"New York Telephone Conversation"

For some reason most of my street photography seems to happen in Manhattan. "New York Telephone Conversation" was taken on 8th Avenue at 34th Street, around 4pm on October 28, as the city was shutting down in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy making landfall.

What I see: The handsets have been left disconnected and ignored, dropped off the hook in an act of civic disregard for both the telephones and those who may need to use it. Dirty, discarded, and anachronistic, they have been left to their own devices and seem to be content with each other's company. But of course their apparent conjunction is a trick of perspective and the flattening of the picture space as they dangle alone.

The yellow phone is striking and unusual, but the focus is quite literally on the mundane black handset in the foreground, denying us the ability to make this photo into a story about novelty or the unexpected.

Despite this being New York there is no sense of bustling crowds; the foreground is empty sidewalk that adds a remoteness to the scene. The few people in the photo are represented just by their hurrying legs, and are dark, distant, and blurred. The disconnection and the superficial passing relationships aren't simply limited to these disregarded telephones.

What I did: Taking this photo involved a certain amount of patience to achieve the empty sidewalk; having the road empty as well proved too much to ask. It was shot from a crouched position to create the alignment with the phones' handsets, using a short telephoto lens at a wide aperture to blur everything but the black handset.

I chose to focus only on the black handset in order to stop the yellow one from dominating the image. It doesn't need the added weight, and the two have a closer visual balance in the finished image. The brighter colour also makes the yellow handset come forward visually, while the black one recedes, adding to the illusion that they're close to each other.

Post-processing for this photo was fairly straightforward. I straightened and trued the angles, adjusted the tones, and tightened the framing to remove some extraneous elements from the left side of the frame.

My assessment: I like the idea behind this photo, and think it comes across fairly well. However, the right edge is cluttered and detracts from the story. I've given it a three-star rating in my Lightroom catalog, marking it as a good photo, but not one that's remarkable in its own right. At the same time its personality is strong enough that I see it being a bad fit for a series, although it might be able to join a looser grouping of some sort.


Comments, questions, thoughts? You can find me on Twitter or via e-mail.

Star Ratings

Star ratings are a funny thing. In some places a five-out-of-five rating seems to be the default – amazon, ebay – but that doesn't make sense when it's time to sort and rank my photos. On a scale of zero through five, here's how I make it work for me.

All photos start at zero, and after my initial sorting and ranking most of them stay there. To be promoted to a one-star rank a photo needs to have some potential; determining this will often involve a quick edit, but other times I'll assign it and move on. But only the most promising one or two of a particular sequence of similar photos will get a star – I'll backtrack and zero out a photo if I see one that's better.

A two-star rating is reserved for photos that are reasonably good. Sometimes I assign two stars to an unedited image so that I know to come back and pay attention to it, but usually these are former one-star images that have been more thoroughly edited and promoted. This is the lowest rank that I'll usually show to family and friends, and a two-star rating is as high as I'll go during my initial few edits.

I have a simple rule for a photo to get three stars: it has to be mine. I have to honestly assess whether another photographer, with the same equipment and skill, would have taken the same photo that I did. Not many photos of sunsets can meet this challenge, and even exquisite photos of lonely trees or red canoes – should I ever take them – would fail as well. Being promoted from a two-star to a three-star rank isn't a measure of quality, but a matter of personality.

A photo that has crossed the critical threshold of matthewness can be good enough to be elevated to four stars, but that's exceedingly rare. A five-star rating is even more uncommon – but that's just fine by me. My best work, as always, is still to come.


Comments, questions, thoughts? You can find me on Twitter or via e-mail.

Megapixels, Then and Now

"[Brand X has] reached the limit of what is sensible, in terms of megapixels on an APS-C sensor. … Even the sharpest primes at optimal apertures cannot (at least away from the center of the frame) satisfy the [redacted] megapixel sensors hunger for resolution. Considering the disadvantages that come with higher pixel densities such as diffraction issues, increased sensitivity towards camera shake, reduced dynamic range, reduced high ISO performance and the need to store, move and process larger amounts of data, one could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that at this point the megapixel race should probably stop."

That's what DPReview had to say about the Canon 50D back in October of 2008. It seems quaint now that we were concerned about the quality ramifications of stepping up from ten to fifteen megapixels, which gives that old Canon about the same pixel density as my D800, and far less than any smaller-sensor camera currently on the market.* But the reality is that, when normalized down to a lower resolution, the 50D really didn't provide all that much of a performance improvement over the previous generation.

That's unlike the move from the Nikon D3100 to D3200, or D700 to D800, both of which provide a real step up from their predecessors. It's not nearly as revolutionary as the numbers – or marketing campaigns – suggest, but these things never are.

Looking back at DPreview's list of megapixel evils, two of them – reduced dynamic range, worse high-iso performance – have been resolved by improving technology. Diffraction and camera shake are false issues, as the higher resolution still give still an overall improvement, even if it's not as great as it could be. My D800 can show problems that I wouldn't have seen before, but it's also able to do a better job than any other camera I've owned whenever I need it too. This is a fundamental shift: we no longer have any reason to be afraid of resolution when we're working with something bigger than a point-and-shoot's sensor.

And reading about the weighty burden of "data storage and processing" of 20MB raw files – from SLR photography's pre-video era – is somewhat charming.

Old camera reviews are refreshing. It's not just a record of where we've been, it's also a hint of what today's greatest devices will look like a few years from now. There's no better reminder to have fun with what I have and not get overly caught up the hardware details – but I realize that that's an easy attitude to have when I already own a D800.

DPReview's full conclusion about the Canon 50D is here.


*Except for Nikon's 12Mpx D300s, which still remains available to order in Canada, but only a complete camera geek would ever think of that one.


Comments, questions, thoughts? You can find me on Twitter or via e-mail.

Perfection, circa 1997

I have achieved photographic perfection.

Not with a photograph, of course – I hardly expect that happy accident to ever happen, and if it did I'm not sure that I'd be pleased. No, I accomplished it in a much more predictable way. I've completed a perfect camera outfit.

Last summer I bought a Nikon F5, which is a film camera that I've wanted for years. It's huge, heavy, eats eight AA batteries at a time, and can rip through a roll of film in under five seconds if I'm foolish enough to let it. Even compared to other film cameras in this digital age, it's excessive and impractical – but it has autofocus, works with all of my Nikon lenses, and is unspeakably awesome.

I quickly added a new-old-stock Nikon F5 shoulder strap to it; the metal buckles are stamped "JAPAN". I've also tricked it out with an MF-28 command back, which adds an intervalometer and has a larger rear LCD than the one on my first digital SLR. That's about as fancy as any pre-Y2K camera can get.

But what has me really excited is a new lens: I found an absurdly great deal on a new Nikon 50/1.4D. That basic lens design is from the late 70's, and this still-current model was last updated in the mid-90's, making it the perfect contemporary for the F5. It's a snappy focuser, small enough to make the camera less ridiculous, and the viewfinder even has a little window that lets me use the aperture ring on the lens to control the camera. Perfect.

Yes, I already own the new-and-improved 50mm f/1.4G lens, and use it on my D800. But being "better" isn't the point.

My creative process starts when I choose my medium and select the tools to work it with. The F5 and 50/1.4D combination gives me a really compelling way to use 35mm film that compliments my existing small-format film rangefinders and digital SLR – I can almost make it sound rational. But the bottom line is simple: it makes me want to go out and take photos, and to try to make them better than what I've done before. Really, nothing else matters.


Comments, questions, thoughts? You can find me on Twitter or via e-mail.