Coming up in May and June, another show at Za Restaurant in Arlington. Stay tuned for details about an opening celebration.

Photos hanging in Front Street Coffeehouse in Salem, MA

About two months after my conversation with Paul I was shooting The Red Elvises (Russian surf rock, if you can imagine such a thing) at TT The Bear’s in Cambridge and accidentally set my camera for the mode where it shoots in both RAW and JPG simultaneously.  This gave me the perfect opportunity to look into the supposed merits of RAW.  The light at TT’s that night (as is often the case at shows) was downright awful.  There wasn’t much of it and what there was was mostly red. Usually in these situations I fall back on black and white, because there’s only so much help you can give to an image that is too red.  Well, it turns out you can do a lot more if you start from RAW.

Here are 3 images of Elena Shemankova, the keyboard player for the Elvises.  The first image is straight from the camera.  It really gives you an idea of what the lighting conditions were that night.  Image #2 is my best effort to do color correction starting from the JPG version of the image.  Image #3 is my final image after I color corrected starting with the RAW version of the image.  The improvement is striking.

Original shot, right out of the camera

Color corrected JPG version

Final color corrected JPG working from RAW

As you can see, there’s just no comparison.  There is so much more information stored in the RAW file that gets thrown away when the camera converts to JPG.  It’s all this extra data that allows a wider range of color correction and exposure improvements.  Exposure correction is the number one reason I’ve seen people recommend RAW.  I don’t have any examples on hand, but it is definitely the case that there’s a wider dynamic range captured in the pure sensor data.  Areas of an image that would be all white or all black (and stay that way no matter what you did) in a JPG capture can often yield more data if you’re working from a RAW sensor dump.

Now, there are two reasons that I had avoided messing with RAW for a while, and I think both would be legitimate reasons to have second thoughts about it.

First, the images are larger than their JPG conversions.  The NEF files that come out of my 12 megapixel Nikon D700 are about 14.3 Megs, while the JPGs are about 4.  Disk space is pretty cheap these days, but that’s still a big difference, especially when it comes to how many images you can get on a memory card.

Second, it adds a step to the workflow, and that’s a little annoying.  RAW file formats are all proprietary and vary from camera to camera, even for the same makers.  Lightroom 1 (yes, I’m behind the times) won’t natively read the NEF format that comes out of a D700, so I first put all the NEF files on disk, use Adobe’s free DNG converter to convert them all to the Adobe Digital Negative format (basically a RAW format that all Adobe products can handle), and then import them to lightroom.  It’s not so bad, but it takes a little more work and a little more organization.  Only you can decide if the improved results are worth the extra effort.  If you’re shooting in reasonable lighting conditions or are just doing quick shots that you don’t want to spend a lot of time messing around with, RAW may not pay off.  But if you’re pushing the limits of what your camera wants to do, I think the choice is pretty clear.  For all intents and purposes I’m pretty much trying to take pictures in the dark when I go shoot shows, so shooting in RAW is a no brainer.

Thanks Paul!

Esthema performs regularly in the Boston area  and if you like instrumental music with a middle eastern feel, I recommend that you check them out. You can listen to some of their tracks at their website.

Andy Milas of Esthema

Tery Lemanis of Esthema

For more photos, check out the Esthema gallery here.

I hadn’t shot a show at Ryles before.  The room is set up with a lot of small tables coming right up to the stage.  If you like to sit and eat while you watch a band, this could be a place for you.  The stage is very shallow, which allowed me to be closer to the drummer than usual (they’re frequently well back from the rest of the band) and it was a natural space between the stage and tables that let me move around as needed, but the backgrounds were a little busy for my taste.  The blue light from the window neon lights added a neat effect in some shots though.

http://weareradiocontrol.com/
http://www.myspace.com/bookkeeperrocks
http://fatheroctopus.com
http://ventsucks.com

Photos:
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For my next trick: finding something to do with 13 large framed photos when August rolls around and the next artist takes his or her place on the walls at Za.  For now, I’m just going to enjoy my first art show.

angles by Stephen Gray

Stephen Gray, xgray on Flickr, has totally altered the way I think about photography. His work forces me to see the world around me differently, and completely changed the way I think about composition. Shadows and negative space also figure prominently in his work, and it is his photos with brilliant sunlight and deep shadows cutting across the frame that most capture my imagination. xgray is also a master of the found scene and taking simple, mundane objects and making the viewer look at them in a different way. This is also the first photographer whose work I have seen and then consciously tried to emulate. I’m sure that if I can learn to see the world like he does, which is very much how the camera sees it, I will be a better photographer.

I sent him a few questions and his answers are below, along with a handful of my favorite images he’s produced.

You can see more shots that I feel best represent what I find fascinating about Stephen Gray’s work in a Flickr gallery I created here and you can find my (so far limited) experimentation with doing work like this here.

Tell me a little bit about yourself and how long have you been taking photographs, how you got into it and what first drew you to photography? Do you work professionally or is photography more of a hobby?

I’ve always had cameras around, but have been serious about my photography for probably the past five or six years. In general I’m a very visually oriented person.

As a child I had a great interest in art and drawing. One of the earliest things I can recall wanting to be when I grew up was an artist (the other thing was a general. So yeah, you could say my interests were “varied”.), but at some point I got away from that and ended up, as an adult, working on computer software and websites. Of course, my visual nature has drew me to web and interface design work.

The only other creative outlet I’ve really had is writing. I used to write a lot, typically a very descriptive spontaneous prose type of style. I really enjoyed describing scenes and events from memory in great sensory detail. Conjuring the images and writing them down, but at some point I hit a wall with that and couldn’t go any further. I guess it was a form of writer’s block. Around this time (2002) two things happened. I developed an interest in Zen Buddhism and I got my first digital camera. Now instead of breaking the world down into text, using the camera I would just see it as it exists.

Your photos reveal a fairly unique way of seeing the world. Do you see your surroundings like this all the time, or only through the camera? How did you develop this sort of vision and what other photographers, if any, led you in this direction? What, if anything, are you trying to show the world with your work?

afternoon by Stephen Gray

I feel that looking at the world through a viewfinder, whether I have a camera with me or not, is really the key to capturing the images that I do. So I’d definitely say I see the world this way all the time. (When I don’t have a camera with me I’ll often say “click” out loud when I see a photo I can’t take–drives the wife nuts.)

The world is full of art–we’re basically surrounded by it–and in that sense I find myself most attracted to the mundane, overlooked, or taken for granted visual gems that exist all around us. So for me, my photography is about going out and drawing a rectangle around some piece of the world and saying, “here, look at this. This is art. This is just as important as anything else.” My tendency towards minimal compositions is part of this as well. I feel the nothing in the frame is just as important as the something. For example empty blue sky and a piece of roof is just as much a photo of a church as a nicely composed tilt-shift-lens’d architectural photo.

Having no formal art background, I must admit I was somewhat ignorant of the art-history of photography before getting involved in it myself. I still feel like an outsider when it comes to the photo-art scene, but then my attitude has always been more of the old punk rock “start a band first and learn how to play guitar later” school of doing things. (Which is actually how I got into software as well, but that’s another story.)

I do have photographers and artists I really admire and find inspiring, but any influence on my style is reverse-engineered. What I mean by that is they’re not influences in the sense that my style was affected by them before-hand, but rather I see myself in their work and thus feel validated by it. I’m also just as likely to be blown away by a photo I see on Flickr as I am by a masterpiece in a museum and that happens a lot, because I spend a lot of time everyday looking at photos. So it’s really hard for me to zero in on one photographer or style, because I’m really a sponge and some of the photographers I find most inspiring have styles that are nothing like my own. They just make me want to get out there, shoot, and find new things to show people.

Many of your photos have the appearance of being a found scene. Do you carry a camera with you at all times and stumble upon these moments, or do you make specific time to go out looking for them?

the trash-recycling gap by Stephen Gray

I guess it’s a little of both.

My photos are pretty much all found scenes. It’s rare for me to construct or alter a scene and when I do, I rarely like the results. Once I’ve moved something, it always looks moved–to me, at least. So yes, I always have at least one camera with me just in case I come across something. Today, I have two (film and digital) in my bag and on some days I have as many as four cameras with me–which might sound kinda crazy to some people. I also don’t drive anymore, so I walk a lot around town which affords me a lot of opportunity to stumble across photos and I try to make time before/after work and during lunch to go out looking for photos.

suspended by Stephen Gray

Tell me a little bit about “the fixture”

One thing that becomes obvious when you view my work over time is that I develop lots of photographic obsessions with specific objects or scenes of various kinds. At this point the most obvious of which is what I’ve come to just refer to as the fixture. The fixture is a light suspended in a stairwell of a building on campus. (It’s location is kind of a low-grade secret for me at this point. You can find it, but I don’t talk about it’s location anymore myself as I’ve already had someone try to re-create my view of it.) As with many of these obsessions, it’s something I came across by accident the first time and it’s really just ballooned from there. The light in that stairwell varies widely with time of day and time of the year and the weather outside. This means the view of the fixture is always slightly different. So now I have taken it upon myself to shoot it with every combination of camera, lens, and even film that I have at regular, but slightly random intervals to catch as much difference as I can. I really like to do a show or book of just prints of the fixture one of these days. So as long as I have access to it, I’ll continue producing new views of the fixture.

I’ve been following your tweets and was entertained the other day to see you post something about getting asked why or whether you were taking a picture of “nothing.” Do you get that a lot?

Photographic rubber-necking, as I’ve come to call it is fairly common and amuses me to no end. Usually people will just look at whatever I was shooting. Trying to be nonchalant while trying to figure out what I was taking a photo of as they walk by. I think for many the idea taking a photo of something not obviously photogenic is still pretty confusing. Sometimes people will stop and ask what I was taking a photo of or even why, but most folks probably just write me off as yet another local eccentric. I have found that older people are more likely to stop and ask–especially why.

Recently I was shooting in a location I re-visit often and there’s an older woman standing nearby. She could see me, but could not see what I was looking at. So after I take the photo and start to walk off, she walks over to where I was and calls to me, “there’s nothing there?!” To which I answer, “exactly.” Then she adds, as she walks away (maybe more to herself than me), “I thought there was someone there.” Perhaps in her mind, no person equals no photo. Probably a common point of view held by people whose idea of photography has been shaped by the marketing. (think: “the Kodak moment”)

My favorite such encounter was a couple years ago, similar situation, I’m shooting something–let’s say a wall–and there’s an older gentleman sitting on a bench nearby reading a paper.

Him: (confused) What’re you taking a photo of?
Me: The wall
Him: Why?
Me: I like it.
Him: It’s ugly!
Me: I know. That’s why I like it.
Him: (returning to his paper) I wouldn’t take no photo of an ugly old wall.

Probably thought I was crazy or just being frivolous.

(And before anyone thinks I’m picking on older folks, my mother–who is 78 has no art background–seemed to get what I was doing immediately when I first showed her my photos years ago.)

Of course, this being the digital age, I have had someone I didn’t know recognize me from the online world. In this case I was indeed taking a photo of a chair (kind of a trademark thing for me) on campus and a guy stopped and said, “hey, you’re xgray–right? I’ve seen you on Flickr.”

no by Stephen Gray

Is there anything you particularly want to accomplish as a photographer?

In a world awash in photographers–both pro and amateur–and photographs and tightening media budgets, I harbor no delusions about having a hugely lucrative photography career. (Of course, I don’t bemoan that fact as is so often the case in online forums.) Financially, I’d like to make enough money to cover my costs. Anything beyond that would be cake.

Artistically, I just want the chance to show people my work to more and more people. To find my audience.

Do you have any particular opinion on photo titles? You give most (all?) of your photographs titles. Is this just a matter of personal preference or do you feel that all photos require them? I tend not to title mine, but my minimalism photos certainly do seem to demand them more.

Leaving photos untitled is fine, but anyone who refers to an untitled photo is basically titling it themselves. So the way I see it, my work is going to be titled whether it’s by me or by others and in that case I might as well do it myself. As for my own titling scheme, other than occasionally attempting to be clever, my titles are usually short and descriptive of the subject or what I’m trying to show or evoke.

church by Stephen Gray

Is there a style of photography you want to explore more, or what direction do you see your work moving in the future?

I really don’t know what direction my work will move in the future. I think it’s really just a case of allowing evolution to run its course. Looking back at my past work, it’s certainly worked for me so far. Certain aspects of my photography has changed over the years and I can also see certain–in keeping with the metaphor–mutations that stuck around and developed into new photographic ideas and other that simply didn’t take hold or ran their course.

As for what I’d like to explore. I find that the photographs I’m most drawn to these days contain people and I would like to incorporate people into my work. How I would do that, I’m not exactly sure or at least the opportunity hasn’t arisen yet. I also have a couple ideas for more documentary type projects that I’d like to explore, given the necessary time and funds. (Forgive me for not describing them, but I’m working on some grant proposals and don’t want to jinx myself just yet.)

from the shadows by Stephen Gray

Photographers seem to sort themselves into the categories of “shoots mostly people” or “rarely shoots people” You seem to be in the latter group. Is this a conscious choice or more just how things worked out? Do you dislike working with people as subjects or just find that they don’t offer the sorts of visual scenes you want to capture and show?

I like people, so I think it’s just the way things have worked out. I’m somewhat introverted by nature, which makes me jealous of anyone who goes out and takes awesome street portraits of complete strangers. Also, as I mentioned, I’d really like to work with people more and actually I often do in the sense that in my non-artistic pursuits I shoot events, portraits, etc., but I rarely share them with my artistic audience. A few weeks ago I shot a Jiu Jitsu tournament and a full card of MMA bouts. Not something most viewers of my fine art photos would probably expect. Up to now, I’ve always tried to keep the two worlds somewhat separate.

For me the real distinction between types of photographers are those who shoot mostly for themselves and those who shoot mostly for others. In that regard, I’m definitely in the first group. I guess that’s also why I still have a day job.

switched on by Stephen Gray

First, I really only know the Nikon lineup since that’s all I’ve owned. I think it’s quite likely that all of these cameras have equivalents in features/price to something in the Canon line. I use Nikon now because it’s familiar to me, and in the beginning I sort of selected it at random. That said, having used a few friends’ Canons, I don’t really like the way their controls are laid out, but it’s hard to say if one is really better or if it’s just my familiarity….

All the prices I’m quoting below come from bhphotovideo.com, a good and reputable camera store in New York City that has a nice website. Beware of places with much lower prices: there are a lot of digital camera scam sites. There are also a few good camera review/comparison sites, dpreview being one of the better ones.

Anyway, there are a few cameras Nikon makes that are under $1000 and some of them are much cheaper than that. The two sort of “entry level” Nikon DSLRs are the D3000 and the D5000 and they both look pretty good to me. You can get the 3000 with a basic lens for $500 and the 5000 with the same lens for a little under $700. These are fairly similar cameras, but I’ll go over the key differences.

First, the D3000 has around 10 megapixels and the 5000 has about 12. This difference is almost eaningless. The megapixel war is more or less over. 10 MP means you get images that are about 3800 x 2500 pixels, and if you print that at 200 dpi you’re talking something like 12 x 19 or so, so either one of these cameras will make image files that are plenty big for most purposes.

The 5000 has a CMOS rather than a CCD sensor and it also has a higher max sensitivity setting (ISO). This means that you’d be able to take pictures in lower light, and for pictures taken at the same level of light you might see less “ISO noise” which is that weird grainy colored noise you see in pictures taken in low light. How much this matters to you might depend on what you plan to do with the camera.

Another big difference that might not matter to you is it looks like the D5000 will shoot 720p HD video, and the D3000 won’t. I don’t have much more to say about it than that. I’m not sure I’d use a video mode if I had one, but some folks might be interested in that.

Smaller differences between these two cameras: the D5000 has “live view” and the D3000 does not. This is the mode you see on P&S digital cameras where you can use the lcd rather than the viewfinder to compose and shoot. I have his on my camera and I never use it.

The D5000 shoots at most 4 frames per second, and the D3000 shoots only 3. I’d say this difference doesn’t matter a ton. Either one is fast enough to get a few quick shots of medium-speed things going on, and neither one is really fast enough to deal with, say, a sporting event where the exact timing of the shot really comes into play.

The D5000 has a few other bells and whistles that you might not use: a dedicated button to lock the exposure settings, which is useful in a some specific cases, exposure bracketing (the camera will automatically take a few rapidfire shots at similar settings), which is sort of a novelty thing on digital cameras since you get instant feedback (in the old film days you would bracket your shots to make sure that you got the right exposure). The D5000 also has a swiveling lcd screen, which works with the live view mode…I guess this would help frame a self portrait? My lcd doesn’t swivel and I don’t miss it.

Now, for some similarities and general info:

Both cameras use SD cards and have an 11 point autofocus system, which is plenty. AF points are the spots within the viewfinder that are capable of looking for areas of contrast to focus on. The more you have, the more finely you can control what’s getting focused on. The camera I use now has 51, but that’s a bit of overkill, I think. My first DSLR was the Nikon D40 (which more or less got replaced by the D3000) and it had only 3 AF points, which felt like too few. 11 should be fine.

Both cameras are usually sold with the Nikon 18-55 VR lens, which while being a lens they just throw in with the cameras is quite nice. I used the precursor on my D40 and it was fine. If you go on my flickr page and look at my older shots, like from France in 2007, all of that was shot with a D40 and an 18-55 kit lens. VR stands for “vibration reduction” which means there’s fancy motors inside the lens that help counteract our inability to hold a camera perfectly still. This allows you to drop the shutter speed to a lower level than you’d normally be able to get away with, and will let you take a clear picture (of things that aren’t moving) in slightly less light than you’d otherwise be able to.

Both cameras have the same adequate but not great built-in flash. We can talk flashes another time. What’s built in here will get the job done, but won’t really avoid red-eye (too close to the lens axis) and can’t be swiveled to bounce.

Now, just a brief bit the main thing that these cameras don’t do.

Neither one has a motor inside the camera to drive the autofocus system of older lenses. Modern camera lenses have a motor inside the lens to focus the lens. This means the camera needs only to tell the lens how far or close to focus and the lens does the rest. Until about 5 or 10 years ago, the motor was usually in the camera and there was just a screw that the camera turned to focus the lens. There are a lot of lenses out there that will work fine with these cameras, but there are also a lot of older, nice lenses that won’t autofocus with these cameras. It’s hard to know if this is going to be important to you when you’re just starting out. Some day you’ll want different lenses (one of the main features of the DSLR is the ability to change lenses, after all!). I think at this point the line of modern lenses with built-in motors is pretty complete, so this probably won’t be too much trouble. It was one of the things that made me eventually upgrade, though.

If you want a camera with an internal motor you’d have to step up to the D90, which goes for about 800 without a lens, so that will push a bit over the $1000 limit. Aside from the motor, the D90 is _not_ that much of an upgrade over the D5000…it has the same sensor, shoots a half a frame per second faster, shoots slightly higher res HD video, and probably has a few more bell and whistle sorts of things. I would definitely classify the D90 as a mid level rather than entry level DSLR, and it is probably not worth the extra money for someone looking to get their first DSLR.

So, I’d say if you just want an SLR to figure out what it’s all about and don’t know what you’d be using it for, the D3000 is a great camera. If you think you’ll be shooting lowish light and might like to take movies then go with the D5000. If you’re sure you’re going to be getting into photography for the long term and want to explore more of the older lenses that Nikon has to offer, then take the leap to the D90.

Center Plaza in Downtown Boston - Photo by Steve Wollkind

I feel I got some excellent photos of this show.

For the first time at a rock show I brought a light stand and set a speedlight up off to the side, and up (I’ve done this before by just setting the flash on top of a speaker or something) but in this space it didn’t work out very well…the performance area was a bit too big to aim the flash well. Fortunately, the ceiling here was nice and white (though a bit high…) so bounce was working reasonably well. Some of the bounce B&W conversions came out really well, I think.

Rachel Jayson

Petaluma Vale

Daniel Schubmehl

Mali Sastri

After Jaggery finished up their set, Black Fortress premiered their new video. I don’t quite know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. I was floored by the quality, especially in the scenes of the band setting up. Now that I’m trying to produce visual art, I’m that much more appreciative of other people’s work, and I can’t imagine how you go about putting something like this together, from a conceptual or technical standpoint. I’m embedding the video here, but I recommend going to youtube directly and watching the higher res version.

After the video was shown, Black Fortress played a nice long set. The lighting was a little less favorable in this part of the show but things came out well.

Rich Cortese

Joe Turner

Tony Savarino

Ajda the Turkish Queen

All in all, a fun and successful night. I’m also impressed with myself that I got them turned around in a day. That normally doesn’t happen, but I think I need to make it work more often.

Next up: a return to urban minimalism and an interview with the photographer that got me thinking about it.