I’ve been a member of the National Education Association ever since I started teaching at the university, but people outside the education field often ask me, “what exactly is the NEA?”
After reading through all the mail they’ve ever sent me I can confidently answer: Some kind of organization that sells life insurance.
The gears of progress — not to mention those of Cafe Press — grind slowly… But I finally sent the first check with a donation to CureSearch and the National Childhood Cancer Foundation with the proceeds from sales on my PDML schwag shop.
To recap: I’ve set up a Cafe Press shop offering t-shirts, mugs, caps and stickers (and one seriously sarcastic mouse pad) imprinted with humorous quotations for photographers. Then you buy this stuff (yes, really) and 100% of the profit that Cafe Press sends me gets turned around and donated to the NCCF CureSearch campaign (actually, more than 100% — I throw in my own donation to round the amount up to the nearest $50.00).
Cafe Press offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on everything sold through one of their shops, so they have to wait that long before releasing the money to me. Then it’s a matter of waiting until the end of the month when they mail me a check. Then I add my own contribution and send a check to CureSearch. Now that we’ve gone through that first delay I should be getting a check every month… provided people keep supporting the shop. (ahem)
That said, here’s the main link for you to visit:
The PDML’s CureSearch/NCCF charity shop
And some other relevant pages:
• My page where you can request custom items at the shop
• The annual PDML quotations page (which inspired this whole thing)
How do you determine the best LCD monitor for your computer? Frankly, I was surprised at just how much research it took and how widely scattered the information was. Having just done the work and made the purchase I’m going to try to sum up the results of my findings here.
First of all, my intended use: I’m a photographer and my most critical use of a monitor is with Photoshop. Other users with varying needs may have requirements quite different from mine, but I’ll try to make clear the advantages and disadvantages of each type and how they might affect different users.
Viewing angle is the characteristic that really drove me into this research: With my old monitor, moving my head up or down a slight amount drastically affected the brightness of the on-screen image. Thus I could never be confident of what was going to come out of the printer. I got tired of having to hold my head “just so” in order to be (almost) certain of what was going to come out of the printer.
There are three general types of LCD technology used in monitors:
If you’re thinking you’ve never heard of any of them, you’re not alone. Manufacturers and retailers don’t go out of their way to inform you of which technology they’re using. I found I had to do some digging to learn which technology any given monitor used.
You’ll also find that each type of technology, besides having its own acronym, has spawned a small tribe of offspring acronyms, each of which represents a variation that offers — or claims to offer — improvements over earlier versions: The words “Advanced”, “Improved”, “Premium” and “Super” figure prominently in these new acronyms. But is “advanced” better than “improved”, or “super” better than “premium”? Only the marketing people know for certain (actually, they don’t, but that’s another story….)
Look for the basic initials (TN, IPS or VA) within the extended acronym and you’ll usually know which technology you’re dealing with.
The really short version of this article is as follows:
TN monitors are the cheapest, most common and lowest quality, particularly for photographers: Fairly limited color gamut and limited viewing angles. (They do have faster response time than IPS or VA, so they’re good for playing computer games.)
IPS monitors offer the broadest color gamut and widest viewing angles, but also the slowest response times.
VA monitors fall in between TN and IPS in most, but not all, regards: Their color gamut, viewing angles and pixel response times are better than TN but not quite as good as IPS. Fortunately, they tend to be closer to IPS than TN and… they offer better contrast ratios than either TN or IPS.
The monitors that are included with general-use computers are all TN technology. If a manufacturer doesn’t tell you what kind of technology a monitor uses, it’s a safe bet it’s TN. And, yes, in general the rule of “the more you pay the better you get” applies. But a high quality 19-inch IPS monitor might cost as much as a mediocre 24-inch TN. I’d choose quality over size, but it’s your call in the end.
As I mentioned earlier, manufacturers and retailers don’t go out of their way to tell you what technology is inside their monitors, but fear not: The TFT Central “Panel Search Database” lets you look up most monitors on the market and find out what’s inside. To get a great monitor on a budget, click on the Geeks.com logo in the left hand panel of this page and look at their monitor specials, then plug each model number you like into the TFT Central database to find out what kind of LCD panel it’s built on. You’ll find there are some great bargains to be had (and some unpleasant surprises to be avoided).
As a photographer looking for a monitor for Photoshop use, I decided my choice came down to the slightly wider color gamut of IPS versus the slightly better contrast ratio of VA. (The pixel response rate is mainly of interest to gamers and my take on viewing angles is that the difference between VA and IPS isn’t big enough to worry about.) I went with a widescreen Samsung S-PVA monitor and I’m thrilled with it. Your mileage may vary.
There are three approaches you can use to narrow down your selection: Go out and look at monitors (if you can find a place that actually has multiple high-end monitors on display – good luck!); Seek out and read on-line reviews; Ask for recommendations from people you know and trust (and have a look at what they’re using if they’re local).
From a purely theoretical standpoint, I leaned toward contrast ratio rather than color because I shoot mostly nature photography, and there’s usually a significant margin of acceptable color in this genre: Who can say what exact color that fall foliage, for example, really was? The area in which color accuracy is most critical (except possibly for some scientific work) is skin tones. The human visual system very sensitive to variations in skin tone and people find inaccuracies in this area particularly annoying. If I were a portrait shooter I’d probably favor IPS.
And before you start agonizing too much over your decision, know that if you’re upgrading from a TN monitor virtually any IPS or VA monitor will knock your socks off!
A good source for information on LCD monitors is the previously-mentioned web site, TFT Central. Using their TFT Selector and entering your size, price and other requirements, you may find the IPS/VA decision is made for you ;-)
Most people don’t need to read below this point! But if you really want details on the variations of each technology and its advantages (or disadvantages), the next section will give you the low-down. If the monitor you’re considering uses an acronym you haven’t seen so far in this article, you may find it here…
Twisted Nematic uses a substance called a nematic liquid crystal confined between two plates of polarized glass. What makes a TN display work is the way these liquid crystals can be affected (actually twisted) by electrical current and the way this twist in the crystals affects polarized light.
ADVANTAGES:
Low manufacturing/retail costs
Fast pixel response times
DISADVANTAGES
Limited viewing angles (especially in the vertical direction)
Lower contrast levels means blacks are not as dark as VA based panels
Smaller color gamut
VARIATIONS (and I’m not going to detail each one!)
STN (Super Twist Nematic), CSTN (Color STN), DSTN (Double layer STN or Dual-scan STN), FRSTN (Fast Response STN), FSTN (Film-compensated STN, Formulated STN or Filtered STN), FFSTN (double Film STN), MSTN (Monochrome STN), CTN (Compensated Twisted Nematic)
IPS was developed to improve on the narrow viewing angles and limited color reproduction of TN technology, with the trade-off of slower response time. Color reproduction is almost as good as CRTs (the old, bulky, picture-tube style monitors), but the dynamic range (contrast) is lower.
S-IPS (Super-IPS) — Improved pixel refresh speed.
H-IPS (High aperture ratio IPS) — A further development of IPS technology, with claimed reduction in backlight bleed (good) but slightly narrower viewing angle (bad).
AS-IPS (Advanced Super IPS) — Improved contrast ratio over S-IPS: second only to some S-PVA screens.
A-TW-IPS (Advanced True White IPS) — A custom S-IPS panel with a “True White” color filter intended to make white look more natural. Developed specifically for displays targeted toward photographers and graphic artists.
There are basically two flavors of Vertical Alignment displays, MVA (Multi-domain Vertical Alignment), developed by Fujitsu, and PVA (Patterned Vertical Alignment), developed by Samsung. Each one has a variety of sub-categories (that may well have grown by the time you read this!) and each subsequent variety claims to offer improvements over earlier versions. PVA is supposed to have the best contrast levels.
MVA (Multi-domain Vertical Alignment)
P-MVA (Premium MVA) — Improved pixel response time, allegedly poorer color
A-MVA (Advanced MVA) — Unknown “improvement” over standard MVA
S-MVA (Super MVA) — Unknown “improvement” over standard MVA
PVA (Patterned Vertical Alignment) Improved viewing angle and contrast over basic VA.
S-PVA (Super PVA) — Improved pixel response speed and viewing angle. Best contrast ratios currently available.
You may have noticed links to the Pentax photo Gallery on various pages around this site (if not, here’s one: www.pentaxphotogallery.com/markroberts). It’s an online photo gallery set up by Pentax to show off work produced by their equipment. Anyone who shoots with Pentax gear can sign up and submit photos. But take note: The standard for getting accepted is quite high and seems to be getting higher all the time as more and more amazing shots appear the Gallery.
And therein lies a tale, because on various discussion fora around the ‘net, we’re seeing complaints from people whose images were rejected (the management of the Gallery prefer to say “declined”, but as one who likes to call a spade a shovel, I’ll “decline” the use of that euphemism myself). In many cases, the rejected images are so mediocre that one has to wonder what the submitter was thinking in the first place. One look at the Pentax Photo Gallery should be all you need to determine that it’s a place for those once-in-a-blue-moon (for most of us) “wow” shots. The standard isn’t how the shot compares to your other photos, but how it compares to the other photos already in the Gallery. Take a look and ask yourself how you measure up. It always leaves me humbled.
Still, there are a lot of superb photographs that get rejected and this leaves a lot of people baffled. It shouldn’t. Think for a moment about the intended purpose of the Gallery. When a company like Pentax goes to the trouble and expense (development of a database-driven site with a complex Flash-based front end and major bandwidth costs — this site cost them a lot), they do so with one goal in mind and it’s not promoting art or photography and it’s definitely not promoting my art or photography. It’s selling camera gear. To be accepted, a photo not only has to good art, it has to demonstrate qualities that will make people want to purchase the equipment that made it. There’s plenty of great photographic art that’s underexposed, grainy/noisy, blurred, etc. But that ain’t gonna sell cameras. I have a friend who does brilliant street photography in Toronto. Many of his shots make deliberate use of camera movement or moving subjects and slow shutter speeds, grain and noise, etc. to create moody, evocative images of startling power. Everything he submitted to the Gallery was rejected. Many of my favorite Henri Cartier-Bresson photos wouldn’t make it into the Pentax Photo Gallery.
Evocative images may move people, but they don’t necessarily make them think, “I want to buy the camera/lens that made that photo!”
Here’s a shot of mine that I entered in a national photography contest last year. It’s one of my all-time favorites and, much to my delight, took first place in the photo contest (winning me a nifty lens worth about $1000.00). Unfortunately, that fog that gives the photo it’s wonderfully atmospheric (pun intended) look also obscures any fine detail in the image, so it makes the lens look much less sharp than it really is (or at least hides how sharp the lens is). Though it took first place in one photo contest, it was — understandably — rejected by the Pentax Photo Gallery.
Of course, photographs can be sharp and perfectly exposed and still be good from an artistic standpoint. But rather than try to be a gallery of all kinds of photography, the Pentax Photo Gallery has chosen to limit their scope, and even from a strictly artistic standpoint that’s almost always a good idea: Winston Churchill supposedly said, “I don’t know the secret to success but I know the secret to failure: Trying to please everyone”. One of the Pentax Photo Gallery qualifications has to be the notion that the end result will help them sell their product. They rely on this for the paychecks they get every week, feeding their families, etc. Their priorities can’t be the same as ours.
Just as we have to accept that they have their own reasons for creating and maintaining the Gallery, they certainly recognize that we participants have our own agenda in submitting photography. I’m not sending them my photos because I want to help them sell gear! I’m doing it to try to promote my work and I have to be as pragmatic and hard-nosed about it as they do. For example, if you try to update the technical data that accompanies one of your already-accepted photographs, it gets pulled from the Gallery and re-entered in the judging queue… and quite often rejected upon re-evaluation. After having this happen to me once, I asked why this was the case and went through several emails with someone who evaded the question every time. In retrospect, it’s obvious that they’re using it as an excuse to “thin the herd”, so to speak, and cull images that they feel no longer measure up to current standards. I therefore decided never to correct erroneous data again. Would Pentax be better off if all the data associated with my images in the Gallery were accurate? Probably. But just as they’re not running the Gallery for their health, I’m not participating in it for mine (nor theirs).
Each side has to recognize the independent motives of the other and make allowances for them. Interestingly, I read message board a post from a photographer who had submitted images to the Pentax Photo Gallery and to one other juried online gallery (I’ll provide the link when I find it again). All the shots he had rejected from the Pentax Photo Gallery were accepted by the other gallery. And all the shots accepted by the Pentax Photo Gallery were rejected by the other gallery! I looked at both sets of images and frankly and all his shots blew me away. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
I will no longer be selling the Along These Rivers book on my web site. The publishers are refusing to sell me any additional books because I have criticized the project in this blog. Despite my comments on the book itself being overwhelmingly positive (enough so to generate several orders), it seems that any questioning of the management of the project is deemed “hateful”, so I am no longer permitted to purchase any more copies. I have refunded the money of all those who placed orders.
The irony of this situation (if the irony of poetry publishers objecting to freedom of expression wasn’t enough for you), is that one of the photographs of mine accepted for publication in this book came about specifically because of my being on the receiving end of blunt criticism myself. I posted my original version of Live Oak and Vines on the web and several people responded positively. But one didn’t like it at all. In fact, he was very harsh and criticized it severely, saying in the end that he thought it was “a sucky photo”.
Everyone loves to hear their work praised and no one enjoys being told that there are faults with it. But the person with the criticism was an experienced and talented photographer whose opinion I respected greatly. At first this made the rejection worse. But after a brief period of anger and frustration I accepted the possibility that… he just might have some valid points to offer. Reading this in print it seems obvious, but accepting that criticism of your work might have validity is much more difficult when it actually happens, especially if you have a great deal emotionally invested in the work, as most artists do.
Black and white photography is often much more challenging than color, and some images are particularly difficult to get right. Ansel Adams would spend hundreds of hours fine tuning the shadow and highlight detail and overall tonality of a print. Digital technology has made this process faster (and you don’t have to put up with the smell of the chemicals), but it’s still quite time consuming and difficult. Starting from scratch from the original file, I spent a many hours adjusting and balancing the tonality of the image, trying to make the highlights stand out without being excessive, burning down the shadow areas without losing all detail. Fine art image printing can be a frustrating experience, but after a week I had the image looking the way it always should have. Although the original had looked all right before, the new version had become a portfolio-quality standout. I have a 12 x 18 inch print that is quite stunning. Looking at it now I can’t imagine how I could have found the original version even acceptable.
It wasn’t those who unthinkingly praised the original image who were responsible for it becoming an addition to my portfolio, it was the person who had the honesty and integrity to stand up and tell me the truth I didn’t want to hear. The only road to improvement open to anyone lies precisely in the direction of one’s faults; the direction one is least likely to want to look.
Without my friend’s blunt criticism my photo never would have become good enough to get accepted into Along These Rivers. Ah, irony.
My photoblog seems to be on a “castle” trend lately, but what’s the harm in that? This photo is from Warwick (pronounced “worrick” for you Americans) Castle in England.
Warwick Castle dates back to around the year 900, although it wasn’t until 1264 that they started building what constitutes most of the castle as we know it today. It’s one of the best preserved and most beautiful castles in England, so give it a visit if you’re ever in the area (it’s less than two hours from London by train).
I posted this shot after a photography mailing list I’m on recently had a brief discussion of “Spirit Photography”, a concept that in one form or another has been foisted on the credulous from the earliest days of photography. It’s the idea that cameras, whether digital or film, somehow have the ability to capture images of ghosts or spirits that are invisible to the human eye. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (a rather credulous chap, it must be said) was famously taken in by photographs claiming to depict fairies. And there’s a new horror movie coming out about ghosts/monsters appearing in photographs.
Warwick Castle came up in the discussion for two reasons: Firstly, like many castles it is known for ghosts, spirits and other manifestations of the paranormal. The second reason is the photo shown here, which I took in the dungeon of Warwick Castle in 1999. Dungeon architects never gave much thought to providing adequate lighting — largely due to the lack of workplace safety regulations in those days — and modern updates have improved the situation only slightly (though I suppose a brightly-lit dungeon wouldn’t provide the proper mood, would it?) Regardless, low light levels create difficulties for photographers, and this was particularly problematic in those pre-digital days. Fortunately, I’d brought my tripod, so I set up for a few long time exposures.
I got a few good 30-second exposures and had just tripped the shutter for one last shot when I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Then another tourist came in, walked around a bit and departed just before the shutter snapped closed. The appearance of this unexpected intruder had annoyed me at first, but then I thought, “What the heck? It might make for an interesting photo.” And indeed it did. The “straight” photos turned out to be quite bland. The only one I ended keeping was this, the one with the “ghost” passing through the scene.
I was recently asked for permission to use one of my photos in AntiDull Online Art Magazine (www.antidull.com). It’s an intriguing concept so I agreed to give it a whirl and the photo they chose (shown at right) has just appeared in their second issue. Having had some time to look at it and to get comments from people I know, I’m ready to offer some thoughts on the end product.
I teach web design and multimedia at Youngstown State University and one of my first lessons is called “The Yin and Yang of Web Design”, which describes the dichotomy between the artistic part of designing an appealing web page and the technical aspect of writing valid, functional code. But there is a third side to web design and it’s usability: Making web pages and applications that are easy and convenient for real people to navigate and use. A good synonym for “usability” in regards to web design is “effectiveness”, because how usable your site is is the single greatest determinant of how effective it will be at achieving your, or your business’, goals.
Usability is the most important thing to get right and for many people it’s the most difficult. Technical correctness isn’t hard (provided you care enough to try!) and many ugly sites are successful if they provide products or services that people want — as long as visitors can successfully use the site.
The Good part of AntiDull “magazine” is aesthetics: It’s an uncluttered and attractive design, obviously the work of people who know and care a lot about graphic design and art. It also must be said that a lot of the featured art work is stunning. I’m flattered to be included with the other artists in AntiDull.
The Bad list is a bit longer. First of all, it’s Adobe Flash based, which is a usability problem in itself (as well as being a major liability as far as search engine indexing is concerned). Secondly, the user interface is non-standard. The thumbnails that launch the Flash window don’t look like clickable links, there’s no text to indicate they are and they don’t even make the cursor change on mouse-over, like normal links.
The Flash content itself is also sub-optimal for usability. Yes, it’s clever, clicking or dragging on a corner of the screen to make a page “turn”, and the visual execution of the effect is well done, but it’s non-intuitive in the context of a web application. We should be past the stone age of web design when people thought they needed to make an on-line experience mimic that of a physical product. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The page-turning sound effect that accompanies each change is cringe-inducing kitsch and there’s no way to turn it off. The fact that navigation is strictly linear — you can only go to the next page or the previous one — is a rookie mistake in multimedia design: They need a “home” page with clickable thumbnails (or text) and the other pages of the magazine should have a link that returns you to home with one click.
An odd liability of AntiDull magazine is the poor readability of the text. The vector-based text of Flash ought to be exemplary in this regard. It looks as if all the text was done in Photoshop, converted into bitmap form and then downsized before inclusion in the Flash content. And though they show each featured photographer’s web URL, it’s not a clickable link. You can’t even highlight and copy the URLs to paste into a web browser! There’s a major oversight.
But the biggest problem is probably the simplest: Size. If your subject matter is visual art, you need to present it large enough for your audience to view it well. Each photo in AntiDull is approximately 350 pixels square. That’s tiny in this age when 20-inch, 1200×1600 monitors are standard equipment on budget computers! The reason for this minuscule image size may be the overhead associated with Adobe Flash, but that’s really just another of the many reasons for doing away with Flash for a site like this: It limits browser compatibility, usability, image quality (size) and search engine friendliness… and all it provides in return is cool animation between pages. The detrimental effect of Flash on search engine indexing is ironic because the publishers of AntiDull most likely found my photography through a Google search — where my web site has a good page rank precisely because I avoid the use of JavaScript, Flash, etc.
Finally, after covering the Good and the Bad, we come to the Interesting. At first I thought I was going to list this with the Bad, but after some browsing I decided I really quite like it. It’s the decision to present the photographs in square format, a way that very few photographers shoot now. Mostly we stick to the 2:3 aspect ratio of 35mm cameras, the 3:4 or 6:7 ratios of medium format gear (most point-and-shoot cameras also use the 3:4 format) or the 4:5 of most large-format cameras. This means that, unless the photographer supplied the image in square format (Hasselblad shooters or those who’ve cropped the photos themselves), most of the photos must have been quite severely cropped to fit. I was surprised to see my image cropped square, but I like the result. Assuming that most of the other photographers’ work was also cropped by the publishers, they did a wonderful job. You can tell the people who put this project together are graphic designers with a good eye for composition.
To sum up: AntiDull magazine is a great idea with excellent content and a flawed execution. As long as you have the Flash plug-in for your web browser (most people do; it’s like one of those bacteria that almost everyone has but makes only a few people sick), it’s well worth a look. As it is now, I can’t imagine many people making it a monthly “must-see”, but with larger image presentation and some interface improvement, it just might catch on.
ADDENDUM: The publishers of AntiDull say they’re hoping to start a print version of their magazine. This sounds like a great idea. They’re clearly more comfortable with print format than online presentation and though I’m not overly impressed with AntiDull.com (in its present form), I’d definitely subscribe to a print publication that features similar art.
I’ve participated in the Great Interview Experiment started by Citizen of the Month. The experiment involves bloggers around the world interviewing each other, pretty much at random. I haven’t yet had a response from the blogger I’m supposed to interview (though I was late in emailing because I didn’t understand at first how I was supposed to know who to interview), but Dan of “Dan’s Distractions” has bravely suffered through an email interview with me and has put it on line. Read it here if you dare.
Looking through my recent post on the subject of blog spam, I was struck by the appealing rhythm and imagery of the nonsense text I quoted at the end. Spammers insert these random pieces of text to try to fool software looks for terms and phrases commonly seen in spam (in order to identify and delete it). Some of these snippets have an almost poetic quality to them. Almost.
But although machine-generated blurbs are almost poetic, they lack the human touch that’s needed to turn the almost poetic into poetry.
That’s where I come in.
I’ve collected the best of the nonsense text from my spam filter to create “Spam Poetry”. It’s a little like “refrigerator magnet poetry” except that the raw materials are delivered to you free and the end result doesn’t have to share space with your kids’/grandkids’/nieces’/nephews’ art work. Here’s my first effort:
Somebody Knows Something
Somebody knows something
Puzzle quest review of awesomeness seeks for a Clifton
It is smooth to receive
Don’t be afraidCurrently the most powerful enhancement device for men
Gas and steam turbines require particular attentionSex with a friend
Genital herpesBiometric Scanner provides wet fingerprint recognition
Be realistic – you always wanted itTo sort the insightful
Can sometimes get challengingThe FastSize Extender is currently the most powerful traction
Best antecommunion
This oak could have been around in AD800Evidence from the dreadful!
Respect for your notice!Don’t be afraid
Somebody knows something
I’m getting fresh material delivered to my inbox every day, so you can look forward to many further installments in this series. And, years from now, when I receive my Pulitzer Prize, you’ll be able to say, “I was there at the beginning!”
Don’t let it go to your head, OK?
Wouldn’t you like to be seen amongst that select group of people on the right? Wait. Let me rephrase that…
The NCCF fund raiser I started on the Pentax mailing list is still going strong and 6 people have actually been brave enough to send photos of themselves wearing their PDML attire. Though some obviously felt the need to disguise themselves I’m going to assume they’re insecure about their looks rather than embarrassed to be seen in our schwag.
Thank you to everyone who’s purchased a t-shirt, mug, cap or mouse pad!
I haven’t yet received the first commission check from Cafe Press but I expect it some time in March. The first donation to the National Childhood Cancer Foundation should be somewhere around $200. Not bad for a start-up, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. Visit our Cafe Press shop and buy a trinket to support pediatric cancer research. And if you’ve bought something already please send me a photo of yourself with it.
Especially if you’re better looking than this lot. :)