David Dugan

Angles on a pyramid

One of the niceties of shooting where you live is having the opportunity to shoot the same subject on multiple occasions, and explore it from different locations and perspectives. One such subject in my neighborhood is one of San Francisco’s most famous landmarks, and its signature skyline element: the Transamerica Pyramid.

Erected amidst much controversy in 1972, the Pyramid’s distinctive shape is a fiendishly clever solution to three problems: 1) Transamerica wanted their building to reach higher than the nearby Bank of America building, the tallest in the city at the time; 2) being on the very fringe of where the Financial District meets North Beach and the historic Jackson Square district, there were limits in place on the amount of square footage for offices allowed on that plot of land; and 3) towering as it would over the Gold Rush buildings of Jackson Square, it needed to cast as small a shadow as possible over its neighboring historic district.

The result is an icon.

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As much as I enjoy shooting a particular subject from several locations and perspectives, I also like to experiment with many different post-production treatments, often revisiting and reprocessing a photo even months or years later. Following are a few variations on the theme, with brief explanations of the shot and the process.

This cross-processed shot was taken at Union & Montgomery Streets in North Beach, on Telegraph Hill, four blocks from my building. Montgomery Street ends briefly just over this rise, as the descent from Union to Green Street is too precipitous for cars to handle--which, in San Francisco, means it’s really, really steep.

This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 30D and Canon EF17-40mm f/4L USM lens, and processed using a black & white luminosity mask, and some faux cross processing with a bit of vignetting.

This Polaroid transfer shot was taken at Montgomery & Washington Streets, right at the foot of the Pyramid, surrounded on each corner by the Financial District, Jackson Square, North Beach, and Chinatown.

This was shot handheld with a Canon A-1 and Canon FD50mm f/1.2L lens on Kodak E200 slide film. The processed slide was then printed to Polaroid 669 film using a Vivitar slide printer, and transferred midway through development onto watercolor rag using a dry-transfer process.

This black & white shot was taken from the roof of my building at Powell & Union Streets in North Beach. The sharp, angular components of the Pyramid make for excellent high-contrast, red-filtered black & white photos in bright sunlight.

This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Vivitar Series 1 100-400mm f/4.5-6.7 lens, and processed using a custom red-filtered black & white conversion.

This glamour shot was also taken from the roof of my building at Powell & Union Streets in North Beach.

This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Canon EF80-200mm f/4.5-5.6 USM lens, and processed using raised midtones and highlights, and a custom color process I call “blue inversion”.

This Polaroid transfer shot was taken at Columbus & Kearny Streets, where North Beach meets Chinatown. The foreground building, one of San Francisco’s two surviving Flatiron buildings, is known as both Columbus Tower and the Sentinel Building, but is most famous for being the home of Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope studios, with a Niebaum-Coppola winery cafe on the street.

This was shot handheld with a Canon A-1 and Canon FD50mm f/1.2L lens on Kodak E200 slide film. The processed slide was then printed to Polaroid 669 film using a Vivitar slide printer, and transferred midway through development onto watercolor rag using a dry-transfer process.

And finally, this unprocessed shot is nearly identical to the previous image, taken at Columbus & Kearny Streets in North Beach. While these two buildings appear to be near each other, there’s a difference of two blocks and thirty-five stories between them.

This was shot handheld with a Canon EOS 300D and Canon EF28mm f/1.8 USM lens in late afternoon sun, with no color processing to speak of.

A more dramatic sky

My brother recently commented on the fact that Ansel Adams was not only an artist behind the lens, but a master craftsman in the darkroom as well, working tirelessly on both skill sets to achieve his status as a legendary and pioneering photographer.

Digital post production is the 21st-century equivalent of Ansel’s darkroom chops, and there are myriad color processing techniques available to today’s photographer. Many of these techniques are rather advanced, of course, but there are many simple adjustments that can significantly improve the photos right off your digital camera, using basic Photoshop skills.

One of my favorite things to do with my photographs is to create a more interesting and dramatic sky (especially since I don’t shoot with a polarizer as often as I probably should), and there is a fairly simple technique to accomplish this.

Above is a photograph of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, just north of Santa Cruz, California. This is the JPEG image right off my camera, cropped to a 16:9 aspect ratio (just because). It’s a decent image, but it’s a little flat, and I’d like to punch up the sky for a more dramatic and pleasing photograph. Here’s my technique:

With my image open in Photoshop CS3, I’m going to bring up my Layers palette. I want to keep all of the color data from the original image intact, so the first thing I want to do is duplicate my Background layer by dragging it onto the “Create a new layer” icon in the Layers palette or by selecting Layers > Duplicate Layer... from the menu bar. (Click on the small screen shot at right to view it at full size.)

I want to be able to make adjustments to just the blue color of the sky without affecting the rest of my image, and one easy method for doing that is to convert my new layer to grayscale using the Black and White adjustment dialog. With my new layer selected, I go to Image > Adjustment > Black & White... to bring up the Black and White adjustment dialog. I want to make sure that I have the Preview box checked so that I can see the effect that my adjustments are having to my image. In this case, I’m only interested in affecting the sky, so I’m going to move the Blue and Cyan sliders down until I get the level of darkness and contrast that I like. In this case, since the sky was pretty light in my original image, that means cranking the Blue and Cyan sliders all the way down; this will vary from image to image. Now I’ll click OK to save that adjustment to my new layer. Now my image looks like this:

Now that I have darkened and increased the contrast of the sky on my grayscale layer, I want to blend this new data with my original color image. I’ll do this by setting the Color Mode of my grayscale layer to Luminosity, using the pull-down menu at the top left of the Layers palette. This blends the light characteristics of the grayscale layer with the color data of the Background layer, resulting in a nice, darker and more dramatic sky. Notice that the coloring of the lighthouse remains unaffected, which is why this method is superior to just darkening the whole top half of the image.

(Since my grayscale image is floating on a separate layer, I have a great degree of flexibility in controlling exactly how much of the effect I want to incorporate, simply by changing the opacity of the grayscale layer, which can be changed at any stage of the process. The effect will be much more subtle at 50% opacity, for example. In this case, I'm going to keep the grayscale layer at 100% opacity for a full implementation of the darkened-sky effect.)

Now my image looks like this:

Much more dramatic, but there are several things I don’t like about this result: I don’t like the way the ocean looks so much darker now; I don’t like the artifacts at the border of land and sea along the left side of the image; and I don’t like the dark green color of the vegetation at the bottom of my image. To fix these problems, I’m going to make a gradient mask so that my dark sky effect fades out nicely as it reaches the ocean’s horizon. With my grayscale layer selected, I’m going to add a mask to that layer by clicking on the “Add layer mask” button in the Layers palette.

With the layer mask selected on my grayscale layer, I’m going to fill the mask with a simple default gradient so that the blue sky effect fades at the horizon line. With my foreground color set to White and my background color set to Black, I’m going to grab the gradient tool (by pressing the g key or selecting it from the Tools palette) and I’m going to draw a simple vertical gradient (holding the Shift key to constrain my gradient to a straight line). I want to draw a fairly short gradient line, starting from about one-third the distance between the horizon and the bottom of my image, and dragging the gradient tool straight up to about one-third the distance between the horizon and the top of my image. You can draw this gradient onto the mask as many times as you like until you get it just right. With the gradient applied to my mask now, only the top half of my image has the dark sky effect applied, and the transition from the sky to the horizon is nice and smooth, thanks to the gradient mask. This is what my final image looks like:

And the “before and after”:

The Mac's amazing resale value

I recently upgraded my system from a PowerMac G5 tower with 22” Cinema Display to the brand-new 24” iMac with Intel's latest 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo processor. (This isn’t a review of the new system, but suffice it to say it is the finest computer I have ever owned and I love every single thing about it, especially the glossy screen. Photographs look amazing on this beauty.)

This top-end iMac is only available as a build-to-order from the online Apple Store, and I upgraded the drive to 750GB and maxed out the RAM at 4GB, bringing the total cost with tax and shipping to $2,700. Expensive, you say? Perhaps...

But here’s the amazing part. I put an ad up on Craigslist to sell my old system, asking $900 OBO for the whole system:

PowerMac G5 dual 1.8GHz tower (bought new in 2004)
3GB RAM, two internal hard drives (about 300GB total)
Apple Aluminum Keyboard and Mighty Mouse
22” ADC Cinema Display (bought new in 2002)
iSight cam

The ad went up on Friday afternoon and by 10pm that night I was loading everything into a guy’s car who had just handed me $900 cash. He didn’t even try to haggle with me on price.

This was a four-year old computer with a six-year old display!

You can buy a brand-new Dell workstation-class tower with a Core 2 Duo processor and a 19” flat panel display for $100 less!

Say what you will about Macs being more expensive on the front end, but you can sure make a lot of that back when the time comes to upgrade.

OS X Leopard rocks (literally)

This is one of the coolest music videos I’ve ever seen (by way of The Unofficial Apple Weblog), particularly appealing to Mac nerds like myself. It’s made entirely with the interface of OS X Leopard and various apps and utilities, like Word, Photoshop, Photo Booth, Final Cut Pro, even Stickies and Time Machine.

The song is “Again & Again” by The Bird and The Bee, and the video is directed by Dennis Liu.

I tend to think of myself as more of a craftsman than an artist--proficient with my tools--and the level of creativity and talent on display in this video is exactly why. There are crazy talented digital artists out there!

This is not just a cool proof-of-concept video either. The execution is flawless. Enjoy... Again & Again.

UPDATE: I love the little sequence at the end where they go to iTunes and purchase the song.

Misprinted Type

My sister Pam [works in a shop, she never stops, she’s a go-getter... oh, sorry], who runs a popular blog on crafting, turned me on recently to some very cool freeware typefaces called Misprinted Type. They’re very reminiscent of some of the sloppier old T-26 fonts (particularly the five commercial fonts offered for sale), but less fanciful and far more usable.

They’re designed by a Brazilian artist by the name of Eduardo Recife, crafted with Macromedia Fontographer and available in TrueType format for both Mac and PC (Windows TrueType fonts work perfectly well in Mac OS X incidentally). And they’re free!

My favorites are Nasty, Porcelain and Selfish, but they’re all pretty great and cover a fairly wide variety of styles (script, gothic, typewriter, etc.). Check them out here.

Apple v. Big Apple

There's been a bit of a brouhaha recently over Apple Inc. trying to block the City of New York from receiving a trademark for a similar logo they’ve designed for their “Green NYC” campaign. The consensus reaction seems to be that this is a fairly frivolous lawsuit on Apple's part, but I doubt that Apple really cares about this very much...they might even secretly approve of it for all we know.

What a lot of people fail to realize is that one aspect of being granted a trademark by the United States Patent Office is an *obligation* to vigorously defend said mark against any and all reasonable violations. Whether Apple wins or loses this case, they will have defended their trademark, which will reinforce their position against any future, more egregious violations.

So, there’s a good chance that the City of New York will win this case, and both sides will walk away happy.

However, Apple might just have the wisp of a case here after all. As with most people, I would have thought that the similarities between the two logos was mostly coincidental, but that was until I came across the image below at the Blue Ember blog, showing artwork from the “Green NYC” campaign alongside Apple’s three-year old packaging for “iLife ’05”.

It was easy enough to give the City of New York the benefit of the doubt when just looking at the two “apple” logos, but it’s nearly impossible to suppose that Apple Inc was not the primary inspiration for the “Green NYC” campaign when looking at the image above. I mean, wow.

Now, this is most likely still not grounds for a pure trademark violation, but it’s pretty clear now that the City of New York is not a completely innocent party here.

If, at this point, you’re asking yourself “Who cares?”, well the answer is “Nobody”. Moving on now...

Oh joy, a website built entirely in Flash!

Adobe today launched Adobe Photoshop Express, a public beta web application, and although it’s called “Photoshop”, don’t let the name fool you. This is *not* an online version of Adobe’s venerable flagship photo-editing application. It’s more of a web app for storing, sharing, and doing some light editing to your photos...like an online version of Google’s Picasa or Apple’s iPhoto.

My initial reaction is... Why?

Does anybody need an online version of these two very capable desktop apps? Have people really been clamoring for a way to edit their photos in their web browsers? Is there an advantage that I’m not seeing in uploading your photos and *then* editing them, rather than editing your photos and then uploading them?

Even if you look at Photoshop Express simply as a way to present your photos, it is disappointingly simple compared to even Apple’s bare-bones-yet-elegant .Mac web galleries, much less the robust experience of a service like Flickr. As far as I can tell, the only way to browse someone’s photos is in a very simple slideshow mode, whereas Apple offers several clever viewing options and Flickr is simply a whole ‘nother ballgame, with nested sets and collections, tags, metadata, advanced search, and much more.

I’d be tempted to call Photoshop Express a Web 2.0 application, except for the fact that it completely eschews one of the ideals behind Web 2.0 by being built and presented entirely in Adobe’s proprietary Flash, rather than standards-based technologies like AJAX and PHP that you find in most Web 2.0 properties, such as Flickr.

I suppose it would be naive to expect anything else from Adobe, but the Flash-based nature of Photoshop Express makes it an absolutely miserable web experience for me. The whole app, as with most Flash-based websites, is very slow. And you can forget about using the forward and back buttons in your browser or any of the several ways you might normally navigate through a web page (arrow keys, space bar, mouse scroll wheel, page down key, etc.) which, from a UI perspective, is simply unconscionable. Not being able to scroll through a listing of galleries with my mouse wheel is maddening. I can’t remember the last time I actually had to grab the window sidebar to scroll. There’s a good reason nobody uses Flash as a web design platform anymore.

I just don’t get it. Perhaps Adobe is desperately looking for reasons to prop Flash up under a steady assault from open web standards such as AJAX and H.264, and from Apple’s refusal to allow Flash on the iPhone and iPod touch. Perhaps they think this is the killer app that will keep Flash relevant for the next decade, and designers locked into Adobe’s proprietary platform.

On a recent episode of the Mac Break Weekly podcast, Andy Ihnatko held up Photoshop Express as a reason that Apple needs to have Flash on the iPhone, but with all due respect to Andy, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to use this service on a desktop browser, much less on the OS X touch platform.

$20: the price is right

At first glance, I didn’t think it was very likely that Apple was about to offer some form of unlimited iTunes music, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s inevitable. From Apple’s perspective, such a move would do two things: it would rejuvenate a saturated iPod market at the perfect time, and it would seal the deal on the absolute dominance of iTunes, now and forever, in such a way as to completely discourage even the spark of an idea of competition from a new entity. And what’s in it for the labels? Only what the labels desire most...obscene amounts of money. More on that later.

There are two potential models being postulated: a monthly all-you-can-eat subscription for iTunes music; and a “free” music plan where the cost of the one- to two-year subscription would be baked into the retail price of an iPod or iPhone.

Apple could probably implement the monthly subscription plan into iTunes pretty easily, and offer it alongside the current “a la carte” model. In other words, iTunes users would have the option of either subscribing to an unlimited music plan or continue to purchase their songs and albums, or both. Conventional wisdom says that the vast majority of people aren’t interested in renting their music in this fashion—that they want to own their music—so it would be very interesting to see whether that is a legitimate consumer position, or if it’s just the end result of the fact that, to date, subscription plans have not been compatible with the market-leading iPod. I suspect the latter would prove to be true.

Though I’ve never been attracted to any of the subscription music services that are currently out there, I feel quite sure that such a subscription plan offered by Apple would instantly validate the subscription model, and be a smashing success. In other words, it’s quite probable that the only reason that all-you-can-eat music plans have failed to date is that Apple hasn't offered one. Apple’s custodianship of the fortunes of music in the 21st Century is that complete.

Which brings us to the second unlimited music model that Apple might choose to implement, the device-centric “free music” plan. Under this scenario, you would pay a bit more for your next iPod or iPhone, and that device would come with unlimited access to the entire iTunes music library for the life of the device, or—perhaps more realistically—a one or two year period.

The music labels love this idea because they have been dying to get their hands on a share of iPod sales, but threatening and cajoling hasn’t gotten them anywhere. By offering iPod users unlimited access to their entire music libraries, the labels would finally have a vehicle for sharing that coveted iPod revenue.

Rumor has it that Apple is agreeable to this model, but the two sides are far apart from each other when it comes to the money. Apple is offering $20 for each iPod or iPhone sold with the unlimited music plan, but the labels are asking for $80. The general tone of the punditry suggests that Apple needs to either cave in and give the labels what they want, or at least meet them halfway. But I think that’s a mistake. The labels should thank their lucky stars and jump on Apple’s offer of $20 per iPod and here’s why.

Let’s say that Apple agrees to pay the labels $80 or even $100 dollars per iPod. The punditry says that this is only fair because, after all, who on earth wouldn't happily pay an extra $100 for an iPod with unlimited music? Answer: a hell of a lot of people wouldn’t be willing to do that. There are a significant number of people who would look at two identical iPods on a shelf, where the only visible difference between them is a sticker that says “free music” and a price tag that’s heavier by a hundred bucks, and would walk out of Best Buy with the cheaper iPod and $100 still in their pocket. “Free music rental is cool,” they’ll say to themselves, “but I don’t buy that many songs anyway, and a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. No thanks.”

Apple would have no choice but to offer two versions of each iPod model and color—which would run contrary to the simplicity and elegance hard-coded into Apple DNA—and who really knows how successful those $100 “free” music plans would be?

On the other hand, if the music labels accepted Apple’s offer of $20 per iPod—which seems very low at first glance—then Apple would not have to offer different versions of each iPod model. Apple could bake that extra $20 into each unit in various ways (small increase in price, temporarily lower margins, etc.) and could simply offer the unlimited music plan with all iPods and iPhones, whether you wanted it or not. No sales pitch, no special packaging. iPods now come with unlimited access to the entire iTunes music library, period. Thank you, and you’re welcome.

Why should the labels be happy with only $20 instead of $80? Because at the $80 price, it’s impossible to know how many people would opt for the plan. Would one in four people pay the extra money for their next iPod? Maybe, maybe not. By accepting Apple’s $20 offer, on the other hand, the labels would get a smaller cut, but they would get that cut on every single iPod and iPhone sold, and Apple will sell 60 million iPods and iPhones in 2008 alone. That means that each year, Apple would write a check to the record labels for at least $1.2 Billion.

One point two billion dollars.

From one partner.

That’s a lot of cheddar.

Sunrise on the bay

Woke up restless this morning... probably because there was a brand new camera body sitting on my desk, so I made my way down to the waterfront and watched the sun rise. These are a few of the first pics off my new baby, a Canon 30D (I like it!).

New podcasts this week

I’m enjoying a couple of new podcasts this week...well, one is really new, the other is just new to me.

First up is a new podcast from Pixel Corps called This Week in Photography, which is an excellent resource on digital photography, featuring tips, news, and thoughtful insight, and is a great listen for any amateur or prosumer photographers out there.

Second is a very professional podcast straight from the SETI Institute called Are We Alone? You’d be forgiven for thinking that a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) podcast would be all about aliens and UFO sightings, but it’s actually a fascinating and thought-provoking podcast about space exploration, artificial intelligence, cosmology, and the emerging science of astrobiology.

Both podcasts are available free through iTunes.