Popular vs Favorite Photographs

I do not know how to pick out good photographs. "Good" is such a general term which I normally avoid, but let me define that word for the purpose of this entry, that a good photograph is an image that compels people to look at it either for a long time or time and time again.

Hence comes the distinction between my popular vs. my favorite photographs. Let us establish that a popular photograph is something that the general public consider good by the above definition, while my favorite photograph is something I personally consider good by the same definition. I noticed in recent years that the two are not necessarily the same.

Mermaid Parade, 2007

Flickr, a photo sharing website, has this feature that tracks a user's most popular photographs by "interestingness." The algorithm used to determine this particular "interestingness" is proprietary to Flickr, but I suspect it takes into account such statistics as the number of views, number of comments, and the number of people who count the image as their favorites to derive this "interestingness" factor.

The image captioned "Mermaid Parade, 2007" was the most popular photograph in my photostream according to Flickr from July 2007 to Oct 2008. That's quite a long time for any one image to hold that spot considering that I have accumulated nearly 300 images online as of writing of this entry.

What I would like to point out is that I do not consider this image to be either my favorite or that it is even interesting. Of course, I would not have uploaded it in the first place if I thought it should have been thrown out. At the time, I was experimenting with different kinds of film from different manufacturers. I uploaded this image mostly because I wanted to see at least one image from each roll of film I shot, in order to compare the images taken with different kinds of film.

This is a prime example of where the general public and I disagree. I found the image mostly uninteresting (by my definition not by Flickr) but somehow people/Flickr did.

The Nightmare Before Christmas and Some Dude, Village Halloween Parade, 2008

"The Nightmare Before Christmas and Some Dude, Village Halloween Parade, 2008" happens to be an exception. It is currently the most popular photo in my photostream, and has been so for a couple of months now. I actually do consider this image one of my favorites, and it appears that people like it, too.

I could sort of understand why the first photograph was popular for a long time. The primary subject of that picture is a beautiful woman in skin tight costume dancing exquisitely. It is certainly pleasant to look at. I don't mind looking at it. It is most definitely accessible.

Graham Nickson, a British painter and the dean of the New York Studio School, once said, "Ugliness is an acquired taste." Ten years since then, his statement rings truer to me everyday.

The picture of the beautiful girl may be easy to like, but a photograph where the primary subject is ambiguous, the picture is grainy and it is not even well composed, is not very easy to like. However, I quickly lose interest in those pleasant images while the ugly ones keep me coming back to look at it.

Sunbathers in Central Park, New York, 2008

Talking of popular photographs, I was listening to This American Life a few days ago. The theme of the show was "Numbers," or the use of numbers where it should not be applied. On that show, they featured an artist who decided to create a painting based on a poll. The artist asked the general public what they wanted to see in their living rooms. Vast majority of them picked landscape. Most of them said they wanted to see people in the painting, and they picked blue as the color they liked most. Therefore, the artist painted a landscape with a family using blue. Did people like the painting? I do not know. I have not even seen the painting. It was a radio show.

This prompted me to go back to my photostream to examine whether the popularity of photographs demonstrated any correlation with the three factors, landscape, people, and blue.

"Sunbathers in Central Park, New York, 2008" happens to be an image that fulfills all three criteria. It also happens to have the highest number of views among all the photos in my photostream on Flickr today. Coincidence?

What I Learned about Color on Digital Sensor and Film

Before I started to goof around with cameras a couple of years ago, I used to goof around with painting and drawing. I spent much of my time in the evening and weekend at an art school, where observation and building of basic skills were given greater emphasis than mastering any specific technique or style. Just as my photogoofy hobby got out of hand, my painting as a hobby was also out of hand at the time.

One of the things I picked up through the painting classes was this habit of constantly thinking about colors in terms of pigments. The colors and pigments are different things. There are range of yellow colors, for example, that I used to use in painting, raw umber, yellow ochre, naples yellow, and cadmium yellow. The difference was not purely the matter of different shades of yellow, but also the characteristics of the paint itself. Some were opaque, some were translucent. Some were saturated powerful, some were muted and gentle.

Police Phone Box in Central Park, 2007 (Digital)

One day in the spring of 2007, I took a photogoofy walk in the park. As it was my routine at the time, I walked up to the Conservatory Garden in Upper East Side, and took pictures of flowers. Among the flowers stood something foreign. You might have seen them if you have visited Central Park, there are bright yellow boxes placed all around Central Park. They are police phone boxes. It is meant to be used in case of emergency; there is a phone inside of the box that connects straight to the police in case of an emergency.

I took a picture of a police phone box at the entrance of the Conservatory Garden. I came home, downloaded the picture of the phone box to my laptop, saw the image on my laptop monitor, and I noticed something strange. Something was different. Something very specific was different.

When I originally took that picture, I had thought to myself that the telephone symbol in on the front of the box was a warmer tone of blue, something similar to ultramarine blue. The blue on the laptop screen, however, was colder, paler shade of blue. Something more similar to cobalt blue with some titanium white mixed into it. It almost seemed like a neon sign to me. That was not the impression I had when I took the picture. I didn't see how I could get such different reactions from the supposedly same blue I saw, once in real life and the other time in the picture.

Police Phone Box in Central Park, 2007 (Film)

There were very few places that could have gone wrong.

1. I was simply mistaken and there were no differences between the two blue colors,
2. The camera captured the color differently than I perceived, or
3. The camera captured the color fine but it was displayed on my laptop incorrectly.

This prompted me to go back to that telephone box. This time, I was armed with my digital camera as well as my film camera, Pentax MX. My theory was that, given the problem was not 1, if I take a picture with the digital camera and the film camera, and if both images display as pale blue, then it is likely that there something wrong with my laptop screen. On the other hand, if the digital image comes out pale and the film image does not, then, the change in color was caused more likely by the digital camera.

Police Box in Central Park, 2007 - Left: Film, Right: Digital

The results were quite eye opening. I had inserted the CD that came with my developed film, opened the digitized version of the image taken on my film camera, saw it side-by-side with the image directly taken with my digital point-and-shoot camera, and there it was, a warmer tone of blue on the film and a colder tone of blue on the straight-to-digital image. This implies that there is something going on with the digital sensor of my point-and-shoot that caused the drastic difference in the color from what I perceived and what was being reproduced.

After this experiment, I somehow ended up with more questions than answers. Why did my digital camera do this? Isn't a camera supposed to capture everything including the colors just as they appeared to our eyes? Why didn't this color change happen with the digital sensor used by the scanner that digitized the film image? The rendition of the color by film appeared closer to what I remembered seeing in real life, but, just how close was it? If I take this film, and place it next to the real thing, will I see the same color in the same light conditions? Are there differences among the way colors are rendered by different types of film? Wait. Take a step back. Is the goal of photography faithfully capturing and reproducing colors or is it something else?

Today, if you see my gear box at home, you will see two SLRs and two rangefinders, all of which are film cameras. If you see my fridge, you'll see boxes of slide films among mountains of black and white films. My blog entries from here on will likely focus on my findings from shooting film with these tools, and this entry will be the last in the sequence of "What I Learned from a Digital Point-and-Shoot."

Even though I have moved on to film since, I cannot deny the benefits I realized from shooting digital point-and-shoot in the first few months of photogoofy. It helped me overcome the initial frustration with cameras in general, and allowed me to quickly identify what I did not understand and allowing me to experiment. After all, if it was not for this incident my obsession with film would probably have never started.

What I Learned about Focal Length and Focus

In my previous post titled What I Learned about Focal Lengths from a Zoom Lens, I talked about the differences between wide-angle and telephoto lens perspectives, and claimed that the difference was not strictly the matter of magnification/cropping. In this post, I'd like to present two photographs I took in the summer of 2007 with my Lumix LX-2 on one of my photogoofy walks, which helped me to see that the difference in focal lengths was not as straight forward as I had initially anticipated.

Roller Skaters in Central Park, 2007 - Moderate Telephoto

The two photographs shown in this entry are of the same subject taken at the same place, less than a minute apart from each other. For convenience, I will refer to the man in the foreground as the primary subject, the group of women behind him as the secondary subject, and the rest as the background. One of these two pictures was taken with the wide-angle end of the zoom lens, while the other was taken with the moderate telephoto focal length standing at the same exact spot.

Roller Skaters in Central Park, 2007 - Wide-Angle

There is the obvious difference. Both my primary and secondary subjects appear much smaller in wide-angle shot than in the telephoto shot. If you look carefully, however, the difference does not stop there.

If you look very closely, you might notice that there is a slight difference in the focus. The wide-angle shot seems to have everything from the primary subject in the foreground all the way to the background in focus. On the other hand, the moderate telephoto shot appears to have only the secondary subject and the background in focus, leaving the primary subject slightly out of focus.

The shutter speeds at which these images were taken were not far apart. The wide-angle shot was taken at 1/125 second, while the telephoto image was taken at 1/100. The difference is not significant enough to suspect motion blur as the primary cause of this difference. Then, how could this have happened?

I searched the Internet for an answer, and discovered that there exists a relationship between a lens's focal length and its focus. Depth of field, for instance, depends on a number of factors, among which is the focal length of the lens. Give everything else being equal, the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects considered to be in focus for a longer focal length is shorter than that of the wide-angle lenses.

This not only explains why the moderate telephoto image had the primary subject slight out of focus while the wide-angle image had the entire scene in focus, but, this also gives us another tool to work with in photography. If a shallow depth of field is desired, it makes more sense to pick up a lens with longer focal length. You can easily separate the subject from the background by only including the primary subject in the field of focus. On the other hand, if you want to have a vast landscape with as much in focus as possible, wider lenses will do the job.

It turns out, there is more to focus than just the focal length. Aperture, the critical focus distance, the circle of confusion for acceptable focus, all are related, and when we start talking about apparent resolution or sharpness, that goes beyond the topic of focus. I will not go into them for now. Perhaps, one of these days, I'll get around to writing about them.

What I Learned about Shutter Speed and Motion Blur

One of the most beneficial photogoofy walks I ever had with my digital point-and-shoot camera must be the one where I came across the roller skaters in Central Park in the summer of 2007. I learned some of the most fundamental mechanics of camera operation on that day.

Roller Skater in Central Park, 2007 - Fast Shutter Speed

I used to have a very basic understanding of shutter speed. I simply understood it as a way of controlling the amount of light passing through the lens. The longer the exposure, the more light passed through. The shorter the exposure, the less light passed through. If I set the lens's aperture twice as wide, then the shutter speed had to be twice as fast to keep the picture "properly exposed." And, by "properly exposed," I meant following the light meter indicator's suggestion. If the light meter indicated under exposure, I brought down the shutter speed until the meter indicated proper exposure. If the light meter indicated over exposure, I then do the opposite.

To put it simply, I was trying to achieve nothing more than mimicking the camera's autoexposure system. It did not even occur to me that the choice of different combination of aperture and shutter speed actually made any difference in the final image.

Roller Skater in Central Park, 2007 - Panning Shot at Slow Shutter Speed

One of the greatest things about digital cameras is that it records the camera's settings at the time of exposure: its aperture, shutter speed, focal length, ISO, exposure compensation, etc. After taking the pictures, not only that I get an instant feedback on the built-in LCD, I can also examine the camera settings for each image and start finding patterns in the way a picture came out and the camera's settings.

For example, I was able to find out that the photograph of the lady roller skater was taken at 1/500 second. It instantly froze the motion in the frame including the background. One the other hand, the photograph of the male roller skater was taken at 1/80 seconds, slow enough for the image to be motion blurred when subject moving as quickly as these roller skaters.

Knowing that the subject's motion (or the motion around the subject) can be captured as a blur is such a powerful tool. If it was not for my camera's ability to record the shutter speed setting, it may have taken much more time before I came to this realization.

Much like any other effects in photography, motion blur can be either found or created. I slightly became obsessed with deliberately controlling the exposure time, and I had later experimented with this again and again in different ways, and, I still do plan to experiment more in the future. Perhaps I will share some of my findings in a different post.

If your digital point-and-shoot camera supports shutter speed priority mode, I encourage you to try it out. Sometimes, set the shutter speed fast at moving subjects, sometimes slow. Sometimes keep the camera steady, sometimes, follow the subject. I bet you'll have a lot of fun, and will learn so much about how shutter speed works.

What I Learned about Focal Lengths from a Zoom Lens

The first several weeks I had my Lumix LX-2, I mostly took pictures in and around Central Park and Tom's farm upstate. I did not have a clear idea about what to take pictures of, so, I shot anything from landscape to trees, plants, and some random inanimate objects I happened to find.

The zoom lens on Lumix LX-2 has the 35mm equivalent focal lengths of 28mm to 112mm. What this means in English is that, at the wider end (28mm or "wide-angle") the camera is capable of capturing a vast landscape, while on the narrow end (112mm or "telephoto") the camera is able to draw the primary subject in the frame as though they were much closer than they appeared in real life. To oversimplify, telephoto magnifies the image while the wide-angle does the opposite.

Tom's Farm, 2007 - Wide-Angle

"Shoe Leather Zoom" is a technique whereby the photographer with a prime lens walks closer to the subject when the subject appears too small in the viewfinder, and walks away from the subject when the subject appears too big in the viewfinder, thus simulating the varying focal lengths of zoom lens with a prime lens. This technique works very effectively, and my most ordinary zoom needs today are met using this technique.

Walking back and forth is a reasonable substitute when your primary concern is the apparent size that the subject occupies in the frame, but walking up closer to the subject with a wide-angle lens does not necessarily produce the same image as taking a few steps back with a telephoto lens.

Here's an example. Suppose the primary subject of your composition is an abandoned bird nest on top of a tree. You want this nest to appear as though you are at eye-level with this nest, and that this nest takes up, say, 1/6 of the frame. With a 28mm lens, it is not easy to achieve that composition, even if you walk closer to the subject because what you achieve is that you stand at the bottom of the tree looking up at the nest, and not being eye-level with the nest. You would have to therefore climb the tree, come up to eye-level with the nest, and then move few feet away from the tree as to hover in mid-air, so that you can have the composition you had in mind.

In the days when high magnification lenses were rare or perhaps unaffordable, that was probably what people had to do to photograph such and image. Is there a point in doing so today? If what you value is the experience and the process of photography which includes getting close to a difficult-to-photograph subject, then, by all means, go ahead and climb the tree. I will go even so far as to write that such a process may give you an opportunity to find an image you never considered before, opening avenues to new creative expressions. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up a telephoto lens.

Tom's Farm, 2007 - Telephoto

I found the built-in zoom lens of my digital point-and-shoot camera to be a precious learning tool. I was able to, without any additional investments in interchangeable lenses, experiment with any focal lengths between 28mm to 112mm. I was also able to choose my focal length on the spot, often shooting the same subject with different focal lengths to compare the outcome. It allowed me to learn how different focal lengths worked under different circumstances without having to commit to one particular perspective all the time.

If you made this far in this blog post, you may be asking "What is this guy talking about? What is this nonsense about perspective? I understand the example about the tree, but what it comes down to is just the matter of magnification, isn't it?" If you asked those questions, then we are on the same page, because that's exactly what I questioned before I started to experiment with different focal lengths. The better thing to do is to go ahead and experiment on your own. Pick up a cheap digital camera with a zoom. Try it. Sometimes, zoom in and walk away. Sometimes, zoom out and walk up to the subject. You just might be surprised by what you find out.

What I Learned from a Digital Point-and-Shoot

Unfinished Figure Study, 2006

I picked up my Panasonic Lumix LX-2 back in February of 2007. It changed the way I thought about cameras.

Up until that time, cameras were something that felt cumbersome and slow. I loved drawing and painting my entire life, and I always enjoyed the instant feedback I received when I was drawing or painting. If I make a mark that did not work on the paper with the rest of the drawing, it became apparent to me within a matter of minutes, or even seconds.

Cameras, on the other hand, was slow. I fiddle with the camera settings, take pictures. Then, I drop the film at the lab and wait a few days before I get the negative developed and prints made. I was often too lazy to go to the lab, which added another several days or even weeks between the time I shot those pictures and I got the feedback. By the time, I did not remember what I was trying to do, what I was experimenting with. It was just too slow a process for me to learn anything about it.

Digital cameras changed all this.

Panasonic Lumix LX-2

I have this impression that the Lumix LX-2 I bought was a bit of an impulse purchase. I had just broken up with someone I was dating at the time, and I thought of it as a form of "retail therapy," if you know what I am talking about.

A careful retrospection, however, reveals otherwise. I certainly remember combing through the Internet, looking for reviews, forum discussions, and sample photos taken by different digital cameras before setting my heart on this camera. I distinctly remember I had some very specific criteria that had gone into my decision. They were

1. Compact Size
2. Number of Megapixels
3. Maximum Optical Zoom

After all, if I were to drop $500 on a piece of electronics, I wanted a pony and eat it, too.

If I were to look for a digital point-and-shoot camera today, however, my criteria would be slightly different. Neither the number of megapixels or the maximum optical zoom factor are so high on the list, and depending on the other more important criteria, they may be even dropped from the list.

In the next few posts, I will cover some topics on photography I learned using this camera. The lessons I learned have more to do with the mechanics of photography rather than the art of photography. What I found out using this digital point-and-shoot helps me realize the tools available to me to create images, tools that I find extremely valuable.

I plan to cover the following topics.

1. What I Learned about Focal Lengths from a Zoom Lens
2. What I Learned about Focal Lengths and Depth of Field
3. What I Learned about Shutter Speed and Motion Blur
4. What I Learned about Frame Size and Focus
5. What I Learned about Color on Digital Sensor and Film

Upon Starting My Third Blog

This is my third attempt at blogging. The first blog I started several years ago on LiveJournal is long gone, and even the second blog which I used to have on Blogspot has been gone for nearly a year.

There are several reasons why I stopped updating my blogs. I got lazy. I did not have the time. I did not feel like writing. I ran out of things to say...

Sometimes, in these blogs, I wrote about my daily life. Sometimes, I wrote about my thoughts and opinions on some random topics. I did not have any constant theme among my posts. I was scattered. From one post to the next, I often found no connection. There was nothing to latch onto. They were simply boring, not only to the readers (if I had any) but even to myself.

It is clear to me that the lack of strong theme in my blog was a major contributing factor for the short lives of my previous blogs. After all, longevity was not even conceived as one of the goals for my previous blogs.

This is my third blog. A couple of things changed since the two blogs I attempted earlier. One is that I do have longevity as one of the concerns. If I am going to invest so much time and effort, I'd rather make it interesting enough, if not to the general audience then at least to myself, so that I can do it for a while. The other change is that I can actually think of a theme that I can hold on to. Something that kept me interested for nearly two years, and from a broader perspective, my entire life.

Winter Night in Central Park, 2009

I titled this blog "Kyoken's Photogoofy." It is not photography. I merely goof around with a light tight box for my personal entertainment.

What this is not meant to be is an instructional site on photography. If you stumbled upon this page, thinking you found a place to learn about photography, I'm afraid you will have to look elsewhere. There are numerous instructional sites and articles, as well as forums where you can learn about photography on the internet.

This blog, on the other hand, is meant to track my learning and realization about topics related to the process of picture making, which nonetheless covers topics on photography. I make no guarantees that these findings are presented accurately or fairly.

If I do not fall into the trap of laziness, I will be reporting my findings and ideas as they occur to me. For the first few posts, however, I will take a few steps back and start from where I first picked up my camera for the purpose of taking pictures, February of 2007.