Adobe Photoshop CS6: A review.

I don’t know about you, dear, but probably non-existent reader, but I thoroughly enjoy it when things don’t work properly. Nothing annoys me more, for instance, than entering my car, turning the key in the ignition, and the engine starting. Getting to my destination on time, and in a safe and comfortable manner is one of the biggest irritations I can imagine. As you can guess, Photoshop CS4, was, there4, an almost constant source of perfect annoyance. I didn’t enjoy the way it rarely, if ever, crashed. I hated the fact that it seemed to understand how much memory my computer had, and did its best to operate within those tolerances. You can imagine, then, the upgrade to CS5 coming as a welcome relief.

Finally! The heady mixture of cannibalised memory and slow as mollasus-mixed-with-dogshit performance, regardless of your system specs, and those sublime moments where you’d accidentally nudge a layer 1 pixel and have to wait for a couple of minutes as the swapfile seemingly crushed itself to a singularity under the awesome reckoning of Adobe’s frivolous and lazy coders. My God, I love CS5.

Even as I use it now, it’s making me smile. I just had a single file open, and granted, it had many layers, and it was a 16 bit image, so it took its time to save. During these saves, it actually sounds like there is someone inside the chassis of my computer sawing large chucks of wood. It is, of course, just my hard drive struggling to cope with photoshop’s galactic processing requirements. Whilst none of that is unexpected for the larger files a photographer has to work with, it doesn’t explain why, directly after saving that file, I also saved a much smaller file, containing only a single layer and a contrast adjustment, which took twice as long to save and also denied me access to to any other programs; my computer had frozen solid with the kind of stricken helpless fear once reserved only for youngest catholic boys in the remotest Irish diocese.

So as you can see, the brilliance of CS5 is that it’s always keeping me on my toes. Never getting predictable like, say, things that work how they’re supposed to? It’s always there, smashing into things, causing a nuisance, freezing my computer, having to be restarted every few hours because it refuses to release precious stockpiled memory like the rotund children in sweetshops of yore, forced, by well-meaning parents to release the handfuls of cola bottles from fleshy fingers webbed by saliva and sugar. Portly little buggers.

Anyway, after two years of this shit, in comes Adobe Photoshop 6: Bigger. Stronger. Faster. Just not at any of the stuff that made CS5 so infuriating to work with.

A quick rundown on what it offers,

Slightly faster liquifiy tool.

A bunch of shit I’ll never use.

A bunch of stuff for hobbyist photographers to completely wreck their photos.

Slightly different UI that does nothing to enhance usability, but rather just makes things slightly confusing as you initially get used to it.

Background Save function that no longer freezes the program while it saves, but instead intrusively freezes the program during random intervals, lasting 30 seconds at a time, mostly when you least expect it.

Recovery feature (See above)

Couple of extra blur filters. Amazing!

 

So if you usually use Photoshop for retouching purposes, this upgrade is far from a no-brainer. 40 days of use and I’ve gone back to CS5. Why? Because whilst using CS5 is the equivalent of standing in your Sunday best below a giant wobbly mountain of crap, you can do it with up to 50% less memory than Photoshop CS6. From a cold start, on my iMac, CS5 requires 308mb of memory. CS6: 506mb. What if I only plan to use features that have been present in the Adobe suit since Photoshop 5 back in 1999? I have to give up a further 200mb of memory for the privilege of a dark UI?

Loading a TIFF I’m currently working on that’s so far sitting at about 1gb file size, CS5 uses a whopping 5597mb to load it (If I close the image, CS5 gives me back a generous 200mb of memory, deciding, for whatever reason, to continue holding onto the other 5gb it took to load the image). In cs6, though, 6500mb is required (It gives back an even more impressive 8mb when I close the image). So in order to load  and work on the same image between versions, I’m expected to give up an extra 1gb of memory. For someone who doesn’t use a single new feature-what’s the point?

And thus we arrive at my point. Who are Adobe making these products for now? Not me. Every single addition I’ve seen in the last few years has been for a userbase that never existed. It adds feature upon feature that doesn’t really add anything to a photographer’s workflow. More and more features give them a reason to justify higher and higher software prices, but in the meantime, I’m still using the same basic tools I’ve been using since Photoshop 5. Not CS5, I’m talking 1999.

Maybe I’m completely wrong about everything here, but as someone who uses PS for up to and over eight hours a day, something just doesn’t feel right. What was once a beautifully coded, succinct tool for photo editing has now become a bloated mass of functions that serve almost no purpose for the audience this program was originally intended for. Adobe are heading the way of RealPlayer, and I’m stating categorically that as soon as a reliable alternative appears, I’ll be jumping ship. They lost my loyalty a long time ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magazine article

I was asked to write an article for a magazine, and here it is. Now, before I continue, know that there are two major flaws to this blog update. The first is the abominable quality of that picture (blame poor light and only an iphone to shoot it with), and the second is that I forgot the name of the magazine I wrote it for. It’s a British one, and it’s one of the biggies. That’s all the information I can give you. With that in mind, it’s fair to say that this is probably the poorest blog update you’ll likely find anywhere on the internet.

The article was on proper black and white photography. A bit of trivia: Originally, I sent them three images to use for the article, but one of them was a portrait I took of an escaped mental patient covered in blood, smashing the head of his captor open with a wooden stake. It being a family/enthusiast publication, they said it was a tad too “strong”. So instead, I just converted one of my colour shots to black and white and sent that instead.

 

 

C’est la vie.

Julian Farrow for BOND magazine

Here’s an editorial I recently completed for BOND magazine. The shoot was for an article they were running on contemporary art expert Julian Farrow, who is the director of art at the Art Sensus gallery in London. The art director on the shoot was Martin Turner, also the intervier in the article. The shoot was great fun, and check out those lights! They were part of an amazing piece by artist Andrei Molodkin.

 

 

Don’t forget to calibrate your monitor

I did a shoot for Mannschaft magazine in Sweden recently, of an Electronica banned called Electronic Deer. The picture is on the left as it appears in the magazine, way, way darker than it should be. A lesson to anyone who thinks calibrating isn’t important. It is.

Tories abusing VAT

I know I said I wouldn’t rant on this blog like my last one, but I just had to put down something that is really irking me at the moment.. VAT on sports drinks: Really? That’s the solution is it, George? The one-two combo cure for the obesity epidemic and a suffocating recession is to charge people extra money to stay healthy? There’s a Christopher Hitchens anecdote about avoiding the use of a stale phrase or cliché in your writing, but it being impossible to do so when travelling to  certain countries. Visiting Prague, for instance, and being forced to mention Kafka.. This is a similar issue with the tories. I honestly can’t stand politics, but the actions of this group of  slobbering, dim-witted egomaniacs are such that I find my attention constantly diverting to them.

I know we arent spoilt for choice at the moment: Ed Miliband looks like he was made by hand on the set of a Wallace & Gromit film, and has the dark, squalid little eyes of a young Joseph Ratzinger; but hes still getting my vote.

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View from the Disney theatre

The Disney Theatre offers some impressive views of the rather crappy, desolate, vacant landscape of downtown LA. While I loved everywhere else I visited on holiday, downtown was the only place I didn’t really enjoy. The local food was amazing, but I grew up  on Lethal Weapon, Hard To Kill, and other such movies that had led to me to believe downtown was a smorgasbord of  car chases, cop shootouts and burning buildings. Instead it was a vast, largely unpopulated expanse of grey concrete interspersed with the occasional wall mural attempting to hide-or make interesting-the sides of buildings that, for an Englishman, appear to smother and dominate your field of view. For anyone else who has been there, I wonder if they had the peculiar sense of being somewhere, but still feeling like you’re in the middle of nowhere.

I didn’t really get my camera out much, as street photography isn’t my trade, but there were plenty of peculiar and/or interesting people around. I even saw someone carrying a shopping trolley full of cans, and while I admit that is tantamount to poverty tourism, Hollywood has burned that person into the deepest parts of my mind, and seeing it for real further confirmed that every US film is, in a small way, capable of seeming far-fetched, while still retaining a large element of unintentional documentary.

I ate tangerine chicken in a Chinese restaurant and it was bloody lovely.

Shooting shoes

Pretty sure ‘shoeting’ would’ve worked in that title, but I spared you.

Working in a studio in Shoreditch today shooting shoes for some press books going out in the summer. We’re having to shoot at the weekend, because the retailer won’t let the shoes stay with us, and will only courier down the shoes in small batches for us to keep over the weekend. They wouldn’t deliver to my studio, because it’s in greater London, so we’re having to use the studio of the graphic designer who is preparing the books. We’ve got a good team, though. Work is moving very fast and we’re hoping to have completed within the next three weekends.

In this shot my friend Nick, who I’m partnering on this job, is hanging the shoe from the beam to make it appear like it’s being worn. It’s got flimsy ribbon that he spent twenty minutes cellotaping into rings to make it look like an invisible foot was inside it, then suspended it from the pole with fishing wire. He’s pretty good at this stuff. He likes to get it right in camera, whereas my approach is to let everything fix itself in photoshop. Basically, I’m just lazy.

It turned out really well.

One of the worst jobs was a shoe that has been delivered seemingly from the cutting room floor that was missing 50% of the strap. It had to be photographed in stages and then comped together. It was a nightmare dodging and burning to get it looking like it was curving round the shoe, when really it was just a completely flat piece of fabric.

We nailed it though. What heroes.

Behind the scenes – Lilly

 

A little behind the scenes shot of one of the images in my portfolio. It’s easy to see which one, so I won’t bother linking. If you think she looks bored in this shot, you’d be right. My scintillating conversation, derived mainly from David Cameron-based diatribes, did little to disengage her attention to the fact that I spent about 30 minutes faffing with the position of a single reflector.

 

I pulled back a little to catch in at least the back half of the lighting setup. Relatively simple, just a couple of strip boxes acting as kickers, a hair light and a wall light. In front is a couple of flags, a reflector and a very large octobox. I keep my kickers a bit higher than other people, as I really like it when someone looks completely bathed in light.

Looking for an assistant.

Yeah, due to massively increasing workload, I’m now in the market for an intern/assistant.

If you’re interested, please get in contact.

The ideal applicant will have a decent knowledge of light. I’d love to do the “must make a good cup of tea” crap, but I don’t drink tea, and I’m really not looking for a dog’s body. I’m looking for someone who can contribute to my shoots.

The criteria for selection is very slight, but surprisingly tricky to fill.

In summary:

Successful applicant must:

1. Know a bit about photography

2. Not be a dickhead.

That’s really it. Number 2 is the most important thing of all. Definitely do not be a dickhead. It’s easy to tell if you’re one: go to the mirror, and take a look at what you’re wearing. If you are wearing:

A. Spectacles as a fashion accessory rather than a visual aid

B. “vintage” fashion of any kind.

C. Anything purchased in Shoreditch.

Chances are, you’re a dickhead.

Just be sound, have a sense of humour, a decent sense of irony, and you’ve got the gig.

Oh, and have a car.

 

Givenchy

It’s always struck me as odd that-for a portrait photographer-I do a hell of a lot of product photography. Not that I’m complaining, sometimes it’s great fun. This shot was for a company called Givenchy, and I *think* it went in either Elle magazine or Harper’s Bazaar, I forget which one now. It was one of two jobs I completed for them, and I loved both. This was the better of the two, still. Not sure if it’s easy to tell or not, but this is actually a composite. Most of the water elements were shot individually, as was the background, bottle, lid, and reflection.