Peter Marshall | >Re-PHOTO

1989

Like 1984, but 5 years later. George Orwell wrote his famous book when the date was some 40 years in the future, but I photographed 1989 at the time and wrote about it badly around 17 years later.

Of course there is no real connection with Orwell (though I do have friends who live in his former house in the North-East.) 1989 is just a kind of account of my wanderings in north-east London on a few days in that year, both in straightforward images and rather convoluted text. What is on line is merely chapter one of this fictional work, which has amused some. It does have certain literary influences, but I can blame nothing on Orwell.

It’s perhaps best just to see it as 20 images of the city and not try to read the rather small text. I put this selection of images and the texts together for another web site, which seems to have folded shortly after these went live, though doubtless just by coincidence. On that site the images appeared in reverse order, but I’m not sure it made a great deal of difference.

In some cases the text does reflect at least some of the thoughts that went through the photographer’s mind as he stood in front of the scene and took the picture. Other parts came long after the event.

Peter Marshall

Leica Blues (or Purples)

I’ve delayed writing anything about the Leica M8 until now largely because I don’t yet feel I know enough about it yet. I started using one in April, but for various reasons haven’t taken a great deal – only a thousand or two shots.

Part of the reason for this was that I was still waiting to send off for my two free filters until I decided which sizes I wanted. Which lenses was I going to use with this camera from the ten or so M fitting lenses of various age and manufacture? When I finally got round to ordering them, Leica had made some of the decisions for me, as several of my older Leitz lenses take filters in sizes not on offer. Even some formerly popular sizes such as 40.5mm are not on the official list.

My favourite 35mm f1.4 for example would be a fine fast standard lens. Some versions of it don’t even focus beyond 3 meters on the M8, but mine fits fine and runs to infinity. But the lens has no filter thread. A cut-out lens hood holds a Leitz Series 7 unmounted filter. My lens hood is now incredibly battered, adding a certain street cred with the impression of having been through Kosovo or ‘Nam, but it isn’t easy to find filters to fit, and the severely crushed cut-out hood on its front has a nasty habit of falling off at awkward moments. More importantly, as Irakly Shanidze says in his excellent Leica M8. How is it for professional use? (in several ways the best and most balanced article I’ve seen about the camera,) just try going to your dealer and asking for a B+W 486 IR-Cut Series 7 filter.

Actually, a 49mm slim B+W 486 filter in black mount supposedly will fit in place of a Series 7, but you’ll need a particularly friendly dealer to order even one of these. Alternatively, I’m told if you contact Leitz, they may offer to make you a filter for the purpose. The B+W filters are a little stronger than the Leitz versions, but that isn’t likely to be a problem in practical use. (Heliopan also make some IR cut filters that differ slightly from the Leitz specifications, though none that will fit in place of the Series 7.)

IR cut filters have a problem with lenses with an angle of view greater than 60 degrees, as they give a cyan cast with more oblique rays, thus increasing towards the corner of the lens. The latest M8 firmware corrects for this by recognising the focal length of the lens from the 6 bit coding and applying a suitable correction. This is fine for coded lenses, but what if your lenses are not coded?

Some older lenses can be 6 bit coded, but not the older pre-ASPH 35mm f1.4. You can try the do-it-yourself method with a black permanent marker – although I’m assured it works, so far I’ve not met any success. Perhaps I’m using the wrong type of black pen?

However, painting on the coding dots is only half the solution, as the camera apparently only takes notice of these if the correct viewfinder frame is automatically selected. This rules out lenses such as my 28mm Minolta f2.8 produced for the Minolta CLE, the best 28mm design of its era, as this selects the 35mm finder frame. I’m told it can be engineered to select the correct frame, but I’m loath to take a file to mine.

However, although the IR problem can’t be solved in software, the filter-induced variable cyan cast should be possible to correct. It would be good to see a Photoshop plugin with a ‘focal length’ slider for this purpose, as with uncoded lenses it cannot be recorded in the EXIF data.

Leica users worldwide have been screaming at Leitz to allow user selection of focal lengths for non-coded lenses as at least a partial solution, but that isn’t the Leica way, which demands perfection, even where this creates extensive pain. Even those with Leica’s own latest lenses such as the wide Tri-Elmar have spent some time waiting on Leitz to come up with the correct filter.

Truly the situation is an unholy mess, and one that severely blots Leitz’s copybook. Their engineers apparently recognised the problem in the camera design stage, but seem to have simply hoped nobody would notice. What should have been announced as a novel and superior solution – along with a plentiful supply of filters for all current lenses and a wider program to deal with the many already owned by Leica users – was allowed to leak out, appearing as incomptence and even deceit.

This is a shame, as the Leica M8 is a great camera, for all our various niggles. It delivers superbly detailed 10 megapixel files from the finest range of standard and wideangle lenses available (including some great lenses from Cosina/Voigtlander and Zeiss.) Its simplicity is a strength – the menus are all simple and straightforward, perhaps the only digital camera you don’t need a manual to use. If as I did, you loved working with rangefinder cameras when using film, you would love an M8.

Peter Marshall

The ‘I’ Word

Archival Ink Prints

One of several things that impressed me at Photo-London last week was the number of inkjet prints on display, mainly in colour, but also some black and white, including what I thought was technically one of the best prints, if not the best, in the show (I don’t much like the subject matter, so perhaps won’t mention the photographer.)

Even more impressive was that none of the wall-labels for these prints mentioned the ‘I’ word. I*kj*t is certainly a taboo word so far as dealers are concerned. Instead there were various circumlocutions, varying from the entirely misleading ‘carbon print’ to things that were more essays than media descriptions, such as “printed with pigment based inks on archival cotton paper.” At least the term giclée seems largely to have gone out of fashion, though not entirely absent. It was probably never too popular in France, where I’m told the word, meaning ‘spurted’, has unsavoury slang associations.

Of course many inkjet prints are of poor quality and fugitive in nature, particularly in the early years of inkjet printing. The same problems beset photography in its early years, with salt prints and albumen prints often disappearing almost before your very eyes – and many watercolours also have fading problems. The rise of the photographic gallery in the 1970s and 80s more or less coincided with the so-called ‘new color’ photography, and many of those early C-types are now more a study in browns than colour images (although some at least of the dye transfer prints from the era retain their stunning quality – and there were some fine examples by Eggleston in particular at Photo-London.)

Dealers are also reluctant to use the term inkjet because everyone has an inkjet printer at home, just as many don’t like the term photograph, because the whole world takes and makes photos. Calling them ‘silver gelatin prints’ or even ‘color coupler prints’ associates them with the long and distinguished heritage of print-making rather than that common upstart photography.

Most of the descriptions of inkjet prints currently in use would surely fail under the Trade Descriptions Act as misleading. Carbon prints are something quite different, dating from the nineteenth century, which produced some of the richest and most lustrous images in existence (as well as many that were atrocious.) Of course many of those did not use carbon as pigment.

Archival is also a term lacking in definition. In terms of paper, cotton is a fine material for long-lasting papers, but probably the best lignin-free alpha-cellulose materials are probably its equal. All papers, including 100% cotton materials, may also contain optical brighteners (OBAs) whose fading will make papers yellow with age, and may also be coated with ink-receptive materials whose archival properties in such situations are undetermined.

Inks too are complex materials. Early inkjets all used soluble dyes, chosen with little thought as to their light stability, and prints faded fast. But there are dyes that are stable, that can most likely match the stability of the pigment inks we use. Not that pigments are always particularly stable, and carbon itself isn’t without problems. Of course even inks sold as carbon based inksets for black and white printing have turned out also to contain metallic pigments and often dyes as well (and there is good reason for their presence.) Inks also contain other materials which may too contribute to their fading.

It perhaps isn’t surprising that Stephen Livick, a photographer who seriously studied the problems of making long-lasting inkjet prints and published his personal test results received “serious litigious threats” which eventually forced him to remove his test information from the website. You can still read some of his conclusions, including the fact that certain coatings, particularly Clearstar’s Clearshield, applied after printing will greatly increase print longevity.

Of course, however prints are made, it is largely storage and display conditions that will determine the rate of their deterioration. Most prints would do pretty well if kept in an inert atmosphere at low temperature and controlled humidity – even silver negatives will keep for a considerable age under these conditions. Mounting on acid-free or impermeable supports (and of course any adhesive material used), framing under glass etc all will affect the rate of fade.

Although inkjet printing covers a wide range of materials (and some differences in method) I think we need a commonly agreed simple term intended to describe such prints rather than the current attempts at obfuscation. I don’t like the term archival, but it is hard to think of a better word, so I think we are stuck with it. Otherwise I think it best to keep the description as short and simple as possible. So I propose the term:

Archival ink print.

It is short, avoids the ‘I’ word (and the ‘P’ word), makes it clear that the image is an ink image, while avoiding much confusion. Of course many photographers will want to give a more detailed description of their working practices, perhaps as a part of a ‘Certificate of Authenticity’ which may also include advice on storage or display (such as “should be displayed framed behind glass out of direct sunlight.”)

This is a subject that has been discussed in various on-line forums over the years, and I’ve taken part in those often heated debates. My views as I’ve thought (and learnt) more about the problem have changed. So for me at least, this is a new suggestion. Your views are welcome.

Peter Marshall

Water, Water Everywhere.

From the beginning, photographers have always had a thing about water. Of course it’s inherited from painting, as a quick walk around almost any art gallery, at least of work before the twentieth century, will soon confirm. Walking around art galleries is always useful exercise for photographers, and in London we are peculiarly blessed with both the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery adjoining Trafalgar Square where I’m often photographing events, and Tate Britain a short and pleasant walk from Parliament Square, where I’ll drop in and say hello to Brian Haw even if there is no other demo taking place. These galleries are also handy places to dry out when you’ve got soaked photographing in the rain.

In the first decade or two of photography, exposures were long, and one of the great challenges was to photograph waves. I wrote recently on ways to photograph water, and mentioned the success of John Dillwyn Llewelyn in an image of waves breaking on the Welsh coast in the early 1850s.

Water was essential to the wet-plate process that he used, where the photographic plate had to be coated and made sensitive to light on the spot, then exposed and developed before it dried to form a hard, impermeable skin. Of course water remained essential to photographic processing until the advent of digital, but we didn’t need to do the business on the spot. Even now, large quantities of water are needed for the manufacture of digital cameras, computers and the other equipment we need. Truly water is essential for life!

Few photographers, even the most cynical of us, are not occasionally seduced by the reflections of our subject in a smooth pool or broken by ripples, even though we know such things have already been done to death (and there is much evidence of this demise on Flickr and elsewhere.)

I’m trying hard to remember which the photographer was when asked for his definition of photography replied “never anything shot on a beach” or words to similar effect. I don’t think it was me, though I have a certain sympathy with the sentiment. As in the same way I used to call for a moratorium on the sale of colour film in the “Fall”, so aptly named by Americans. O Kodachrome, O tempora, o mores!

So when I agreed to take a walk with Linda and Samuel along some of London’s canal system last Saturday, did I stick to my principles and leave the camera at home? Of course not. From Mile End, we walked not to Paradise, but Willesden Junction by way of Kensal Green.

Grand Union Canal (Paddington Branch) at Kensal Green, steady rain.
(C) 2007, Peter Marshall

Water, at least towards the end of our journey was certainly everywhere, with an intense fine rain falling constantly as we walked the last few miles, although for once I managed to keep most of it out of my Nikon. Perhaps the canal looks at its best in rain?

More pictures from the walk in My London Diary, May 2007

Peter Marshall

Summer Photography

Certainly the most satifying of the various photographic shows currently in London is the Summer Photography Exhibition at Bernard Quaritch Ltd on the edge of Golden Square in Soho. It gains from being a relatively small show, concentrating on photographers who have photographed within a particular community or urban area. The show continues until 29th June, 2007 and is open Mondays to Fridays, 9.30-5.30.

Quaritch is an antiquarian bookseller, established in 1847 by Bernard Quaritch, who on his death in 1899 was described, according to The Times, as “the greatest bookseller who ever lived.” Their premises in Golden Square, where they moved in 1970, have something of the air of a gentlemen’s club and the walls are lined with bookcases of old and rare volumes.

Before going into the downstairs gallery, we lingered around a glass case with some examples of the work of Thomas Annan, including a couple of fine large published volumes of his work, the superb carbon prints published in 1878/9 and the photogravures published in 1900 by his son, Robert Craig Annan, which included 12 of his prints along with 38 taken by his father. The photogravures are also splendid prints.

Downstairs in the gallery is a rare treat, 5 salt prints from the calotype images that Hill and Adamson made at the fishing village of Newhaven on the edge of Edinburgh, not a great walk from their Calton Hill studios. These prints are still powerful images 160 years later, and I was particularly struck by the image of the three fishermen. The different poses they have adopted to attempt to remain still for the lengthy exposure required express powerfully their varied characters. It remains a far more powerful portrait than anything I saw in Photo-London, and reminds me strongly of some of the best images of August Sander, taken some 80 or 90 years later. The five fishwives grouped around some of their baskets is also one of their more interesting images.

The five Thomas Annan prints in the show are glowing examples of his work on the closes of Glasgow in 1868-71 (printed in 1877.) Carbon prints are perhaps capable of a quality unequalled by any other photographing printing process, and these are good examples.

John Thomson’s Street Life in London, with text by Adolphe Smith is represented in the show by six Woodburytype prints. These are carbon prints produced in a printing press from a lead relief plate, created under high pressure from a gelatin relief image made in a similar manner to a carbon print, contact printing a dichromate sensitised gelatin coated sheet under the negative using a powerful UV source.

Street Life in London was one of the truly pioneering works of documentary, and the nicely produced Quaritch catalogue for the show (Catalogue 1351) lists copies both of this work and ‘Street Incidents’, published a few years later to get rid of unsold sheets of prints from ‘Street Life.’

Although Henry Dixon along with Alfred and John Bool produced many fine images recording London around the 1870s and 1880s, their work was perhaps the least striking in the show. Compared to the Annan images, the prints shown lacked depth, and both the viewpoints and the choice of times when the streets were largely deserted make their work of less interest.

By contrast, Roger Mayne’s images from North Kensington, Notting Hill and Paddington in the 1950s are entirely about incident. I was particularly taken with his view of children and teenagers on the doorsteps of St Stephen’s Gardens. Times have changed, not only in the dress and behaviour of children, but also in public attitudes to photographers and being photographed; it would be a brave photographer who tried to take similar pictures on the streets of London today.

Again by contrast, Mike Seaborne’s ‘Facades‘ are deliberately empty of people. Taken from across the street with a square format Rolleiflex camera, they create a systematic visual catalogue of shopfronts surviving (in some cases only just) from an earlier age. Taken in 2004-6, these colour images (some of which are on the Urban Landscapes site I started with Mike) are powerfully evocative, the remains of an older world still with us, often in contrast with ugly 2000s street furniture.

Also included in the show is a single print of New York by Berenice Abbott, a beautiful riot of washing in the yard of New York’s first model tenements, built in 1882 and photographed by here in 1936.

Peter Marshall

Photo London: Fish out of Water

It was I suppose apt that I felt like a fish out of water as I wandered around Photo-London on the opening day yesterday. Its new venue, the old Billingsgate fish market, seems an excellent choice, airy and open, completely unlike the underground tomb in which Paris Photo is held.

What made me feel out of place and uneasy was in the main the work on the walls. Photo-London is supposedly dedicated to contemporary photography, meaning from the 1970s on, although a little earlier work did creep in, so I’d expected to see contemporary work. What I hadn’t been prepared for was the almost complete dominance of the show by large empty photographs. Of course shows like Photo-London are dealer shows, and the dealers follow the money, and big money is largely corporate money with vast office walls to fill.

Although the work in corporations may actually get done in open plan offices and cubicles often with virtually no walls at all, reception areas are designed to impress by scale, and 20×16 prints look rather small on a 30 foot high wall. As Photo-London showed, there is plenty of photographic choice for such spaces, from garish to minimal, to suit your company profile.

Of course not all big photographs are bad photographs, but in general I don’t think a large scale fits the medium well. Its most powerful statements have an intimacy that works better on a moderate scale, perhaps best of all in the pages of the photographic book.

Of course there was work that stood out for me, though relatively little. I’ll go back to the show (it runs until Sunday) and look at some again. Much of what attracted me was however familiar, for example – a fine set of work by Don McCullin as well as pictures by Chris Killip, John Benton-Harris and Ian Berry, all showing “How We Are”, (although three of these four are unaccountably missing on the walls of the Tate show) – but there was also work new to me (at least in actual print form) which I found exciting and hope to write more on later – so long as I can find images on the web. Along with much that confirmed my exisiting predjudices.

Portraiture in particular seems very much in a rut. Use flat lighting, stand your subject or subjects central, looking deadpan at the camera, photograph in medium or large-format colour and you seem to be guaranteed gallery space. Around ten years back this seemed fresh and new (at least to those who had never seen the work of August Sander, who did it so much better, if in black and white.)

Photo London opening
John Benton-Harris (2nd from left) with friends at the opening.

As openings go, its a rather dreary and disappointing event, with small cliques in the different gallery spaces and its hard to meet new people or have a real party. At least at Billingsgate you could go and sit outside by the Thames, although it was a chill evening on the north bank, even though the sun shone on the buildings on the other bank.

Peter Marshall

Missing Persons 5: James Craig Annan

Another important figure from the 1890s omitted from ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain was the second son of photographer Thomas Annan (whose work was included.) James Craig Annan joined the family fine-printing firm when he was 19 in 1883, and went with his father to Austria to the studio of Karl Klic to learn his novel photogravure process for the reproduction of photographs, for which they bought the sole UK rights.

The firm specialised in the reproduction of works of art, and in the early 1890s, James applied his skills to making carbon prints and photogravures from the negatives of calotype pioneers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. The Annan family had known Hill, and had moved from Glasgow to live in his Calton Hill studio in Edinburgh for the last year of Hill’s life.

At the same time, James decided to become a photographer, and his first show, on the company premises in Glasgow in 1892 made a great impression. His landscape work from Holland inspired Alfred Steiglitz, who went to a similar area of the coast and made a his own, in some ways similar image. Soon he was a member of the ‘Linked Ring’ and his work was shown to critical acclaim in London, New York, Paris and Russia, and later in many other cities in Europe, America and India.

James Craig Annan was included with Hill and Evans in a 1906 show at Alfred Steiglitz’s ‘291’ gallery in New York, as well as in the great show Stieglitz organised in Buffalo in 1910 which in some ways marked the end of the Pictorialist movement (and the Linked Ring dissolved in the same year.) Steiglitz published eight of his images from a trip to Spain in 1913 in ‘Camera Work’ the following year. This more or less marked the end of James’s photographic career, and he apparently took few photographs after this time. He retired from the family firm around 1940 and died in 1946, his photographs largely forgotten.

I’ve never fully appreciated the work of Annan, probably because of his use of photogravure as a printing method. I can testify from limited personal experience that this is an extremely tricky method. I made one print, largely to see exactly how it was done and never wanted to repeat the experience. It is a process that requires (and allows) great control. Although I can appreciate the photography of Annan, I find the prints themselves have too pictorial an aesthetic for my more ascetic taste.

There are many photogravures by other photographers that I admire, but his work has always left me with an uneasy feeling of compromise between the photographic and the pictorial, which to some extent characterizes almost all the art photography of this era.

Peter Marshall

Missing Persons 4: Frederick H Evans

No proper view of British photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century would be complete without the work of Frederick Evans. At a time when most photographers with any pretention as artists were busily engaging in making their prints look less like photographs and more like paintings through the use of rough papers and special printing techniques that allowed them to work on the image.

Evans followed instead the example of P H Emerson, photographing in a technically precise manner and printing on platinum paper, which produced a linear tonal scale and was not normally susceptible to manipulation. He was noted for refusing to retouch his work, relying instead on perfecting his technique. His images owed their effect to light, and he would sometimes spend hours, days or even weeks studying the effects of light in the buildings he wanted to photograph in order to find the time of day and light that would produce the photographic effect he wanted.

He valued the clear and delicate tonality of the platinum print to such an extent that when the material went off the market he made no more prints, refusing to use the cruder and less linear tonal scale of the silver print. Some of his images were also reproduced using the Woodburytype process, which uses a relief image on a lead printing plate to produce different thicknesses of pigmented gelatin – and hence different tones – on the paper – essentially a mechanically produced carbon print.

As well as his architectural studies, which certainly include some of the finest images of English cathedrals and their interiors, he also made a number of fine portraits, including justly well-known images of Aubrey Beardsley.

Evans was a leading member of the ‘Linked Ring’ group of artistic photographers. He was also the first English photographer to have his work printed by Alfred Stieglitz in his magazine ‘Camera Work’ in 1904, and 2 years later Stieglitz showed his pictures in his New York gallery, ‘291’, along with the work of D O Hill and James Craig Annan.

Peter Marshall

Lightroom in Perspective

Requirements
One of several things that I kept putting off in my previous incarnation at About Photography was a review of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I kept away from the betas that came out over around a year because although it looked interesting, my hardware wasn’t up for it. But when I heard the release date, Linda got my six-year-old PC and I got a new big black box with a reasonably fast processer and decent amounts of memory and storage to run Lightroom 1.0. (I instantly forgot such figures, but since some people like to know, Control panel tells me Intel Core2 6400 (2.14GHz), 2.93 GB, and ‘My Computer’ shows I started with 1395 GB of disk space.)

The second thing you need to make the most of Lightroom (hereafter ‘LR’) is a big monitor. If you want to print color it also makes sense to get a good monitor, and I chose an Eizo ColorEdge CE210W. Running at 1680×1050 pixels in 32 bit color it does a very nice job of displaying 1.5:1 aspect ratio images at 18″ wide – including both digital and scans from 35mm. Carefully adjusted with the supplied ColorNavigator CE software and an Eye-One Display 2 it has greatly improved my colour printing too – and the Display 2 can also calibrate all my other monitors. I’d certainly recommend a wide-screen monitor for use with LR – the program fits on better than on a normal ratio. I’ve not tried running it on dual monitors which might well be an even better solution.

Disillusion Sets In?
LR isn’t perfect – after all it is still in version 1.0 – and I’ve read on the web of various people becoming fed up and abandoning it. In several cases the problems that caused them to give up could have been solved by learning a little more about the software, and others certainly come from trying to run it on underpowered systems.

Improved Workflow
LR aims to look after most of your images from camera to end use, and for me it does a pretty good job. The tools for extracting from RAW are a real step up from those in Photoshop CS2, and are now up with the best available, although there are a few features that still need improvement (I was among many who cursed when they bought up the superior Pixmantec, but the free copy of Lightroom has now made me feel a lot better.) Of course there are still some images that need the more selective approach that Photoshop can provide, through appropriate selection or masking before applying effects, or indeed sometimes by combining areas of two different outputs from the same RAW file.

One of the strengths of LR for me is that it allows me to keep the old filing structures I’ve set up over the years to serve my purposes (with some very minor changes.) One of the reasons other people have given for abandoning it is that it doesn’t! Both statements could be true, but I suspect not. It took a lot of persistent fiddling to find out how to do it, and had I written a review after a short acquaintance I would probably have got it wrong.

Another is that it simplifies workflow and cuts down time. It automatically makes the initial backups I need. During the import I use a basic preset I’ve specified that applies a standard tone curve, a minimal amount of sharpening, performs an ‘auto tone’, a minimal amount of luminance noise reduction, rather more colour noise reduction and various other minor tweaks. For each group of images I import, it adds the basic keywords I specify, along with my standard name, contact and copyright information.

Chromatic Aberration
Recently, particularly thanks to Nikon’s 18-200mm VR lens, I’ve discovered chromatic aberration with a vengeance (the 10.5mm also has a nice amount too.) There is really very little on the other main lens I use, the 12-24mm Sigma. LR provides a simple pair of sliders that can largely remove it. I do wonder if this could be largely automated in the same kind of way that PTLens (winner of my best value award for Photoshop plugins) does for lens distortion.

Speed
As my initial paragraph suggested, LR needs a reasonably specified computer. I haven’t tried to install it on my notebook, and won’t. I’m currently working with a library of almost 50,000 pictures (and growing fast.) It does take the software some time to finish loading, although it comes up on screen almost immediately. It’s best to switch the computer and monitor on, start the software and do something else for a while – and it also gives the monitor time to become stable. Once it has finished all the things it does in the background, the software seems reasonably responsive on my system – and seldom keeps me waiting. I’m very impressed by the speed at which it writes out a set of a hundred or so files. With other software I used to do this as a background task, but with LR it hardly seems worth the CTrl+Alt+Shift+E keystroke needed after each and I usually just run the task at the end while I take a short breather.

Gripes? Of course.

Importing files: So far I’ve found no way to automatically get LR to assign consecutively increasing numbers to files from different cards in the same directory. I have to look at the last file imported, add one and enter this into the start number box.
Templates: Some templates can’t be edited or even deleted (except by going to the appropriate folder using ‘My Computer’.)
Sharpening: This isn’t great, but then I don’t sharpen much – the libraries I send files to say not too. When I do sharpen for my own use I use the Focalblade plugin appropriately set for the particular output, rather than Photoshop’s rather less useful tools.
Noise Reduction: Again doesn’t match that of the better Photoshop plugins, though gives a basic adequate effect on most of my files.
Crashes and Hangs: This is version 1.0, and yes, it does from time to time. Usually it requires actually using Task Manager to end the LR process rather than the application. The good news is that so far, LR has then started up again without problems, and I’ve never lost any image files, nor even edit information other than about the file I was working on.
Lens Distortion: One of LR’s biggest missing features for me is a tool for removing lens distortion (again, the Sigma is fine, but the Nikon 18-200 needs help.) It would be nice to see this made largely automatic along the lines of PTLens mentioned above.

Still No Review
I still don’t feel I know LR well enough to write a review (though some hacks do it from the press release.) After all I’ve only been using it 3 months, and have hardly looked at the Slideshow, Print and Web modules. But I’ve said from the start, this is something worth buying and worth spending time and trouble to get to know.

Lightroom 1.1
It’s good to hear that this free upgrade will be arriving before too long (Adobe are still coy on the date), including some fixes for a few of the problems above. According to reports on the preview (see for example in the comments on Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider blog – reposted well down the thread after details mysteriously disappeared in the item itself) here’s what we can expect:

Lots of bug fixes, so it should crash less (and perhaps speed up a little;)
It will apparently let you edit and delete metadata templates;
Better ordering of templates;
Support for exporting and importing (merging) libraries;
Improved unsharp masking for sharpening, with controls for amount, radius etc.
A ‘Clarity’ slider that increases local contrast using high radius low amount unsharp masking.
A Spraypaint tool that lets you copy settings of various types – keywords, flags, develop settings, crop/rotation etc – to groups of images (replacing the Keyword Stamper.)

I suspect this will be the last free upgrade and the next (except perhaps for some bug fixes) will be chargeable, perhaps early next year. However if you’ve bought a book on using Lightroom, you may well want to upgrade that as well, as the changes are considerable.

Peter Marshall

Missing Persons 3: H P Robinson

Looking at the booklet for the show ‘How We Are: Photographing Britain’ before making my way into the gallery I got a shock. The curators appeared to have omitted the very man who started the whole thing, W H F Talbot. I checked again – it couldn’t be true, and thankfully it wasn’t. They had simply placed him wrongly in alphabetical order under the letter F. So when I realised that H P Robinson was missing, I immediately looked for him under ‘Peach Robinson’, but he wasn’t there either.

Although Rejlander’s ‘Two Ways of Life’ showed a path for photography, it was one taken most enthusiastically by his friend Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), who, over the years, starting with ‘Fading Away’ (a ‘touching’ deathbed scene which is perhaps hard for us to appreciate, but was only too common an experience in the era before modern medicine) produced a number of impressive works using similar combination printing techniques (such as ‘When The Days Work is Done’, as well as many fine portraits and landscapes.

fading away - HP Robinson
‘Fading Away’ is one of 12 images by H P Robinson available on the Free Information Society web site.

Robinson had trained and exhibited as a painter and was a great fan of Turner and of the Pre-Raphaelites, and he composed his works in much the same fashion, and dealt with some of the same subjects, including for example, a picture of “The Lady of Shallot“.

His use of combination printing continued to cause controversy in photographic circles, Robinson arguing that the aim of photography was to make beautiful pictures, and that the techniques used were irrelevant. He explained his appraoch in the influential book, “Pictorial Effect in Photography“, published in 1867, and was famously involved in arguments with another great photographer, Peter Henry Emerson, who favoured a more simply photographic approach to produce pictorial images.

Pictorialism to which both men contributed, remained a powerful influence in art photography for the next 40 or so years, particularly through groups such as the ‘Linked Ring’ (a strangely masonic guild established by Robinson and others when he left the Photographic Society in 1891) and various other seccesionist groups of art photographers based in other countries.

Although pictorialism was eclipsed in art photography by the rise of modernism in the early twentieth century, much of the debate between Robinson and Emerson had strong resonances in the 1970s and since, when increasingly fine artists began to take up photography and reject much of the purist orthodoxy.

Peter Marshall