Saturday, July 30, 2011

The History of Photography

Jerome Liebling died this week. I hadn't seen him for almost a year and I knew his health was an issue. He founded the film/photo program at Hampshire College and taught here from the beginning until 1990 when he retired. When I read the date 1990 in the Daily Hampshire Gazette article I was quite surprised. For me Jerry had just left a few years ago, but I was wrong, quite wrong.

When he retired he had a wonderful photo show in the library gallery and I had the honor of helping to hang a couple of walls of his photographs. Toward the end of the day there was a discussion about how to hang two photos (part of a larger group of images) - which should be on which side. I said the distant shot should be on the left and the closeup shot should be on the right as if you were looking into the group of photos (scanning from left to right you moved into the image), not away. Everyone paused and looked at Jerry. He thought a moment and said I was right. Bingo, best evaluation ever. Jerry though I was right. Hah.

I think I took his concentrators class four times and each time my photos got better. Jerry could make a walk down a hallway a memorable experience with questions, comments and stories. It was the stories that surprised me the most. I loved his photos, but his stories were even better which I guess was the real reason his photographs were so good. He saw the story in the image and as a result each single image had the depth of a ten minute story in it, not just the length of the click.

I always said when you talked to Jerry you were talking to the history of photography and you felt it. After he retired that history, without him,  took many odd turns at times. Photography seemed to flounder and not know what to do with itself. Fashion took over and every year there was a new "look" to how photographs should be made. The classic documentary photo was deemed old fashioned and out came "text". You had to have "text" somewhere in the image to be hip or look like you were "making a statement". Gender politics took over for several years, and hasn't completely disappeared, making photos an ideological opportunity, though not really interested in photography at all.

It all thrashed around. Color came and went and then came back again. Size has always been troublesome and unresolved. There were arguments about frames, but everyone has forgotten that now. Digital was the new kid, then the only kid, then still a kid. Finally everyone just got tired of the changes every season and it's all settled down again. Most photos look like classic documentary photos after all. What a waste of effort. It should be a lesson for all of us, but it isn't, is it.

So Jerry really was the history of photography - from World War II until now. The people who knew him, were students of his and, ever widening, were students of his students have had that history touch them.

The power of photography is in the story that's captured by the image and the relationship of the photographer to that story. The method of a great photographer is to have the camera disappear in their hands. The measure of a great photograph is to have the photographer disappear and leave only the image and the story. Jerry's photos are still telling his stories and will forever. Thanks Jerry.

gunther

Friday, July 15, 2011

What Works Around, Goes Around

Thankfully there are a lot of smart people out there poking Final Cut X with a stick to see what it'll do. Sometimes that's even useful. On Ken Stone's web site Steve Martin posts a method of making and using disk images to keep your work separated from other editors on a station. It's easy and clever and has the added advantage of allowing us to also edit across a network as we did previously with Final Cut 7. So that takes care of my two big complaints against the new kid.

It would have been nice if Apple has just mentioned this right from the beginning, but maybe they didn't know about it either. I can't tell if I think that's good or bad. Hmm.

I surprised myself yesterday, editing in Final Cut X, with the ease of copying a "look", or rather matching a color pallet from one shot to several others. That was useful. It gave a more unified look to a quick montage sequence I cut using good and not so good shots.

I had the RGB parade view up (to give me insight into what's off with the color) and I was also using a second monitor for the Events window which made it much easier to see the clips I was working with. So, all in all a pretty good experience with our new friend (or is it the devil in disguise, just tempting us).

I haven't had as much time working in Final Cut X as I would like because we're, as usual most summers, remodeling the labs in the media basement. This year I cut down the depth of the desktops by about a foot. I built them quite a while ago to fit all of the video equipment we used to have at a station: decks (DV and VHS), video monitor, two 17" or 19" CRT monitors, a tower computer, hard drives, (Zip and Jaz drives, remember), a mixer, headphones, speakers, Final Cut colored keyboard and I'm sure something else, too. Well those days are over. We have much less stuff at a station now and that empty space ends up just collecting dust bunnies and tumbleweed.

Now, we're down to an iMac, an external Raid drive. speakers and headphone, a regular Mac keyboard, an Epson flatbed scanner and a couple of desk lamps. A little sleeker and, I hope, a little sexier. I still have to stop off at Target and get some more of those chrome desk lamps that everyone likes.

We used to have a couple of stations facing each other, but now they all look in the same direction at the large projection screen so it'll be easier to do training sessions in the lab. We're also taking over the old tech shop space and converting it to a classroom. That will relieve the use of the studio as a classroom space and  get it back to being a real shooting space again, something we all need desperately.

So lots of real work to do yet, but the results are already paying off in the cleaner look and feel of the lab, which always makes it easier to maintain, and the open-ended potential of an adjacent, high-end, media classroom. We were surprised to notice that we'll end up with three adjacent spaces all with large projection capabilities and good traffic flow from one to the next.

Oh, and we have the new InfoBar concept to work with up on the main floor of the library – we'll have a public presence for a change (that's a whole other post to talk about). Looks like it could be a fun year.

gunther

Monday, July 4, 2011

Working Your Way Around

So I've had a little time to work in Final Cut Pro X – just a couple of days. But first we really do have to modify the name. It's now "officially" FInal Cut X, no Pro in the name please. Now I'm not mad about it, not crazed like some have been, but let's be honest it's not a pro app based on what's still in our heads from past experiences. Sure it still has some bugs if you go by the discussions, but it is a good application for editing video in an easy, yet powerful way. I want to use it and I think a lot of students will also. It's what iMovie should have been.

If you remember, my biggest complaint was that it wants to give you access to all the footage and projects all the time. For a home computer that's OK, but not in a multi-user environment, nor particularly in a business environment, no, not at all. Is there a way around that – yes.

In the old days the Avid Media Composer had the same problem. All we did was add our name to the name of the folder and it disappeared. The software could only see the 5.xMedia folder and nothing else.

Well, same thing here. Final Cut X makes two folders. One is the Final Cut Events folder for the footage and the other is the Final Cut Projects folder for the sequence (see even the application doesn't call it Pro). All you have to do is rename or better yet move them into a new folder with your name on it and the application can no longer see your project and footage. Easy.

OK, it's not going to be easy, people are going to get it wrong and lose track of their footage and project, but in the end it'll be OK. Does it bother me that I can't output to tape? No, in my world tape is dead, no loss there. Do I think the color correction is a little clunky - umm, yes, but I"m far from being a perfectionist. In fact I may be the perfect customer for Final Cut X – lots of in-house projects, mostly short form and working in a lot of differing formats.

So, will I toss out the old Final Cut Pro Studio? No way. People are still working on projects with that and I suspect people will also start projects with that. Will I switch over to Adobe Premier to edit? No, probably not, but I am interested in their DVD authoring application to make interactive Blu-ray disks and once I've got the whole package of applications maybe I'll use Premiere a bit.

In the end it's been useful to see that a monolithic approach to our problems isn't such a good idea after all and that we should have a broader range of options for doing work. It's also important to notice that, for a lot of us, the work has changed and the concept of the monolith video editor is no longer true either. It's a new day for all of us in all respects.

It's also been amusing to see how vocal everyone has been. We don't usually get as rilled up as this. That has made us feel like a community of users, but also with differing opinions and different needs. Let's keep talking to each other and help all of us get through this transition into the future. As we say at Hampshire we're driving fast into the fog. Good luck.

gunther