't find an explicit index file. So if somebody browses to /portfolios/Nice_Pictures/bin/image/large they Apache will tell them exactly what is in that directory: Your hires image! To fix this, put Options -Indexes Unlike option 1 above, the files are still accessible to people via apache, but people will have to guess at the names of the files. Not impossible to guess the names, but it is a little more secure than having Apache just let everyone know what the names are!

A quick tutorial on color management: Getting colors right on the web

2007-11-05T23:11:19Z

Browsers don't color manage! Convert images to sRGB to display them correctly! Digital photography is about digits. Numbers. That's why it is called digital. When you take a picture, your digital camera takes all of the colors that you have presented to it in that brief flutter of the shutter, turns them into numbers and stores them somewhere. When you get home and look at the image that your camera has made, your computer then takes all of those those numbers and turns them back into colors for you to see. Then you tweak this or that, adjusting the contrast, color correcting and adjusting the white balance. When you are happy with what you've produced, you might transmit it out across the internet to your favorite printing service to be made into a digital print. Like your monitor, the printer that you've sent the image to is now tasked with turning those numbers into colors with their device. Through this whole process, wouldn't it be convenient if each number represented exactly one color, always, without exception, to every device on Earth? Unfortunately, this is an impossible dream. We do have absolute references like the Pantone colors where one number is exactly one color, universally. And that is very helpful for many applications, but there is no practical way that every camera, monitor, printer and scanner could ever call the exact same color the same number. Even if every device across the planet were in perfect agreement with each number being exactly one color, one device might have a greater ability to reproduce a wider range of certain types of colors than another device, and we'd have to take that into account somehow. So digital photographers have to know how their devices turn color into numbers or vice-versa. I know how my monitor will turn numbers into colors. I know how my printer will turn numbers into colors. And I know the opposite - how my scanner will turn the colors into numbers. When I say "know" it isn't like, "my monitor displays things a bit warm, and the printer that makes my big prints for me tends to be cooler" That is an impossible way with dealing with color. One could never get the colors of what one sees on a monitor to match a print this way. Instead, I rely on color profiles. A color profile is a set of instructions stored in a file about how a device (a monitor, a printer, a scanner, a camera) turns a number into a color or vice-versa. A color space is similar to a color profile. A color space, however, doesn't necessarily correspond to a particular device like a profile does. A color space serves as a convenient container to put all those colors in while working on the image in image editing software. You can think of a color profile and a color space as a big sack that we fill with tennis balls each of a different color. The bigger the sack, the more colors we can fit in! I have software and a device that builds a color profile of how my monitor displays colors. It works like this: The software says here's this number: 220000 and tells the monitor to show a big square of the color that the monitor recognizes that 220000 to be. Then, I stick a device not too different from a digital camera right to the monitor and it records how the monitor displays the color and says back to the software, "the monitor displayed 220000 like 221010". And the software says, "that's great information, now how does the monitor display this color?" And so on. With enough cycles of this with different colors, the software builds a profile of how the monitor turns numbers into colors. I can go through the same process for discovering how my printer turns numbers into colors. And then, once I have all these profiles, and know how each device interprets or outputs color, I can be sure that what I see on the screen will be what I see on a print. But, what if now I want to put an image on the web? I haven't a clue about how the thousands of monitors that will view my image will turn those numbers into colors. We can never hope to profile all those monitors, but we can take a good guess. sRGB is a color profile proposed by Microsoft and HP as an approximation of the color profiles of the most common computer displays. sRGB, like most monitors, is described as having a very "narrow color gamut". Returning to the sack of tennis balls analogy, sRGB is a tiny sack. There is a lot of color information that the monitors and sRGB simply can't display. We run into problems when we work on images in image editing software in a huge "wide gamut" color space like ProPhoto RGB, and then export the images as JPEGs to show on monitors with a tiny color gamut that cannot possibly display all the colors in the color space we were working with. When we make this mistake, the images look perfect in our image editing software, but when we export them as jpgs and view them through a web browser, the colors are very desaturated and look strikingly different. Here's why: Browsers do not color manage the way image editing software does. Even though our jpg explicitly states in its metadata that its color information only make sense in the ProPhoto RGB color space, the developers of browsers are concerned with developing pop-up blockers and security features, not figuring out ways to extract color space information from images and converting them to look perfect on everyone's monitor. The developers of browsers have ignored color management. Image editing software, in contrast, is good with color management. It knows that I am viewing my images through a monitor, and it knows the profile of the monitor, so even though I am working in the ProPhoto RGB color space, my image editing software picks and chooses what colors to take out of the enormous sack of my ProPhoto RGB color space and pack it into the tiny sack of my monitor profile so that the image looks like it should. So the browsers, not color managing, just assumes that every image is made custom for display on the tiny color space of the monitor. If you give a browser an image with a wide range of color information from an enormous color space like ProPhoto RGB, the color information will be essentially clipped - thrown out. What you end up seeing is a strikingly desaturated image. To solve the problem, we need to do the color management for the browsers by converting the image to sRGB, our best guess at how monitors are going to reproduce colors. In Photoshop there is a "Covert to Profile" feature. In Lightroom, we can choose the destination profile when we export. Only by converting the profile can we can export as a jpg and expect to display our photos on the web the way that they look to us in our image editing software. This is a ProPhoto RGB colorspace image. If the image looks desaturated compared to the image below, it is because your browser doesn't color manage to convert this image to your monitor's profile. When viewed in image editing software, the software is "color managing" - taking into account the profile of my monitor, and it converts the ProPhoto RGB color space into a profile appropriate for my monitor. Web browsers, however, do not color manage. So when this ProPhoto RGB colorspace image is presented on a monitor through a web browser, colors are essentially clipped, and we end up with a desaturated image instead. Same photo but now manually converted to sRGB to do the color management for the browsers. To deal with the fact that browsers don't color manage, do the color management for them and convert images to sRGB. Much better! Check this page in a few years. Perhaps by then, web browsers will be color managing, and the two images above will look pretty darned identical.

2007 Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference

2007-07-10T18:51:51Z

I'll be teaching again this year at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographer's conference. It is a one of a kind event - not to be missed!

]]> "The Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference has an extraordinary reputation among publishers, editors, and writers. Alumni have published books, articles, and photos -- many as the direct result of lessons learned and contacts made at the conference. There is no finer travel writing conference anywhere in the world. The Conference offers an array of workshops, panels, and evening activities. There are many hours of informal interaction between faculty and students during lunch and in discussions that often last late into the evening." 2007 Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference Aug. 16-19, (16th Annual) Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. Corte Madera, California 94925 (Just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco) Read more and register on the Book Passage Website

My Note Pad

2007-07-10T00:00:39Z

Occasionally I write about some photography related topics that are interesting and important to me. If below is blank, that's because I haven't written anything on this note pad for the last 30 days - But there are plenty of interesting items in the archive on the right. Cheers, Jeff

Social Change Photography

2007-06-14T03:23:17Z

One of the joys of being on the board of the American Society of Media Photographers NorCal chapter is putting together what I feel are important events for the Northern California community of professional photographers. I organized this event for the ASMP, hoping to put a spotlight on some local heros who support what we should call "social change photography". Read my review of the event. (c)2007 Ken Light. From His Current Work "Central Valley". With a healthy dose of mingling out in the sunny UC Berkeley Journalism School Courtyard, a full lecture hall in attendance, and some inspiring and vital perspective from some local leading figures in the field of Social Documentary Photography, many left last night's Social Documentary event inspired. Andy Patrick kicked the evening off. Andy is founder of Fifty Crows. Fifty Crows supports Social Documentary Photography by supporting compelling projects the way a business person approaches a compelling entrepreneurial concept. Andy is also the CEO of Livebooks, so we shouldn't be surprised about his business acumen. What was surprising to me was to see Andy's business sense applied so passionately and effectively to the cause of social change photography. Andy broke it down very simply for us, while highlighting many of the success stories of the photographers that Fifty Crows has assisted. A strong message from Andy's presentation was that Social Documentary Photographers need to approach their projects like a business person approaches the first inkling of an idea. Have those confident handshakes and "elevator talks" down. Know what you are doing and why. Know how your project is going to affect social change. Understand what is sell-able. Have the media and marketing savvy to get your work out there. Use several different outlets. Know new media. Andy Patrick talks about Social Documentary Photography. Photos by Larry Angier Melanie Light then talked about Fotovision, the organization that she co-founded and is the Executive Director of. Melanie talked about how Fotovision supports Social Documentary Photographers through workshops with some of the icons in the field, and through community. Ken and Melanie Light then rounded the evening off by presenting a current joint project that highlights many of the themes Andy had discussed. Ken's black and white photos are combined with Melanie's writing in a powerful book called Coal Hollow that documents the lives and the poverty of the people in the Southern West Virginia hills. Coal Hollow is a great example of how documentary photographers, in their passion to communicate important stories, need to seize opportunities, adapt, remain (always!) business people, and use any platform available to creatively distribute their work. Ken shows prints from the Coal Hollow media kit Ken and Melanie told us the story of the book's success. The key was a winning combination of serendipity and the variety of creative media that the team employed. After the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia in early 2006, US attention was suddenly focused on the lives of the people Ken and Melanie had worked diligently to provide a voice for. As seasoned pros, when Anderson Cooper of CNN was going to highlight their work with a narrated slideshow of Ken's Photography on Television, Ken negotiated that they be paid like any content provider would be. CNN was surprised – thinking that promoting the book was enough payment – despite the fact the CNN, of course, regularly pays for their content! Being a business person when it comes to photography is of course vital for success. The Panel: Andy Patrick, Melanie Light and Ken Light Currently, Coal Hollow exists in several forms: A book, online, on DVD in a narrated slideshow, and packaged in a "multimedia kit" distributed to libraries. It has been seen on TV, and even described several times on radio. We should be always thinking of a variety of media platforms, even when the essence of what we are doing is creating a still photograph. Big thanks to Andy Patrick, Ken Light and Melanie Light for putting together a great evening. Thanks as well to the UC Berkeley J School for allowing us to use their courtyard and lecture hall. And thanks to Livebooks for sponsoring the event. And big thanks to all that came!]]>

Lawrence Lessig Speaks in Doha, Qatar

2007-05-10T19:47:12Z

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and the founder of Center for Internet and Society. I was at the Al Jazeera Media Forum in Doha, Qatar and heard his keynote address there in April 2007. Lawrence Lessig's talk is perhaps the most succinct and accurate description that I've heard about the role of the Internet today in democracy, society and journalism. His perspective is an important tool in understanding the enormous transformations that we are seeing and participating in today. MP4 video format Windows Media video format

Interactive 3D images from Damascus, Syria

2007-04-15T17:41:44Z

The following are some interactive 3D images made by Jeff Pflueger in Damascus, Syria of the Old City Souq and inside the stunning Umayyad Mosque. To view them, you will need Quicktime player installed (its free from Apple) and some patience with the 5 meg files. Then just click and drag on the image to move it around. You can also zoom by clicking on the + and - button on the QuickTime window. View all eight Interactive 3D images A view from the Damascus Old City Souq looking toward the Umayyad Mosque. The arches are the remains of the Roman Western Entrance of the Temple of Jupiter - the temple previously where the Mosque stands.]]> Within the main entrance to the Umayyad mosque. Within the Prayer Hall of the Umayyad Mosque. Below the dome of the eagle within the Prayer Hall of the Umayyad Mosque. Another view from within the Prayer Hall of the Umayyad Mosque. The main gate from the courtyard to the Prayer Hall in the Umayyad Mosque. The Dome of the Treasury in the courtyard of Umayyad Mosque. Another view of The Dome of the Treasury in the courtyard of Umayyad Mosque.