Meanwhile, over at the highly productive and entertaining auspiciousdragon.net, Colin wrote an entry in response to a comment I made on a previous entry (still with me here ?), which I turn would like to expand on. Colin wrote:

I recently wrote a short essay called In defence of the non-luminous landscape where I tried to draw a distinction between landscape photography that met cultural ideals and landscape photography that was a much more personal reaction to the land. Both forms can be satisfying to look at, but I find the cultural norm sort very unsatisfying to produce. I'm not in the business of making mass market calendars

This leads me to wonder about these "cultural ideals". Are succesful landscape photographers such as David Noton, Charlie Waite or David Ward, following cultural ideals ? Can we consider that they do not have a personal reaction, because they are popular ? Is there something inherently wrong with emphasising beauty in landscape ? Is it perhaps that "real" photographers only do black & white ? In fact, I'd even say that the sort of B&W stuff which typically decorates "tasteful" Habitat-furnished homes is a far worse offender when it comes to purely decorative unchallenging dreck masquerading as art. We are all part of a culture. We are conditioned by that culture. We see wild landscape as beautiful, or at least interesting, whereas in an earlier culture we'd have seen it as hostile or just a wasteland of non-viable farmland. Cultural conditioning works both ways, it is both shaped by us and shapes us. Maybe there is some confusion between "cultural ideals" and "popular culture", or even "pandering to the lowest denominator". But to be honest, if you line up a series of standard "local views" postcards in any seaside tourist shop, alongside the same scenes shot by, say, Joe Cornish, I bet a pound to a penny that the flat, midday sun, blue sky "Greetings from Sunny Skegness" will outsell the more artistic stuff by 20:1. Just because a photo has a visual attractiveness, or is taken in dawn light, does not make it necessarly unchallenging or even unsettling, and it certainly does not rule out a "personal reaction" on the part of the photographer.

Zuerich camera retailer Foto Baern has certainly come up with a very post-modern take on film 😊



If you can't work it out, the photos show shop window layouts, mimicking football fields, where the "spectators" are 35mm film canisters of various types, and the "players" are cameras...all digital apart from the odd Leica.
Some of the films (shock, horror, etc) are even unused!!

I never really intended to publish anything political here, but sometimes enough is enough. Quoting from a report from today's Independent online edition:

Humpback whales - the best loved and one of the most endangered of all the giant mammals - are to be slaughtered for the first time in more than 30 years, in defiance of an international ban. Japan is to put plans to kill the humpbacks before a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, the body that regulates world whaling, on the West Indian island of St Kitts today. The Japanese claim the whales will be used for "scientific research", a loophole that gives a licence to kill.

There isn't so much that any individual can do about this. The arrogance of the Japanese authorities beggars belief, and some extremely non-politically correct thoughts concerning harpoon targets are crossing my mind. It is extremely difficult to boycott Japanese products if you're into photography, but where ever I have a choice, from now onwards, that's what I'm doing. I always preferred yellow film boxes to green.

Following earlier posts about this, today I managed to find time to evaluate Iridient RAW Developer 1.5.1 against CaptureOne Pro 3.7.4, for Olympus E-1 RAWs. The results are clear: RAW Developer is extracting more detail and more neutral colour than CaptureOne. As a long time CaptureOne user, I'm a bit shocked... There are plenty of RAW developers (lower case) out there, but a strong motive for my moving to Iridient RAW Developer (let's call it IRD from now on) is that it has no pretence to be a workflow tool. It doesn't even try to read images from newly inserted cards, thank heavens. Therefore I can use efficiently in tandem with iView MediaPro, which is exactly what I want. To be fair, Adobe Camera RAW could also be used in this way, as can Olympus Studio. CaptureOne cannot, easily, because of its sessions concept, and obviously do-everything solutions like Aperture and Lightroom cannot. Concentrating on RAW development alone has allowed Iridient to focus effort on delivering what must be the most extensive range of adjustment tools in any program of this type. It is complex, and it does take a bit of getting used to moving from CaptureOne (for example there are 4 different sharpening methods, of which 3 are pretty esoteric). You can do an enormous amount of fiddling, but, fortunately, you don't have to - the default settings are pretty good. Although the workflow issue is important, image quality is still a prime factor. From what I've seen so far it seems that IRD has little to fear here. I settled on a test image which has detail at various scales, and also has a sample of the dreaded, Tetris-inducing bright red in it.

The full image

100% crop, processed in C1Pro v3.7.4

100% crop, processed in IRD v1.5.1

Looking at these two crops, the first thing that has to be said is that the IRD version is basically "out of the box", although I did decide to use the R-L deconvolution at low settings, as this seems to to restore sharpness lost in the demosaicing processing / anti-aliasing filter. In C1Pro, finally I turned sharpening off, because even using the very low settings I had settled on as "capture sharpen" defaults, it seemed over-sharpened. I also turned "pattern suppression" on, but I was really surprised to see the infamous "tetris effect" in various places, and not just in red. It isn't clearly visible in the JPEG here, but one area is outlined in green. As for reds, well C1Pro for whatever reason did not tetrisise (new verb - you saw it here first!) them, but it certainly over-saturates at default settings. Here I am using -20 on the saturation scale, which is quite drastic - and it still looks wrong compared to IRD. To my eyes, IRD brings out more detail, including highlight detail, and delivers a more natural colour. The R-L deconvolution sharpening lends itself very well to different levels of output sharpening. The IRD versions shows a little low level tetrisisation in the reds, but it doesn't show up in prints. I've been considering switching to RAW Developer for some time. Now that I've finally found a few hours to evaluate it, I've decided to do so. It's a great piece of software at a very fair price. I'm not saying that CaptureOne is no good. I've been using it happily for 2 years. But I doubt that PhaseOne see much point in improving Olympus RAW performance for the tiny user base which all indications show they have. I think they are more likely to focus on the higher end DSLRs and their own medium format backs in future. CaptureOne can still sometimes be a very obscure program, and the session concept is too limited to provide a full image management solution, whilst getting in the way of programs like iView. It saved me from being stuck with Olympus Studio, but for now, it is probably going to be put out to pasture...

Following Bernard's comment to the previous article, I tried giving RAW Developer and CaptureOne a better chance. Here is the IRD version, using the new R-L deconvolution sharpening (aside, I wonder if this is what FocusFixer uses ?), set at radius 1, iterations 10, as Bernard suggests. Noise reduction is off: It's certainly better, but I wouldn't say that the Tetris effect is gone, exactly. I was unfair to CaptureOne, as I'd left "pattern noise suppression", designed precisely for this problem, switched off. So here it is switched on, with my standard light capture sharpening (amount 10, threshold 1, standard look) and noise suppression off. Everything else is left to defaults. Well, it is better than before, and actually setting noise suppression up a bit helps even more. But it is still there. NOTE: in both cases, the JPG compression on these images is artificially enhancing the effect, but about 20%. Finally, does it matter if you can't see it on a print ? Generally speaking, no. In 99% of cases, no. But it can limit the scope for enlargements, and since resolution is not the E-1's strongest feature, it is worth considering. It still seems for absolute quality, Olympus Studio is best, but with a lot of caveats. Raw Developer seems to be about at the level of CaptureOne, and at a considerably lower price, with a much more dynamic release schedule, it looks like a very worthy candidate. But CaptureOne is still my first choice. Until further notice.