Mike Johnston’s wonderful post at T.O.P. about the perils of blogging:

Inexplicably, a lull–and the blogger is aware that the already huge crowd has suddenly achieved a whole new dimension; it has magnified exponentially. Behind him, an enormous mass of people have materialized. They are armed with cudgels, verbs, spikes, bricks, epithets, all sorts of things. And they are looking menacing. A wave of fear travels up his spine.

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Karl Zipser at Art & Perception:

Staying artistically fit in 2007

Thanks to my New Years resolutions, I took my camera on my walk this morning. Making photos every day — what’s the big deal? Photography is just a matter of pressing a button, right?

I did the same walk around the harbor that I do every day when I am in Wilhelmshaven. But today I felt exhausted afterwards, and it wasn’t from the physical weight of the camera. I felt tired because I used my “photographic vision,” a special way of looking at the world. It took about half an hour of walking and shooting to get into “photographic vision,” and it now persists for some time after I put down the camera. “Photographic vision” lets me take photographs without using a camera, in a sense. I assume all the photographers have this; probably the professionals live with it all the time. For an amateur like me, it yields a sort of “mental muscle ache” something like what you feel when you first start exercising muscles that you didn’t realize you had. All the more reason for the daily workout!

– Karl Zipser [Art & Perception]

Yes, Karl, yes. :-)

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LA Weekly interviews John Szarkowski:

These days, he’s turned his attention back to his own work, a small survey of which can be seen at Peter Fetterman Gallery through the end of January. In town for the opening of that show and for a lecture at the Getty – whose current exhibition of photographs from the Berman Collection bears the stamp of Szarkowski’s advocacy of the American vernacular tradition – he met us for coffee on the sleek patio of the Luxe Hotel, looking anomalously dapper in a Northeasterner’s tweed blazer.

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Luminous Landscape is featuring part one of a multi-part article on “http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/Digital%20Focusing.shtml“>Focusing in the Digital Era” by Gary Ferguson.

This article confirms some of what I have believed about the concept of depth of field. Many people seem to assume that objects within the depth of field at a given aperture (on a given camera) will be “in focus” and those outside of the depth of field will be “out of focus.” I’ve always thought it couldn’t really be quite that simple. It has seemed to me that there should be a plane of optimum focus with objects in front of or behind that gradually going out of focus at rates varying by aperture. In other words, an object that is not in the plane of focus may be “acceptably out of focus,” but it is not really in focus.

Ferguson explains the history of the depth of field scales on lenses, and points out that they were designed in an era when photographer did not think to enlarge images to the extent we do today. If one took a 35mm negative and enlarged it to, say, 4 x 6 inches, the fuzziness in front of and behind the plane of focus would not be visible. However, today many of us make quite large prints from images captured on sensors that are often smaller than 35mm film frames, and the focus issues become more critical.

He includes a series of photographs that clearly illustrate just how fuzzy objects that “should be in focus” turn out to be – important stuff to understand and think about.

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