Never fear, there is finally a solution. Well, the beginning of a solution. A solution in the early stages of beta testing, but a solution nonetheless, and it doesn’t involve uninstalling Lightroom and eating more cheesecake. Although you are welcome to eat more cheesecake anyway if that’s your thing.

No, friends, what I’m talking about is Knobroom. What is Knobroom? Knobroom is a plug-in for Lightroom written by Jarno Heikkinen. Now hold on, I know what you’re going to ask: “What is that picture to the right?” It’s a good question. That is a Behringer B-Control Rotary BCR2000 32-channel MIDI encoder panel.

Oh, you want to know what Knobroom does! You haven’t guessed yet? Knobroom connects the sliders in Lightroom to MIDI control channels. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and is essentially the standard by which electronic instruments communicate with one another (and with computers). The Behringer shown on the right is just one example of a MIDI control panel that would commonly be used to control volume, pan, vibrato, loudness, and other such attributes in music software.

Of course, it’s just a USB device that communicates through the well-documented MIDI protocol, so Jarno wrote a plug-in that takes that information and allows you to say “when knob 1 is turned, change the exposure slider.” This allows you to move settings up and down with the knobs without having to move the mouse or even have the appropriate panels in the develop module open.

How cool is that?!

I’m seriously considering the purchase of a Behringer BCR2000 as that is the model Max Edin used in his demonstration video, which sort of proves that it works. There are some issues and the software is in a beta stage of development so you have to expect some bumps in the road, but it looks very promising.

Read more on Max Edin’s blog: Using Hardware Controllers with Lightroom. Check out the Knobroom home page for more of the gritty details.

Today is Louis Daguerre’s birthday, and Google is helping to celebrate it by devoting their logo to him. Happy 224th, buddy!

Wait, are you really about to ask me who Louis Daguerre was? Hey, it’s OK, to be fair the guy has been dead for about 160 years… Even so, in this line of work I sort of expected more from you. Maybe you’ve heard the word Daguerreotype before? Even my browser spell-checker knows that word. That’s right, it’s a photographic process; that’s probably close enough for most tabletop trivia games.

Unfortunately, this blog is not interested in tidbits of trivia, so get ready for facts. Lots of facts. With historical context.

Returning to the topic at hand, Daguerre’s eponymous method was the first silver-based imaging process and one of the first techniques for creating a photographic image ever. So before you start wagging your tongue and making noises that sound like “why does this guy deserve a Google logo?”, remember that Louis has done more for photography than all of your hiking through the backwoods of Yosemite with a full-frame digital SLR has ever done. Or will ever do, because you are not an inventor. Seriously, assembling an IKEA coffee table is not the same thing as inventing something.

Poor, poor Louis Daguerre. He might have lived longer if making a Daguerreotype didn’t involve boiling mercury until its steam envelops a copper plate treated with iodine vapor. Yes, the Daguerreotype was the first commercially viable photographic process, but it was also a great way to accidentally poison yourself and die. Like that one popular song put it, “Shake it, shake it… Shake it like a poisonous picture…” No, hang on, that doesn’t sound right… Either way, iodine vapor and boiling mercury are among the worst things to get all over your hands and face, and this was the eighteen thirties. You think they had respirators and fume hoods back then? (For trivia buffs: they did not).

Anyway, flip the calendar back a bit and meet Nicephore Niepce (born Joseph Niepce), a French inventor with a totally unpronounceable name who had been fiddling with photographic reproduction since 1793. You see, Niepce liked to reproduce engravings, and the way you reproduced an image in the late 18th century was to point a camera obscura at it and trace the projected image. Niepce had an unsteady hand and couldn’t trace the images well, so he set about his search for a chemical process that might capture the light from the projection.

Ultimately, he was successful, and Niepce is acknowledged by historians as the creator of the first ever photographic image, but his lavender oil-based process (now called “heliography”) had plenty of issues. Like, you know, the eight-hour exposure time. “Please hold still, Madam. Just another six hours.” This is why he only made images of other art or of landscapes. Things that generally hold still all day long.

Niepce began collaborating with artist Louis Daguerre in 1829. After Niepce’s death in 1833, Daguerre continued their work and eventually created the Daguerreotype, a process hardly resembling heliography in method and which overcame many of its challenges. So good was this process that Daguerre was able to sell it to the French government in return for a stipend of 6,000 Francs each year for the rest of his life. Laughing all the way to the bank, Daguerre went down in history as the inventor of the first photographic method that produced results of any lasting value, and Daguerreotypes from that period remain intact to this day, even in spite of their fragility.

In fairness, Daguerre got the French government to give Niepce’s estate 4,000 Francs a year for his contribution to the development of the process, so it wasn’t as though he stole all the glory, although Niepce never got a Google logo dedicated to him. That, I feel, is the true measure of one’s significance within the larger tapestry of history; has Google recognized your contributions by commissioning a logo in your honor that will appear on their main page for one day? No? Then you are nothing.

In that respect, Louis Daguerre joins the ranks of such other consequential people as Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Earth Day. OK, so Earth Day isn’t a person, it’s my blog and I like Earth Day so sue me.

The next time you pick up your fancy shmancy digital camera to go out and take 4,000 photographs in an afternoon, I want you to remember M. Louis Daguerre and his iodine- and mercury-coated hands that labored for many hours to create a single image on a copper plate, and who couldn’t even share it on Flickr, because he didn’t have a computer.

It is easy to say that we are “standing at the crossroads.” Occasionally it’s even true, but the expression sounds so important, it evokes such responsibility, that it’s hard for scientists, technologists, journalists, historians, economists, and futurists to hold back the urge, even if the decision to be made is minor, the outcome arbitrary.

So recognize that it is with a full understanding that I say to you, right now, we stand at the crossroads of creativity. We’ve stood here before, we will stand here again, but I can say categorically that we stand here now and it is an important and exciting time to be a photographer.

To our left lies the path toward a technological utopia, a world where anything can be achieved in post-processing, where your creative vision can be phoned in from the desktop. On October 19th, Lytro announced the release of the Lytro “light field” camera. A digital camera smaller than a TV remote that allows you to take a picture and choose a focal point later.

The Lytro camera adds “focal point” to the list of characteristics that can be changed through software long after the photo has been taken. Among those are now white balance, tone curve, color balance, overexposure (to a degree), lens distortion, and likely more that I’m having trouble coming up with right now.

To our right lies the path toward a simpler time, toward the nexus of art and craft where technology assists in some small fashion the mind and hands of the artist, whose vision is crisp and whose execution is informed by experience. In September of last year, Leica released their second digital camera, the M9, a camera with so few features it seems, at first glance, a cataclysmic engineering gaffe.

The M9 is an 18 megapixel digital camera with no auto-focus, no single-lens reflex or through-the-lens view, and a metering system that barely qualifies as a “system” at all. It essentially puts a NASA-quality full-frame 35mm sensor behind a camera from the 1950s.

Though these two events do not precisely coincide on the calendar, they are so perfectly juxtaposed as to appear planned. The Lytro asks a photographer to think less—about focus, at least—and provides the software tools to create images with perfect focus. The Leica M9 asks a photographer to take back the responsibilities that have been held firmly by technology for the past decade or more and gives the photographer nothing beyond exquisite glass and one of the best digital sensors on the market.

To accept the Lytro as the future of photography is to embrace an art practically devoid of error. Conversely, to accept the Leica M9 as the future of photography is to embrace human imperfection.

Creativity has never been, and surely will never be, stifled by progress. No tool, not even the Lytro, can extinguish the creative spirit. Light field technology joins the ranks of tools like RAW format and Photoshop, neither of which suffocated any artist that I know of. Quite to the contrary, precision has historically led to new frontiers of expression as Ansel Adams demonstrated by forming his f/64 group and defying the unfocused, painterly style prevalent at the time with his staggeringly sharp and detailed images.

Nevertheless, and at the risk of sounding unintentionally critical of Ansel Adams, there is always a human element in art and the less you can perceive of the craft, the further a work creeps from an embodiment of human spirit to a science of human mind. Surely an image of social gravity executed with infinite precision, lacking nearly any flaw, is nevertheless the vision of its creator. But is content, devoid of interpretation, the sole measure by which expression should be judged?

The Lytro camera is a tool that frees the artist from one more shackle, but does it also take away one more opportunity for the artist to express their humanity?

The Leica M9 is a tool that says to the artist, Realize your vision, control for yourself nearly every aspect of your work’s creation, and when you fail to perform at the level of a machine, burn the machine. It is a camera for those who see beauty in the flaws, and there is a purity and a nobility to that.

Descending from the clouds for a moment, I should also mention that the Lytro camera is now on sale for about $400 ($500 if you want it in bright red), and that the Leica M9 can be found for almost $7,000, without a lens. I mention this because I expect people to call me out for comparing apples to oranges. Believe me, I already know.

But you don’t have to take my word for it:

• The Lytro camera, from Lytro.com
• Lytro Launches, via The Online Photographer
• Leica M9 Hands-on Review, from dpreview
• An M9 in Paris, via Luminous Landscape, an in-depth review

It’s a sad day for Olympus, the venerable maker of both artistic and scientific optics equipment based in Japan. Business news outlets are reporting that Olympus has allegedly covered up decades of financial losses through questionably large payments to advisers and other tricks that could only be described as “cooking the books.”

Bloomberg’s photographer Tomohiro Ohsumi captured the photo at right of Olympus president Shuichi Takayama bowing his head during a news conference. On the front page of the Olympus global site, Takayama writes:

We wish to make a profound apology for all of the distress and trouble caused due to the recent series of media reports and fall in the stock prices triggered by our recent change in President.

No business executive longs to write words like those.

Read more coverage:

• Olympus Admits to Hiding Losses, The Wall Street Journal
• Olympus Says Top Executives Hid Losses For Decades, NPR
• Olympus Hid Losses With Acquisition Fees, Bloomberg

I’ve posted about Canon’s involvement in the filmmaking industry before; in my cheekily titled Canon 5D Mark II in the (Dr.) House I reported on the use of the EOS-5D Mark II to film an entire season finale episode of House M.D.

Since then, the hipster Vimeo community has been running their Converse All-Stars threadbare filming hundreds of hours of content with the 5D Mark II and thoroughly enjoying it. But the 5D Mark II remains, at its core, a still camera. I mean, that’s what it was designed to do. The ability to record video is a cute add-on, and although it works very well for small-scale filmmakers in oversized scarves and skinny jeans, it falls short on many features a crew would need to film a real movie (regardless of wardrobe).

At the same time, high-end optics mogul Jim Jannard, founder of the well-known Oakley eyewear company, has been building a new empire around his peculiarly named Red cameras, poised to literally transform the filmmaking industry with modular, extensible, relatively inexpensive (operative word here, relatively), and staggeringly performant digital cine cameras.

So performant, in fact, that Peter Jackson was reported to have bought 48 of the things to film his upcoming Hobbit movie, and now word is out that James Cameron slapped around $3 million on the proverbial barrel head for 50 or so of Jannard’s black-and-red hand-machined devices.

On the tails of this nearly complete transformation of the entire filmmaking industry into yet another contributor to our practically unsustainable hoard of digital data, Canon has announced that it is throwing its hat into the ring with what they are calling the Cinema EOS C300.

The camera will reportedly hit the market in early 2012, but it has already been making the rounds in some exclusive circles as Canon worked with filmmakers to ensure that all of the proper functionality was in place. Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and Canon Explorer of Light Vincent Laforet was invited to use the C300 in his upcoming short film Möbius and Vimeo was there behind the scenes to document that experience.

In the Vimeo piece, Laforet gushes about the C300; its image quality, the extent to which Canon integrated filmmakers’ specific suggestions, and about Canon’s new cine-specific lens, the 30-300mm f/2.9-3.7, which, balanced on his knee, looks like it probably weighs at least ten pounds.

The retail cost is said to be around $20,000, which is just above the low target for these digital cine cameras (Red cameras can cost anywhere between $17,000 and $60,000 depending on options, and even that is a fraction of what film cinema cameras cost).

Is Canon shifting their business toward the cinema given that Nikon is kicking them up and down the street with huge and practically noise-free sensors? Are they facing financial challenges that has prompted them to search for more revenue streams? Will this foray into the cinema industry forsake those of us who are still fiercely loyal to their still camera brand?

These questions and more will undoubtedly be answered in the coming year as the C300 is released into the wild.

• Read the press release, see product photos, and watch the Laforet video on dpreview: Canon unveils Cinema EOS C300 interchangeable-lens video camera
• Haje Jan Kamps also covers the release and his reactions at Pixiq: Canon vs Red: The battle for amateur filmmakers is about to commence

The goal of photography is to capture a moment, an idea, a thought, or an event and suspend it in time. Whether it is journalistic, editorial, representational, abstract, or artistic is not important in reaching that goal. Occasionally, as a photographer is striving toward their singular goal, they unwittingly meet another one.

Such is the case with these amazing depression-era color photographs published by the International Business Times; though they were taken at the time as recordings of events (though demonstrating the aesthetic sense of the accomplished photographer), the social and cultural distance between the depression and today has vaulted these images into pure artistry. They are truly breathtaking; scenes from a past world, a past America.

View the entire set of photographs on International Business Times: Rare Color Photos from Depression Era.

The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” has been around since at least the ’20s—according to Wikipedia—and it’s just as true today as it was then. The phrase refers to our ability to absorb information faster in a visual mode than in a reading mode. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that all living creatures are born with the ability to see and to recognize (to varying degrees), but humans’ ability to write is something that we created.

As photographers, we are acutely aware of the truth in that statement. If you had to describe just one of your photographs in enough detail for someone else to draw it, which only touches the very mechanical surface of the depth of content that a photograph can represent, it would certainly take thousands of words. But never was this statement more demonstrably true than this month, May of 2011.

I don’t usually write about current events outside of the photography trade, but in this case I will make an exception because it has significant relevance to us. Only days ago, American special forces raided a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and for countless other acts of terrorism around the globe.

When the military undertakes an operation like this they are very careful to document everything and this case was no exception. It is now well known that at least one gruesome photograph of a shot-in-the-head Osama bin Laden exists, but such a photograph has not been released, under any circumstances or terms, to anyone.

More is shown of the true power of the photograph by this particular photograph’s absence than would ever have been shown by its release.

The Obama administration is acutely aware of what could happen if people were shown this “incendiary image,” as journalist Sean O’Hagan described it in The Guardian last Friday. By every measurement, this type of documentary recording is an area where the photograph has always held at least an assumed power, though the public may not give it much thought. This power is what keeps photojournalists in business and they hone their craft to amplify its effects. Still, if there is any greater moral to this story, it is that photography is a truly influential medium and there could be no higher calling than to use its emotional and instructive abilities for good.

Michael Johnston over at The Online Photographer has spoken to Michael Reichmann and informs us that the site experienced a fatal crash and is currently in the process of being restored from a backup. If they’ve crossed their Ts and dotted their Is, everything should be back up again soon.

Having gone through more than one fatal server crash, I know how nerve-racking it can be (and my site gets around 1% of the traffic of The Luminous Landscape!) Best of luck to Michael and his crew in getting things running again!

Looking back on these five years, there are some particular posts that stand out in my mind. Many of them, as you might imagine, are irrelevant to most of my visitors. If only there was some way that I could find out which articles the Internet loves the most…

Fortunately, since mid-2007, I have been using Google Analytics to record and analyze the traffic on this site. I thought, since this is sort of an anniversary of the blog, it would be appropriate to share some of the gems from these last four years that I have on record.

Without further ado, the Super Single-Serving Wrap-Up!

Top Five Most-Read Posts

In terms of pure traffic, these posts are by far the most popular, either because they attract the largest number of visitors who are searching for something and found it here, or they were mentioned or linked from other sites the most.

5

With 2,002 total unique pageviews, Art Concepts in Photography, Part 2: Composition comes in fifth.

This was the second part of a rather short-lived series of articles I did on the high-level design concepts relevant to photography. Though I enjoyed writing them all, this chapter on composition is probably the most widely applicable, so I can understand why it’s so popular.

4

Coming in at 2,501 unique pageviews, and possessing the distinction of being quite possibly one of my own personal favorites of all time, Histograms, Huh? claims fourth place.

I wrote this article when I, myself, was exploring Photoshop as a post-processing tool, and although I knew in my mind what a histogram did, I wanted to explore all of the details of its behavior and share that with you, my loyal reader. Using a more illustrative approach than I was ever able to find, I explain exactly what a histogram does.

3

Claiming, quite rightfully in my opinion, third place with 2,847 unique views is Mastering the Only Five Camera Settings.

In the technically dense content of this article lies the answer to virtually every question I have ever been asked by beginner and intermediate photographers during my workshops. The fundamental balancing act among each of the five variables you, as the creator, may control is the crux of the craft of photography and the foundation for everything else you will ever learn. This article is deserving of its third place position.

2

Due most likely to its contentious proposition, second place is claimed by Why Bubble Levels Are a Waste of Money, with 3,905 unique pageviews.

It was a lot of fun to write this diatribe against a small, fluid-filled piece of plastic that, at around $25, is likely to be one of the least expensive items in any photographer’s kit. Still, the fact that they probably make them for $0.50 and my lasting belief that they are utterly useless combine to power this article nearly to the top of the list.

At the end of the article I concede that shooting panoramas might warrant the use of a bubble level. Since then I’ve gone out to Yellowstone and shot multiple panoramas hand-held, so really, don’t buy a bubble level, they’re a waste of money.

1

Finally, numero uno, the king, the absolutely most trafficked article on the entire site… With a whopping 12,343 unique pageviews, which is three times more than the second place article, and almost twice the pageviews that my front page receives, is…

Neutral Density Filters.

I know. I have no idea why this article is so popular. According to Analytics, the number one traffic source for this page is the popular social link site StumbleUpon, which contributed the lion’s share of pageviews. Apparently there are a lot of photographers on StumbleUpon.

My reason for writing this article on what seems like, and in point of fact really is, a numbingly boring topic was my search for neutral density filters to add to my kit. When I started researching, I immediately discovered that several scales are used to measure their opacity (or “density,” actually), so I decided to figure out what was going on and share it with everyone.

Apparently it was very helpful for a bunch of folks.

So that wraps up this wrap-up. I hope you had fun skimming over the top five most popular articles I’ve written in the past few years, and if you have any favorites of your own, feel free to drop them into the comments. I always welcome comments from you guys, you’re the best readers in the world. Because you’re reading my blog. And because you’re awesome. The two things go hand-in-hand, really.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Dennis Hopper passed away just days ago (the 29th of May, 2010). As an actor, I personally loved his roles in such classics as Super Mario Bros., Waterworld, and Speed, though he is best known for Easy Rider, Rebel Without a Cause, Cool Hand Luke, and more. He certainly had a knack for the dramatic, but what I didn’t know was that he also had a knack for photography.

The “Chasing Light” blog has a wonderful post containing photos that Hopper took through the years (all of them black and white). I was very impressed with them; they show attention to composition and subject comparable to those of a seasoned professional or serious hobbyist. You could certainly call Hopper a serious hobbyist, though he was more widely known for his feature films than for his photography, painting, and sculpture.

Over at artnet, you can view (and attempt to purchase) 39 other photographs by Hopper that are held by various galleries.

Whether you are into Hopper’s photographs or not, let’s take a moment to remember a great actor and inspirational creator.