Happy New Year! - More or Less

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I'm not really playing the Grinch here, but conversations about New Years usually deal with "more or less."  We want to weigh less, we want to earn more.  We want to spend more quality time with those we love, we want to be less driven by the demands of work. We wish Congress would do more, and spend less time explaining why it is always the other guy's fault that nothing gets done - stuff like that.  So I thought it would be fun to take this first essay of 2012 to look back at 2011 to see  - from a digital technology perspective - when "more" was a good thing, and when, instead, "more" was really less.


When more really is more: The Lytro Camera

The Lytro camera [http://www.lytro.com/] claims my top spot by virtue of the fact that it is "more" in a sense far beyond "more of the same."  Lytro is more in the sense that it increases the total of what we had before - it is "more" in that we never had this before.

Never had what before?  Excellent question.  Everyone who has ever taken a picture, from the gods of Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White to the worst Facebook projectile photo poster, has had the experience of wanting a "do over."  "If I could only go back and focus more on their faces!" "I wish I could see both the foreground flower and the background mountain better."  But the shutter had snapped and marched on and no amount of fretting could undo the compositional decision made at that moment - until now.

Lytro is a light field camera for the masses, and you can Google "light field camera" if you want to read the long explanation.  In a nutshell, it means that a light field camera like Lytro gathers all the light waves bouncing off the scene in front of the camera's lens and stores them as a data set that can be manipulated after you trip the shutter.  Focus points, depth of field, light dark, framing - you can mess with everything.  Just thinking about the creative possibilities that arise when you add Lytro to our already existing bag of Photoshop goodies is enough to make a photo geek - dare I say it? Swoon?

One can preorder the Lytro for $499.00 for a 16 MG version, $399.00 for 8MG, so it still isn't an impulse buy item, but compared with the far more expensive, far less portable previous generations of light field cameras, that is an exceptional price for some really sweet technology.

And the downside is?  Well, just as a word processor can turn you into a sloppy writer, I can see the Lytro making one a sloppier photographer.  Back in a previous life when I taught photography, I would ramble on at length over the arcane aspects of f-stops, shutter speed, depth of field and the aesthetics of composition.  Now, I must admit to more than one instance when I came across some natural or urban vista and realized that there was a good photograph "in there somewhere."  However, rather than seek it out, compose and shoot the desired image, I would simply loosen the frame and shoot the wider image, capturing mega-megapixels, and trusting Photoshop to allow me to do the compositional work necessary to find the good photograph in post-production.  Sloppy, sloppy! A "where's Waldo" approach to photography.  The Lytro gathers far more information in each exposure than the most muscular digital cameras - and thereby possibly increases our inclination to "shoot now, compose later."  That, I must admit, concerns me.


When more is less: Social Networks

Facebook is the worst, simply because it is the biggest and can bring us even more of the "more that is less."  I could wax tiresomely on and on about my concerns regarding the trivializing of social ties that spin out from the "culture by the herd" churned by social networks, but I will limit myself to just a couple motes of "more is less."

The first I dubbed "Marley's Digital Chains," in a previous essay [http://awholenewbucket.blogspot.com/2011/08/marleys-digital-chains.html].  The core of the problem is this: when you "friend" or "connect" or "co-join" or whatever with someone via a social network, you also invite his or her other friends/contacts/accomplices onto your screen as well.  The result, without hiring a professional programmer to prevent it, is that entering the realm of "your" social network, is akin to walking into what you thought was going to be your class reunion or your family Thanksgiving dinner only to discover that most of the people there are utter strangers - strangers seeking to engage you in embarrassingly personal conversations regarding individuals you neither know nor about whom you care.  Yeech.

The other problem stemming from social networks and the general increasing transparency of the Internet is a loss of intentional private communication, whether with another individual or a group of close friends.  Google+ seemed to be addressing this issue with its notion of circles, but it was in the context of what I thought was a close and closed Google+ circle, that the notion of Marley's Chains first became apparent. One invited circle member signed in, and trailing behind him was a digital chain ponderous beyond all imagining. Friends and friends of friends clung to his coattails, and posts upon re-posts from utter strangers stretched off to the far horizons.  Another time, I posted an anonymous comment on the website of a TV show, only to have it show up - with full attribution - during one of my infrequent visits to my Facebook page.  I have no idea how it got there.  It was more than slightly creepy.  I worry that perhaps privacy really is a fading relic of the previous century.

And the upside is?  The rebirth of snail mail?  Of personal correspondence?  I have a friend who still mails cards of his own photographs with brief, but tangible, messages of commemoration or remembrance.  The experience is unusual enough as to be slightly disorienting.  But the notes affirm that if I REALLY want to send a private message to just one person perhaps I need to take up a writing implement of some form or another, mark meaningful symbols upon a page, download postage from the USPS website [Heheheheh] and mail the letter.  Does that guarantee privacy?  Of course not - but it greatly reduces the number of possible peekers.


When I'm not really sure whether more is more or less: Free books in the Kindle store. 

Hello, my name is Robert and I am a mysteryoholic.  I read them the way I used to smoke cigarettes - back before cigarettes were a health hazard and cost less than a steak dinner or a small car.  You weren't really aware that you were smoking, but then at the end of the day there was this empty pack in your shirt pocket.  Huh? Weird, wonder who smoked all my cigarettes.  Now it's "Damn, finished another mystery.  When did I start that one, and where is the next one coming from?"

Obviously then, when I mosey on over to the Kindle store and search the top hundred free offerings, I am immediately drawn to the mysteries and thrillers.  Actually, I don't even have to do that anymore.  Given the transparency of the Internet, my Amazon history, and the increasing sophistication of "personalized search,"  Amazon now emails me the top free and 99 cent mysteries each week in a personal email.

I download a few.  I start them all.  Some die, along with the vic, in the first few pages.  Some last only a couple of chapters, and a surprising number I read completely.  But remember, I do have an addiction in this area. The issue you see, is that we are fast moving into an era when a self-published book, the product of what we used to call a vanity press, is - in a digital format - indistinguishable from a publication by an established publishing house.  That is until you begin to read it.  The self-published book often makes it into the hands of a reader without benefit of a second opinion, let alone an editor.

The results are as varied as stars in the sky.  A few are delightful, even shimmering.  More, like dark matter, are best appreciated unseen.  I don't know where this glut of electronic novels will lead.  I think we are going to have to wait out 2012 and the evolution of e-readers and the digital publishing industry before hanging the "more is more" or "more is less" label on these Saturday Night Special Digital Mysteries.  Maybe the good ones will find their way to established houses or digital cooperatives and return a living to their authors.  The bad will, no doubt, remain with us due to imperturbable self-confidence of their creators.  But with any luck at all, the ugly will end up swimming with the fishes in that dirty, dark river, Denial.

So then, forward into the New Year with eyes wide open - more or less.
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Making Light of Art or Art with Lytro?

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If you were an “image maker” back before 1800, odds are you worked in paint, ink, clay or stone, and your objective was representation.  Etch the critter you want to kill on the shaft of a spear or the wall of a cave and you increased your chances for a successful hunt.  If you were both a good hunter and a talented artist, maybe Og would slip you an extra hunk of Mastodon haunch to do some painting on his wall or weapon.  Fast forward 20,000 years, and the ability create a particularly godly rendering of the monarch or prelate could get you a pretty cushy stay in Athens, Alexandria, or Rome. 

Come the 14 and 15 hundreds, and the dominant artists of the Renaissance were employing canvas, oil paints, and occasionally ground glass from the thriving foundries out on Murano to craft portraits and landscapes that seemed real enough to stride off the wall and stroll around the piazza.  Brush and palette-type image-makers continued to thrive well into the 1800s.  Anybody who was anybody had a cluster of oils adorning the walls – like some eerie foreshadowing of today’s refrigerator doors or cubicle walls.  Consider James Whistler’s homage to his mother; still mainstream when painted in 1871.  But by then the game was definitely afoot.

As far back as 1826 Frenchman Joseph Nicephore had used a camera obscura to burn a permanent image of the view from his garden onto a doped pewter plate.  He called it heliography, or sun-drawing.  It was, in reality, the beginning of photography.  By mid-century image-makers were toting boxes of various shapes and sizes in to the halls of congress, the homes of the high and mighty, the backwaters of jungles, and onto any battlefield to which they could finagle access.  Photography arrived and changed image making for forever.

Photography was a double-edged sword.  It certainly loped the legs out from under the portrait painter.  Who needed a “close to real” painting when you could have something else that was “picture perfect”?  On the other hand, from this newly mandated supine perspective, artists began to look beyond the blinders of representationalism.  It is not by chance that Impressionism sprang onto canvases in the late 1800s, just as photography was claiming control of portraiture. 

Almost without exception, significant innovations in our ability to create images change the entire spectrum of human expression.  Consider these three connected innovations:
Point and shoot digital cameras, their inclusion into cellphones, and, the Internet. The result? At the end of May of this year, Facebook announced that its users photo archives had exceeded 100 billion images.  That is a lot of refrigerator doors, and an incredible number of dumb cat pictures.  But it is also a phenomenon that we should not ignore.  The iconic photographer, Ansel Adams, used to distinguish between “scenic beauty” and artistic beauty.  Scenic beauty is what you see on postcards.  Artistic beauty is what you see in images created by Adams, and Margaret Bourke-White, and Yousuf Karsh.  I would hazard to guess that the majority of Facebook photos contain neither scenic nor artistic beauty.  They are images of convenience posted as a shorthand peek into our experiences.  Neither the intent nor the impact is aesthetic.  They are reportorial – because the capabilities of the technology incline us to that usage:  Point. Click. Dog. Child. Vacation. Flat tire.  Photography trivialized.

But there is a new game in town.  Its name is Lytro.

The short explanation is that Lytro is a company founded by a freshly-minted Stanford Ph.D. by the name of Ren Ng that is going to put the light field camera in to our hands.  Whether it will be in our phones or a stand-alone unit is still up for grabs, but we will have it.  Dr. Ng intends to see to that.

“Cool.” I thought.  .  .  .  .  “What’s a light field camera?” [And, I’ve taught photography in a very respectable university!] 

I now know that a light field camera is one that grabs and stores all the light being reflected by whatever is in front of the camera.  That, too, seems something of a yawner until you think about what it means to have ALL the light that is reflected by whatever is in front of a camera.

Remember Joseph Nicephore and his heliography? Sun drawing?  And remember what it became? Photography?  That’s right – photo = light.  Photography is “light drawing.”  Photography has, until Lytro, grabbed SOME of the light being reflected by whatever is in front of the lens and makes a drawing with that little bit of light.  Without getting all warm and geeky about this, being able to grab ALL the light, store it, and play with it all you want AFTER clicking the shutter is, well, incredibly warm and geeky – and artistically awesome.  I understand that it used to take scads of cameras and computers to generate those “ALL the light” images.  Lytro does it with cellphone size technology.  Truly wonderful.  Why?

Just three examples:

Depth of field.  The depth of field in any photograph is the range of the image that is in focus.  Think of a photo as a loaf of sliced bread.  You are looking in one end of the loaf and the picture ends at the other end of the loaf.  The depth of field is the number of slices that are in focus.  Depth of field is one of the things that photographers who are concerned with artistic beauty agonize over.  Focus draws the eye, de-focus feathers attention.  Deciding which slice or slices of the loaf you want to be in focus is an artistic decision.  BL [Before Lytro] you had to decide on the desired slices beforehand and adjust light sources and the opening of the lens and the shutter speed that would – depending on the light sensitivity of your film – allow just the right amount of light into the camera so that it would draw the loaf of bread so that only the slices you wanted to be in focus, would be in focus.  Clear?  Of course not, and it no longer matters.  What is important is that an “ALL the light” image let's you determine depth of field AFTER you take the picture – and you can keep changing your mind and/or create multiple depths of field.  Make slice one clear, fuzz out 2 through 6, 7 and 8 clear, and so on.  Old images quickly become, well, toast.

Example two: Shutter delay.  Gone.  You had to push the shutter halfway so that, WAIT, the autofocus could decided which slices of the loaf you wanted in focus, adjust the light and shutter speed and NOW you can take the picture.  Oops.  Baby smile gone, speeding athlete out of frame, whatever.  Not with Lytro.  One click of the shutter gathers ALL the light – gobbles the whole loaf.

Example three: Flash.  Surely you jest.  Lytro grabs ALL the light, and rarely needs more.

I better stop now.  I’m feeling a little lightheaded.  Oh, I know, people will do silly things with it.  We’ll see images with more focus highlights than anyone could absorb.  Those will be horrible.  But the others?  Oh, the possibilities .  .  .  .

All right, way down here is the link to the Lytro picture gallery.  I knew if I put it up higher on the page, you’d never get here.  Enjoy.

http://www.lytro.com/picture_gallery
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