In digital photography there is much discussion about file size. File size? What is that? This refers to the number of megapixels (MP) a given chip or sensor in a camera has to capture the light coming through the lens.

Generally, the number of megapixels has increased in size since early digital cameras. What was once regarded as excellent at 6 MP is now thought of as being small and what was regarded as impossible at 24 or 36 MP is now relatively commonplace.

On screen at 72 DPI (dots per inch), pretty much any camera makes files that look very good. That can include smartphones. It is when putting ink to paper to make a print that some of the smaller file size cameras and smartphones don't hold up.

Again, generally, the larger the file size, meaning the higher number of MPs a camera can record, the larger the prints it can make.

There are important and longer range considerations to keep in mind regarding what camera you use and what you can and can't do with the files shot with it.

In early digital days my first digital still lens reflex (DSLR) camera was a Nikon D70. I believe its sensor made 6 MP RAW files. This becomes larger when processed into an RGB file and ends up at about 34 MP. (BTW: RAW is not an acronym for anything and simply means that the file once shot isn't processed into anything in the camera. That's why it shooting RAW  is referred to sometimes as a "digital negative").

Small files sizes look fine on screen:

This photograph of my 8 x 10 camera in Wyoming shot in 2005 looks fine here on screen, but blow it up and take a look at its makeup were you to make a print 36 inches across and a crop looks like this:

Not so good.

So, what's my point? The only real reason for a 24 or 36 MP DSLR over something like a 10 or12 MP camera is print size. Simple enough.

Let's compare what that looks like:

Full file from the Nikon D800e (36MP):

and the cropped image:

Nothing is falling apart here because there is far more information contained in the file and therefore an enlargement holds the sharpness and detail far better. This is roughly equivalent to the difference in enlarging a 35mm negative to a big print size verses enlarging a 4 x 5 or 8 x  10 inch negative to the same size.

So, much is made of new cameras and their amazing capabilities but stick to making 4 x 6 inch prints and you could be working with a 10 year old digital camera and the quality would be fine and you could save your money.

For most people out there a camera shooting in RAW mode at 12-16 MP is about right and meets most needs. Anything with more MP is for those wanting to make larger prints at higher quality. 

All this is pretty straightforward and may sound like Digital Photography 101 to many of you but there is a more subtle and longer ranging issue to think about and that is: what do you want to do with the photographs you make now in the future? 

Since beginning to work with full frame sensors and cameras with 24 or 36 MP chips, I have had options available to me in terms of print size I didn't have before.

Another way to put this is that I cannot show any pictures I made with the 6 MP D70 Nikon larger than about 8 x 10 inches, and even that is a stretch. For someone who often makes 36 to 40 inch prints for exhibition, this simply eliminates that work from consideration. Knowing this back then, I wasn't very serious about what it could do and didn't dig in and make real work with it at all, thank goodness.

A final point:  I seem to be saying that working with a full frame sensor camera that shoots a RAW file in the 24-36 MP range makes good sense, and I believe it does. The downside is that everything gets bigger and slower too. This means larger and  more storage, bigger files and slower computer times. 

So be it. It seems a worthwhile trade off to me. 

Is it true? I've never told the Cabelas story? Yes, it's true.

I am going to now.

Let your mind drift into a "what if?" category. Let it range through the world of no restrictions, no restraints, the "do whatever you like" that you use to go into when you were a kid. This is like daydreaming, of course, and something I did far too much of in Latin class in the 8th grade.

Okay.  Let me set the scene: a friend and I are driving through rural PA on one of those late summer just before going back to teaching trips. It is maybe 2006 or 7. We approach a large billboard announcing that a Cabelas store is coming up. He asks if I'd ever been to one and I respond by saying no, that I'd never heard of it. We stop and go inside and I am confronted with a sports outfitting store built on a huge scale. In the middle is what I can only describe as a taxidermy mountain of animals arranged in situ and several  smaller areas where we are transported to the Serengetti in Africa with lions and elephants and giraffes. The displays are like dioramas. They are over the top wonderful, bizarre, a little twisted and I want to photograph them. I mean really want to photograph them!

I ask at the information counter about photographing and am told to go ahead take all the pictures you want as long as there is no flash and no tripod. Good but not so good. I take some snapshots with a point and shoot digital camera.

I get back home, start teaching again, am in meetings meetings meetings all the time but Cabelas pulls at me. After several false starts I find myself on the phone with a marketing guy at the home office in Nebraska. He's asking me why I want permission to photograph in the stores when they are closed, why I need to work with a tripod and what I want to do with the pictures once made. I am prepared for that and am using my title as a professor at a prominent university to validate my intentions to make pictures that are cultural research that is based in the USA and  that I am really interested in this "museum quality experience" the company promotes about its displays. Oddly enough, he says okay. Just like that. Then he tells me how it'll work.

I am to email him a few days before I want to photograph in a given store, then I am told to arrive about 6 am at the staff entrance, sign in and go about my business until the store opens at 9 am and then clear out.  I try it out first with the closest store to me at the time which is outside Hartford, CT and it works fine. I shoot for three hours while the employees are stocking shelves, sweeping floors and having a sales meeting that is very rah rah rah just before they open.

I am shooting with a Nikon D200 which is a far cry from equipment we use today. I am using the lights that are on in the store and I am way out of my comfort zone, dealing with white balance issues, areas that are too hot due to the floodlights in the ceiling, difficulty in getting access to some of the displays due to not being allowed over the railing, not having the the right lenses, etc. Over the next several months I make some upgrades. I move up to the new Nikon D300, the first digital camera that gave me usable files.

I am now planning the first of two dedicated trips.  My first one is early March while on spring break. I fly to Chicago and work stores in the Illinois, Indiana and lower Wisconsin region. There are about 50 or so stores in the chain. I drive, get close to a store, stay in a motel, arrive at the staff entrance at 6 am the next morning and, well, you know the rest. Each store's employees are wonderful, helping me move stuff and offering me coffee. After I am done at about 9 am I drive most of that day to the next store and repeat the same process. It being early March I hit some weather and have a not my favorite adventure with my rented minivan with no snow tires in a snow storm of epic proportions but I soldier on. In that trip I shot in four stores.

I've written about this before but I am now accruing real work. I am no longer a novice, I am becoming experienced in the topic of my interest and I am making increasingly knowledgeable pictures. All to the good. Each store is the same but different, some on a scale that it is difficult to comprehend; 250,000 square feet of store. Others are far smaller with fewer displays that interest me.

I complete that trip and the following summer fly again to shoot more stores. This time I start out in Boise, ID and hit stores in Nebraska and South Dakota. It is August and it is very hot. In all I photographed in 17 stores and to this day I cannot pass one by without going in with a camera.

We did a book of the pictures: Cabelas

The work's been shown and published quite a bit over the years. 

When I began the Cabellas projet I had no idea what the outcome would be. I didn't really even know why I wanted to do it. I believe we are just as novice as anybody else when we start out. It is important to acknowledge that and to face up to the fact that you will make mistakes and have false starts. But, soldier on and trust your instincts as they're probably the best thing you've got. 

Cabellas is on the site: Cabelas

Odd to be posting new pictures made almost two years ago but I have spent the last week or so resurrecting this now older work into prints and I am very excited about them.

Forti Dei Marmi

That is a link to the full series but I will give you a few here too:

I think of these as being indulgent as they are so filled with the love of color... but I am getting ahead of myself.

In the fall of 2012, still enjoying the newness of being retired, a friend and I made a trip to Italy to stay with close friends who were having a delayed honeymoon in a small house in the hills in Voldottavo, about 20 minutes from Lucca in central Italy. Would I work? Would I make pictures? Could I pull that off in the middle of vacationing, being a tourist, shopping, eating, drinking copious amounts of wine, laughing a lot and overall having a great time? As I packed up my full kit in Cambridge prior to leaving, which includes several lenses, tripod, laptop computer and hard drives, I thought I would soon find out.

How do we resolve this? This desire to go someplace wonderful and then deal with the conflict of the fact that if it is so wonderful, we have this desire and need to make pictures? Luckily for me, I had in my traveling friend, Marybeth, someone who understands this need and is amazingly helpful in letting me go do what I need to do. Without her these pictures would not have been made. Marybeth isn't an artist, but she sure gets my need to make pictures and I am everlastingly grateful for that.

I made four bodies of work while there:

Luna Park

Trees

Rivalta

and now printed, Forti Dei Marmi. You tell me? How'd I do?

The deal we struck, Marybeth and I, was that we would go if I could get back to Trieste where I'd shot the stands of trees three years earlier about 30 minutes west of the city near Palmanova. I'd made a series of pictures there in 2009 (Trees, 2009) and I very much wanted to be there again with a camera to make a series  in color.

So, here I was in Forti Dei Marmi, an Italian seaside resort, which was very trendy, posh and managed, with my friends shopping as it was market day and me wandering around, camera in hand, looking for pictures to make. I found myself down by the beach. As so often happens, pictures began to unfold and reveal themselves to me as I walked about. First it seemed to be about the sand and how it is always manicured at "paid" beaches in Italy. Yes, there are public and paid beaches in Italy. The paid ones are always made perfect at the start of each day with tractors dragging along behind them a rake that disappears the previous day's foot prints. So, I worked with that for a while. The sand was flat and rich in middle tan/gray, contrasting with the changing rooms in bright bright colors.

So, from the sand there are one or two transitionals, pictures I make to help get me from one idea to another in a series.

"It was one of those days where if you stood out there looking at the meeting of the water and the sky, if you just let your senses relax and take in this light, this color, this sound, you could, yes, it true, you could feel like you were able to see forever and be at peace with yourself."

I wrote that in the evening after we were back at our hillside home, sitting outside under the trellis at the table where we were about to have a wonderful meal. 

From there we move on to these, printed as pairs:

The pictures move on then to a Pantone wheel of colors, the changing rooms paid beach goers rent to put on their swim suits in the summer:

For me, Forti Dei Marmi was good, very very good, short but sweet.  It took me almost two years to get to it, but with it being 8 degrees outside as I write this on December 31st in Cambridge, MA it feels great to put my mind back to a perfect, and warm, day in Italy. 

Hope you enjoy it.

Man oh man, things are changing! Hard to imagine what will come in five or ten years as there has been so much in the past five or ten. December 2003, ten years ago? Think where photography was. We didn't even have digital capture that was very good yet. I was working in a hybrid way 100%: shooting film (either 120mm or 8 x 10 inches), developing the black and white negatives myself and sending the color out to be processed, scanning the negatives and making my own inkjet prints. I  believe I was printing on my first 44 inch inkjet printer by then: an Epson 9600. A pretty good printer but a far cry from where we are now. I remember we were having  discussions (and arguments) about metamerism, print longevity and pigment verses dye inks. We were also having real issues with color profiles as they were unreliable from paper manufacturers and the papers themselves were all over the place due to batch inconsistencies.

Of course, we now think of inkjet printing as being a mature technology. There are a great range of papers of different qualities and surfaces, inks are very stable, and prints can be truly lustrous and detailed. In 2003 most black and white inkjet prints were terrible and we were in the era of printers set up to just print black and white with dedicated ink sets. OMG! About then I took a summer workshop at Cone Editions Press in Vermont to learn to use his system of printing black and white with inks he and his team had developed. Good prints from a painful process. Now I often print my black and white imagery as RGB files with no color cast at all.

But on the shooting end, real change is right around the corner as it is looking like the concept of big camera for best image is going to go away soon. The sooner the better as far as I am concerned. Sony is looking like the company for innovation as the new Sony A7r has set the industry buzzing. A smaller camera with a very large sensor (at 36 mp) this flies in the face of conventional wisdom that says a camera with a large file size has to be big and heavy. Not so. Indeed, for most with no need to make really big prints, a 36 mp large sensor camera is overkill. Sony thought so too as it made mostly the same camera, called the A7, with a 24 mp sensor. Cheaper too.  Smart. But think twice about rushing out to buy one of these as Sony came out with the cameras before making many lenses to fit them. That should improve over 2014.

Any other big changes in photography? I thought you'd never ask. Big changes are afoot in image processing and perhaps have been for a while now. It's not clear that Photoshop reigns supreme anymore. Old style digital: shoot RAW, load the file into Camera Raw, convert the file to a TIFF, load it into Photoshop, work the file using layers and smart objects and output it through Adobe and printer drivers. New style digital workflow: load the RAW file into Lightroom or Aperture, color correct and adjust contrast, work the file in some plug-in like On One's Perfect Enhance or Nik's Viveza 2, finish up with Nik's Perfect Sharpener and then export the file to Photoshop for final sizing, then, optionally,  to a RIP like Colorbyte's Image Print for output. Sounds more complicated but it isn't really and it sure beats bloated files with 20 or more layers. Plus the process never touches the original. Coming next? More automation, less hands on, picking the image you want from a menu of thumbnails that give you the look you want and avoid the heavy lifting. That isn't exactly my idea of paradise, having some software company determine how my image is going to look. But, so far at least, all those canned looks are flexible with sliders that control how much, how contrasty, how much color is added, etc. 

Confused about formats? It is a very confusing time. Michael Reichmann works at trying to clarify the issue and weighs in on large verses smaller sensors at: Luminous Landscape.

Good luck.

This is post number 1 highlighting three series I've loaded onto the site from 2004-2006 that have never been there before.

"Billings" was made the same summer I made the Old Trail Town series from Cody, Wyoming. The mid 2000's were heady years for me. I was now a full professor at Northeastern, I was starting to teach summers in Venice and photography had embarked on a sea change of a different way to capture light on a light sensitive material, from film to CCD sensors. Looking back at my work made during those years, the series I made at the end of the film era for me, the work looks large in scale, completely known in terms of the materials I was using and comfortable in  the tools I used to make my images. Two of the series I have just placed on the site, Billings and Thomspon are large works, and look complex, involved, and are perhaps less accessible to many. If anything I can do as a photographic artist is close to "symphonic" then these are two groups that would represent that idiom best. As such, again looking  back at them with years of perspective, I would rate them highly in terms of works being made by an artist at the height of his powers and secure in the materials being used to make his statements. If it sounds as though I am proud of these works, I am. Are they among my most beautiful series? Absolutely not. Are they for everybody? No. But they are rhythmic, melodic, arrive at a climax, finish with a conclusion and are intended to take the viewer somewhere. All three are mature works, not really possible for a young man to make. 

So, Billings pays homage to my youth due to two summers spent in Wyoming and Montana as a teenager working on a ranch. In order to get to the ranch in those years, one flew to Billings, then drove from there to Cody and then went west to the ranch. Forty years later, in 2005, I rented an apartment in Cody and worked for five weeks in 8 x 10 and early digital. shooting daily, driving a rented Jeep. Looking back it was the last trip I took where I worked in the 8 x 10 inch format.

The Toyo 8 x 10 field camera that was my main camera for twenty years set up here in Wyoming:

and here, what it was pointed at:

Cleary, I was photographing the big camera as I was thinking this way of making pictures was close to being over.

What was I photographing the 8 x 10 with? A Nikon D70, an early generation small chip DSLR that was very affordable and made a picture from a 6 mp file. In truth I had a blast with the Nikon, shooting things like a 4th of July parade in downtown Cody.

Looking back, the Nikon wasn't much of a camera in today's terms, but it does support the idea that for many people there is no need for a large file. The images seen at 72 dpi don't suffer a bit here. It is only when trying to make prints and large ones, that this camera's file is severely deficient.

I also went to Yellowstone Park that trip and had a great time photographing the tourists and the amazing things coming out of the ground:

I also worked in the 120mm film format on that trip and that is how I made the Old Trail Town series and Billings as well.

So where's Billings? It's coming up in the next post.