LensWork Technology Blog

Who Controls Time?

We are asked with some frequency why LensWork Extended is not available in DVD format for playing on a television like a DVD movie. The technology is relatively easy to create and it's not a matter of difficult authoring that prevents us from doing so. Rather, it's a matter of timing in the sense of the viewer's experience of time.

In the world of technology, there is what I think of as "the great divide" — those media that are viewer-timed and those that are author-timed. Movies are author-timed; PDF slide shows are author-timed; live lectures are author-timed; music is author-timed. In my way of thinking, photography is best when it is not author-timed, but when the viewer sets the pace of viewing. It's enough for me as a photographer to control what is seen, and perhaps in what sequence it is seen. But, I don't feel a compunction to control how long a viewer sees any given image. In fact, it's perhaps as a viewer of photographs that my prejudice was formed — I want total control of that characteristic for myself when viewing photographs, primarily because I find I prefer to spend far more time with an image that most people do.

Why? I've always thought that viewing photographs is more of a dialog that an entertainment. As a viewer, my responsibility is to look, ask questions, think, place the work in context of my life experiences, ask more questions, even ask that most leading of all questions, What if?

This kind of dialog only happens when there is enough time to do so. Sometimes, I feel a photograph is worth a minute to two. Sometimes an hour to two. Almost never do I think a photograph (I'm talking about serious artwork here) is worth a fraction of a second or two as is so often the case now in our age of the quick cut.

Author-timed media has accelerated in my lifetime to rates that would astound and confuse our grandparents. I'm not sure this is a virtue. There is a lot of power in the pregnant pause that is all but absent from today's author-timed media. This is where the book, the PDF, the still photograph can still be of value — providing the time to think and react that is missing from author-timed media.

Of course, there is a risk for us photographers when we let go of control of time. Viewers can be fickle. Work we intend for leisurely viewing replete with meaning and counterpoint may be consumed in a glance, discounting all the subtlety we worked so diligently to include. It's a risk I think is worth taking for this simple reason: the best strategy as a producer is to create for that subset of viewers with whom we connect at the deepest level. I know of no other philosophy of art making that promotes the core of art's dual purposes — experiencing and sharing with the pursuit of excellence.

Besides, I'm pretty convinced that the author-timed media creators have the same problem. One can watch a movie while cooking, doing homework, talking, or otherwise distracted from full immersion in the artwork. Media does not determine connection; connection determines connection. You may quote me on that.

So, I prefer to have faith; faith that some viewers, albeit a few, will want to take time to connect with what I produce; faith that allowing them control of the time they spend with my art work will foster connections that are appropriate for them, long or short; faith that what I produce will, indeed, connect with someone, somewhere, in spite of this philosophy being in such opposition to the zeitgeist of our times.

Copyrights and the audience

Here is an odd observation, I know. Just something to think about.

With the advent of eReaders like the Kindle and the Sony Reader, there has been an explosion in the consumption of so-called "classic" novels. Why? Copyright law.

Novels published before 1923 are in the public domain and can be freely published. Hence, all kinds of people — amateurs and commercial publishers alike — are cranking them out with enthusiastic volume. Gutenberg.org has 30,000 free books available on their website. Feedbooks and MobileRead have thousands. Manybooks.net has over 25,000. All free, all public domain. Neat.

But, here is an interesting observation. There are some authors whose career spans the 1923 dividing line — W. Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, PG Wodehouse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber just to name a few of my favorites. Work they published before 1923 can be had for free. Work after 1923 is still protected by copyright and is only available for sale.

Guess which books are being read most? Guess which books are developing the widest audience? Guess which books live and which are relatively mothballed?

Consider Maugham. If you want to read Of Human Bondage, Liza of Lambeth, The Moon and Sixpence, or The Magician you can do so immediately, without paying for them. However, if you want to read The Razor's Edge (one of his very best, IMHO) you'll have to buy it. Same with The Painted Veil, Secret Agent, Cakes and Ale, The Writer's Notebook, and all his later, often better works and all of his wonderful short stories.

Setting aside issues of money and his right to earn it (which I support), there is an interesting issue here about the independent life of the artwork and the writer's relationship with the audience. Without being read, without an audience, a novel (or a book of photography) is a dead collection of molecules and ideas. How does the copyright law serve the needs of the artwork? It unquestionably serves the needs of the publisher, author, and their heirs, but seems to me it gets in the way of the artwork itself.

I recently discovered the writer Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited is a fascinating book on so many levels. I wanted to read more. As it turns out, most of his work is post-1923. Another is PG Wodehouse. How can you not like Jeeves and Wooster? Again, most of his work is post-1923. So, naturally enough, I've been reading their early works first because I have access to them for free. I'm buying their books as I have time for them, one at a time. I may get to them. I may have so much at my disposal from the public domain corpus that I won't. I wonder how the writers would feel about this? Would they be more pleased that their finances post-1923 are protected, or that their earlier work is being read?

There is a metaphorical giant hole in literature after 1923 and before the contemporary lot. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy and the like need not worry. They are hot, contemporary authors whose work flies off the bookstore shelves — and into the new digital readers, too. Dickens, Austen, Dumas, and Twain need not worry either. Their work lives vibrantly in the public domain.

But, Earle Stanley Gardner? Graham Greene? HP Lovecraft? James Thurber? Erskine Caldwell? Dorothy Parker? Virginia Woolf? Is the audience for their work still alive and well? Perhaps, but I can't help but wonder if the audience for their work is suppressed because of the copyright laws. We remember them — and even read them — but do we do so as much as their work deserves? I wonder.

There is always the public library, I know, but lots of books I'd like to read are no longer available. There is only so much room on the shelves. I love to see these books available for digital borrowing, but we're too early in the technology for it to have penetrated the library system very far. Someday . . . but in the meantime, we're left to acquire books for our personal use either for free from the public domain or for sale by commercial publishers.

Of course, just because a book is free doesn't mean it will be widely read. Long lost authors like Irvin S. Cobb, George Barton, Robert Ames Bennet, and Arthur Train can attest to this. Conversely, a few authors from the 1930s are still widely read — like JRR Tolkein, Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, and Aldous Huxley come to mind. The 1923 copyright barrier is thankfully quite porous. Work of the highest quality will always find an audience.

I'm not an anti-protection nut. As an author and publisher, I believe in and support copyrights as ardently as anyone. Nonetheless, I do think it has a dampening effect on the widest-spread distribution of artwork. I see no better solution than the current copyright paradigm, but I do also see its deleterious effects on some works of art.

eReaders on Parade

This last week was the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. As a former electronics buyer, I attended these extravaganzas every year for decades and miss them now. It's a technogeek's weekend orgy of new gadgets galore. I always carried extra handkerchiefs to keep the drool off my chin.

This year, reports are that eReaders took front stage and dominated the new product announcements. As a publisher, you can well imagine how I am keeping my eye on this category. (As a consumer, I love my Sony Reader.) We are definitely in the very early stages of this technology, but it's one that we photographers should know about. Think of the implication of ePublishing for us photographers! Right now, digital books of our photographs would be absurd because the displays are far too primitive for our use — 16 shades of gray only, not enough resolution, small displays in the 6-inch size range.

But, project ahead 10 years. Why? Well, look back 10 years ago — at the cell phone or the MP3 player, for example. They were new, big, clunky, barely functional, and expensive. Look how far these now-ubiquitous technologies have come. What if we can project ahead 10 years and see the same ubiquitous distribution of eReaders? It may not happen, but what if? What if they have color displays? What if they are larger, say photo-book size? What if the resolution improves so photographs look as good as, say, your computer monitor? Or better? What if it opens the possibility that all of us could self-publish our own photo-ebooks and distribute them via, for example, Amazon.com or our own website?

Think this is a fantasy? You might want to read this about the coming color display eReader from ASUS, or this about flexible displays. If you are new to the concept of eBooks and eReaders, you can learn more from the MobileRead forum. I am certainly not a Nostradamus, but it doesn't take a mystic to see how this might be something we photographers should keep an eye on.

Welcome to the LensWork Technology Blog

As you long-time readers of LensWork are fully aware, we tend to concentrate on the artmaking side of photography and the creative process rather than on technology, cameras, or equipment. But, truth be known, as photographers our productive life is very involved with technology. Without cameras, lenses, equipment of all sorts — and now computers, software, email, websites, etc. — our life as creative photographers would be pretty difficult.

Well, after 17 years of publishing LensWork and LensWork Extended without technology discussions, we're comfortable adding such to our repertoire with this blog. 

But with a twist.

It seems self-evident that here in the new millennium "technology" for photographers is much broader thing than merely cameras or other photographic equipment. We've specifically titled this The LensWork Technology Blog for a reason — so we are free to discuss software, computers, PDF publishing, print and book publishing, ebooks, digital printing, folios, website design and marketing, special edition prints and folios, and even blogging itself — that encompass such a variety of skills and tools so important to photography and the creative process to modern fine art photographers. To limit the discussion to just cameras and lenses seems more an anachronism than a useful strategy.

So, in this blog I'll share with you my random collection of thoughts, discoveries, explorations, hard-won experience, and — I fully anticipate — some technological failures and struggles as I wade through this world of technology and its use to create photographic artwork.

I'm particularly excited about the technology of blogging because it offers, almost for the first time in my publishing history, a fully integrated platform that allows an exchange of ideas with LensWork readers and between our readers. Since 2004, we published one of the most popular podcasts about photography on the Internet. To date, there are about 600 podcast episodes available on our LensWork website in which I discuss various aspects of photography and creative process. (Consider yourself invited.) I love doing these podcasts and will continue them in addition to these new blogs. Podcasts however, by their nature, are a one-way street and blogging offers a different opportunity that allows not just a two-way street but also cross-traffic that opens all kinds of lines of communication that further the notion of a community of photographers who share a passion for photographs, the creative process, and the technology required to produce them. I tend to think of LensWork readers as a community and I love the idea that the community, from around the globe, can find each other through these new LensWork blogs.

By the way, I use the term "blogs" (plural) because we're launching three blogs simultaneously, each with a specific focus and purpose —

• this blog on technology,
• another we're titling Ask Brooks in which I'll do my best to respond to questions from our readers (or help them search for answers to their questions within the community of other photographers who follow the blog),
• and finally a sort of relaunch of LensWork Vision of the Heart. Version 1.0 of Vision of the Heart was a podcast-format production that offered commentary on photographs we'd published in LensWork or LensWork Extended. As such, it was intended to be a discussion of images (rather than either creativity or equipment) and was one of my favorite projects for the last few years on our LensWork website. Unfortunately, as a podcast it was simply too cumbersome to produce and bogged down in its own logistics. The blog format, however, is ideally suited for this project so we are relaunching it using blogging rather than audio as the platform. This also will allow you, the LensWork community again, to add your comments and join the conversation.

So, here we go! Welcome aboard.