What's New 
Recent: publication in Photographer magazine
In progress: Nikon D700 camera user experience report
June 9th, 2009
The beautiful island that I mentioned in the previous post was Mount Putuo in Zhejiang Province, China. I photographed there a couple of times in the past and the only reason I went there again was that it is easily accessible from Shanghai and, relatively speaking, not too touristy—this time I went there during a public holiday and the alternative of dealing with crowds of visitors in other possible destinations or making any complex arrangements for a three day trip did not seem particularly attractive. I was not very lucky with the weather but still managed to bring back a couple of decent images; home page photograph has been updated with one of them.
I attempted to photograph star trails again but this time miserably failed: light pollution was too heavy for long exposures and because of a thin haze the stars were not bright enough to produce impressive trails. As a result, the two hour exposure that I made ended up wasted. Despite the failure, though, one of my best mates and I on the spur of inspiration wrote a couplet in Chinese about photographing star trails:
星亮高飞天慢转
哈苏稳坐酒顺流
Bright stars are flying high and the sky is slowly turning
(I hope it don´t turn away, I hear Neil Young singing)
The Hasselblad is steady on tripod and wine is smoothly flowing
Had this been written when I photographed star trails in Xinjiang Province, China last year, we would have had to add a third line about smoking cigars 
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Last week I was also on a business trip in Beijing and from the rooftop bar of the hotel I stayed at happened to capture the photograph below. In case you are not familiar with Beijing, those are the roofs of The Forbidden City on the left, The White Pagoda of Beihai Park right under the sun and the hilltop pavilion of Jingshan Park on the left.
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Beijing skyline at sunset
As this image attests, photography is very often about being in the right place at the right time. When that happens, though, it is not enough to simply shoot away—you need to envision what kind of an image you would like to produce and make photographic decisions accordingly while photographing. In case of this picture, I wanted to retain as much detail in the sky as possible as well as have almost no detail in foreground, which I intended to remove in post–processing with the use of levels. In view of that, I dialed in a minus exposure compensation and, once back home, quickly processed the RAW file, fine-tuned it a little in Photoshop, and—voilà!—pre-visualisation realised.
May 28th, 2009
A couple of days ago I started shooting with my Nikon D700 and the Canon 5D Mark II side by side and was immediately startled by a rather curious observation. Basically, for my high ISO performance comparison test I shot the same scene with 35mm fixed-focal-length/prime lenses mounted on the cameras (EF 35mm f/1.4L USM in case of Canon and AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D in case of Nikon). Both lenses were focused at infinity, the same aperture was used (f/9) and tripod position was not changed when I switched cameras. And guess what? Fields of view of the EF 35mm f/1.4L USM and the AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D are surprisingly different—the full image below shows the field of view of the Canon and the red rectangle inside it indicates the field of view of the Nikon. The Canon lens is obviously wider than its Nikon counterpart.
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Now, I have always known that there are tolerances in lens specifications, etc., and that there are inconsistencies in fields of view; however, I never expected that the difference in fields of view of two prime lenses of the same focal length could be so massive. I thought I would share this with you.
P.S. To be honest, I have been doing a little too much pixel-peeping lately and all this attention to the digital gizmos starts to make me wonder where one draws the line between knowing his equipment better and forgetting about photography and becoming a gearhead. I will be photographing on a beautiful island over the weekend and the only thing digital I will have with me is my voice recorder to take notes.
May 24th, 2009
It is funny how sometimes you think of something and then read a passage in a book that sounds uncannily similar—not exactly the same but sort of coming from the same place.
"There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual—become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.
It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.
At such times there is a song going on within us, a song to which we listen. It fills us with surprise. We marvel at it. We would continue to hear it. But few are capable of holding themselves in the state of listening to their own song. Intellectuality steps in and as the song within us is of the utmost sensitiveness, it retires in the presence of the cold, material intellect. It is aristocratic and will not associate itself with the commonplace—and we fall back and become our ordinary selves. Yet we live in the memory of these songs which in moments of intellectual inadvertence have been possible to us. They are the pinnacles of our experience and it is the desire to express these intimate sensations, this song from within, which motivates the masters of all art."
A friend of mine has lent me his Canon 5D Mark II with two lenses (35mm f/1.4 L and 24-105mm f/4 L) for a couple of weeks. Two weeks, of course, is too short to have a meaningful experience with a new, complex piece of gear, especially that of a brand that one is not well versed with. I, nonetheless, am going to compare 21MP digital capture with scans from medium format slide film (for fun, again), as well as let you know my initial impressions of the camera.
May 16th, 2009
So how does 12MP digital capture compare with high quality scans from medium format slide film in terms of resolution? To give you a short and quick answer, prints from film scans show more detail, albeit not by a massive margin. If you are interested in the whole story then have a look at part four of my on-going Nikon D700 camera user experience report, Resolution (12MP vs. medium format film).
May 4th, 2009
With the help of my friend Alexander Maltsev who is currently optimising html code of the Web site and, unlike yours truly, is absolutely brilliant with these things, I have now added an RSS feed (the small icon next to the page title as well as on the right side in the address line of your browser). If you subscribe to the feed then following updates on this page in a timely manner will be much easier.
May 3rd, 2009
Some pictures that we take are really strange. You know right from the start that they will not appeal to anyone else or stand any critique. Wrong composition, inappropriate light, inadequate subject (lack thereof whatsoever, quite possibly) or, worse yet, all of the classic mistakes embodied in one singe image. Yet, somehow, they speak to you, cling to you, and you just cannot shake them off. As imperfect as they may be, they make you hear music in your mind, and when you actually hear the music the pictures invariably come before your eyes. Sometimes they might even be not actual photographs that you have taken but rather only imaginative still scenes or associations that you have been trying to translate into visual art, that you have been meaning to bring into tangible existence. Here is one photograph that just does not let me go despite its triviality:
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Such images indicate intimate connections. No matter how strange, inconsequential or controversial the photographs might seem, you should listen in carefully and hold on to them until they start making sense and lead you somewhere further. Any connection, no matter how subtle or seemingly incomprehensible, is a token of meaning and it would not be wise not to cherish it.
April 22nd, 2009
Part three of my ongoing Nikon D700 camera user experience report, Image quality, has now been posted. What is next? Next I am going to have some fun and see how 12MP digital capture compares against properly scanned medium format slides in terms of resolution—stay tuned!
April 16th, 2009
Photographer is the leading photographic magazine in Ukraine that specialises in fine art photography; it is also one of the most important magazines endorsed by FIAP (Fédération Internationale de l'Art Photographique) in Europe.
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The latest edition of the magazine (#3 March 2009) features an extensive article (14 pages, 22 photographs) on my photographic work in China. The piece is in Russian and most of you will probably not understand it; nonetheless, have a look at the PDF version of the article (4.4MB) here.
Home page photograph has been updated with an image taken in Nanxun (南浔), one of the watertowns near Shanghai, earlier this month.
March 29th, 2009
So, finally, I have conducted a test to ascertain whether there is any discernable difference between 16-bit and 8-bit printing. I chose four photographs and printed each image twice, in 16-bit and 8-bit mode (converting 16-bit image to 8-bit mode and saving it as a separate file as the last step before printing). For this test I used the Epson 4880 printer with the latest printer driver (v6.12) and Adobe Photoshop CS4 running on MAC OS 10.5.6. This combination of hardware and software provides a complete, beginning-to-end 16-bit printing pipeline.
I chose photo #3 here, photo #4 here, photo #4 here and this photograph for the test. These images boast very subtle colours, delicate tonal gradations and, between them, a great variation of colours, all of which can potentially benefit from 16-bit printing. The photographs were taken with a Hasselblad V series system on Fujifilm slide film. Transparencies were then scanned with an Imacon 848 film scanner at 3000 ppi in 16-bit mode into Adobe RGB (1998) colour space, thus producing true 16-bit TIFF files. The files were further post-processed in Photoshop CS4, all along in 16-bit mode and Adobe RGB colour space, and then reduced in size to produce 40cm by 40cm (16 inch by 16 inch) prints at a printing resolution of 360 dpi. I printed on Epson Enhanced Matte paper (which I have been using most of the time).
After the prints dried, I carefully examined and compared each pair of images, as well as showed them to several friends (both photographers and otherwise). And so here is my final verdict: no matter how hard we looked, we saw no difference between 16-bit and 8-bit prints—indeed, they looked perfectly identical. What, you ask, no difference at all? Nope, no difference whatsoever. Nothing, zilch, nada.
I, nonetheless, would still like to give 16-bit printing the benefit of the doubt. There probably might be some unique kind of images, colours or paper-and-ink combinations where 16-bit printing would produce a discernibly better transitions and gradations. Again, though, given the fact that I can see no difference in my tests whatsoever, I would not expect any possible improvements to be readily noticeable or of any fundamental significance. And if you shoot digital, where most current cameras do not go beyond 12-bit capture, the issue is even muter.
So is 16-bit printing nothing but marketing hype? Technically speaking, the claim that 16-bit printing produces better results is correct; in practice, however, I am afraid that, yes, for the most part it is marketing hype. This finding is especially interesting in the light of the tendency where future printer announcements are more than likely to boast and market this feature (look, for example, at the recently announced Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II printer).
March 25th, 2009
I have finally managed to install the latest printer driver for my Epson 4880C printer. As it turns out, the driver was fully functional but Epson did not document its installation procedure properly. According to Epson, it has to be done as follows:
1. Download the file.
2. Double-click the downloaded file to create a disk image on your desktop.
3. Open the disk image.
4. Double-click the installer icon to begin the installation.
What this does not mention, and has caused me quite a lot of confusion, is that if you have a previous version of the driver installed then the old driver must be deleted and the printer removed and then added again. Otherwise, when you send a file to print, the status shown for the file in the printer utility will be "Stopped". Clicking the "Resume" button will not change anything and if you click a few times more the system will report the following error: Operation could not be completed. Client-error-not-possible. For some of you this might be common sense but I am not that tech-savvy.
The reason why I looked at my printer driver again is that, as it turns out, all my previous attempts to see any possible differences between 8-bit and 16-bit printing were in vain because I missed one crucial part—the software you print from should support 16-bit printing, too (duh!). I presumed that Photoshop CS3 could send 16-bit data to the printer but, alas, it cannot. So I looked into the issue of 8-bit vs. 16-bit printing again and, in summary, it transpired that to be able to do 16-bit printing you need each of the following:
- 16-bit capable Operating System. Mac OS 10.5.X supports 16-bit printing (source) but both Windows XP and Windows Vista do NOT offer this feature.
- 16-bit capable printing application. For most photographers this will mean upgrading to Photoshop CS4 (source) as earlier versions of the software, including CS3, do not support 16-bit printing (source).
- 16-bit capable printer driver. Check with the manufacturer of your printer if your current printer driver supports 16-bit printing.
In other words, as of now one has to use Mac OS 10.5.X, Photoshop CS4 and one of the latest printers with a driver that supports 16-bit output to be able to do 16-bit printing. That is a pretty high wall to climb, if you ask me, to obtain possible benefits of 16-bit printing. I am nearly there, though, and will report shortly whether 16-bit printing offers any visible (as opposed to theoretical) benefits over 8-bit printing.
March 24th, 2009
One of the difficult things in the photographic process is recognising your unsuccessful images, or images that are not quite what you had hoped they would be, as such and letting go of them. The essence of the issue lies in the fact that photography (fine art photography, at least) is a highly personal undertaking and, as far as the photographer is concerned, any image includes a lot more than what meets the eye. What are those intangible things that are not obvious to the viewer? They are the efforts that the photographer puts into creating an image: affection towards the subject, days or weeks of research, planning and traveling, hours of post-processing, you name it.
It is a hard fact of life, however, that substantial efforts often produce inconsequential outcomes and great results sometimes are achieved without much effort. Aesthetic merits of a photograph often have nothing to do with what efforts have—or have not—gone into creating the image. Granted, our efforts greatly improve the chances of producing outstanding photographs; they, however, do not guarantee it. And in case of unsuccessful images, they ironically become deterrent to objectively evaluating our own work.
To grow as photographers, develop our vision and improve overall quality of the work that we present to the public we have to be the harshest critics of our own photographs. And the starting point is learning to separate the efforts that have gone into creating an image from what the picture objectively is or, more generally, evaluate the latter without interference of the former.
I personally find that the best, if not the only, way to recognise things for what they are is to temporarily distance myself from them and let any emotions involved to at least partially simmer down. The same principle can be used in photography to objectively evaluate aesthetic merits of our work without interference of the efforts that have gone into its creation. More often than not we need to distance ourselves from our new photographs for some time—set them aside, put them away and stop thinking about them as if they did not exist. Then after a while, come back and try looking at them as if they were someone else´s work. By doing so you will find that as time passes by you hold onto the efforts you had exerted less and less and thus can look at your own work more calmly and impartially.
This being said, one has to be careful and not overdo the separate-the-wheat-from-the-chaff part of the photographic process. I always give the benefit of the doubt to the images that I am not certain about in the beginning. From this perspective, returning to your work after a while or at a later time potentially has the benefit of rediscovering the images that initially were considered not quite what you had hoped they would be but in actuality do have a connection with the essence of your character.
By now you have probably started to wonder where all this is going. What I am getting at is this: I think I have now let enough time to pass to more objectively look at the photographs shot earlier this year in Western Sichuan and Xitang; the former can be found here and here and the latter here, here and here. I have to admit, though, that I still cannot completely let go of the uniquely subtle emotional whirlpool I was in while creating them. It is possible that in a couple of months´ time I will find that the whirlpool was nothing but a passing mood and eventually remove the images from the Gallery. But then again, I might at some point realise that the whirlpool and the photographs do bear a signature of the fundamental currents and thus reveal them further. The creative process is never a straight path and more often than not it is closely entwined with discovering and expressing one´s true self.
February 25th, 2009
To me, one of the most difficult things about photographic expeditions is deciding what to occupy myself with in the evenings after a full day of photography. Granted, there are many things you can do: working on the photographs shot during the day (a privilege of digital photographers), reading a book or listening to music (the regular escape of analog photographers), or chatting to your companions (where digital and analog photographers come together). All the regular stuff you habitually do at home comes to mind first but I always keep an eye on the sky after the sun sinks behind the horizon—whenever it is abandoned by clouds and the moon, I invariably feel compelled to photograph star trails. The underlying reason is very simple: whatever else you can think of doing otherwise can be done at any other time. No matter how you slice it, being in an adequate place to photograph star trails and having all the conditions that this type of photography requires met is always a luxury.
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Star trails @ Mount Minya Konka（贡嘎山）
Hasselblad 503CW, CFE 2.8/80 lens and Fuji Provia slide film; one hour exposure at f/2.8
So here is yet another star trails photograph. I have photographed star trails at The Yellow Mountain, Muztagh Ata and now Mount Minya Konka. The images might seem quite similar, possibly even indistinguishable from each other, but if you think about the distances between the locations where they were taken and the differences in states of mind that they impose, it is no mean feat in my book.
February 21st, 2009
Expectations is an elusive, immeasurable yet crucial variable in the equations of our lives. The number of things that are measured against expectations, which often includes life itself, is overwhelming. Very often expectations are difficult to articulate or express clearly yet we tend to know unmistakably what they are. And even if you are not entirely sure of them beforehand, you always know after the fact whether they have been materialised.
Expectations are a living thing—while numerous aspects of our existence are immensely influenced by them, expectations, on the other hand, are constantly and subtly shaped and adjusted by the impact of the ever-changing outside world as well as internal workings of our inner selves. Expectations can be calculated, emotional or instinctive; most of the time, however, they are a highly personal blend of what logic, feelings and intuition dictate.
To a large degree, photographic expeditions tend to be evaluated against expectations, too. Go out for a long walk in your neighbourhood with a camera hanging off your shoulder, bring back a couple of great shots and the outing is considered a complete success. Go on a dedicated photographic trip to, say, Antarctica, bring back only a couple of great images and the expedition is rendered a failure. (Have you noticed that expectations were unintentionally built into the wording of the last two sentences even though I am not going on either trip?) Or, travel all the way to Western Sichuan Province (China), bring back several pictures that you are not even sure you want show, and the trip is a complete disaster. If you do not manage your expectations, that is. If you do, though, sometimes you can see a silver lining while a cloud is only starting to take shape or even before you see an inkling of it.
As you might have already guessed, I did not produce any brilliant photographic work during the recent trip to Sichuan. Quite interestingly, though, I did not have any expectations that would have caused me grief right from the outset. I thought I would just travel down there and see and photograph what there is to see and photograph—with no expectations. While it is very natural to ask why anyone would do anything if he has no expectations related to the outcome whatsoever, this somehow made perfect sense to me. Maybe that was because I traveled in the area before and intuitively knew that having no expectations would be prudent. Or perhaps I just listened too much to Radiohead prior to the trip and the music faintly lingered at the back of my mind ("Don't get any big ideas, they are not gonna happen...").
A couple of days the weather just did not cooperate; one time we were in a wrong place when ambient light was beautiful; and on several occasions we were in the right place but the light did not play its part well. When things end up unfolding not as expected it is crucial to play it by ear from when you remember the old saying about the best laid plans, as well as adjust expectations accordingly. Fortunately, I realised early enough that there was mostly no hope for exciting photography and instead of chasing exhilarating fleeting moments switched to searching for subtlety in the prevailing tedium. Further, I deliberately decided to work slowly and meticulously and used my Hasselblad Flexboby most of the time (operation of the camera is very slow and only marginally faster than that of a large format camera). I used tilt and shift camera movements quite extensively; graduated neutral density filters saw a lot of use, too.
Looking back at it now, the learning experience of practicing photographic technique in the field alone made the trip well worth my while. Setting expectations right, adjusting them in a timely manner, as well as trying to see a silver lining instead of paying too much attention to the cloud is now my new motto.
January 26th, 2009
As planned, tomorrow I am off to Western Sichuan Province. Meanwhile and for what it is worth, have a look at my ten desert island CDs.
January 15th, 2009
As you might recall, in the end of last year I (finally) realised that to produce a cohesive, finished and meaningful body of photographic work it is necessary to work within the framework of a project. This year I intend to put this notion into practice and have now commenced two projects that I hope to complete before the end of the year.
The first project is to create a portfolio of 30 square black-and-white photographs depicting Watertowns of Jiangnan, China. I photographed in several watertowns near Shanghai in the past and have a fairly good basis for completing the task. In line with this purpose, earlier this month I spent three days photographing in Xitang (西塘), one of my favourite watertowns in Zhejiang Province. I intend to further travel to other watertowns in the vicinity of Shanghai throughout the year as many times as completion of the series will require. Oh, and why 30 photographs and not any other number? I will let you know in due course .
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Xitang, Winter Sunset
Hasselblad Flexbody, CFE 2.8/80 lens and Fuji Provia slide film
The photograph above is the only picture from the trip to Xitang that was taken in colour; the rest are black-and-white. What is the crucial and most difficult thing about getting a shot like this? It is timing—you have to knowingly and patiently wait for the moment when the balance between the fast fading evening light and the red lights is perfect for the recording media (slide film in this case). It literally lasts for only several minutes; more demanding photographers would indeed say that there is only one moment when the subtle balance is reached.
The second project is a part of a much larger undertaking that is being carried out by COSACOSA art at large, a non-profit arts organisation based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA. Entitled Change in the Making, the project engages 20 artists in 20 communities around the world to commemorate COSACOSA′s 20 years of working for social justice and positive cultural change. The idea is to match 10 communities in Philadelphia with 10 communities in other countries to explore eight subjects related to community, culture and change. My subject is Landscapes of Change and there are artists in Hong Kong and Philadelphia who are working on the same theme. The photographic part of the project will not be too dissimilar from what I did when photographing the Disappearance of Old Shanghai series. One major difference, however, will be that this project implies a much closer interaction with the members of the chosen community. At the end of the project the photographs created by the artists will become a part of a Wiki as well as be published with corresponding essays and other material in book form.
Apart from these two projects and not to be too radical, I will also do the classic, "purposeless" travel and/or landscape photography just for the fun of it. To begin with, I will be photographing for several days in Western Sichuan Province (yes, again) in the end of January and more trips are likely to be undertaken later in the year on a more spontaneous basis.
So these are my preliminary photographic plans for this year. I hope to post a lot of new material as they unfold, so please keep coming back to this page to see what is new.