Irrationally Exposed

No zoom

2010-01-05T10:46:00.001-08:00

Examining the heap of stuff to be packed as I was to leave Boston before Christmas, there seemed to be a tad too much of it to fit into my backpack. An ice axe, a tripod for my dad, a tent, a motherboard, a laptop, a lens, another lens, another lens, a bivvy sack, another laptop, a camera bag, some clothes, shoes, another lens, ski goggles, a camera, more clothes, crampons, another lens... Naturally, first I ditched all my clothes not needed for hiking or skiing. Next I tossed the camera bag, wrapping my gear in my clothes. And then I left all my lenses behind, except for one: a fixed-length, 35mm f/1.8 dream-team member. That's right, no zoom, and no other lenses I was taking along.

"But how can you take pictures with no zoom?" Easy, I just I ended up moving a lot. A lot. Crouching, lying on the ground, sticking my neck out, moving back and forth until I banged my feet against something.

The upshot? As everyone says, it makes you think about the frame a lot more. When I have to go through the trouble of spiralling around my subject until it fills the frame better, and makes you think harder about what you're actually trying to capture. The technical stuff like more pleasant colours and fast aperture is also a nice bonus, allowing me to take pictures indoors with no flash.

I think I might leave it on my camera for a while. No matter how ridiculous I might sometimes look when taking pictures. It's still better than this.

Irrationally Exposed

2009-09-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

It seems very hard to argue with the statement, "People care about privacy." The legal system protects this as a right of individuals, stalking is considered socially inappropriate and individuals have a strong sense of private space. I was somewhat worried about my privacy when I learned that Google and Yahoo! ad servers track my web browsing including the advertisements I've seen on the internet. My shopping cart on Amazon.com, my conversations on gmail and data from online surveys are all stored on some ad server and the data is used to market products to me. In fact, the delay in loading nytimes.com is not a result of the slow NYT server but the fact that Google Ad Sense is trying to figure out the best advertisement to show you based on this data. If I had recently shopped for camera lenses on amazon.com, I'm very likely to get an ad from bhphotovideo.com.

The argument that our internet-savy lives is a threat to our privacy is made stronger considering well known facts that employers look at facebook and that marketing strategies by large corporations no longer rely simply demographic data. It is now important to know whether you care about the environment or care about fighting AIDS to predict the likelihood that a Product (Red) tagged item will sway your purchasing decision. If this isn't convincing, it's easy to see why it would make sense for Nikon to spend $10 on targeting an ad for this beautiful lens to me rather than the average person on the internet or even on Ken Rockwell's blog because it knows that I shoot portraits, have a nikon D60 and don't have a lens that is a close substitute. The degree to which our preferences are exposed on the internet is astounding and our hunch is that it can be exploited by evil corporations to make profit.

Yet, I write a blog, have a facebook account, still use gmail, shop online and fill out online surveys. Such questions were part of the motivation for naming our blog "Irrationally Exposed" (the other reason is that we take irrationally many pictures). The benefit from writing a blog is supposedly low but the costs are presumably high. Sometimes, even the friends of blog writers can suffer from having their "private" portraits up for public viewing. In fact, I took down a beautiful portrait from the slideshow on the right because one of my subjects wasn't happy about her picture being up on this website. Yet, this person has drunken pictures up on facebook for everyone to see. Are we all really this irrational?

I argue not. The targeting of advertisements reduces the cost of searching for the right products. The fact that you see the ad means that the company is rather confident that their product will fulfill your needs better than their competitors' products. If you have the appetite, I encourage you to read a paper by my advisor on internet auctions and how they increase consumer wellbeing.

About the drunken pictures - I'm sure that in thirty years, everybody will have a college photo with a red-cup in one hand and bud light in the other that can be held against them when they run for public office. This might hurt our ego, but for most of us, our private lives aren't worth that much to the general public. And if you really are afraid of your privacy being invaded and held ransom against you at some point in your life, then the rational response is to become a hobbit.

Economists, Photographers, and the Whites

2009-09-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

Just like becoming a bad physicist, it's much easier to be a bad landscape photographer than a good one. Just omit foreground, choose uninteresting subject, overexpose, and take the picture in the middle of sunny day when the light is harsh and ugly. As I discovered on a last week's trip to the whites, however, you need to get all four factors right to take a decent shot. Nikhil and I find ourselves on top of Mount Liberty, watching a beautiful sunset after the rest of the group has galloped ahead to the Liberty springs campsite, and taking pictures with nice light, but no character. Nikhil was indeed so dissatisfied that when my alarm rang at 530am, he actually got up, and did the 15min climb back to the top to look for something more interesting. I slept through it. Same applies to the numerous waterfall pictures I took during those two days.

At least i confimed the validity of Nikhil's theory outlined in a previous post that if you take 500 shots, about 20 of them won't be bad just by chance. So the portraits ended up being decent, especially thanks to Tristan's hat. And the improvement from a year ago is that these days I am much better at telling which shots are the lucky ones. This time Nikhil picked well, and I was happier (only the second half is from this trip) than I thought I would be.

Oh, and another thing. If you are too lazy to pitch a tent and decide to sleep in the open in a 35 degree bag in 40 degrees, and if you're also too lazy to bring anything but shorts, don't use an emergency bivy sack. Somehow it didn't occur to me that while the bag retains 90% of temperature, it also retains about 99% of moisture, so you wake up bathing in condensation.

Economists and Photographers

2009-09-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

One of my rather photogenic subjects doesn't like her pictures. Hoping that she wasn't referring to the ones I took, I asked her about them. She responded, "You're a good photographer, you only put up good pictures!" She was right; I just hadn't heard it articulated so clearly.

I switched from my 35mm film camera to a digital SLR early this year because I didn't have access to a darkroom and printing was very time intensive. Thinking back, my shots with the old-school camera were more carefully thought out because the marginal cost of a click was high. The pictures I picked tended to be worse than the ones I put up now but the average picture was much better. From two good pictures every roll of film (36 frames), I've probably gone down to two in every hundred. The total number of good pictures have gone up because the total number of pictures I click has gone up! What does all this mean?

It means that I was born an economist. A friend translated the wisdom above in terms that I understood: "A good economist picks out only 5 of the 100 regressions he runs." This was indeed the story of my photography. Here are 26 of 442 frames that I took during my most recent hiking trip, Mt. Flume -Mt. Lafayette, Franconia, NH. True to my profession, I must conclude that I'm barely skilled (at the 5% level).

PS- There's value to marginal cost zero pictures on a DSLR. I learned through experimentation.

Windy City (August 7-11)

2009-09-03T20:12:00.000-07:00

Because Zach, Amit and I hadn't seen each other since January, Amit and I flew to Chicago to visit Zach (truth be told, I just wanted to go to Lollapalooza). Having not been to Chicago, I was particularly excited to take pictures, sample some amazing cuisine and attend my first music festival.

I had tried taking night-time city pictures in NYC a while ago on 1600ISO B&W film with a Canon AE1-P but the results were a little disappointing when I developed the film in the darkroom. I kept a mental note of things that I would do differently and one of the things was to first try photography during the day :-p. On August 8, Zach was our tour guide while I kept myself busy experimenting with the camera because it was the only day that weekend when I could've taken my camera out. The picture on the left is one of the rare successes that are collected in this album. The other favourite picture happened while waiting for Zach at a Starbucks cafe.

The food in Chicago had Boston restaurants beat. Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba was well worth the 1.5 hour wait for the three hungry boys and the debate about the longest greak word (on the menu) at Pegasus was priceless (OPA!!!). I must give a thumbs-up to death-on-a-plate Chicago style pizza at Gino's East but the Chicago breweries including Goose Island were disappointing with their flat brown ales and watery lagers. Zach, a St.Louis native, was especially happy about my opinion given his devotion to Anheuser-Busch.

The most exciting day was Sunday with Kaiser Cheifs and The Killers at Lollapalooza. Great energy, great orchestration. Lou Reed, Vampire Weekend and Snoop Dogg were disappointing enough to prevent me from advertising their music by providing links. Dan Aurbach was a great discovery although all his songs sound very similar.

I must recommend the boat tour run by the Chicago Architecture Foundation for providing great information about the city where the skyscraper was invented. The design of the modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago (where I took this photo) is a great example of the continuing tradition of interesting architecture in Chicago. The new building owned by Donald Trump on the other hand, not so much.

Finally, I leave you with Kelli Connell who's pictures displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Photography left me stunned. These pictures are composed from two shots of the same model (I love that Chicago requires museums to have days with free admission).

Golden Hour, Boston, MA

2009-09-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

August 31, 2009 marked the end of a productive summer of research: food, beer, travel, rock bands, hikes and pictures. To convince ourselves that all was not lost before Economics classes took over, we took our Nikon D60s after a wholesome meal at Le's (max protein/$ grub in Cambridge) to hit Golden Hour on the Charles River. These pictures taken by Michal and me, we hope, keep you occupied till we catch up from the backlog this summer...