Ollie Matson and the Power of a Simple B&W Image

I read recently that Ollie Matson had died.  The Pro Football Hall of Famer had the kind of career that doesn’t happen anymore…thankfully.  He was the leading college rusher in the nation in 1950 and his University of San Francisco team went undefeated.  But, since he was black, he finished 9^th in the Heisman Trophy voting and the team was not invited to any bowl game.  There were fewer bowl games then and many were in the South, where the bowl organizers and the southern college teams refused to play black players. The squad adopted the slogan – ‘Unbeaten, Untied and Uninvited’.

I might have seen him play before his pro career ended but don’t remember.  However, I still have this impressive memory of one striking photograph that I first saw fifty years ago.  In the winter of 1961, I was hospitalized for over two months and my father’s commercial art studio gave me a copy of Robert Riger’s new book, ‘The Pros – A Documentary of Professional Football in America’.   

Robert Riger was first an artist and illustrator, then a photographer and sports was his beat.  The Pros was published just as pro football was becoming more popular in this country.  It was only two years after ‘The Greatest Game Ever Played’ – the championship game between the Colts and Giants.  Television was just starting to fuel fan interest and Vince Lombardi’s Packers were about to begin their dynasty period.

On one hand, the book has a dated look to it.  There are no color photos and the illustrations included Riger’s fine drawings.  Without the sharp, fast cameras we have today, the full-page shots are often dark and grainy.  The game was different then.  There were no domed stadiums and no artificial turf.  The cleats were high-topped and the goal posts were padded…and on the goal line.  There is a chapter entitled, “Mud”. 

But the images are terrific.  You don’t need color or sharpness to show speed, power and athletic grace.  Color is secondary when the picture shows two lines crashing together and the movement, direction and eyes of the players tell so much about what’s going to happen.  This skinny, sickly kid from the Bronx saw Ollie Matson’s picture and thought he was a titan.  He looked like he was eight feet tall and could run down or through anything in his way.  Images…flat, two-dimensional arrangements of dots [or pixels] on a page, can be very powerful.  The great ones burn themselves into your memory…and stay there forever.

Ollie Matson by Robert Riger from ‘The Pros: A Documentary of Professional Football in America’ (1960)

Rule Number One

It occurs to me that this would be a good time to spout off about my most important rule…and reveal a personal flaw.  Some of you are already thinking that spouting off might be one of them.  While there are many others, it is necessary to note, following the white balance advice in the last post, that I am color blind.  I am among the 5% of the male population that has trouble with reds and greens.  I was editing pictures from a wedding and was told that some of my ‘improvements’ made the bride look like a painted hussy…not so good.  Consequently, when I think the ‘cloudy’ WB setting gives the image needed warmth, a person with normal color vision might think it looks like kaka.  You should see what your settings do and I recommend taking the same shot with all of the WB settings to understand the differences.  Why not?  The film is free.

However, that does not detract from my Number One Rule…until the next Number One rule comes to mind.  That is - ALWAYS take the best picture possible the first time.  Get as many of the settings right on the camera BEFORE you take the shot.  Do NOT adopt the attitude that says, “I can fix/improve the shot back home on the computer”.  Think about the settings and composition so you minimize the editing later.  Why?  Because every change you make afterwards burns up pixels, shrinks your file and loses information.  The size of an edited file is dramatically reduced and will limit what you can do with the image.  An example of how images lose information is shown below.  On our February trip to Ireland, I got this nice view of Adare Manor in the morning fog.  The unedited JPEG shot is 5.04 MB in size.

Adare Manor in the Morning (unedited, 17 February 2011)

Being a novice, I have relied (too much) on the easy, one-step commands that automatically adjusts color balance, sharpness, contrast and saturation. However, all that modification reduced the file to 1.37 MB. The results are often a nice improvement but that has prevented me from learning how to really enhance images in better ways.  We’re hoping that will change as this blog develops.

Adare Manor in the Morning (edited, 17 February 2011)

Then I thought about cropping the image to emphasize the manor and the horizontal elements of the shot…and making it black and white.  Interesting but now the file is only 497 KB.  I best not have any plan to make an enlargement of this one.

Adare Manor in the Morning (edited more, 17 February 2011)

On the other hand, if you have no desire to do anything more than make 3x5 prints and use the images on-line, have fun.

White Balance – Get Away from AUTO all the Time

These initial postings have been a bit disjointed.  I should follow a better outline and script as we introduce and develop digital photography ideas together.  But, I just returned from Ireland and there are these two shots that illustrate a point which is now our second Tip of the Day.

One of the neat things about digital photography is the ability to control white balance.  The term refers to the different colors (and wavelengths) of light from different sources.  Our eyes are much better at adjusting to different kinds of light – tungsten and fluorescent artificial light versus outdoor, natural light.  Before digital controls, we needed different films and filters to keep pictures from having unnatural color castes.  Now, instead of using separate camera bodies and films, you can just change the white balance setting on your one camera.  This allows you to go from indoor to outdoor light and get it right on the same ‘roll of film’.  Sorry for the archaic references but I’m old.

Dublin - Auto WB (20 February 2011)

This was a typical winter day in Dublin.  The air was thick with cold humidity.  It is not a season with much color.  The buildings were gray.  The sky was gray.  The trees were bare.  A lot of time was spent indoors.  When I got my first digital camera, I tried to change the WB settings every time the source light changed.  While AUTO works pretty well for all light sources, the specific settings are often better.  However, one learns early that if you’re going to do that, you best remember to change when the light changes.  Tungsten white balance on a sunny day makes the world look like Smurfland.  One will burn up a bunch of pixels editing the blue out of everything.  It’s easy to keep the camera white balance setting on AUTO because it will get most situations pretty right. 

Anyway, when the outdoor scenes are just too gloomy, change the WB setting to ‘cloudy’.  That will warm up the picture and give it some life.

Dublin - Cloudy WB (20 February 2011)

The Big Uneasy

I noted in the re-introduction to this blog that it was not always going to be about IMAGES and photography.  Sometimes, the AND MORE part of me will need to express itself.  What better time for this than an event that harkens back to the post that started it all.  To loop back on that first blog in 2006, I return to the subject of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of my former home town.

Lower Ninth Ward One Year Later (12 April 2006)

Last night, I attended a screening of the new documentary, ‘The Big Uneasy’ at the great AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD (see http://www.thebiguneasy.com/index.html).  Harry Shearer, the humorist and part-time New Orleans resident, wrote, directed and narrated the film.  He was also present to take questions as this screening was part of a weekend of presentations in the D.C area. 

There was a decent crowd of appreciative, similarly-minded people in the audience who agreed with the film’s premise – the destruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was NOT a natural disaster but a human failure.  The flood control system was (as I noted almost five years ago) poorly designed, badly engineered and not well maintained.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the main villain in the movie, is responsible for the miserable flood protection.  In addition, they confounded their storm protection goals in the middle of the 20^th century by building the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO – “Mister Go”).  This boondoggle did little to serve the shipping business it was supposed to support.  However, as a funnel to direct sea water to within a few miles of the city, it performed magnificently.  Coastal wetlands were obliterated and storm surges had a much better path to the very edge of town.

Lakefront Marina One Year Later (10 April 2006)

The main premise of the film, besides showing that New Orleans is too important and special to abandon (I agree), is that the Corps’ inferior methods and questionable practices continue to be applied today as the flood control system is being rebuilt.  A feature player in the film and also present to take questions was Maria Garzino, a Corps employee and pump expert who was brought in to test the replacement systems that were going in.  She found multiple examples of poor designs and parts deficiencies.  She reported that the tests consistently failed to meet performance standards and the criteria were weakened so the equipment could pass.  When she tried to alert the chain of command about the problems and they balked, she became a whistleblower.  This, like almost every other time we hear about brave people who put their careers on the line to alert the public about the failures in our grand system, effectively ended her future in that business.

As a former scientist, this part of the story strikes at the very core of my being.  While the Corps is there to help build the things the military needs, it has become a much bigger entity in the civilian arena.  It is a major provider of political pork as it builds all sorts of water projects for special interests all over the nation.  These projects mean a lot to the people who will benefit from them (contractors, developers, water users) and there is always pressure to get them done.  Fudge the tests.  Stay on schedule regardless of protocols.  Don’t leak information.  Transparency is something we talk about but don’t practice. 

A scientist or engineer is taught to say, “This is what I sought to learn.  These are the methods I used.  These are the results I found.  These are the conclusions the results indicate.  Judge for yourself”.  The method is objective and, dare I say, sacred.  We are not supposed to ignore that.  We are not supposed to dismiss the conclusions because we don’t like them.  We are definitely not supposed to call the scientist a traitor because the results might complicate our objectives.  If you don’t like the results, run your own experiment and prove me wrong.

‘The Big Uneasy’ is an important movie.  I fear it will not be seen by enough people and its message will be ignored because too much money is riding on business as usual.

Tip of The Day – Look Behind You

When it comes to picture-taking, there is nothing I like more than walking with the camera through beautiful country and grand spaces, looking for photo ops.  Hiking through majestic forests, scenic shorelines, mountain trails, even the narrow streets and alleys of old cities, you can see terrific images.  Sometimes, the footing requires your attention so you may not be looking at much more than what is in front of you.  All I’m saying is that when you slow down long enough to consider framing and capturing a shot of what’s in front of you or to the side, turn around once in a while and check out the view behind.  There just might be a shot worth your attention.

In May 2007, I was walking through the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia trees in Yosemite National Park.  It is REAL easy to be awed by what’s in front of you.  Ginormous trees with great, red trunks stretching too high to see where they end.  One can imagine that, with trees over 200 feet high, not much direct light reaches the forest floor.  It was a wonderful place to wander and it was so easy to be drawn further down the trail to see what the next grand scene might look like.

I make this my first Tip of The Day because I don’t do it enough.  That day, I remembered to turn around. There was this fresh, green, youngster of a tree…with a sunbeam shining right on it…directly in front of a big, red mass of a tree.  Like Ansel Adams described when he made his iconic ‘Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico’ image, I had enough time to snap off one shot before the sunbeam moved on.  Don’t miss the chance to capture what’s right behind you.

Mother and Son, 

Yosemite National Park, (15 May 2007)

D.C.Photographer Tips

Like many papers used to do, Friday’s Washington Post includes a Weekend tabloid section with articles about the cultural going’s on around the area.  With a number of photography exhibits happening this month, they produced a nice article with input from three shooters who give their tips ‘for taking photographs you want to keep’.  The on-line version of the piece can be found here [I hope you can access it without some silly password issue].

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/10/AR2011031002105.html?sub=AR

While ‘The Concert Photographer’ – Josh Sisk and ‘The Jet-setting Portraitist’ – Joshua Cogan show some fine work and have very valid tips, I was drawn to the subjects and work of Mark Parascandola.  http://www.parascandola.com/links/

He likes to shoot structures and ruins.  As the text notes, his images are “all lines and geometry, the photos never feature people”.   He and I have that preference in common.  Buildings don’t blink or move.  They are most cooperative subjects.  However, as my shot of the National Gallery of Art below demonstrates, it still helps to be there at the right time so the light works for you.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (22 April 2007)

(Re-) Introducing Images and More

It’s been a long time between posts. I have not stopped thinking and writing since 2006…I’m just not much of a self-promoter. I want to change that. There are many photography blogs out there. Most are done by pros that have expertise and special knowledge to impart. ‘Images and More’ will be about this person’s continuing growth and development as a photographer.

Friends say I am a good photographer. At times, I have doubts. I have seen good photographers and believe I know what they do to excel in this craft. Since I have been doing it for a long time, I would admit I am experienced…but not necessarily accomplished. I may have an eye for composition but my abilities in the digital darkroom are definitely limited. My hope is that this effort to regularly communicate photographic learning and experience will promote development - the reader’s and especially my own. If I formally propose to expand knowledge, do things that are new to me and share them on line, maybe I will actually do it. What a concept.

Then there is the ‘And More’ side of the blog. If I were to have a tombstone, it would read, “He tried to be informative and entertaining”. At the risk of alienating some readers, there will also be the occasional post that is not about photography. This site was first created because I saw the devastation that Hurricane Katrina did to my former home town and I was upset at the government’s failure to respond to it. If one pays attention to current events, not a day can pass without some development that makes you grab your head in frustration. Absent a picture story, I just might fire off an opinion piece. If the reader is offended and vows never to return, that’s the breaks. To paraphrase Leslie Gore, it’s my blog and I’ll rant if I want to.