Michael Kenna: taking away in space, adding in time
What photography does when it takes away and when it adds, what is left of an object once it stops looking like itself, the part played by atmosphere and the print, and the long exposure as a temporal low-pass filter, through the work of Michael Kenna.
Four tools for Capture One: stacking, grain, film development and the zone system
Four free tools for the Scripts menu of Capture One Pro: temporal stacking with alignment, grain calibrated against the datasheets, development with spectral film models and a zone system map.
Long exposure: how to work out the shutter time from the blur you want
Long-exposure recipes give fixed times that only work for one scene. How to calculate blur in pixels, how long your hands can hold the camera and which ND filter you need, with an interactive tool.
A framework for thinking about photography: from Flusser and Barthes to Japanese aesthetics
A personal framework for thinking about photography, drawing on Flusser, Barthes, Berger, Sontag, Shore, Ghirri, Cotton, Tanizaki and Japanese aesthetics.
Wabi-sabi, mono no aware, ichigo ichie and yūgen in photography
Wabi-sabi, mono no aware, ichigo ichie and yūgen: four concepts from Japanese aesthetics applied to photographic practice.
The abuse of storytelling in photography
Almost every photography website promises storytelling. Why the term misleads, and what a photograph can do instead.
The broken photo: five concepts for learning to see
Five concepts from Japanese aesthetics (wabi, sabi, mono no aware, yūgen and fukinsei) for learning to see, with examples.
The tensor of photography: classifying images with Steinert and Barthes
A proposal for classifying photographs with a three-axis tensor, based on Otto Steinert and Roland Barthes, applied to iconic images.
A lens’s character can be measured
A lens’s character is the set of aberrations its designer chose not to correct, so it can be measured. An interactive chart of 129 Leica M-mount lenses.
Binning on the Leica M11-P: does Triple Resolution really reduce noise?
Does the Leica M11-P’s Triple Resolution Technology reduce noise? SNR measured by image differencing, compared with Lanczos, and dynamic range at three ISO settings.
How to read an MTF curve: aberrations, bokeh and lens character
How to read an MTF datasheet: which aberration produces each curve shape, what to ask of it for pop, creamy bokeh or glow, and eight lenses analyzed.
