Technical | >Re-PHOTO

Salted Paper Prints

Paris Xe, 1988 Salt Print – Peter Marshall

To coincide with the opening of Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840 – 1860 at Tate Britain, here is a slightly updated version of a piece I wrote some years ago on salt prints, including step-by-step instructions on making them and four examples of my own efforts from the late 1980s.

Key Facts

‘Photogenic drawing’ used ordinary paper which had been given a coating of silver chloride or similar light-sensitive silver salt.
Prints were made by placing objects on this paper and exposing to light. In the 20th century this way of working was named as a ‘photogram’.
Photogenic drawing was a printing out process – the image actually appeared during the exposure to light.
Photogenic drawing can also be used as a method for contact printing from negatives – prints made in this way are known as salted paper prints or salt prints.
Contact printing requires the negative to be held in close contact with the printing paper, usually in a special printing frame, while being exposed to light through the negative.
Exposure times in salt printing vary from around 10 minutes to 8 hours depending on the strength of the light source and how transparent (or translucent) the negative material is.
As with all contact processes, the print is obviously the same size as the negative.
Talbot fixed his images by using strong salt (sodium chloride) solution, or a weak potassium iodide solution. Neither was totally effective.
Later, Herschel’s suggestion of hypo (sodium thiosulphate) as fixer was adopted. This was fast and totally effective.
By repeating the sensitising process several times, Talbot found he could increase the speed of the salted paper sufficiently to use in a camera obscura.
Typical exposure times in the ‘camera obscura’ were around 30 minutes, with apertures probably around f8 in modern terms.
The paper negatives were fixed and then often made translucent by treatment with wax or oil before being placed on top of a fresh sheet of sensitised paper and contact printed using sunlight as the light source. Typical printing times would be around 30 minutes to an hour.
Although rapidly superseded for use in the camera by the Calotype process, the basic salted paper print was the normal process for photographic prints on paper until replaced by the albumen print around 1850.
After 1855, salted paper remained in use mainly as a proofing medium and by a few who preferred its matte image. It saw a revival in the 1980s and 1990s as a part of a growing interest in historical and alternative processes

Talbot’s method

Talbot started with a sheet of best quality writing paper ‘with a good firm quality and smooth surface’.
This was dipped it into a weak solution of common salt and then wiped dry
The sheet was then coated on one side with a weak solution of silver nitrate (a saturated solution diluted with six to eight times the amount of water) and dried in front of a fire.

The paper was then ready for use for making photogenic drawings or as Talbot more poetically wrote ‘nothing can be more perfect than the images it gives of leaves and flowers, especially with a summer sun : the light passing through the leaves delineates every ramification of their nerves.’

A more modern version of this procedure is still used by those photographers today who wish to make salted paper prints – also known as salt prints – see below for directions.

For use in the camera, the speed of the material needed to be increased. Talbot found he could do this basically by repeating the treatment. He first washed the prepared paper with a saturated solution of salt, and dried it. Tested at this stage it was more or less insensitive to light, but if re-brushed with ‘a liberal quantity of the solution of silver’, it became more sensitive than before.

By repeating the coating several times, it would become fast enough for use in the camera (though his exposures might be 30 minutes.) Talbot obviously found the process rather unpredictable, noting that sometimes the paper would begin to darken without any exposure to light, showing the process had been taken too far.

After each coating with silver, he clipped a small part from each of the sheets he was working with, numbering them carefully to correspond to the sheet, and ‘placed (them) side by side in a very weak diffused light for about a quarter of an hour.’ If one of them darkened considerably, the corresponding sheet was ready to be exposed in the camera obscura. It was a crude but effective system of control for a process where there were too many variables to guarantee success by simply following a given procedure.

Talbot’s results

Looking at Talbot’s early results from the camera – or rather at reproductions of them – it is not surprising that they were generally not regarded highly compared to the splendidly sharp and detailed daguerreotypes. In some cases it is hard to see any image at all, others are more weak splodges than detailed pictures. His first existing negative shows a window made of small panes, and on the back he notes that it was possible to count them all when it was first made. Presumably it was no longer possible when he made the note. The image is certainly not now highly detailed and the shadows in particular are completely empty.

Although the photogenic drawings – made as what we now call ‘photograms’, by placing objects such as leaves and lace on the paper – have considerable elegance and are finely delineated, his early camera attempts can only be seen as suggestions that it might be possible to get the process to work rather than as a successful solution. It was a problem that Talbot was to solve himself in the following years with the Calotype process.

The major problem was of inadequate sensitivity to light. These first photographic materials relied entirely on the printing out of the image, which is slow. In the Calotype, Talbot made use of what became to be called a developer to amplify the effect of the light, bringing out the ‘latent image’ from the apparently unchanged paper. It was this discovery that was really to lead to the domination of the next 160 years of photography by silver based materials.

Another aspect of the problem that Talbot faced was inadequate fixation. After exposure he either washed the paper with a dilute solution of potassium iodide or a strong solution of common salt before ‘wiping off the superfluous moisture, and drying it.’ The potassium iodide solution formed silver iodide that was largely insensitive to light, but too strong a solution would dissolve parts of the image. As he had found in his repeated coating, using a large excess of salt solution produces a very low light sensitivity. However images fixed in these ways still faded in light – and certainly the bright sun needed to expose through the paper negative will have also caused fading of the negative.

When Talbot visited Herschel at Slough on 1 February 1839, he received a solution to the problem. Herschel’s wife, Margaret, noted in a letter to a friend that ‘when something was said about the difficulty of fixing the pictures, Herschel said “Let me have this one for a few minutes” and after a short time he returned and gave the picture to Mr Fox Talbot saying “I think you’ll find that fixed” – this was the beginning of the hyposulphite plan of fixing.’

It was also Herschel who provided a clue – in the shape of gallic acid – that was to be the key to Talbot’s discovery of the latent image and development in the Calotype. There are many of us who have made prints using salted paper and even a handful of photographers currently using the Calotype process – some have used actors to recreate Talbot’s later pictures at Lacock Abbey. The recreation of images in camera obscura using his methods, and making prints from these again following his directions would perhaps be an interesting project. It is the only way any of us can possibly see these kind of images in the same condition as when Talbot made them.

Make your own Salt Prints

Montreuil, Paris, 1988 © Peter Marshall, 1988.
Gold toned salt print on Georgian Watercolor Paper.

Ordinary writing paper is now factory produced and no longer of suitable quality for any of the alternative processes. Machine made papers generally have shorter fibres and fall to pieces readily when wet, and you need to use a suitable hand or mould-made paper, usually sold for use in watercolour painting.

Silver nitrate needs to be handled with care – you should use gloves and wear safety glasses. When handling any finely ground chemical powder a mask should be worn. Silver nitrate is a poison that can build up in the body and it can both burn and stain skin. It produces stains and marks that are often very difficult to remove from some surfaces.

Like all chemicals, both solid and solutions should be kept in a secure place, locked away from possible reach of children. Silver nitrate solutions are sensitive to light and are normally stored in brown bottles, but it also helps to keep them in a cupboard.

Procedures normally give precise quantities required for solutions measured in grams. However, there is seldom any real need for great accuracy, and many people have made salt prints without using any weighing equipment. Chemicals such as silver nitrate will generally be bought in fairly small quantities and you can make up the full amount into an appropriate solution.

You can use ordinary table salt or sea salt, making up a solution of roughly 1-2 ounces (25-50g) per litre of water.

Other salts, which some people prefer, include ammonium chloride, potassium citrate, potassium tartrate and potassium bromide. You will often get small differences in image colour and paper speed using the different salts or mixtures of them.

The silver nitrate solution is generally around 10-12% by weight – so you can dissolve 7g (1/4 oz) in around 60ml of water.

I’ve used a range of watercolour papers, including Waterford Hot Pressed which was possibly my favourite, along with Rowney’s Georgian. Some other papers give better results if coated with a dilute gelatin solution and left to dry before use – this is called ‘sizing’ – but Waterford works well without. Most watercolour papers are already sized when you buy them, and extra sizing is often not needed. You will get good results with most papers.

You also need a brush to coat the paper with – a wide, thin brush is best. Japanese hake brushes which do not have metal ferrules are probably the best, as the silver solution corrodes metal.

Salt printing is a contact printing process and you need a negative the same size as your print is to be. Unless you have a large format camera you may like to follow Talbot’s examples and start work with photograms, using materials such as leaves or lace etc. If you do have a large format camera, take a picture specially and try doubling your normal development time as you need a much higher maximum density than normal for salt prints. You can also work by printing large negatives with an inkjet printer, preferably on to acetate film designed for inkjet use. Prints on paper do work – better on thin paper – but exposure times are much longer. You can also work with negative prints made on photographic paper.

Talbot used the sun for his exposures, which meant the times he could work in England were limited. Unless you are blessed with a sunnier climate you may want to find another light source. You need something which is strong in ultraviolet, such as a tanning bed – or you can buy or make special light sources using mercury lamps or UV fluorescent tubes similar to those in sunbeds.

A printing frame is needed to hold the negative in contact with the paper. You can buy or make these, but a sheet of plate glass and a card or ply backing board with some rubber bands round will do (for large prints the weight of the glass is enough to ensure contact.) These were once cheap photo accessories, and small sizes (such as 5″x4″) can still be found cheap in junk shops. I had a good look at an expensive hand-made version, particularly the price-tag, took out a pencil and designed my own, which took about an hour to make. Precision freaks will want a vacuum frame!

St Denis, 1988, © Peter Marshall, 1988. Gold toned salted paper print.

Step by Step Instructions

Making a salt print

Tear or cut the sheets of paper to the size required – you need at least a one-inch margin around your negative. Mark the top side of the paper on each piece.
Make up the salt solution, soak the paper in it for 2-3 minutes at room temperature or slightly above, gently brushing each side while under the solution to remove any air bubbles. Lift out, drain and hang to dry, putting down newspaper if necessary to catch the drips. Paper treated in this way can be used as soon as it has stopped dripping or dried and used weeks or months later.
Tape the salted paper top side up to a board. Put the negative on top and mark the position of its corners lightly with pencil.
In dim room lighting (away from sun and fluorescent lights), pour a few ml of silver nitrate into a small beaker or dish. Dip the tip of the brush in, and spread left to right across the paper making sure to cover the marked area. Keep the brush wet. Repeat using a series of top to bottom strokes. Try to get the surface of the paper evenly wet all over, but without any pools of solution. Don’t return any excess the solution to the bottle; add a little more to it to coat the next sheet. Leave horizontal until any liquid on the surface has been absorbed, then hang to dry in a dark place. Use gentle heat from a hair-dryer if you are in a hurry to get on.
Put your negative on top of the dry prepared paper, matching its corners to your pencil marks. Unless you have a proper hinged-back printing frame, secure it to the paper down one edge using crystal clear transparent tape, making sure this does not go over any of the image area. Check you have the negative the correct way up. Put under the glass or in your printing frame.
Typical exposure time needed is 10 minutes in bright sun, but you can remove it from the light and peel back the negative slightly to inspect the image. Take care not to move the negative – this is where a proper hinged-back printing frame is a great advantage. Expose until the highlight detail is slightly darker than you want it – the shadow areas will normally seem too dark, but will lose some density on processing. Paper negatives may take several hours, particularly in winter.
In dim light, remove the paper from the printing frame and put into a tray of water – preferably use distilled or purified water for the first rinse. Use gloves and be careful how you dispose of this first rinse in particular as it will contain most of the silver nitrate. If possible it should be added to your normal waste fixer for recycling. Later rinses will have much lower silver content. Agitate for about a minute before pouring off, and repeat several times (using tap water for these later rinses.)

Paris XIIe, © Peter Marshall, 1988. Gold toned salt print.

If your image is successful, you may wish to gold tone at this stage. Prints with developed edges are often trimmed to avoid waste of gold toner. You will find instructions for gold toning in books dealing with alternative photographic processes. As you may expect, it adds considerable expense. Gold toning was a later development not use by Talbot. I’d suggest you leave it until you have gained some experience in the process. Gold toning changes the image colour (not always for the better) and improves image stability.
For prints that can be displayed and last, you should fix using hypo.If you are interested in following Talbot’s methods, you will find his instructions in various sources, including Beaumont Newhall’s ‘Photography: Essays and Images‘. Talbot does not appear to have washed his early prints either before or after ‘fixing’. For prints that will last longer, fix using a solution of 25 gm (1 ounce) of hypo crystals in 500ml of water with a pinch of soda (sodium carbonate) added. You can also use normal print fixer, diluted perhaps twice as much as usual, but this will alter image colour more and also remove more of the highlights. Fix for up to 5 minutes, keeping a careful watch on the highlights and remove the print and wash immediately if these start to disappear.
Wash for around an hour in occasional changes of water and then hang to dry.

Resources

Various books have been written with methods for making salted paper prints in the more than one hundred and sixty years since they were introduced.

Henry H. Snelling‘s 1849 volume ‘The History And Practice Of The Art Of Photography‘ is subtitled ‘The Production Of Pictures Through The Agency Of Light’ and claims to contain ‘all the instructions necessary for the complete practice of the Daguerrean and Photogenic Art, both on metalic, plates and on paper’ (sic), and is well worth downloading from the web if you want to experiment further. Snelling more or less copies the details given by Talbot for making salted paper, but does add a number of further details.

The year after this was published saw the publication by Louis Desire Blanquart-Evrard of his work using albumen. This was an idea first proposed by an anonymous contributor to ‘The Athenaeum’ in May 1839 but Blanquart-Evrard was the first to put forward a practical method that contained the chlorides in the albumen. Albumen rapidly replaced salt printing as the normal photographic print because of its greater brilliance and depth of tone, and remained the dominant print medium until 1895 (finally going out of production in 1929.)

All paper prints in the first ten years of photography were salted paper prints, but after around 1855 it was probably mainly used for proofing. However, modern salted paper prints that I have made are a good match in terms of colour and tonal range to many matte prints from the 1850s (and later) identified in collections as ‘albumen prints’ and although it is possible to make matte albumen prints I suspect these are relatively scarce. If a print is matte, made before 1885, and does not have yellowed highlights it is highly probably that it is a salted paper print, whatever the curator’s label.

Many later photographic books also had instructions for salt printing and other early printing methods, but they were dropped out of most photographic textbooks by the 1930s. One of the best known from this period, ‘Photography, Theory and Practice‘ the English edition of ‘La Technique Photographique’ by L P Clerc, contains details of this and other by then obsolete processes such as albumen printing.

If you are interested in older processes and practices, you will find books such as the 1911 ‘Cassell’s Cyclopaedia of Photography‘ enthralling. I find it a useful source of information particularly for its many line drawings and learn something new every time I pick it up. However the older chemical nomenclature and weights and measures do make life a little trying at times, and there are some procedures suggested which bear no relation to common sense let alone health and safety procedures. Almost every page deserves a health warning. It lists salted paper under one of its alternative names, Plain Paper.

The best modern source of information on the whole area is ‘The Albumen & Salted Paper Book’ by James M Reilly mentioned above. First published in 1979 and long out of print it is now available in full on line – a generous gesture from the author. It really tells you everything you could wish to know.

The same year saw the publication of William Morgan’s ‘The Keepers of Light’, which remains a key text for those interested in older processes and is available secondhand. Since then a number of other books have also appeared which cover alternative processes in detail. Although some of these have excellent articles and illustrations on salt printing, there is nothing essential in them that is not available in the earlier works.

There are also a number of on-line resources, including the alternative processes mailing list and a number of fine web sites – too many for me to list or spend the time reviewing – just search on Google.

Materials for the processes can be hard to come by in but can be found online at specialist dealers, including Bostick & Sullivan and Photographers Formulary in the USA and Silverprint in the UK. Many articles on alternative processes have appeared over the years in various photographic magazines, and there have been independently produced magazines dedicated to alternative processes in both the UK (now defunct) and the USA.

Hope for Linux Users

I’ve always wanted to stop using Windows. Well at least since I first installed it many years ago. At the time, back in the 1980s, Gem seemed to be a rather better system. But by the time Windows 3 came along, around 1990, Windows seemed more or less the only game except for the uber-rich fuelled by advertising who could afford to go the Mac route.

For those with computer science degrees there was of course UNIX, which became affordable in the form of Linux. Over the years I’ve installed Suse and Red Hat on quite a few computers, and my wife’s computer is now running happily on Ubuntu. Or mainly happily, but after it crashed while running an update I had to do a complete reinstall. Which worked fine, but had problems finding the parallel port printer. Not that it couldn’t find it at all, just that it seemed to insist on sending data a bit or two at a time, so it might take half an hour before a page would emerge.

There was a lot of advice on the various support forums, and I tried it, but nothing worked. Clearly too, a lot of other people were having similar problems from all the messages that were posted – and a few did find that the solutions posted worked. Most I think finally gave up and brought a USB printer instead.

Fortunately both my sons are computer science graduates, and when the elder came home he soon solved the problem, editing a few files here and there on the system – and posted his fix on a support forum too, so others may benefit. But if you don’t have a first in Comp Sci, and don’t want to devote most of your life to learning Linux there are still rather a lot of possible hurdles. We’ll probably have to call Sam in again after the next OS upgrade too.

But if you are running some flavour of Linux, you might be able to install Darktable. If you are running a Mac, it’s also possible, though looking at the instructions not entirely straightforward. If you are using Windows, you could run it in a virtual machine (likely to be slow) or should you be a true geek you might just be able to get it to run natively if you have most of your life to spare.

Why should you want to? Well it does seem as if it is almost a alternative to Lightroom for the Linux user. Here is the start of the description from the web site:

darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

And here is most of what the FAQ says about a Windows version:

What about a Windows port?

None of the developers use Windows, so a port of darktable to that operating system is very, very unlikely to happen.

That being said, many things should already work, so the actual porting should be relatively straight forward. It’s just that we won’t do it. However, there is the “win” branch which kind of cross compiles using MinGW to generate a Windows version. It’s still really buggy and might crash, kill kittens and eat your baby. You have been warned.

Like much Linux software, Darktable comes free. Of course it isn’t the only alternative, and there are a couple of review articles I quickly found that briefly compare some of them. Best Linux photo editors looks at half a dozen of them, including two I’ve tried, Gimp and Corel’s AfterShot Pro, but this review is a couple of years out of date (and the versions I tried and found a little wanting were older still – when the Corel software was called Bibble.) Top 15 Photo Editors for Linux Distributions is more recent, but also rather less informative.

AfterShotPro (now AftershotPro2) isn’t free, but commercial software, though reasonably priced, and were I seriously going the Linux route would probably be my choice. But as the writer of the ‘Top 15’ article says at the end of his roundup:

I’m quite happy with how the list turned out, and it also made realize that there is still a quite big gap in the photo editing software market when it comes to Linux. A ton of people I know, and even those that I encountered during my research – still prefer to work with Photoshop through Wine.

For the moment, rather than tangling with Wine (a Windows-like environment which allows some Windows programmes to run in Linux) I’ll continue to whine about Windows, and when necessary drown my sorrows with a glass or two of a decent red. Oh dear!

JPEG or RAW

While I was having computer problems recently I had to work in ‘Raw+Jpeg’ mode, and I chose the highest possible jpeg quality from the Nikon, ‘Fine’. And they are certainly pretty good files. But I was also having problems working with them on an uncalibrated screen and using Photoshop rather than Lightroom.

I tried to calibrate the screen visually, using one of the sites on the web that offers suitable graphics, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. I decided that my best approach was to rely mainly on Photoshop to make the judgements, keeping my own tweaks down to a minimum.

This also speeded up processing. I suppose I could have automated the process, but soon a set series of keystrokes became wired into my brain. ‘Alt+E, V, Enter’ to change from Adobe RGB to sRGB, then ‘Alt+I, A, U’ on the outdated version of Photoshop on the laptop for Auto-contrast. Next came Ctrl+M, which took me into the curves dialogue, where I used the mid-tone dropper to set the colour balance on a neutral in the image. Though it isn’t always possible to find a neutral, and sometimes it was a matter of trying a few different patches of the image until the result looked about right. And a little tweak of the curve produced a result with what looked like appropriate brightness and contrast.

Having OK’d this, then came the rather riskier business of trying to guess whether I’d got things about right, and sometimes fiddling a little with Brightness and Contrast, adjustments I normally try to avoid. It was hard not to try and alter the colour balance a little, and although I knew I wasn’t seeing it correctly. But I also know that having things a little on the warm side is always more acceptable than the opposite.

Here’s one of the results:

It isn’t too bad, though it does have something of a colour cast – I obviously added a little too much yellow. Perhaps most obvious in the sunlight grass.

It was a difficult day for lighting, photographing the Green Party Photocall What Are You Afraid of Boys? in a shady corner of College Green, next to the Houses of Parliament, sunlit in the background at right. And at the left, the building has completely lost detail in the jpeg.

I’ve now been able to process the raw file, and to make it a little easier to compare I’ve adjusted it to a similar colour balance, though I would normally have left it more neutral.

Overall the image from Raw is a little less contrasty and less saturated colour, and the shadow areas are lighter, but part of the difference is also because I’ve made some use of the Lightroom local adjustment brush. That could have improved the jpeg too, but would not have restored the missing detail in the blown-out highlights.

Looking at the full-size images, there does seem to be just a little more detail in the raw file. Although I think the jpeg version of the jacket that Green Party leader Natalie Bennett is wearing actually looks better for being a little darker, I think the raw version is probably more accurate.

As I stood there taking a whole series of photographs of her, I was hoping that she would make the same expression as her portrait on the poster behind her, but she didn’t quite do so, keeping her head more upright. But I was worried by that picture of her, as it didn’t quite look like her. What it lacks is the determination that I think shows in her jaw when she talks.

I stood there taking pictures wondering whether it was digital retouching or just careful lighting and choice of view that had caused the difference and made her and Caroline Lucas look rather more like a toothpaste advert than real people. But somehow it was a look that shouted PR and advertising and didn’t at all fit with my vision of the Green Party. More like the old politics we need to get away from.
Continue reading JPEG or RAW

Slow Recovery

I’m sitting typing at my notebook, and using it to copying my files from 2007-8 from an old external hard disk onto my new Drobo 5N NAS. And rethinking how I intend to backup my work. This is a slow process, as the hard disk is only USB2, and at around 15Mb/s the 500Gb will take around 8 hours.(Later I found the speed roughly doubled if I actually plugged the Ethernet cable into the router, rather than just assuming it was connected and transferring over the wireless link.) I’ve another 9 disks to go through, some larger, though I’ll not transfer everything to the new system.

To my right, my desktop computer is still chuntering through Chkdsk on my drive G:, all 3TB of it. It’s now got on to telling me that there are around 450,000 files that need fixing and is looking at each in turn to tell me it can’t fix them. It says that it is 10% through, but I don’t believe the figures. Probably it will finish some time early next week. Meanwhile I’m doing the best I can with the notebook.

I got all ready to take pictures yesterday when I got a message telling me the event had been cancelled. There was a suggestion I might cover something else, but unfortunately by the time I read the message it seemed to late to get there. I don’t have Lightroom installed on my notebook – I decided the screen was too small and the keyboard and pad wouldn’t make it worth having. I could install it now – or put it on my smartphone as the licence allows, but instead I’ve decided to work in RAW + Fine jpeg mode until I get back onto the desktop machine. I do have an old copy of Photoshop I can use to do some adjustments.

The Drobo has advantages and disadvantages. It should protect against a hard drive failure, enabling me to replace a failing disk without losing work, and it should also allow me to increase the capacity of the system by installing disks of higher capacity. It also means that should my computer go down I will be able to easily access all my files from any other computer I attach to the network. And it is certainly convenient to have access to so much work in the one place.

Its big disadvantages seem to me to be that it is a proprietary system, and that it is also a single point of failure. So while I’m backing up my files to it, I’m also looking at keeping at least one other copy of all important files elsewhere.

I’ll store the old external hard drives carefully – and hope they remain in working order unused. And I’ll keep another attached to my main computer to store current work, replacing that as it gets full. I suspect that they will remain usuable if stored well – at least so long as we still have hardware with USB ports.
I still have boxes full of CDs and DVDs with most of my digital work (and some scans) on them, going back now in some cases around 20 years. Despite the health warnings many have given over the years, so far these have remained readable – I did always look for disks which were supposedly of good quality. I gave up writing work to these around a year ago when with 32Mp files things really got out of hand. And some of the scans and panoramas come to around 250Mb a time, which makes DVD at 4.7Gb look rather small.

I’m thinking now of going back to them, though only for storing a copy of the jpegs that I develop from Lightroom – a much more manageable proposition. An alternative would be to use USB memory sticks, given the low prices of 64Gb USB3 sticks; again people say these are not suitable for long term storage, but those I wrote when they first came out remain readable. I’ll also consider getting a Blu-Ray – perhaps external – writer which are now available at a reasonable price, and 25Gb media at around a quid a piece, but I’m less sure about them.

Of course I should be using cloud storage, but I trust that less than I do optical media. Who can say which companies will still be in business next year – or whether the promises they make will be kept? And cloud storage for all of my work would be prohibitive in cost. It does provide a valuable safeguard against theft, flood or fire etc, but perhaps I’ll ask a friend to keep a small bag of memory sticks or box of disks instead.

Computer Problems

Today I’m having computer problems. Yesterday while I was working we had a little power glitch; the light and my printer went off for a fraction of a second and then restarted; I don’t have a proper inyterruptible power supply, but the mickey-mouse protection on my fancy socket kept the computer working. People not far away had a power cut that lasted some hours, so we were fortunate. Unfortunately one of my external hard disks although it seemed to keep on working appears to have suffered some damage.

I turned on the computer it’s connected to today and went away to leave it to boot up, returning a minute of so later to find that it was running CHKSDK on my drive G:, with white figures about unreadable files flashing across the screen. Seven hours later it is still doing it, with a message telling me “10% complete”. It isn’t a good idea to interrupt CHKDSK (and I think the only way to do so is to turn off the power), so I’m working today on my notebook.

It isn’t a bad notebook, but the screen is around a third the area of my desktop, and the keyboard isn’t great for typing. But perhaps the main problem is that I can’t easily access the files stored on the desktop machine and its attached external drives.

For years I’ve been meaning to go over to network attached storage, but haven’t managed to persuade myself to pay out the cash for a decent system. Instead I’ve just added more external drives, though not all permanently connected.

I don’t know how much of the data on the disk currently being checked I will be able to recover. I think most or all of it will in any case be stored elsewhere, either on other hard disks or on CD or DVD. So I’m hoping little will be completely lost, though I anticipate it will take me quite a while to sort everything out.

Meanwhile, I’ve finally got around to ordering that NAS system I should have installed years ago, and once everything is up and running will be copying my work onto it. It will be a very long job, but should end up with things being better organised than before. It may mean rather less time for me to write here for a while.

Fluorescent Orange

One of the many reasons I wish President Obama would live up to his promises and close Guantanamo Bay is that I hate trying to photograph those bright, often fluorescent, orange jump suits which have become such a part of the protest vocabularly. Of course its a very minor reason compared to the torture and human rights abuse, but one that gives me a certain amount of personal grief rather than engaging my conscience and my empathy for the suffering of others.

Bright reds and oranges have long been a particular problem for photographers, and it was certainly something I came across in the days of film – but then almost all colours were a problem with film, at least if you had any concern for accurate reproduction. Which is something many photographers don’t suffer from, and why so many long for the days of Kodachrome or wax long if not eloquent about the warmth of Agfa, or even pine for the garish purples of Orwo. And why so many Fuji X users are excited about the new firmware that adds ‘Classic Chrome’ to the various distortions you can – if so inclined – give your colour images.

Personally I moved from chromes to negative film in the mid 1980s in the search for more natural colour, switched to Fuji when I experienced the cleaner look its colour negative films and paper gave compared to the yellow box. And realised immediately the great leap forward with Nikon’s digital files when I started using the D100, something that I think led to me soon virtually abandoning black and white (though there were other reasons too.)

But though I generally love digital colour, or at least Nikon’s version of it (and Fuji X is usually great too) there are still a few problems. Artificial light, often far removed from a continuous spectrum has its own problems, and just occasionally in natural light there are conditions where I can’t really get entirely satisfactory colour results. And there are bright oranges.

So while I expect problems at protests for the release of Shaker Aamer, a Londoner still held in Guantanamo to the shame of both US and UK governments, I didn’t expect to have to deal with the same problem when I went along to y Frack Off London’d Global Frackdown event. But I arrived to find their fracking rig workers in bright orange suits.

The files on My London Diary were processed rapidly in Lightroom before uploading them for possible publication, and I didn’t have time to think about the orange suits. I’ve done another rather quick edit (with some slightly careless burning in) which gives a rather better result to the suit, though still not entirely to my satisfaction. Apart from darkening and lightening some areas, the main change is a switch from the Adobe Standard profile I normally use to ‘Camera Portrait’ for this image made on the D800E with the 18-105mm.

For images made using the D700, I have a wider choice of profiles available in Lightroom. Changing from ‘Adobe Standard’ to ‘Camera Neutral dcpTool untwist’ with just some minor adjustments to contrast and exposure – but no burning in – gives a better result, and corrects the slight hue shift in the original oranges.

I’m sure it would be possible to get a similar profile for the D800E, but I haven’t bothered to do so yet. For almost all pictures the ‘Adobe Standard’ is fine.

You can read about the protest and see more images from it at Global Frackdown at HSBC.

Since writing this I did a quick web search and found a link to some useful D800/D800E profiles.

Continue reading Fluorescent Orange

Better Portable Graphics

In what could be really good news for photographers, French programmer Fabrice Bellard has come up with a greatly improved new compression format for images which he has named BPG for (Better Portable Graphics.)

Making use of ‘a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard‘, it offers significant advantages over the JPEG format that has been the standard compressed graphics format for many years, in particular supporting up to 14 bits per channel and giving a greater dynamic range and better compression ratio. For equivalent quality it gives much lower file sizes, though for most of us it will be the ability to get much higher quality at around the same file sizes that will probably be of more interest.

Bellard has deliberately chose to support the same chroma formats as JPEG, to reduce losses in conversion from (and to) JPEG, and the format also supports an alpha channel and RGB, YCgCO and CMYK colour spaces. The format can also include EXIF, ICC profile and XMP.

Gizmag has a nice image gallery which compares the two formats, concluding “The BPG files seem to hold up vastly better, demonstrating a lot less color banding, blocking and step-ladder aliasing along edges, and producing pleasing images down to surprisingly small sizes.” You can also see some good examples at Imaging Resource.

The weakness of BPG which Gizmag points out is that it makes use of the HEVC open video compression standard, of which, as Bellard states, some “algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries“. The whole legal position over this and other MPEG-related technologies is unclear.

Also muddying the water is Google’s WebP format which they have made freely available under a BSD licence. Although clearly from the on line comparative examples inferior to BPG in image quality, it’s hard to compete with Google. But perhaps on seeing the advantages Google will want to run with BPG – so long as any patent problems can be surmounted.

At the moment BPG is not supported by browsers, but you can download source code, windows command line PNG or JPG to BPG encoder and BPG to PNG or PPM decoder, as well as javascript decoders for use on web sites which take pixel width and height from <img> tags to produce a canvas into which a BPG is decoded. So in theory you could start using BPG on your web site today.

Of course this is all rather experimental stuff, and few will wish to take it up. But as the number of photographers now working with RAW images shows, many photographers are aware of the deficiencies of the jpeg format, useful as it has been over the past more than 20 years. With the increasing importance of video in cameras, the use of the H.264 video codec for both video and still images might make BPG a sensible alternative for camera manufacturers. JPEG arrived just in time to make images viable on the web, but it now seems time to move on – and BPG seems the best direction to take.

Umbrella Revolution

No, I didn’t get to Hong Kong, but like so many protests around the world, it also came to London, with a little help from the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, who organised the protest at the Chinese Embassy on 10th October.

It was the last of four stories I covered that day (and I found time to do a few urban panoramas too – which you can see with the other stories on My London Diary) and in some respects the most interesting. But it was probably well after midnight by the time I had finished uploading the earlier stories and was working on the post processing of the final event. Which is perhaps why one of the pictures I uploaded was just a little strange:

As is probably obvious, this suffers from a rather nasty case of extreme distortion, though perhaps that makes the yellow and black umbrella stand out even more.Here’s the image that I intended to post:

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO 800, 1/80 f5.6

It still looks a little distorted, and the verticals are converging, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I’d made the original picture from which both these were derived using the Nikon 16mm fisheye, chosen mainly because I was in a very crowded situation on the pavement in front of the Chinese embassy and unable to move any further back from the subject. I’d wanted both the umbrella and the messages on the poster, with the ‘No Violence to Peaceful Protests in Hong Kong’ at the left- with another umbrella and, at the right the word ‘Solidarity‘. The text on placards is very important when photographing protests (something I learnt rapidly from the first editor I took my pictures to), and something you always need to be aware of in all images, as legible text always alters the way that we see images.

I usually process the images from the 16mm using either the Fisheye-Hemi plugin, PtGui or occasionally Photoshop’s ‘Adaptive Wide Angle’ filter. The first two are rather simpler to use and more or less automatically convert from fisheye to a cylindrical perspective, straightening the verticals and reducing the curvature of objects at the edges of the frame. Fisheye-Hemi has just 3 options, depending on the type of fisheye lens you have used (circular, full frame or partial), while PtGui gives greater flexibility. Photoshop’s own filter enables you to straighten any of the lines curved by the lens, but to do a great deal of work usually involves losing a lot of the image, and I usually end up getting some very funny curves indeed and deleting the results.

Somehow I have used Fisheye-Hemi twice on the top image, not a good idea. While the edges oft he placards and the crane at right are more or less straight in the lower picture, they have become curved in the opposite sense to the original in the upper image in a kind of extreme pin-cushion distortion.

Another pair of images perhaps gives a clearer view of what Fisheye-hemi does:

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO800, 1/60 f5

The protesters were crowded around the doorway of the Chinese embassy – much to the annoyance of the police, who like to keep protests to the opposite side of the road. I am very close to the speaker and the man at right who I could reach out and touch. In the upper images there is very clear curvature close to the edges, particularly noticeable in the pillar of the doorway at the extreme right of the image, but also in the other building in the background and in the woman at the left of the frame.

Fisheye-Hemi has more or less straightened the verticals of the architecture and made that woman look fairly normal. You can also see that the centre points of all four sides show identical subject matter – at left the word ‘Solidarity’, at top centre the top of the pillar, at right a police officer’s ear and at bottom centre the lower edge of that red jumper (I’ve cropped the lower image very marginally to remove a little distraction, which is why there is very slight less of that officer’s face.)

There is also a little part of the image missing at the corners, something you need to be aware of when taking pictures, but it isn’t really a great deal. Because you keep those four edge centres the viewfinder image remains a pretty goo way to frame the image.

D700, 16mm fisheye, ISO 2500, 1/160 f5

Here’s another image taken a few minutes later when people were applauding. I’m pretty sure my shoulders were touching those of the guy whose hands appear at the left of the image.

D700, 16-35mm at 22mm ISO 2500 1/160 f5

Here’s another picture of a different speaker taken from more or less the same position but with a different lens. It’s an ultra-wide view, with the 16-35mm at 22mm, which gives a good idea of how close I really was to the speakers – and I couldn’t move back because of the crowd.

D800E, Nikon 18-105mm DX, 62mm (93mm equiv) ISO 1000, 1/60 f7.1

Later I moved a little to the side and was able to work with a longer lens. I could even work from a distance where I could use a more normal ‘portrait’ focal length, in this case 93mm equivalent using the 18 – 105mm. By this time the light was getting low and I was needing flash to brighten up the ambient.

More pictures from the event at Solidarity with the Umbrella Revolution.
Continue reading Umbrella Revolution

Darkness and Rain

October I seemed to spend a long time struggling to make pictures in darkness and rain, particularly at several of what turned out to be a weekly fixture covering the Poor Doors protests outside the hugely expensive One Commercial Street flats in Whitechapel High St at Aldgate, just on the edge of the City of London.

It wasn’t really quite dark when I took this- and other pictures in Poor Doors Musical Protest

One solution (of sorts) to darkness is to use flash, and I’ve kind of got used to that, even if things go infuriatingly wrong at times. But using flash in rain is a problem, as all the raindrops glow in the flash, particularly those closer to the camera (as the light falls off with the square of the distance.) My flash units aren’t waterproof either, and using them in wet conditions without some kind of protection can lead to expensive repairs – and even the possibility of getting 400 volts when you least expect it.

A week later it was darker and raining rather more – Class War Poor Doors Week 12

Flash is often infuriating in any case, and there are some very good web sites about using it which suggest various creative set-ups, none of which are particularly appropriate to the kind of work that I do. For that you need quick and dirty flash, but there are a few things to bear in mind which can improve matters. I suspect I’ve mentioned all this before, but here goes with my 10 flash tips.

Use high ISO to avoid blackness around the close bits your flash can light up. Mostly at night with flash I work at ISO1600 or ISO3200.
If your flash has a diffuser built in, use it for wide-angles unless you want ‘creative’ vignetting. For longer lenses you can use it for close subjects. The little built-in white plastic bounce reflector helps too – but only at fairly short range, when you can then angle the flash head up at 45 degrees.
Work with your camera in manual mode and your flash in auto TTL mode (assuming you can – it works with my SB800s)
Usually a shutter speed of 1/30 or 1/60 will do fine. Mostly I also work with my rather slow lenses more or less wide open too. Aim to get an exposure without flash that is perhaps 2-4 stops under.
Try to underexpose with the flash too, but only by around 1 stop. If you give correct exposure you will get pictures that don’t look as if they were taken at night. If I’m working without flash I generally need to underexpose by 1-2 stops
Most night scenes – at least in cities – will contain lots of light sources which seriously muck up your camera’s metering. Best work in manual and check the results, adjust as needed, then leave alone until you move into a differently lit area.
When possible make use of the uneven light spread your flash will give by angling the flash head away from the closer parts of the subject.
Sometimes it pays to use your left hand as a flag to shade parts of the subject.
Work in RAW, as you are going to need considerable post-processing for best results.
Never let people see your flash pictures until you’ve sorted them out in post-processing!

We did have one dry week, but then it rained again – another Wet night at Poor Doors

Nikon also have some kind of random fault generator, that will result in the occasional image being hopelessly over-exposed. It might help to make sure flash and hotshoe contacts are clean and that you have pushed the flash right on and locked it in position. But you will still get the odd random white-out (or at least I do) and the occasional random non-flash image with burnt out highlights. Its just to keep you on your toes.

Of course there are some faults for which only the photographer is to blame. Like taking a second picture before the flash has had time to recycle, which I manage frequently. Or forgetting that any exposure compensation for flash set on the camera adds on to that set on an external flash unit…

And while flash actually built into the camera may sometimes be a good idea, it’s largely a marketing point. Of the five lenses that I normally use on the Nikons it actually only works sensibly with one of them (and the one I uses least) the 20mm f2.8; with all the other lenses except the fisheye get a large shadow in the lower part of the frame from the lens. For the 16mm fisheye it’s also generally useless as it only illuminates a central oval in the frame.

I always thought that, as the SB800 manual says the flash diffuser is needed to provide proper illumination for 14mm and 17mm lenses, this meant that there was no way the flash would give a wide enough coverage with the 16mm fisheye. So I’d never tried it before these occasions. To my surprise it actually works quite well, and is slightly better still if you also use the bounce card. Used out of doors, recycling times will be around the maximum – and NiMH rechargeable batteries the only sensible choice. When I remember, adding the optional 5th battery really helps, bringing the recharge time down to under 3 seconds, almost as fast as the best external power supplies.

Having fitted an external flash into the hot-shoe, it becomes possible to only slightly raise the built-in flash. Just a little, so it is difficult to notice, but it is still enough to mess up flash exposures completely. So much so that I keep it permanently taped down, only for emergency use.

Uncorrected Fisheye and flash

But flash and rain is still a problem. As an alternative to flash I have a couple of cheap LED light sources, the more powerful with 9 rows of 16 LEDs, a total of 144 LEDs. It makes quite a good torch for looking underneath furniture, but as a light source for taking pictures it is far too weedy. There are more expensive units around, but I’ve yet to try them, though I have at times ‘borrowed’ the light from the larger units wielded by professional videographers.

But in the end I’ve often found myself trying to work just with available light, and wishing that I had lenses for the Nikons like some of those I used to use, particularly the 35mm f1.4 Summilux. Neither the 16-35mm f4 nor the 18-105mm f3.5-f5.6 is much of a lens in low light, and most of the time I find myself using the 16mm f2.8 fisheye, or, if I’ve remembered to put it in my camera bag, the 20mm f2.8. I’ve had most success with the 16mm (not least because I’ve almost always got it with me) but I’d still like a really fast wide lens for use on dirty nights. The only real choice I can see is the Nikon 20mm f1.8G AF-S but its a little on the expensive side.

Druids and Viewpoint

Twice a year I get an invitation from The Druid Order through the post inviting me to their Equinox celebrations, and although I’ve now seen them a number of times both at Tower Hill in Spring and on Primrose Hill in Autumn, I still like to go. Its an interesting spectacle to watch and still presents a challenge to photograph, even more of a challenge to try and produce different photographs of. I’m not sure I succeeded in that second aspect this time.

D700, 16-35mm at 16mm, f9 1/320 ISO 640

Primrose Hill is certainly the more spectacular of the two locations, with the green grass a better surface and the distant view of London. Tower Hill has its historical associations, but the Tower is a little distant and the closer buildings uninspiring. In some past years they used to process some distance through city streets which had some visual possibilities, lessened now as they emerge from the church hall next door.

I also have my suspicions that the ancient druid rites may well have been very different to these rather dry and solemn occasions. Probably a much more bloody and drunken orgy than these carefully scripted routines following the book. But the ceremonies doubtless satisfy those who take part in them and surely encapsulate some truths about the relationship between us and the planet we live on that are essential to the future of the species. We have to respect the earth, not desecrate it, and to be aware of our relationships with nature.

D700, 16-35mm at 16mm, f9 1/320 ISO 640

This is one of the very few occasions on which I screw anything into the tripod socket on any of my cameras. I hate tripods. I’ve never found one that really suited me – either too heavy to carry any distance or too flimsy and short to be of much use. If I could afford an assistant to carry the tripod (and much more usefully in London, the umbrella) I might think differently, but probably not. Tripods get in the way and slow you down. I’d rather lose the imperceptible scintilla of sharpness in the odd image than use one. Most of my images are at least sharp enough.

D800E, 18-105 at 25mm (37mm equiv) f14 1/800 ISO 800

I had to use one when I photographed the multiple image panoramas for the ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood’ as it was essential to get the lens nodal point in virtually the same place for all of the exposures. Though I messed up the only ones I screwed the camera in place for, and generally worked just by resting my hand supporting the lens at the correct place on the tripod plate. I used one – a solid Manfrotto – for some of my film panoramics too, particularly with the expensive Widelux which had no viewfinder or spirit level, but soon abandoned it with relief once I was working with the cheap Horizon that came with both.

But for this occasion, what I took to Primrose Hill was a monopod. It’s relatively light but still won’t fit into my camera bag, which is a pain. I put it across the top of the contents and close the cover and it stays there until I open the bag to get something out and forget it’s there, and then it isn’t any more. Fortunately I’ve yet to drop it anywhere completely unretrievable.

Also in my camera bag is a long cable release, an electronic thing that fits into the fancy socket on the front left of the camera. I did experiment with a cable-less release, with a little box in the hotshoe plugged into the same socket and another with an aerial in my hand, but it seemed more fuss for this job.

The monopod screws into the tripod socket on the base of the camera, or rather it should, but I have a strap that screws in there, with its socket that I always forget and screw the monopod into instead. What I should do is unscrew the strap – and then use the quick release built into the strap to remove it from the camera – before screwing in the monopod.

In use it makes no difference, but when you come to remove the monopod, it comes off the camera with the strap, leaving the camera hanging from the other end of the strap only, and it takes a mole wrench to separate the monopod from the other end of the strap. Unless your assistant carries a mole wrench (if you have either) your only recourse is to screw the monopod back in and keep working with one attached to you camera. Which I did.

D800E 16mm fisheye, f16 1/1000 ISO 800

The purpose of this is to photograph the circle from a high viewpoint, particularly with the fisheye 16mm lens. But holding the camera high above your head you can’t see through the viewfinder. Live view puts the image on the rear screen, but it’s almost invisible from below with the sky reflected in the glass. The Nikons have a ‘virtual horizon’ feature which is a little more visible and I sometimes try to use, looking for a green line. But it still isn’t easy to see

It really is a problem trying to keep the camera level – and necessary unless you want a curved horizon. What I mean to take with me but always forget is a plumb line which ought to solve that problem. Until I do so I will just have to rely on guess work and taking quite a few exposures in the hope that some will be ok.

It isn’t too easy either to keep the camera pointing in exactly the correct direction, working very close to the circle even with the very wide angle of the fisheye.

Of course there are high-tech solutions to the problem. With the Fuji cameras I have an app that lets me control the camera and see the viewfinder image on my phone, which I might try another time. But I think I would need a cradle of some sort to fix the phone onto the monopod or to grow a third hand (or that assistant again.) Perhaps better still would be a drone, though I’m unsure how well that would go down with the druids, especially were I to fly over the druids, and it adds another level of complexity. It would probably need to be used at a greater height, and I think the kind of view I’m getting from monopod level is probably the most interesting.

D800E 16mm fisheye, f16 1/1000 ISO 800

But perhaps I’ve already done enough on these druid ceremonies, and if I wanted to take the work further should look at it in some very different way. Though that – like the drone – is probably something I’ll leave to others.

D800E 18-105 at 42mm (63mm equiv) f13 1/640 ISO800

There are more pictures on My London Diary, in Druids on Primrose Hill and as usual the images, apart from the one on the ‘month’ page with the text are posted there in more or less the order in which they were taken, and are my attempt as usual to try and tell the story mainly through images, though some words of explanation are necessary to go with them. There are a few captions, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do this as well as I would like. As you may appreciate it is now less than a month to the winter solstice and I’m only now on this blog writing about the equinox.

I’ve included exposure details, though they don’t have a great deal of meaning. All were probably taken on P setting and with -0.3 stops exposure compensation. All on pattern metering, with probably all on autofocus. Generally the camera does it at least as well as I could, though I occasionally make changes when time allows.
Continue reading Druids and Viewpoint