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Showing posts from 2009

What kind of camera should I buy?

That is perhaps the most frequently asked question I hear. My usual response is to buy the one you like. By that I mean get one that feels right in your hands and looks like something you will want to carry around. Second, buy the best camera you can afford or spend the most money you feel comfortable spending on a camera. You really do get what you pay for. Beyond that the main consideration, in my opinion, is the viewfinder. The viewfinder is what you will spend your time looking at or through while you are making those beautiful photographs. There are three general types of viewfinders. The best is a single-lens-reflex which means that you are looking through the actual lens that the sensor is looking through. In the digital world the term is DSLR for digital single lens reflex. DSLR cameras are generally the most expensive, but are far and away the most pleasure to use. You almost always see exactly what you are going to get, the original WYSIWYG design. Most have interchangeable l

Jim Mathis School of Photography

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I have believed for some time that as we get older we need to be passing along the things we have learned over the years. I got my first camera in the fourth grade and have been making picture almost every day since. I believe that is 18,980 days and it is certainly millions of photographs. I have sold cameras, owned a custom photo lab, taught photo classes, and of course been a professional photographer. I have photographed people in every situation imaginable and all kinds of machines and scenery in about a dozen countries. It is now time to start doing what I can to teach others. With that in mind I am launching “The Jim Mathis School of Photography.” Most photo classes are introductory level or teach out-dated technology. The first phase of my school will focus on taking people from where they are in their photography skills and help then move to where they want to be. The format will be one-on-one coaching, one day it a time. I think I can help most people dramatically improve th

The National Parks

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We enjoyed watching the PBS Ken Burns special on the National Parks last week. Not surprising, there have been a number of photographers directly associated with the parks in various ways. William Henry Jackson’s photos were instrumental in the forming of the first National Park at Yellowstone. The Kolb Brothers had a studio at the Grand Canyon and helped promote it for many years. And of course Ansel Adams will always be associated with Yosemite. In many ways the National Parks grew up with photography and the rise in attendance at the parks paralleled the growth in amateur photography. We have not been to all of the National Parks, but we have been to a few, and making photos at The Grand Canyon or Yellowstone are some of my fondest memories. For many years our business was such that we took our annual vacation in the winter. For that reason we are among the privileged few who have been to Yellowstone, not once, but twice, in the winter when the park is covered with snow and the hord

Art Westport

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We had a good time at Art Westport last weekend. This was our first experience at this show, but hopefully not our last. Though the sales of framed photographs was not what we had hoped, we practically sold out of panoramic notecards. More importantly, we saw many old friends and made new acquaintances. The Westport art fair draws an eclectic mix of people which makes for wonderful people watching and good conversations. My panoramic photo of a London street scene attracted the attention of an older gentleman who said he had driven double-decker buses in London as well as cross-country buses through Europe. He told me about the old Routemasters with their crash-box transmissions and manual steering. The new buses have automatic transmissions and power steering even though they are still double-deckers. In the words of Yogi, “You can hear a lot just be listening.” We saw lots of dogs walking their owners, but no cats. I guess cats aren’t all that into art. I took a break from the art fa

Digital Resolution

There is a lot of confusion concerning resolution in digital photography. In the days of film, we just tried to get as much resolution as possible, figuring the more the better. With digital imaging, the subject is a lot less subjective and a whole lot more specific. Cameras are sold based on the number of individual pixels, or picture elements, they can achieve. 35mm film, under ideal conditions, could possibly show the equivalent of about 10 million pixels. In reality, a five-meg, or 5 million pixel camera, is about equal to 35mm film in resolution. But the number of pixels is far from the whole story in digital photography. With virtually every camera outside of camera phones, producing images with more than five megapixels, other qualities become more important. The quality of the lens, the type, size, and quality of the sensor, and of course the skill of the photographer are all more important than the number of pixels. In practical use, the final use of the image determines the r

"Mama Don't Take My Kodachrome Away"

This week the Eastman Kodak Company announced the end of Kodachrome. Kodachrome film was introduced in 1936 as the first successful color film. In 1986, my wife and I attended a celebration in Rochester, NY marking the 50th anniversary of the introduction. 1936-2009, 73 years is a good run for any product. I shot my first roll of Kodachrome in about 1960 and carried on a love/hate relationship with it for the next 35 years. Its color was garish, the exposure was ultra-critical, and the processing extremely specialized, but it was still the best color film we had for many years. I have slide cabinets full of gorgeous Kodachrome slides made primarily in the 70’s and 80’s. But I have also thrown away thousands of slides that were over or (mainly) under-exposed. Getting the exposure right was a real pain, and you never knew how you did until, a few days later, when the little yellow boxes came back from the Kodak labs in New York, Chicago, or Dallas. Bracketing, which is a technique of sh

The Art of the Car

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The Kansas City Art Institute’s Art of the Cars Concours was this weekend. About 180 gorgeous cars were on display on the lawn of the art school. As a photographer and car lover, I had a great time walking around, chatting with car owners and enthusiasts and making photos. The interesting thing about photograph as a hobby is that it is nearly always tired to another hobby. People photograph their pets, their coin collection, birds, cars, or just about everything else that interests them. I would be impossible to be a photographer and not be interested in other things because you wouldn’t have anything to photograph. The bulk of my professional work is photographing people because I love people. But as a hobbyist, I like all kinds of thing – and cars are certainly high on that list. To see my photos from the Art of the Car, 2009, CLICK HERE .

10,000 Hours

For a long time I have been interested in the idea of talent verses work. I believe that talent is over-rated and hard work is under-rated. Some research at Florida State University has born this out. FSU researches have determined that it takes about 10,000 hours to learn a difficult skill. In other words, to become a top golfer, surgeon, musician, or photographer, it takes about 10,000 hours of diligent work and practice. If you practice every night during the week and all day on Saturday’s, you would reach 10,000 hours in about 20 years. If you are in medical school, 10,000 hours is about 5 years. So this number seems about right. And practice is not just piddling around. It must be diligent and disciplined work with a purpose. A few people like Tiger Woods or Mozart were able to get in their 10,000 hours before they were 21 years-old so people called them prodigies. For others of us, it has taken many years to develop the skills that we need to be considered “talented.” The top mus

PMA Wrap-up

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Thursday, March 5 started with a breakfast featuring Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. http://www.craigslist.org/ I was surprised that he still worked in customer service of his own company. He hired somebody else to be CEO. That shows where his heart is. He started Craigslist in 1995 just to help people. They figured out later how to pay the bills. Craig's personal blog is: http://www.cnewmark.com/ I then went to a class put on by Franziska Frey who is professor at the Rochester Institue of Technology about archiving photos and long-term storage of digital images. She said that the magic number is five years. Make new CD's every five years and replace your hard drive every five years. After that you are at a greatly increased risk of loosing information. There is a lot of information about this kind of thing that is not commonly known. I will be adding links to Library of Congress sites from http://www.mathisphoto.net/ later. I finished up the trade show in the after

PMA Part II

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Wednesday, March 4 I started off today with a couple of workshops about bookbinding and printing. The best one was by some folks from the Hardcover Binders Association, a trade group. http://www.hardcoverbinders.org/ After that, I finally made it to the main floor of the trade show. Canon has now declared itself the world leader in digital imaging, and I didn’t hear anybody disputing that. As such, they claimed the most prominent and biggest space on the floor. They have a huge array of products from cameras to printers and in all prices from inexpensive to out of sight. A number of the large manufactures such as Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Pentax were putting on demonstrations and shows featuring famous photographers and personalities. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and am looking f orward to more tomorrow. There were a few amazing products that would have been unbelievable just a few years ago. For example, Sony was showing a new camera that will produce true 220 degree panoramics in camera

PMA Report

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PMA 2009 Tuesday, March 3, 2009 The first session of the day featured Stephen Burns, http://www.chromeallusion.com/ He talked about graphics software other than Photoshop. Virtually everyone in the group were Photoshop users, so he talked about what some other things could do differently. He specifically talked about Nik Software. At 9:00 was the business meeting where five people were given special recognition for their contributions to the industry. The CEO of Nikon was elected to the PMA Hall of Fame. Geoffrey Moore then talked about disruptive innovation. I went from there to the trade show. The whole photo industry has changed dramatically since the last time I attended PMA about 15 years ago. No one was showing photofinishing equipment, no new film or film cameras were introduced, but there are all kinds of new things never dreamed of before the past few years. There are a large number of companies showing equipment for printing and binding photo books at all different prices an

Addios 4x6 prints

I spent 23 years in the photofinishing business. Since our clientele was primarily professionals, we called the 3x5 or 4x6 prints “proofs.” That was really just a subtle hint that we didn’t consider a little piece of paper a suitable end to the art of photography. We knew that 95% of all photographs would end up as 4x6 prints in a drawer. This was never a particularly satisfying thought. Figuring out what to do with all those little prints has been an ongoing challenge ever since George Eastman began cranking them out in 1893. By that time photography had been around for nearly 60 years, but Eastman’s Kodak Company opened photography up to everybody, and opened the floodgates on all these little pieces of paper. Now in the age of digital photography we have a lot more choices. We are no longer bound to the tradition of the little paper print. We can share photos on web sites, email them to anybody who might be interested, display them as wall size works of art, or wrap them around our

Photos on your web site

In this era of electronic communication, it is easy to forget that it is still about relationships. We want to feel connected to others. The amazing success of sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook attest to this fact. When we deal with another company via the internet we still strive for some sort of personal connection. I recently chose a vender for a project that could be handled by a specialty company thousands of miles away. A Google search revealed several choices, but I ultimately choice the company which posted photos and a short biography of each of their staff. The bios included e-mail addresses and a direct phone number so I knew I could contact anybody in the company. I also knew their job title and their background experience. When someone from the company called me with a question, I called up their photo page and felt like I could make a personal connection. I did not even consider any company that did not provide a phone number or a street address on the first page