John's Newsletter of Non-Euclidean Thoughts #28
A possibly weekly email about what's been going on in my brain
29 May - 4 June 2023
I almost bought an air conditioner last Saturday. The temperature that day peaked at about 24°C which, for me, is about the ambient limit for sitting comfortably at my computer. I'd researched window kits, read reviews, and had one in my basket ready to go before getting distracted (no doubt by something shiny) and forgetting about it. Then on Monday as I started work I had a blanket wrapped around me, shortly followed by my heating kicking in for the first time since I've been back. Truly the British summertime experience.
I'm still undecided as to whether to purchase one. It's an extravagance for the potentially few days of the year when things are uncomfortably hot, to say nothing of contributing to the climate change root cause by trying to tame it in my leaky house.
For this month at least I won't be getting one as the money I would have spent on that (and then some) has gone on a new mattress, bedding, and towels. The former has been on my list for a few years now since my current, ex-display one begun to feel its age; sleeping in various beds during my travels though hammered home how much I needed one. New bedding naturally followed that, especially as I don't have a set without missing fasteners or some kind of tear.
Warning: I've used some fairly large animated images in this email so I'd suggest waiting until you're on unmetered data before loading them.
Photography
Some recently processed photos from my Japan trip
I've been sporadically working through the 6,000 or so photos I took while away in Japan. Depending on my mood or who I'm talking to, I'll usually describe this as "developing", "editing", "processing", or just "doing" my photos. There's a lot packed into that verb and this is probably the most appropriate space to talk about what it is I actually do, and why specifically I couldn't do it when my laptop broke.
Software
Adobe Lightroom (specifically the "Classic" version as opposed to Adobe's online "CC" version which is frankly bobbins for too many reasons to get in to here) is the cornerstone of my photography process. First released in 2007, it is tailor made for photography which is confusing because there's "photo" right in the name of another of their apps. Most salient for this conversation though is that modern Lightroom, like most Creative Cloud apps, only runs on Windows and MacOS. This isn't a specific endorsement of Lightroom, there are alternatives out there (I've heard good things about CaptureOne), but it covers a lot of useful features all in one package.
Organisation
All of my digital cameras thus far (from way back to my first, the Nikon D50) have captured to SD cards, so the question is how do I organise those files? Currently I transfer them to my home NAS, sorted into year and then date folders, e.g. 2023/2023-06-04; I have higher-level folders for special events (e.g. Japan 2023) but the format within remains. Lightroom does the transferring and organising for me (with options for copying as well as moving) but also has an abstraction layer on top of that, "catalogs".
Effectively a database file, the catalog stores the file location of photos so I'm not limited to browsing one folder, it enables camera metadata searching like capture date/time, exposure, shutter speed etc. as well as custom metadata like keywords, geographic location etc. My most used workflow feature though is picking: adding a flag to a photo that I use to say "hey, this photo isn't bad". Because wow do I take a lot of shit photos. I don't want to give a ratio of quality to bobbins, but it's low. At the end of each day I'll go through the photos and pick the ones that seem decent, saving me from continuously looking at all those creativity sapping bad ones.
I often record my wanderings via GPS as a GPX track and Lightroom will match up photos to the track based on the time it was taken. As long as the photo time is accurate and I haven't shifted my camera's internal clock to account for timezones, but hey, Lightroom can sort that too thankfully. Most recently I've been adding keywords to photos to track where and how I've shared them online so that I a) don't inadvertently re-post a photo, and b) only post the best to my newsletter, and leave the dregs for Twitter.
Lightroom's organisation features are superb, though my way of sorting and storing my photos has evolved with the program so it's not fair to champion it for that, and judicious file management can (as I found) get me most of the way to what it offers.
File format
Before getting onto the big topic of editing, it's worth talking about camera RAWs. I would imagine most people are familiar with JPEGs as an image format, for the purposes of this discussion JPEGs store their visual information as RGB values i.e. how much red, green, or blue there is for each pixel which creates the visual colours you see (ignoring the thorny topic of monitor colour profiles, ugh). This obviously works fine, but it has difficulties when you start trying to manipulate them in a meaningful way. Camera RAW files don't store their data as RGB values but as the unprocessed output of the camera sensor, effectively the amount of light hitting a physical medium, but which often doesn't map neatly to a pixel grid. This opens up a lot of possibilities when it comes to editing, but in order to use the files they first have to be interpretted. And as with any interpretation, there can be differences between programs. There is a debate about shooting raw versus JPEGs which I'm not going to get in to, I have always shot raw, though I do also get my camera to give me a JPEG "sidecar" image as well, these are what I used while I didn't have access to Lightroom and found other apps (RawTherapee specifically) lacking.
Editing
When I started out taking digital photos (sorry, "computational photography"), I vociferously avoided any kind of post-processing or editing, believing that doing so defeated the purpose, the "purity" of the photos. Then I took some photos with the incorrect white balance or slightly off-level and quickly changed my mind.
There are several ways of manipulating your photo in non-destructive ways using the data from RAWs. The simplest is just to mess with some sliders, and perhaps the easiest way of showing their impact is a before and after:
These sliders all change various elements of a photo from the basics like contrast and saturation, as well as more targeted areas like highlights, vibrance and texture through to tweaking individual colours for their hue or saturation. One of my most common tweaks is "boosting" the shadows, effectively drawing out more visible information than is visibly there, or in the case of the JPG, is actually there. The ability to do this is governed by the dynamic range of your camera sensor and gets into knotty discussion of native/base ISO sensitivity that isn't super relevant. A lot of my processing time with Lightroom is messing with the many sliders as just changing a few values can drastically change the feeling of a photo:
Most of these can changes can also be localised through the use of masks, meaning I could judiciously make clouds more distinct without blowing out the rest of the highlights.
There are various ways of changing the physical aspects of a photo as well, the most obvious being cropping and, for those of us incapable of holding a camera straight, the overall angle or rotation. There are also various cosmetic touch-ups that can be done, usually removing things like red-eye (if you use a flash and take portraits), but also good for erasing unsightly traffic cones and signs from existence:
The final major editing step is one I don't even have to think about anymore, and that's correcting a lens's optical profile, easier shown than described:
My stalwart Nikon D7100 didn't have any lenses with built-in profile data so I had to manually apply the, admittedly very good, ones from Lightroom on each photo. Compare that with my Fujifilm X-mount lenses which all attach that data along with the RAW file that is then picked up by Lightroom. It's obvious when showing a before and after, but not necessarily something you'd immediately notice.
Introspection
All these capabilities open up a lot of questions. The one I struggle with the most is whether something is a "good" photo and whether the processing I'm doing is making it better. You unfortunately can't process a bad photo into a good one. I strongly believe that to become better at photography, like writing, you have to self-edit. It's only by getting a feel for what you're changing (angle, it's always the angle, I cannot hold my camera level) that allows me to try different things in the future rather than making the same mistakes over and over. But in having to edit a photo, I am forced to face it and question its quality. And that's a fickle feeling that isn't entirely within the control of the photo itself.
The photos I take aren't art - I've been to enough exhibits and watched enough documentaries to hopefully know the difference; that kind of photography isn't for me. But then are my photos telling a story? Or are they just mementos for me to remember the times and places I took them? In which case when they're viewed by other people, divorced of my lived meaning, what good are they? Mechanically perhaps you can judge the composition, the lighting, the subject (put more interesting things in front of your camera, top photography tip), but beyond that? Is it a bid for empathy then, to ask the viewer to understand why I took a photo the way I did? In which case am I just seeking validation from others, and my quality is really in the beholder?
I don't have even half answers to many of these, and I'm largely guided by what I enjoy which is the process of taking photos and editing them afterwards. I don't have loftier goals than that really and I'm glad that people get some small enjoyment out of my photos. And that's really what cut me when I couldn't use a tool like Lightroom when my laptop broke, it felt half of my creative expression had been taken away, and that somehow showing the unprocessed photos was like stopping a magic trick halfway through. Which I guess by that analogy I've now explained the magic trick to you by diving into all this.
Paraphernalia
- Captain Disillusion on Colour - this is my go-to video about introducing people to the bonkers depth of colour, or when I tell someone that magenta doesn't exist
- Primitive Technology: New Brick Kiln Design - do love some Primitive Technology
- Summer Games Done Quick will be wrapped up by the time you read this, some of my favourite runs I've watched this time around are: Devil May Cry 4, Signalis, Returnal and this Bastion tutorial where someone who has never speedrun a game is taught how to do it; the full list of videos
- Stuff Made Here's Forgery Robot - not super impressed with this as it seemed like he just bought a robot and then used someone's code for a short interview with a forgery expert which isn't what I expect from his videos
- Ratchet and Clank A Rift Apart is coming to PC - now if Sony could announce Horizon Forbidden West as well, I wouldn't have to consider purchasing a PS5
- Silent Hill Ascension trailer - I am not hopeful for the tranche of new Silent Hill games that Konami announced late last year, and this trailer does nothing to assuage that feeling
- Spider-Man Across The Spider-Verse trailer - have I linked this before? regardless, the first film popped and the reviews for this sequel seem to be just as good if not better
This was hand-crafted by John.