Tim Grey’s Blog

I love when my camera helps me connect with another person in a unique way.

One day on my recent visit to Japan I found myself in a cemetery, capturing various photos. I’m fascinated by cemeteries, in part because they say so much about people and their culture. And yet I get very self-conscious when I’m in a cemetery taking pictures, because I respect the sacred nature of a cemetery and don’t want to intrude. So here I was in Japan, not sure if it was really OK to be taking pictures in this cemetery, and yet fascinated.

It was then that a woman came up to me. Now, you have to understand that (much to my surprise) there was an incredible language barrier in Japan. Very few people I came in contact with spoke any English at all (which was part of what made it such a wonderful and memorable trip). This brought communication down to a very fundamental level, which actually made the interactions that much more treasured.

It seemed clear to me that this woman singled me out in part because I was taking pictures. It seemed to tell her that I was indeed fascinated with this place. I suppose it helped that as a relatively tall Caucasian I sort of stood out in this place.

She motioned for me to follow her, and tried to speak to me in very broken English. She guided me to a small Buddhist temple across the courtyard. She showed me the statues inside the monument, and taught me, using only gestures and motions, how to pray. I followed along out of respect, and savored the moment.

This isn’t the only time someone took note of my special interest signaled by my camera, and offered their assistance in understanding–on some level–what I was experiencing. I love that something as simple as having a camera held to your eye can signal that you are a friend and you are interested in learning more. Even if you don’t understand the language.

Sometimes I think you’re reading my mind. OK, not really, but it is funny sometimes how different people are thinking the same thing at about the same time. Thus was the case of a comment posted to one of my recent blog entries. The person posting the comment referred to taking a trip and capturing a lot of photos, but feeling on some level that she had missed out on the experience of being in a wonderful place.

This is something I’ve actually contemplated quite a few times, and was thinking about recently as I reflected on some of my recent trips and the way I approached them photographically. As I’ve written in previous blog posts, I like to take pictures. Lots, and lots, and lots of pictures! But I have felt on various occasions that focusing on capturing images in order to preserve my memories in photographs leads to not actually having that many memories in my own mind. I can look at certain groups of images and feel like I wasn’t ever at that place.

I’ve dealt with this in various ways. When I went to Italy last year, I wanted it to be first and foremost a vacation. I still took a lot of pictures, but I changed the way I approached the act of taking pictures. I focused on using my digital point-and-shoot camera for most of my photos, to the extent that only 25% of the photos I took were taken with my digital SLR. I didn’t want my focus to be on making beautiful pictures (crazy though that may sound) but rather on enjoying the experience, and snapping some casual photos to help me remind myself of all the wonderful things I saw.

When I went to Japan a couple months ago, my focus was a bit different. Sure, I still wanted to have a vacation, but I also wanted to come back with some images I could use in the books I’m working on. So I balanced things a bit differently, and on that trip more than half of my captures were with my digital SLR.

In some cases I take things to a bit of an extreme. When I really want to make sure I am fully engaged in an experience I’ll leave my camera behind. For example, a few years ago I had the opportunity to fly a Huey helicopter and a T-34 airplane (I’m a private pilot, though I’m not doing any flying these days). I knew this was going to be something I would want to fully experience and remember, so I made the decision not to do any photography.

I’ve also made a conscious decision not to bring a real camera with me when I’m cycling. You can imagine the beautiful scenes I frequently find riding scores of miles each week in the Puget Sound area. Several times I wanted to kick myself for not having a camera with me. But I have made a decision that when I’m riding that’s all about getting fit and having some time to myself to decompress. I want to focus on my riding, and not be stopping every few miles to take a photo.

It is a difficult balance, to be sure. But I think it is important to find that balance. I think it is important to be sure you’re both experiencing life, and doing the things you love. It’s OK to get completely absorbed in your photography. But sometimes I think you need to make a conscious decision to set that aside and enjoy the experience that is unfolding before you.

Today is my last day as a Microsoft employee.

Way back in high school (or maybe even earlier) I read a poem by Langston Hughes called “A Dream Deferred”. I would think of this poem often when I pondered dreams I wanted to turn into reality. For example, it was on my mind when I considered whether I should get my private pilot’s license or wait until it “made more sense”. I followed that dream and got my license twelve years ago (and now hopefully I’ll actually have the time to start flying again).

Taking a job at Microsoft fulfilled a dream I had since I started attending college. I wanted to become a programmer at Microsoft, but I assumed my dream of working for Microsoft died when I decided to drop out of college and focus on my computer programming work. Ten years later Microsoft recruited me, allowing me to realize a dream I thought I had lost forever.

Today, having pursued that dream, I am changing course to follow a dream that has loomed even larger in my mind for many years (and a dream I did pursue briefly before going to Microsoft). I’ll spend my time working to build success writing, teaching, speaking, and consulting, all around the topic of digital photography and imaging. I’ll also have more time to actually take photos! These are the things I’m passionate about, and I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to pursue them and (hopefully) be successful at them.

I’m looking forward to the challenges and achievements that lie ahead, and appreciate all of you who have been along for the ride thus far. I have a feeling it’s about to become a much more exciting ride!

The picture here, by the way, is a photo of a bunch of inflatable balls emblazoned with the Windows logo, floating in “Lake Bill”, which was visible outside the window of my first office at Microsoft.

I’m a huge fan of many of the automated features of today’s digital cameras. For example, I very much appreciate having auto focus, as there’s no doubt it greatly increases the number of sharp photos I end up with.

But sometimes going “retro” and doing things manually can be a lot of fun, and can actually serve as a creative motivation. I was reminded of this as I started playing with my LensBaby lens recently. I’ve been using a LensBaby lens for years now, bringing it out now and then to explore what I can come up with. This lens is totally manual focus, and behaves something like a view lens with bellows, allowing you to have a relatively small area of your image in focus as the rest fades into a blur similar to a motion blur effect. The results can be remarkable.

What I like most about the LensBaby is that it encourages me (forces me, even) to think a bit more about the composition, and to work a bit harder to produce a great image. It’s like all the buttons and knobs are removed from my camera and I actually have to do all the work myself for a change. It’s refreshing, and great fun!

A LensBaby is only one way you can explore creativity with photography. I’d be curious to know what you do to push yourself to explore the outer edges of your comfort zone in the interest of coming up with some great new photographic images.

Sometimes I even scare myself.

In April I went to Japan for a week, and as usual I captured a lot of photos. As you might have guessed I love photography. I love taking pictures. And as I’ve said before, I would probably even take pictures if I didn’t have a CompactFlash card in my camera. But I’ll admit, even this is ridiculous.

You see, after spending a week in Japan I decided to perform a bit of math (I’m such a geek) to figure out the rate at which I was capturing pictures. I was shocked.

To get the full impact I decided I needed to calculate based on “waking hours”. I mean, it really wasn’t fair to include the hours I was sleeping when calculating the rate at which I was capturing photos. So over the course of the week I was in Japan I calculated that I captured one photo for every 1.9 minutes I was awake. Wow! That’s crazy! So I decided I’d mitigate it by calculating based on all the time I was actually on the ground in Japan. It turns out that meant I captured a photo every 3.28 minutes including time I spent sleeping.

I know I have quite the trigger finger, but I was still surprised at these statistics. I guess I didn’t realize I had this level of addiction to photography. That’s a lot of photos! I walked around a lot in Japan, but still, do you think there were things that interesting that I could capture a photo every 1.8 minutes? Obviously there was!

In fairness, this was split between my digital SLR and my point-and-shoot digital camera. I would try to be selective about which shots deserved to be captured in RAW by my digital SLR and which were really just snapshots. But that still translated into 1,081 RAW captures with my digital SLR, which calculates to one RAW capture every 5.1 minutes I was awake, or one RAW capture every 8.1 minutes I was on the ground in Japan.

What really struck me about this experience (besides the realization that I have a serious photography addiction) is that digital removes all barriers when it comes to photography. I remember in the “film days” how I would be so careful about how many images I would capture, because I didn’t want to waste film. Now I don’t feel that constraint, and instead tend to capture as many images as I possibly can. That introduces its own challenges, but it also allows for much more creative expression, and a much greater chance that I’ll actually end up with the photo I was hoping for. It also means I’ll experiment a lot more without concerns of “wasting film”.

So while it might seem a bit crazy that I captured so many photos during one week in Japan, it also represents one of the many advantages of digital photography. For all intents and purposes I had an unlimited supply of “film”, so I could focus on trying to get the best images possible without worrying about the resources available to me. In my mind, that’s a huge advantage of digital.

Well, OK, I wasn’t really on TV. But it sounds cool, and my mom was impressed. I mean, it’s not every day she gets to hear me say, “Hey, mom, I’m on Channel 10!”. It may not be “real” TV, but it was still fun, and I think you’ll enjoy the result.

What I’m talking about is a new show called “Shutter Speed” that appears on Channel 10, which is a place you can learn about cool technology and trends. I was a panelist on the first episode, where we talked about some of the latest news and trends in digital photography. Also included is a great in-studio visit with photographer and Microsoft Icon of Imaging Phil Borges (you can learn more about the other Microsoft Icons of Imaging on the Microsoft Pro Photo website).

In this first episode we talked about online photo-sharing sites, common features in digital cameras, and more. Check it out, and let me know what you think. Even better, let me know what you’d like to see in future episodes and I’ll pass that on to Channel 10.

You can view the first episode of “Shutter Speed” with the inline video below, or by going to the Channel 10 website. Be sure to check back at the blog of Nic Fillingham, the host of “Shutter Speed”, for future episodes.

ShutterSpeed Episode 01

Have you ever had one of those moments where you’re taking pictures, and you find yourself surprised at what a remarkably fast shutter speed you’re getting for the current lighting conditions, and you feel absolute joy about it? Something like, “Wow! It doesn’t really seem all that bright yet I’m still achieving 1/500th of a second at f/22!”.

Then it dawns on you.

You had set the ISO to a relatively high value earlier so you could get a faster shutter speed under low light conditions, and you forgot to dial it back down. I can hear photographers who are fans of film saying they never have to worry about this problem. Sure, that’s true on some level. For one thing they don’t have to worry about noise per se, only significant film grain with high ISO films, and film grain is more “organic” and thus not automatically offensive to a photographer. But film photographers also don’t have the option of changing ISO on a per-shot basis. You have to put a different roll of film in the camera to get a different ISO. Digital offers much more flexibility and freedom.

Suddenly I’m reminded of my mom telling me when I was a teenager that “with freedom comes responsibility”. In this context, the freedom of changing your ISO setting from one shot to the next as you see fit comes with the responsibility to remember to change it to a lower value when you no longer need a high ISO. When you forget to reset your ISO and thus use a setting that is higher than you need, you’ll likely end up with noise in your image that could have been avoided.

It would be nice if we could decide to simply never forget to reset the ISO, but that’s just not realistic. So we get to one of my pet peeves (I have a lot of them, and many will be covered in my upcoming book, which I’ll talk about very soon when it is in print). Here’s the pet peeve: Why doesn’t my digital camera give me the option to automatically reset the ISO to a designated value (probably 100) whenever I cycle the power on my camera? For me, at least, using a high ISO setting is an exception used in special circumstances. Even though todays digital SLRs do a great job of noise suppression, I’d rather use a low ISO setting to ensure the best results. So a feature like this would be a huge benefit to me.

I’m curious what other features photographers would find helpful in their digital cameras. Perhaps we could put a list together, so camera manufacturers could spend less time adding more megapixels to the imaging sensor, and more time giving us cool new features that would improve our photographic experience.

I was teaching a workshop at the Lepp Institute last weekend, and I found myself (yet again) reminding those attending the workshop just how valuable the “magic” Alt key (Option key on Macintosh) really is when it comes to Photoshop. I often joke about how cool it is that this “secret” keystroke provides so many cool options that otherwise wouldn’t be available, and in fact that otherwise wouldn’t even be discoverable. The punch line, of course, is that me telling them about these “secret” features makes me look smart but makes the students feel stupid. This isn’t exactly a good thing.

The more I thought about this, the more frustrated I got. I’ve always thought it was so cool that there were so many “secret” features in Photoshop. But then I realized it was only cool because then I could impress audiences with the revelation of this feature. From the perspective of a user who is trying to learn how to use a truly complex piece of software, this is a very bad thing. If the user can’t discover the feature, it probably might as well not exist. I’m not suggesting that every feature should have yet another checkbox or button or other control so the user can see absolutely every feature available. But I am suggesting that Photoshop (and other applications) aren’t exactly the best when it comes to the ease with which users can discover the many available features. I love Photoshop, but I do sympathize with those who are trying to learn how to use it, and how to leverage the incredible power it contains.

I think Adobe is realizing that ease of use is a very important feature. I notice, for example, that Curves includes a checkbox for the clipping preview rather than relying on the user knowing they can hold the Alt (or Option) key to access this powerful feature. I just hope this is the beginning of a new era in making Photoshop more accessible, and not just a fluke.

OK, so maybe I’m not exactly addicted to bad photos, but I certainly capture a lot of them. And I don’t just mean that I’m a bad photographer (though I’m not claiming to be good either). I mean there are plenty of times when I take a picture knowing full well that it isn’t going to be a good photo in the traditional sense. I’ll never hang it on the wall (heck, I’ll probably never even print it), never put it in one of my books, and likely never share it with other people (at least not that many people, and not all that often). So why bother taking the picture in the first place?

I just can’t help myself. If something grabs my attention, inspires me, or just looks cool, more often than not I’ll snap a photo of it. In many cases that means I didn’t use my digital SLR, because I generally only have that when I’m intentionally looking for photo opportunities. I might not even have my point-and-shoot digital with me, though I try to make sure to have that everywhere I go. So sometimes the photo ends up being captured with my cell phone. And quite often, I find that the image is taking from my car. While I’m driving. Fast.

The photo here is a good example. It’s not a good photo. But it’s a good memory, even if not exactly an important memory in the grand scheme of things. I was returning from Seattle early one morning, driving across the floating bridge of I-90 just as the sun was getting ready to rise. Mount Rainier was visible, which is sort of a big deal around here. More often than not it is obscured by clouds. I love sunrise (it’s way better than sunsets, especially in the desert, though not always from a photographic perspective), so this was good from the start. What was better, there was a lenticular cloud formation above the mountain. As a weather buff and inactive private pilot, I thought this was really cool. So I grabbed my camera and shot a picture out the window of the moving car while driving (I wasn’t going to slow down on the freeway here, as I drive slowly in traffic far too often!).

Of course, if the scene were really that important, I’d stop the car, get out, setup my tripod, compose the scene carefully, and capture a great photo (or try to anyway). But sometimes the scene just isn’t that good. It won’t necessarily translate into a good photograph. It’s just something I saw that I want to remember.

And I guess that’s the real bottom line. I think of photography first and foremost as a way to capture memories. Of people, places, events, and scenes that had an impact on me, that I don’t want to forget, and that I want to be able to revisit later. I find revisiting memories is so much better when done with a visual aid, and I think a photograph does that perfectly.

So I’m going to continue capturing bad photos, and continue loving those bad photos.

I got my “real” start in photography in high school, when I took a photography class and spent many untold hours in the wet darkroom, producing prints from my black and white negatives. I spent many years working with film, but jumped into digital quite early, and for the most part haven’t looked back.

While I had spent many hours working in a wet black and white darkroom, I had never actually printed in a color wet darkroom. In fact, I had never even set foot in a color wet darkroom. I knew about it in theory, but not in practice. Last week I decided it was time to change that.

I’m the president of the Board of Directors at Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW) in Seattle. PCNW offers a wide range of classes (including a certificate program) and workshops, which include both film and digital courses. As a member of the Board I’ve given tremendous thought to what the future of the school should be. That includes thinking about how (or whether) we continue offering color wet darkroom classes and lab rental, when digital has obviously taken over photography in many ways.

I decided I needed to have a better perspective on just what it was we had to offer, so I enlisted the help of one of the faculty, Seth Thompson (www.seththompson.com), to show me how the process worked.

This proved to be an incredible experience that took me back to much of the joy of working in a wet black and white darkroom. Granted, it lacks the ability to see the image coming up on the paper as it soaks in the developer, but the magic of exposing the paper from a negative is still there.

Now, I’m not going to give up on digital and go back to film photography and printing. I feel digital simply has so much more to offer in the way of flexibility that I’d have a difficult time giving it up. But I do have a new appreciation for the process of produding color prints from film, and plan to dig out my old black and white negatives and spend some time in the lab at PCNW to relive some of the fun I used to have before digital.

If you have an opportunity to produce prints like this from film, I highly recommend it. Even if, like me, you’re commited to digital, there is a certain magic to the processes that served photography for so many years.

There aren’t too many places where you can still make your own color prints from film, so if you have the interest I’d suggest you do it soon. If you’re anywhere near the Seattle area you can review the course offerings at PCNW, and if not hopefully you can find a similar facility near you.

So, do you think wet darkrooms should be kept around for those who still appreciate what it has to offer, or is it time to give up the ghost and stick with digital? I think you might be surprised how many photographers aren’t yet ready to dive into digital. Now I have a better appreciation for their perspective.