The Canadian Association of Professional Image Creators (CAPIC) Vancouver Chapter, just held an event where Heather Morton, who publishes her ‘Ask an Art Buyer’ blog, shared her insights about how photographers should be taking risks. Knowing Heather more through the contents of her blog but never having met her before the event, I was pleasantly surprised by her casual and down-to-earth demeanor in person, which set the tone for the event.

This is CAPIC Vancouver Chapter President Rick Etkin addressing some questions from the audience. The talk went late into the evening and it was clear from the content of the presentation, as well as the reactions from the other members of the audience, just how challenging and dynamic today’s environment is for professional image makers. Among the many points Heather Morton and the other panelists made, these are a few that stuck with me;

If you’re a photographer, I highly recommend attending one of Heather’s talks to get the finer points of the things I mentioned above, as well as have the opportunity to react and evaluate how these things apply to you. Personally, my take on it is, just like other risky endeavors, like being, say…a Skydiver, a Race Driver, or a Ninja, being a successful Photographer is to adopt a certain lifestyle.

I thoroughly appreciated the straight talk from panelists Nora Ahern, Managing Director and Founder of Village and Co., and Eric Arnold, an Art Director from DARE. Heather Morton invites local industry experts to the discussion to make sure the content of the presentation is as locally relevant as possible. It definitely wasn’t a fluffy let’s make-each-other-feel-good motivational talk. If anything, the atmosphere was pragmatic – with the hopeful notes being grounded in a solid dose of reality.

This is Rick Etkin and Dave Rossander the moment after I told them that, in keeping with the spirit of the evening, I was going to blog about the event.

…And off she goes.

“There is nothing new in the world. It’s all been done before.” (To paraphrase the rest of the statement: If you want to create a new style, then you have to look at what’s been done before and learn to combine elements from different periods or styles.)

“(The evolution of style) …is about action and reaction.”

- Ivan Sayers

These are just a couple of gems that I picked up from listening to Ivan Sayers; a fashion historian who specializes in the study of women’s, men’s, and children’s fashions, from 1650 to the present, in his lecture entitled “A Survey of Accessories in the 20th Century”. His talk reminded me that just as we can always trace the evolution of art through technology, we can also trace the evolution of culture through fashion.

Why would I be attending such a lecture? Because it’s interesting and I’m open to anything that broadens or enriches my understanding of this world.

I am also a photographer, and I can get assigned to re-create the glamor of a certain era for a fashion spread, like what I did for this 50′s retro-styled fashion shoot. By experience, getting the styling right for a period piece is one of the most difficult jobs for a fashion stylist, so as a photographer, it pays to know as many details as I can. Of course, there is always a possibility that I’ll someday model a historical character in 3D.

Ivan Sayers was kind enough to bring so many (and in some cases, very valuable and historically significant) hats, shoes, and bags for the attendees to peruse. See images below.

You cannot script moments like these. They happen, and the best thing we can do as photographers is capture it is beautifully as we can.

This is a series of vignettes on how I use my Photoshelter Personal Archive today.

A Tale of Two Cities

Whenever I upload photos from a shoot with Canadian Immigrant magazine, the decisions on which images to use are made by editorial teams based both in Vancouver and Toronto. Using Photoshelter’s invite-only gallery feature, I can give private access to the images from the shoot, which not only facilitates the final shot selection by Editors across two cities, but also gives them instant access to the full resolution images that can be downloaded directly into lay-out.

Canadian Immigrant – Images by Tommy Zablan

Family Ties

Momoko’s sister and grandmother visited from Japan. On the last day of their visit, her sister surprised with a very special Kimono, for the purpose of shooting her Seijin-shiki (成人式) ceremony photos. They booked us for a shoot on a morning ferry from Victoria to Vancouver and we did the shoot on that very same afternoon. Since her sister and grandmother were to go home to Japan on the very next day, they were worried that they would not be able to see all the images from our photo session. We promised that we would show them all the images through an on-line gallery. We uploading the images and sent invites for the gallery shortly after, and the decisions on which prints to order where made both by family members in Japan and Vancouver.

Seijin-Shiki – Images by Tommy Zablan

Virtual Visualization

I’m also a 3D Artist and Instructor, specializing in texturing, lighting, and rendering. At times, I get asked to make a presentation on various aspects of 3D production, and the classes that I teach. Sometimes, the presentations can be impromptu and the workstation that happens to be hooked up to the projector may not have the right software installed, or I may not have my flash drive with presentation data on hand. By keeping many of my rendered images in my Photoshelter Archive, I can quickly pull the images into a Gallery, and using the built-in gallery tools to sequence the slides, turn it into a professional presentation – with just about any workstation that has an internet connection and a Flash enabled browser.

CG Work – Models And Textures – Images by Tommy Zablan

Vancouver’s Got Talent…

…a mix of local and international talent that gives this city it’s unique flavor, and I want to play a part in promoting it. Because of the way Photoshelter’s core Archive to Gallery system is built, I can easily create mini-portfolios like the one I created for Make-up Artist Ayumi Komiyama, without having to create folders with duplicated data (which would be the case when creating web galleries from a program like Lightroom or Photoshop). Because the galleries can be e-mailed and embedded into blogs and web sites (by clicking on the e-mail or embed code links on the bottom of the navigation bar) – they can be like mini, self-contained portfolios that can be sent to whoever wants to see them. The Photoshelter – Graph Paper Press integration makes it efficient for me to publish artist profiles and interviews such as this one.

Ayumi Komiyama, Make-up & Hair Artist – Images by Tommy Zablan

Gallery In A Flash

On one of the rare occasions that I could actually follow the updates on my Twitter stream in real-time, I read that one of the people I’m following, an Editor in a major Canadian Fashion magazine, wanted to have some sushi in Vancouver. The time it took me to pull some recent shots of Sushi (from one of my favorite Vancouver Restaurants) from my archive, organize them into a gallery, post it on my Photoshelter – WordPress integrated blog, and send her the link on Twitter? Around 3 minutes (and a lot of that was due to my Internet connection bandwidth more than anything else). She said the food shots made her drool. I’d say that’s a good thing.

Sushi – Images by Tommy Zablan

Hannibal Chew: I just do eyes. Just eyes…just genetic design…just eyes. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy Batty: Chew, if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes!
- from the move Bladerunner (1982)

Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Bladerunner has been a favorite of mine for the longest time (along with Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell Series). Apparently, someone at Google feels the same way – the rogue Replicants in Bladerunner were Nexus Six models (Google’s phone is called Nexus One), and the femme fatale in the movie played by Sean Young is named Rachael, which is the same name of the Nexus UI used in the Sony Xperia X10. The operating system is called Android.

Having worked on creating virtual worlds and CG characters for the last 3 years, and appreciating just how fast technology moves forward – sometimes I wonder just how long it will take…

Cedalion standing on the shoulders of Orion from Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun by Nicolas Poussin, 1658, Oil on canvas

Introduction

The challenge of teaching the History of Photography is that there is an incredibly broad spectrum of material to go through, so many different kinds of photography that are practically worlds onto themselves, that I can easily spend an entire semester teaching the history of any one them, which is much more than the two 3 hour sessions I have allocated. The last session was a 16,000 year walk back in time from looking at cave paintings to the contemporary issues facing image makers today. This session is the second class of History of Photography, dealing with The Digital Revolution – and I find it only fitting that I deliver the course material, in part, through my blog. (I briefly considered Live Tweeting it on my Twitter account, but then that would compromise the value of your education (-;

Review Of Part I

There is a Latin saying: nanos gigantum humeris insidentes. It means “Though we may be dwarves compared to giants that preceded us, if we stand on their shoulders, maybe we can see a little further.” There can be no doubt that advances in technology have allowed us to see much further, much clearer, and much faster than possible in any other time in history – and this is all the more true with advances in digital technology. There is no ther time in history where we can alter the look of an image so easily with just a few clicks of a mouse. The real question is, “So what?”. The highest resolution sensors, the sharpest lenses, the most advanced image editing operations really don’t amount to much unless the resulting image itself has something to say. So in the last class, we looked at the history and motivations for image making, photographers whose images changed perceptions on both the medium of photography and their subjects, how the technology evolved, as well as touched upon contemporary issues that makes us ask the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What’s the point?’, and hopefully help us ask our questions into finding meaning in our own photography and the images that we see. For a brief recap of the last class;

• The human impulse to create images can be seen as far back as the cave paintings 16,000 years ago in Lascaux, France.
• Early optical devices such as the Camera Lucida and Camera Obscura. There has been some discussion that some great masters such as Carravagio used these devices – essentially making the paintings hand rendered ‘photographs’.
• The invention of light sensitive materials (which eventually evolved to film) and the limitations of early technology
• Remarkable early composites using wet plate technology such as such as Oscar Rejlander’s ‘The Two Ways Of Life’ shown in 1858.
• Alfred Stieglitz, his Galleries, and efforts to make Photography an accepted art form.
• The Pictorialist Movement (and the philosophy that photography should emulate painting)
• The Straight Photography movement with Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and the f/64 Group
• Street photographers such as Henri-Cartier Bresson (founding member of Magnum) and Garry Winogrand
• Fashion photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn
• Contemporary conceptual photographers such as Mark Seliger and Annie Leibovitz.
• And finally finding a conceptual framework from which to find meaning from looking at images, either our own or those made by other artists, by looking at the point of view of the creator/artist, the viewer, and the technology used to create it.

Digital Technology Timeline

Even just 60 years ago, the world was a drastically different place. The next section is a time line which shows the evolution of digital technology that has radically reshaped the contexts in which we conceptualize, create, and view images today.

1947
The Transistor is developed by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Industries, winning them a Nobel Prize and initiates a revolution in the Electronics Insdustry

1951
The VTR (Video Tape Recorder) is developed at Bing Crosby Laboratories. It uses electrical impulses to record images on magnetic tape.

1956
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories experiment with the creation of ‘Silicon Crystals, giving rise to ‘Silicon Valley’

1957
Russel A Kirsch at the National Bureau Of Standards creates the first scanned photo (one of his son) with an early mechanical drum scanner.

1959
The Integrated Circuit is invented by Fairchild Semiconductor manager Bob Noyce, who later co-founds Intel corporation.

1964
Tha Mariner spacecraft transmits electronic images of Mars back to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California

1969
Wilard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Laboratories design the charged-coupled Device (CCD), which until today is used in digital cameras to record images electronically.

1972
First patent for Filmless Electronic Camera filed by Texas Instruments

1980
Sony Corporation is the first to commercially market color video cameras with a solid state image sensor, the CCD.

1981
Sony released the first Sony Mavica electronic still camera, the camera which was the first commercial electronic camera. Images were recorded onto a mini disc and then put into a video reader that was connected to a television monitor or color printer. Not really considered to be a true still camera, it was a video camera that took video freeze-frames. Instructor’s Note: With the introduction of the Nikon D90 and Canon 5D Mark II in 2008, with the ‘ground-breaking feature’ being the ability to shoot video, most would be surprised that the first digital camera was a video camera adapted to shoot stills.

1984
Canon conducted a trial of a professional color still video camera (the RC-701) and an analog transmitter at the Los Angeles Olympics. The images were transmitted back to Japan via phone lines in less than 30 minutes and were then printed in the Yomiuri Shimbun. The color electronic still video camera with a 400K pixel CCD used in the tests was the first practical application for public use.

1984
Apple Macintosh personal computer with a speedy graphical interface and a mouse

1986
Canon was the first to market a still video camera, the professional model RC-701. The RC-701 was aimed mainly at the press market. It had four dedicated interchangeable lenses and also offered an adapter for 35mm lenses. Price of the RC (RC stood for Realtime Camera) with an 11-66mm f/1.2 lens was about $3,000. The complete RC-701 system consisting of the camera, a player/recorder, a printer, a laminator, and a unit for phone transmission cost about $27,000. The CCD was 6.6mm x 8.8mm with 780 pixels horizontally. This was equal to about 300 horizontal and 320 vertical lines on a TV monitor.

1986
NIKON SVC (Still Video Camera) PROTOTYPE – This camera was built around a 2/3-inch CCD of 300 000 pixels (.3 Megapixel Camera). It allowed the analog recording of 25 or 50 images on a small floppy disk of two inches, the same one as used by the Canon Ion to be marketed in 1988. The body of the SVC was designed similar to that of the Nikon F801 film camera which was marketed two years later, Two lenses were intended for the SVC, a 6mm f/1.6 and a 10 to 40mm f/1.4. The Nikon SVC was shown at Photokina ‘85.

1988
Joint Photographic Experts Group develops and implements standards for an image compression format (JPEG)

1990
Photoshop 1.0 (Mac Version) (Instructor’s Note: which is why, along with an integrated monitor that had better QA and more consistent output, the Mac became the standard tool for desktop publishing)
Kodak Photo CD

1991
Kodak DCS 100 (1.3 megapixel $20,000)

1992
Kodak DCS 200 (includes a hard drive)

1993
Adobe Photoshop for Windows

1994
Compact Flash is introduced by Sandisk

1996
The Vancouver Sun and British Columbia Province become the first major newspapers in North America to convert from film to all digital photo capture, using Nikon N90 based 1.3 megapixel NC 2000 cameras developed by Kodak and the Associated Press.

1999
Nikon D1 – first digital camera to be designed and manufactured by a single camera company (2.7 megapixel)

2001-2003
The world transitions into digital image capture. I sell my Mamiya RZ-67 Pro II camera and purchase a Kodak DCS-760, the first true 6 megapixel camera that could be bought for less than $10,000 USD. It was this generation of camera, along with Nikon’s D1X that really drove the transition to digital capture in mainstream editorial and advertising applications. Prior to this time, asides from press images transmitted by wire, most editorial and advertising photography was photographed with either medium-format or large-format film. By first-hand experience, what really drove the sales and R&D of early digital cameras was the Advertising Industry, where advertising photographers could justify purchasing $25,000 digital backs that, at the time, had a maximum resolution of 6 or 12 megapixels.

The Curious Case Of Moving Pyramids (And Other Photoshop Disasters)

While as far back as in 1858, with Oscar Rejlander’s ‘The Two Ways Of Life’, along with the Pictorialist movement, it was shown that photographs could clearly be manipulated. However, this took a lot of work (or at least a dedicated darkroom). For the average person, and for most of the 19th century, photography was considered to be ‘an accurate depiction of truth’. The widespread use of digital cameras and image manipulation software changed this. Here are some points for discussion;

• One of the earliest controversies involving digital images was that of National Geographic’s Moving Pyramids in 1982.
• Recently, the New York Times withdrew a Photo Essay entitled ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’. The newspaper says “most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show.”
• Even more recent is the yet unresolved case where an Italian photographer claims Annie Leibovitz used his images as backgrounds for a high-profile calendar project. The issue here, of course, is not one of manipulation (it’s obvious), but rather one that is arguably as compelling – copyright.
• What is wrong with this picture?

Additional Points Of Discussion

Post modernistic attitudes towards intellectual property and copyright
Creative Commons
Stock Photography
Moores Law, Technology and Obsolescence
Internet-based image platforms (Photoshelter, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter)
Shorter attention spans