Kat in the sunshine

Kat

A new view...

First blog post on the new monitor... I decided to get rid of my rather old Apple CRT monitor because the phosphors seemed to be pretty burned out and not giving me accurate contrast. Plus, between laptops and cheap "flat panel" monitors, it seems like that is the "target" for most of my images anymore, so I should be working them to look good on one of these über-sharp, bright and ultra-contrasty jobs, instead of my comfortable old monitor where things still look rich and warm and just the right amount of softness.

So, not only will I have to get used to this for my online images, but I'll have to find out just how what I see on this screen equates to my camera, and to my printers, and even publishers. Calibration is, and has been, the biggest bitch for electronic publishing and digital photography. An advantage of film is that most people used one of a handful of film stocks, which were the same pretty much anywhere you went, and which would be processed in essentially the same way every time, and negatives were printed in pretty standardized fashion, so the results were predictable and within the photographer's control. You'd shoot an image, process the film, make a print, put it on the wall, and everyone who viewed it saw the exact same thing.

Nowadays, I shoot an image like the one of Kat above, and it looks good on the back of the camera, but it may look different once I get it into photoshop, so I fix it to look good on my "calibrated" monitor, and I post it, only for everyone to look at it on a thousand different types/brands/ages of monitors with countless variations in the settings, so frankly, it's hard for me to predict what ANYONE is seeing when they look at this image. I considered getting one of the high-end Apple Cinema Displays but instead I chose a nice, but basic, Samsung T220, since that's probably closer to the "common denominator" of what people are using to view this blog and my online portfolios. If it looks good on this, an image should look even better on a higher-class monitor, right? Or maybe not.

When I edited this image a few days ago on the old CRT, her hand on the left side was almost completely lost in the shadow, as well as virtually all of her face. Today when I look at it on the new LCD monitor, those areas are still in shadow, but now they're somewhat visible. Which do you see? Which would the judges for an art show see? Which is truer to my vision? Should I go back and "correct" the image to what I'd originally thought I was getting?

The "implications" of this change are pretty daunting in some ways, as I need to decide how to answer these questions for the hundreds (thousands?) of photos I have out there, if it's worth revisiting, or if I just move ahead.

Any photographers reading who'd care to share their insight, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Music to my eyes...

One thing that separates my generation from most of my models is that I remember when MTV played music videos, and ONLY music videos, just for hours on end. My uncle's house in Columbus was one of the original houses to get cable and MTV, at least in Ohio, and I remember going up there one time and just being stuck to the set, watching them randomly cycle through the few dozen videos they had available at the time. Granted, by today's standards, most of them are pretty hokey or at least rough around the edges, but in the day, it was just great fun. There were shows on broadcast TV that would show a few videos on weekends, but MTV was oddly revolutionary for such a simple concept.

Even though MTV turned into a "reality TV" crapfest, music videos are still going strong, thanks to iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, cellphones, and various other online outlets. Recently, MTV announced they're getting serious about videos again with the launch of MTVmusic.com, an on-demand source for their video archives. That number pales compared to YouTube, but these are the legit videos in clear resolution with clean audio. You won't find obscurities like Hilly Michaels on the MTVmusic site yet, but I'm guessing they'll be adding to the library on an ongoing basis, so who knows?

It's funny, I used to daydream about how a business could make music and videos available to the public "on demand." This was WAY before the internet, and at least before broadband made something like iTunes possible. I even remember this idea where stores could have metal "masters" of various hit songs on metal rings, and customers could select 8 songs, and the rings could be placed in a holder concentrically, and it would press a customized vinyl record just for you, instead of buying 8 separate 45s. And when I first heard of digital recording technology (Ry Cooder's Bop 'til you Drop the first rock record that was digitally recorded) it immediately seemed to me that one could encode songs/albums onto computer chips that could be purchased and put into some sort of playback device. Oh well, good ideas are nothing without the resources to develop them.

Above is Kat from a recently-edited-but-not-so-recent shoot. Below is a vaguely Rauschenberg-ish video by the Pixies that I always thought was very cool, if deceptively simple.

The Pixies |MTV Music