On BBC4 tonight Roundhead or Cavalier: Which One Are You?

In this programme, celebrities and historians reveal that modern Britain is still defined by the battle between the two tribes. The Cavaliers represent a Britain of panache, pleasure and individuality. They are confronted by the Roundheads, who stand for modesty, discipline, equality and state intervention.

The ideas which emerged 350 years ago shaped our democracy, civil liberties and constitution. They also create a cultural divide that influences how we live, what we wear and even what we eat and drink. Individuals usually identify with one tribe or the other, but sometimes they need some elements of the enemy’s identity – David Cameron seeks a dash of the down-to-earth Roundhead, while Ed Miliband looks for some Cavalier charisma.

Dare you miss it? Hopefully you won’t see me in it as I was trying to get my own pics while the SK stuff was filmed. Which am I? Definitely a Roundhead!

There’s a fascinating article about publishing to the iPad by Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review. In Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps  he argues “The future of media on mobile devices isn’t with applications but with the Web.”:

Here, the recent history of the Financial Times is instructive. Last June, the company pulled its iPad and iPhone app from iTunes and launched a new version of its website written in HTML5, which can optimize the site for the device a reader is using and provide many features and functions that are applike. For a few months, the FT continued to support the app, but on May 1 the paper chose to kill it altogether.

And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.

In InDesign CS6 there are tools to maintain alternative landscape and portrait versions, but even if designers are smart enough to use them (which I rather doubt) maybe the problem is indeed more fundamental?

Here’s the interesting story behind the striking and rather gruesome picture used on the Photoshop CS6 box. Interesting for me because I didn’t expect it was a Russian rather than an American artist, and because I hadn’t the faintest idea how the effect had been achieved. The artist Oleg Dou says “I am looking for something bordering between the beautiful and the repulsive, living and dead. I want to attain the feeling of presence one can get when walking by a plastic manikin…” It’s clearly a very fine line….

Sadly I don’t have six grand burning a hole in my pocket. Even then I’m not sure a shiny new B&W-only Leica M Monochrom would be on my shopping list – certainly not ahead of a Nikon D800E and a couple of fancy lenses.

Much though I love my black and white, one of the things I love about digital photography is that you shoot in colour and can leave until afterwards the decision about how to separate the colours into black and white tones. Instead of experimenting in Lightroom or Photoshop and deciding at your leisure, you’d need to get it right in camera with a careful choice of glass filter.

Still, it’s an interesting idea, and I’m sure it produces fine pictures. Thanks to Leica’s wise use of DNG as their raw format, it’s already supported in the free copy of Lightroom that comes with the camera, as well as Silver Efex Pro.

Though I’ve always been interested in the photojournalism of the 60s and Vietnam in particular, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this wonderful picture before.

It’s by Horst Faas and there are a couple of interesting articles marking his death – see the NY Times and the Guardian. Surely one of the great war photographers – and just as importantly one who enabled others’ work to become iconic too.

From the North Korean leadership school of modesty, here’s the first review I’ve seen of my Advanced Digital Black and White Photography. It’s from last week’s Amateur Photographer and is short and sweet – the book’s “readable and inspiring”.

Like the first edition, it is an end-to-end treatment of the subject from camera to print. In between it covers every known method of doing black and white in Photoshop, but most of all it tells you which ones are now best forgotten, and why. The first edition was bang up to date when it was first published and so was the first book on B&W to feature Photoshop CS3′s B&W Adjustment Layer – as well as Lightroom and Aperture. That content is now updated, and there’s a lot more material on Lightroom and Silver Efex Pro.

It now seems to be available at Amazon UK and Amazon US, and translated versions will follow – including Korean.

Now it’s disappeared onto a Sky pay channel which isn’t on my Virgin cable service, that’s the end of Mad Men for me. Too bad, I always found it one of the more interesting things on telly (at least until The Killing) and loved the intro’s Saul Bass homage.

But someone just tweeted this series of pictures by James Minchin III which I’d missed. It shows behind-the-scenes moments such as this one of Draper playing with his iPhone. The black and white seems so appropriate it makes you wonder why they didn’t do the TV series the same way.

The pictures are here too

There’s an interesting and wide-ranging interview with Peter Krogh at The Week in Photography – including a LOL moment when Peter disinters my “DAM as serial monogamy” quip (thanks Peter!).

When something gets in the way of what I’m trying to photograph, I’m no Mother Teresa. Last week my tripod was set up below Stockley Bridge, a stone bridge above Seathwaite. Most walkers only pause briefly on the bridge as it’s where the path to Great Gable or Scafell begins to climb upwards. Some might want to sit down on its low walls, but they see you and tacitly acknowledge your being there first gives you a greater right to the scene, or they just don’t want to be used in another damn photographer’s snaps. Mostly people move on after a few moments. So I’d like to pretend I was happy to wait for the couple who said hello and then promptly sat down right in the middle of my picture. But it became obvious they were staying for a while, so I was looking in their direction and doing my best to make it obvious I was waiting for them. It was only after 10 minutes that I started looking at my watch, with a grand sweep of my arm, and only after another 20 that they left. And after all that time, I wasn’t sure it was that good a composition anyway.

While I’ll confess to getting irritated and trying a bit of body language to get my way, I always try not to get too worked up. Had this couple stood up and pointed to the right, they would have made the photograph. In other words, what I try to tell myself is that there’s a fair chance that the unwanted element can easily become the subject of your picture or even play a more important role in the final result.

This is exactly what happened with this shot from yesterday. The sun was sinking below the hills behind these rocky outcrops and with almost no breeze Crummock Water had become beautifully-still. An idyllic summer’s evening – in March – and the light was crystal-clear. And then some people started up a barbecue. What you’re seeing isn’t mist, but thick smoke drifting across from behind a wall, and as soon as I noticed “the problem” I’d moved closer to get more of it in the frame and make the most of it being backlit by the sun. And the funny thing – these people apologised for spoiling my picture.

Photoshop CS6 was released as a public beta last night – see 20 things you need to know and 7 things to know about the new interface.

Now who do you know who goes to Blea Tarn and does lots of B&W? Buy the next Practical Photoshop for my thoughts on what’s there for photographers.

Also see the post Painted landscapes which uses the amazing Oil Paint filter – it’s great fun.

This was my second walk in three days up to the old explosives store near Castle Crag. The first day I was plagued by tiny raindrops that got on the grad filter and were beautifully in focus at f22, and yesterday the weather seemed to be playing the same game with me. Eventually it cleared though, and this was my favourite from the day.

Shot with Lee 3 stop soft neutral grad, then adjusted in Lightroom 4 with a grad filter to beef up the sky.

April’s edition of Practical Photoshop doesn’t just include a 6 page tutorial I wrote on using Photoshop’s Mixer Brush – the cover DVD includes a 20 minute video tutorial I recorded to accompany it.

I don’t really think of myself as a graphic artist and my painting skills are best suited to doors and walls, but I’ve always been interested in art and know my Raphaels from my Titians. Sadly I confess I do call most Italian masters by their Italian names, which helps mutual understanding when talking with M and Italian friends but sounds incredibly pretentious in English company. Anyway, this tutorial is a return to the themes of my Fine Art Cookbook in which I showed how photographs can be manipulated in Photoshop to resemble well-known paintings or styles. If only the Mixer Brush and CS5′s amazing Bristle Brushes had been available back then, because they can work together to create stunning oil painting effects. For me it was a pretty good excuse to spend time examining Turners in the National Gallery, and next month’s article on Seurat is almost in the can.

If you do get to see the video, I’d love to know what you think!

A little late this year but finally my plans for Focus on Imaging 2012 are falling into place. I’ll be there on Tuesday and Wednesday showing Lightroom for Adobe. Come along and say hello.

For me the oddest thing will be Monday – I’ll actually get to see the show. If you attend Focus as a regular visitor, you may not appreciate how little time exhibitors get to look round. I try to arrive early each day and wander round, but everyone is busy getting the stands ready for opening time, and once the doors are opened you just don’t get a moment to yourself. I know I should take breaks, but I find I can’t really relax until the evening so I just stay on the stand and enjoy the buzz from exchanging ideas. But this year I am due in Birmingham on Monday evening, so I plan to arrive early and just see the show. I may even get to heckle other presenters….

Some lovely black and white images are at Adrian Davis’s site, or rather:

Actually, brown and white! I like color images too, but for personal, fine art work, I prefer monochrome with a slight warm tone. I print exclusively on Hahnemuhle Torchon, which is a highly textured surface. I like to think of, and refer to my prints as, “Neo-Vintage” as they looked slightly dated but use a modern, digital process. On many occasions I’ve been asked if my prints are Platinum on textured papers! I get a big kick when asked this question by the viewer!

His site’s slightly-odd organization means the best starting point is here and there’s next-to-nothing about him. Best to see this interview at ND Magazine.

Earlier this week I was looking through some sample books that Blurb sent me and noticed a colour picture of Madagascar. Initially I was only going to look up the photographer’s web site for one of my nieces who is going down there this summer. I didn’t find the colour picture but I did find that the photographer, Beth Moon, a new name to me, seems to specialise in black and white and particularly trees:

The criteria I use for choosing particular trees are basically three: age, immense size or notable history. I research the locations by a number of methods; history books, botanical books, tree registers, newspaper articles and information from friends and travelers.

The process I use for exhibition prints is platinum/palladium printing. By using the longest lasting photographic process, I hope to speak about survival, not only of man and nature’s but to photography’s survival as well. For each print I mix ground platinum and palladium metals with iron oxide, making a tincture that is hand-coated onto heavy watercolor paper and exposed to light. With this process the metals are actually embedded into the paper. A platinum print can last for centuries, drawing on the common theme of time and survival, pairing photographic subject and process.

The sets that most impressed me were Portraits of Time and islands of the dragon’s blood which shows the amazing trees of Socotra in the Indian Ocean.

Ian Bramham is an architect and photographer based in the Peak District but seems to prefer coastal regions for his mainly black and white work.

This was my favourite, from Ravenglass in Cumbria, but also see his Morecambe Bay

The Guardian notes that Chris Killip’s retrospective is being held in Essen and asks “why is great British documentary photography overlooked at home?”

Surely, too, a group retrospective of the above-named pioneers of British photojournalism [Tony Ray-Jones, Graham Smith, Chris Steele-Perkins and Brian Griffin] is long overdue? My instinct is that this kind of work has long been out of fashion with our arbiters of culture in Britain. It is black-and-white, gritty, hard hitting and politically provocative – the photography critic, Gerry Badger, correctly described In Flagrante as “taken from the point of view that opposed everything Thatcher stood for”.

I’m not sure it’s true that we’ve lost our appetite for that kind of work – maybe some of it’s now under the “street photography” umbrella. But with the film, the economy grinding along the bottom, and the Argies getting one-eyed about the Falklands again (let’s see if they give the pampas back to the native peoples), it does seems the right time for a Thatcher-era retrospective.

Anyway, Killip is one of my long-time favourites, so much so that I still remember being blown away when I saw big prints of these two pictures, and he currently has a small web site. As well as some pictures which didn’t get in the retrospective, there is a slideshow of his series Seacoal.

Based enviably close to the Lake District,  I wasn’t sure if Stewart Smith‘s web site was a fell-walking blog as there’s so much about climbing half a dozen fells before breakfast and camping at 2500 feet, while his excellent photographs seem to be most easily accessed by clicking links in the tag cloud.

 … principally concerned with catching the fleeting and dramatic light that can play across the crags and ridges of the mountains at the extreme ends of the day; light that is capable of transforming an already enthralling scene into something remarkable and almost surreally beautiful.

The interpretation is of an almost primal landscape devoid of human intrusion, the Lake District mountains as they have been for thousands of years and will continue to be for thousands more.

Not a lot of black and white but I do like this view of the Langdales.

Peter Hogan seems to be a black and white guy – at least, calling his site MonochromePhotography,com is a pretty strong clue. No doubt I enjoyed his site the more for its having a decent number of Lake District scenes, like this one from near Ashness Gate on Derwentwater.

I suspect the pictures are quite a lot better than they appear from the rather poorly-compressed soft versions on the site.

Alex Nail's Pavey Ark from Blea Rigg

I’ve been stuck indoors recording a tutorial about Photoshop’s wonderful Mixer Brush for the last few days. Fun though it was, it took me a while to get to grips with Camtasia and much longer to become at all happy with the sound of my own voice. Combining a vaguely-Mancunian nasal drone with my background asthma doesn’t lift my confidence, so maybe next time I’ll pretend I’m John Cooper Clarke and give Photoshop the full Beasely Street treatment?

Anyway, stuck inside when we’ve had a couple of light snowfalls has given me itchy feet, even more so when I know there’s been snow up in the Lakes and when I see this gorgeous shot from the Langdales by Alex Nail. There aren’t nearly enough Lake District shots on his site, but this one alone is worth a visit.