Should be on the news stands this week, and available through the summer. Shame I didn’t have my iPad version of the book available for this… must sort that one out as soon as possible.

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Borax capital of the world

Rocket engines in Boron

As I was driving past the town of Boron I felt I had to make a visit. As I entered the town, I photographed the sign. I couldn’t see much town at that point. Soon I rolled in, and it seemed like a very neatly kept town. I could see that the borax mining industry had been good to the people of Boron over the years. The local museum was closed but I found some rocket engines in its yard and made a picture.

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So, here I am maybe two weeks away from receiving my iPad and wondering how useful it will be for displaying my own work. I’ve been giving some thoughts as to what I’d like to do with an iPad portfolio.

I was discussing this with Michael Prince who has been presenting his portfolio on the iPad for the past month or so and he’s sold on the idea. To paraphrase Michael, “pictures on the iPad just look better than they do on your monitor or your printed portfolio. One of the good features is just being able to hand the iPad over to an art director and letting them browse around your work, check out tearsheets, so they are driving it and looking at what interests them”

http://www.michaelprince.com/

For the record these are some of thoughts of other bloggers regarding this. I’ve not found many blogs by professionals who have actually used it so far, theres more speculation about it than fact. So if I find more written about this in future I’ll edit this post and add it later.

There is some reasonable discussion taking place among photographers and photo buyers whether or not the iPad can “replace” the printed portfolio.
…
If you can deliver an exciting and beautiful experience to prospective clients using your iPad, you may not need printed work. If that’s not the case now, I believe it will be soon. Here’s why: It’s a better “experience” than just looking at a screen.

Scott Bourne on photofocus

PDN Gear Guide

flip89 wrote this at the Huffington Post

So what the hell good is it? Really depends on what you want to use it for. For me, I like to present my photography portfolio to my clients on the iPad. It’s not bulky to carry around, it adds a lot of ooomph to my presentation and certainly added interest to my clients. Everybody loves the interactivity – especially to someone who apologize all the time, “I am a computer illiterate” but once they experience holding and using it with their fingers … they’re hooked. It is a totally different experience and you really have to have a different mindset when using it because it is

This looks like a good way to get pictures onto the iPad from a computer

http://ipad.maccreate.com/2010/05/19/photo-transfer-app/

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I feel a continuous conundrum about exposing lovely large images online, because its so easy to grab them and potentially for them to be abused. One solution to this is watermarking, but it generally just makes the images look terrible.

I’ve been thinking about whether the solution might be to just put more design effort into the watermarks, or to design a website around a watermark so that the images become protected, but remain within a well designed and attractive designed site.

I was looking at the possibility of using the rather fine ‘Impact’ Lightroom plugin for generating web galleries as its navigation bar acts as a kind of functional watermark… but my thoughts and researches on this matter are still nascent and I’m undecided.

However, I’ve found out some new things about how people look at pictures that lead me to think that this is the right way ahead, and so long as cheesy-ness can be avoided, photographers would do well to find a way to incorporate branding into watermarks on their images.

This is what the Impact Web Gallery looks like, note the transparent navigation strip across the bottom of the image, it’s tasteful and the images fill the whole screen. I personally don’t like the default size of the player controls, and there are a few other niggles, but in general I like the general design concept. Oh, and its DHTML so it will work on iPhone/iPad etc.

About a week ago I attended a talk by Tim Flach who is a brilliant photographer, specialising in animals.

He talked for a bit about some ideas he had picked up about how people look at pictures, and how this relates to experimental evidence about eye movements. I was a student of psychology, with a lot of interest in vision, and so this is something that sounded interesting to me so I decided to check it out.

According to Tim, viewers tend to scan a picture from left to right, with a kind of visual path entering into the picture from somewhere in the lower left (psychologists call this a ’scanpath’). This holds true even for art work originating from different cultures, and he mentioned how a painting from Hokkusai takes advantage of this visual ‘affordance’

Its long been known that people’s eye movements are made up of rapid jumps called ’saccades’ and longer periods called ‘fixations’ where the eye settles on a feature of the image. I wasn’t aware of research specifically related to some kind of natural bias that might relate to the compositional syntax of artwork so my interest was piqued.

As an aside, I have some form in this area. In the early 80’s I was briefly a graduate student at U.Mass in the department of Psychology and started working as a research assistant to Dr. Keith Rayner who was and still is a top expert on using eye movements as a tool of experimental psychology. One of my jobs involved making wax mouth rests that subjects had to bite on, because their heads had to be kept rigidly still in order to accurately ascertain where their eyes were looking. This is somewhat reminiscent of the approach to portraiture by early Victorian photographers.

So, since last Saturday I’ve been spending a bit of time trying to track down the empirical source of Tim’s comments and I came up with two interesting studies that might be of interest to photographers. I was rather surprised to find that the largest body of work that has been done specifically on how people look at artwork dates all the way back to 1935.

There may be more scientific work that I can’t find on the web, because much scientific material tends to stay in subscription only databases that can’t all easily be located via Google, but as far as I can see ‘How People Look at Pictures’ by G.T Buswell (1935) seems to be one of the most comprehensive studies. In the case of Buswell he had to build his own incredibly complex equipment in the pre-computer era. I found this PDF extract that includes some diagrams of his impressive eye tracking ‘rig’.

That PDF was tantalising and a bit irritating because it doesn’t provide the information I was looking for. From a wiki page I found that Buswell even uses a Hokkusai image in the study, but its not in the PDF. The book is out of print and not easy to come by. However the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum has a copy, so when I have a free afternoon I will go down there and satisfy my curiosity.

But this wasn’t my only find from my cursory searches on the web. I also found a reference to more recent work by my old boss Keith Rayner which has direct relevance for commercial photographers and advertising photography in general.

Lizz Judd refers to the main findings of a 2007 study by Rayner et al where eye movements were monitored in order to find out how print advertisments are viewed.

This study reminded me of Barthes essays in Image/Music/Text where he develops the concept of anchoring, but it has more implications regarding branding and the power of the omnipresent logo or screendog or even, to return to the opening theme of this blog posting, to the visual watermarking of digital images.

Rayner et al looked at eye movements when the viewer was looking at print advertisements containing a picture, text and branding/logos. I’m going to gloss over the main part and purpose of the study to focus on some of the findings that may be relevant to photographers and advertisers.

Firstly, viewers spent more time looking at images than at text in an ad, and do not jump forth a lot between images and text.

Secondly, Brand names have more eye fixations than text or pictures, even though the brand names are small.

Thirdly, eyes move quickly to the text in ads, particularly the large headline text.

Now, my first conclusion from this is unsurprisingly that the images used in print (or online advertising, I think that would hold too) form a huge part of the value of the ad. Its hard to quantify the value of the images, but we know in our guts as photographers that they are what make the ad ’sell’ most of the time.

This study seems to provide some hard empirical basis for statements I sometimes have heard like ‘The photograph is worth 50% of the effectiveness of the ad’, or some other such contentious statement.

The relationship between the text in the ad and the image reminds me of the concept of ‘anchoring’ that Barthes described whereby the ambiguities in an image can be resolved by the text. The best example of this I can think of is in John Berger’s book ‘Ways of Seeing’ where he shows this picture

He then goes on to reprint the picture but with a caption

This is the last picture Van Gogh painted before he killed himself

The ‘connotation’ of the image is anchored by the caption. Having read it, we see more intensely the ominous deep blues and blacks in the sky.

My final point is about that second finding in the list. The branding or logo received more fixations than any other area of the image. This is intriguing. I am not alone, I’m sure, in hating those screen dogs that have appeared on digital TV and cable images for many years. So I’m wondering if these larger number of fixations represent the human eye being dragged almost ‘against its will’ from the enjoyment of the image to the fly in the ointment that is the logo rather than anything intrinsically enjoyable about looking at branding or a logo.

My conclusion is that whether or not people enjoy it, the effectiveness of the logo is incontestible. Maybe the image is the honey and the logo is the trap? The advertising photograph is like the elegant display of a pitcher plant drawing the little insect into its sugary death.

Try as I might, I can’t help concluding that so long as it could be made sufficiently attractive, consistent in branding and not too distracting, that a watermark on an image containing really well designed branding will repay a photographer more than it detracts from their image. It will ensure that if the image moves around in cyberspace that their moral rights will remain asserted.

In addition, more fixations of the eye, as experiments have shown, lead to greater memory recall… so your logo gets remembered and your authorship is more likely to be remembered in the more general situation where your website is being viewed by a potential buyer.

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I’ve just updated my website, and now it contains mostly personal work shot in the last year. The dreadful business conditions of the past year have had their positives and I don’t think I would have been able to generate the work on this site if I had been as busy as I’d been in previous years. Every cloud has a silver whatsit and all that. I’ve finally managed to wrestle the Ebony camera into working with a digital back and the work in the series ‘The Community’ has benefited from the slow and methodical way of working this camera has forced upon me. It really is as slow as using 5×4 film for those doubters who think that digital cannot recreate a large format way of doing things slowly and with pre-visualisation, it really is the only way to go about it. I even have a black cloth to put over my head so that I can see the image on the digital camera LCD screen more effectively.

Architecture doesn’t feature as highly here as in the past, but in many ways it remains a big focus of what I do, though I’ve always struggled against the formalities of it, and my response often is too go too off the wall. Its fun though.

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New Mexico Spaceport Construction

One of a series of aerial photographs I made of the construction at the Spaceport America site in late October last. The pilot flew brilliantly and enabled me to get a set of perfect elevations of this 10,000 foot, 200 wide monster runway. This is the site where Virgin Galactic plan to launch their tourist flights, possibly in 2011.

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Space Lands at Three White Walls, Birmingham

Its not often that an art exhibition gets two private views… however because of the poor weather on the 7th of January, my gallery, Three White Walls has graciously offered to host it again, hopefully more people will be able to come this time.

To celebrate this event and reward those who come, I will be providing a space themed cocktail. Now lets just cross our fingers that the Siberian Weather doesn’t return in the first week of February!

To attend please RSVP to 3whitewalls@btconnect.com

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Some of the people who attended my private view last night were from Birmingham Photospace who are campaigning for a permanent world class venue for photography in Birmingham. Needless to say, I’m right behind them in this. Birmingham is a huge conurbation and whether or not one agrees with the spirit of the ‘Britain’s second city’ epithet as well as its form, it seems hard to deny that there is a big enough potential audience for a venue of that sort.

Thanks to all those who came, and for those who have an interest in photography and live anywhere close to Birmingham, make sure that you follow their blog or twitter feed.s

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Front room, left wall

Front room, right wall

Jo, Sylvia and Naomi

Some photos from yesterday after finishing the hanging. I wasn’t sure about using the hook and line hanging system that the gallery had, but it was really fast compared to nails, rulers and all that paraphenalia. Three White Walls, and the Artlounge (who look after 3ww) provided four people who did most of the work hanging. I was very happy with the end result. The private view was quiet, but there were enough people to make the gallery feel inhabited. Considering the sub zero weather it was a pretty good turnout. Its posssible that there may be a second private view a couple of weeks from now so that people can get to it, though I have a suspicion this weather could last for weeks and not just a few days.

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