WARNING: since I wrote this post, Photographer’s i Issue 4 has been published, and it is quite different Issue 1 to 3. My conclusions on this publication here do not apply any more. See my (updated) rant on the matter for further details.

I’m an avid reader of photography magazines. These days I’ve got over the repetitive, shallow print titles that seem to be little more than dressed up advertising wrapped in either ghastly overblown epic landscapes or the perennial soft porn. I’m also increasingly getting bored with gear, and more and more realising how meaningless in real terms the vast majority of gear review sites are. But what I do still enjoy is reading about photography and photographers.

The publishing world has been turned on its head first by the internet, and then by the iPad and its copycats. A direct-to-consumer business model has emerged which allows viable publications to be run free, or almost free, of advertising or the more insidious product placement. Two particularly nice examples of this are “Photographer’s i”, edited by Michael Freeman, and “Photograph”, edited by David duChemin. I’ve subscribed to both.

Photographer’s i, which has reached Issue 3, is perhaps the most ambitious. Edited by the renowned author-photographer Michael Freeman, it uses a fully interactive format and is distributed as an iPad Bookshelf app through Apple’s App Store. The format allows for embedded video, for interactive tutorials, and for variable formatting. It is quite similar in approach to National Geographic’s electronic edition. It features an eclectic and impressive range of contributors, and each issue is pretty weighty. Production standards are immaculate. It does cover some technical topics, but completely avoids gear reviews. But mostly it’s about photography, in all shapes and sizes. It’s available by subscription, at £2.99 for 2 months, or by issue at £3.99. There are also free samplers. Issue 4, however, seems to be rather overdue, and I’m pretty sure my subscription auto-renewed already. There are several complaints about this on the App Store. I suspect it is due at least in part to Apple’s restrictive pricing models. Another downside, for some, is that so far it’s iPad only. But if you’ve got an iPad, and you’re into intelligent writing on photography, then it’s a no-brainer.

Photograph is brand new, with Issue 1 just out. Published through Canadian world & humanitarin photographer David duChemin’s Craft & Vision, this is a straightforward PDF title, so it’s more universally accessible. Going by Issue 1, and by the general quality of Craft & Vision titles, Photograph has little to envy Photographer’s i for. The list of authors is equally impressive - Photographer’s i may have Steve McCurry, but Photograph has Art Wolfe. Photograph also gives more space to, well, photographs, with generous portfolios from a series of photographers, ending with an interview. A classic, but effective, format. And although they’re at different points in their careers, duChemin is just as eloquent and readable as Freeman. Photograph also covers a wide range of styles and downplays gear - although, again, there is some technical content. Based on Issue 1, the balance is fine. Photograph Issue 1 costs $8. A subscription to 4 issues will cost $24 - and you can try Issue 1, then pay an extra $16 to subscribe if you like it. A pretty fair deal.

Both titles are well worth your money and your time. Of course, if you haven’t got an iPad, then Photographers i is out of bounds, which is a shame. Hopefully they will find a way to reach a broader market (although I’m sure the iPad market alone is perfectly viable). Long term, I do wonder if the less overhead-intensive production approach of Photograph might give it more staying power. I’m afraid that Photographer’s i may have bitten off more than it can chew. But the key, in both cases, will be maintaining the quality of content, and avoid repetitiveness. Time will tell, but so far they’re both doing a great job.

I don’t do street photography. At least not street photography with people in it. And I don’t do portraits. I’m just hopeless at people photography - I have neither the skills, nor the wish, to photograph people. And so when somebody asks me to photograph their birthday party - because I take photos, I must have a really good camera, etc - as happened today, I find the offence caused by refusing is less than the disappointment I’d cause if I accepted.

Weirdly though, the vast number of photography-related blogs I visit and subscribe to are mainly run by “people photographers”. I just find them more stimulating. There seems to be a lot more inventiveness, a lot more pushing the boundaries than in landscape, or “places” photography, where really there two camps - the romantic landscape, the “fine art photographers”, and the deadpan “post-modern” stuff. Why this is I don’t know. Perhaps there is less scope, or attraction, in pushing the look and texture in landscape, and more in finding new approaches to composition and viewpoint. Of course there’s the Flickr all-sliders-on-11 + extra contrast “style”, and, puke, HDR, but those are just failures of aesthetic judgement, not inventiveness.

There’s also a lot less gear talk on the “people” side, although there’s still plenty. The main difference is that there it’s pretty much all Fuji these days, as opposed to Canikon or very big, very expensive toys.

If there are any active, truly compelling blogs run by predominantly landscape photographers, I’ve yet to find them. But I’m open to suggestions.

I don’t do street photography but I couldn’t resist this. Como, Italy, Olympus E-P3 with 45mm f/1.8 lens. Probably should be black and white - and taken with a Fuji - to really qualify as “street”

Here’s a few of the blogs I subscribe to:

• Jeff Damron’s “Better in Black & White” (actually Jeff does do quite a lot of interesting landscape work, but from a portraitist’s perspective, it seems to me)
• Patrick LaRoque
(I totally love his photography, which is about as far away from mine as you could get. For a start, his is good.)
• Neil Gaudet’s “Ramblings of a Photographer”
• Gordon Lewis’ “Shutterfinger”
• Roël’s Holy f-stop … hmm, you know what ? He does landscape too!
• Robert Boyer’s RB|Design

Now this doesn’t mean I don’t like, admire and appreciate many landscape photographers. Of course I do. A large proportion of the few friends I have are landscape photographers. But they don’t tend to have much really interesting to write about. Maybe they just let the photos do the talking. Maybe we’re all sociopaths.

This is slightly crazy. A few weeks ago I decided to work on a small set of photos of Venice, converted to black & white using the excellent Nik Silver EFX 2.0. Silver EFX does a pretty good job of turning digital images into emulations of monochrome film photography. So far so good. But then it occurred to me that I was actually transforming scans of positive film into emulations of monochrome negative film, which is not exactly an optimum process, since there’s a good 5 extra stops of exposure range in b&w, and the contrast curve in positive film doesn’t like being stretched too much. Well anyway. I’d probably have been better off loading Agfa Scala in my XPan in the first place. Or even Ektar 100. And apart from that, the originals actually were shot very much with colour in mind. But I quite like the way it all turned out.

I’ve decided to publish the set on 500px. I’ve had an account there for a while, but so far I haven’t used it much. What I like about 500px over Flickr is that it lends itself more to publishing sets, or portfolios. Flickr of course allows you to create sets as well, but it really puts an emphasis on individual photos. I can’t say I’ve built up much of a following over the 5 years or so I’ve been on Flickr, so perhaps it’s worth trying another approach. Personally I feel my photos work better in portfolios - in fact I was nudged in this direction a while ago by a professional photographer friend - but photo sharing sites are pretty much all about the latest shot, followed 15 nanoseconds later by the next. Also somehow photos taken recently are granted more worth than ones taken several years, or more, ago. I don’t really know why that is. These photos are nearly 2 years old, but they wouldn’t look substantially different had I taken them yesterday.

I’m not all that happy about 500px deciding that everybody’s photos should be represented by a square preview. That’s them imposing their aesthetic decision over mine. But I suppose everybody else does this too. Otherwise it’s certainly much cleaner and photo-centric than Flickr.

Here’s one that didn’t make the cut. Possibly a little too clichéd.

And there’s another one that didn’t make it to 500px, but ended up on Flickr instead. Well, I wouldn’t want them to feel left out.

A couple of days ago, while searching for photo books on Paragonia, I discovered the work of Linde Waidhofer, on the Western Eye Press website. Linde is, it seems, a long established landscape photographer with a particular affinity for Patagonia. She has an extremely nice eBook available on her site, Unknown Patagonia, which she is freely distributing in the hope of raising awareness on the risks to a stunningy beautiful, isolated part of Southern Chile which is at risk from the energy industry. This sadly reminds me of similar destructive forces in parts of Iceland.

The location is amazing, and the photography even more so. Linde Waidhofer has an understated style which does not impose itself on the subject matter, does not overly abstract things, but presents natural beauty with great taste and judgement.

Since the eBook is available for free, I would encourage you to download it, enjoy it, and pass it on, and hopefully the message that Linde is trying to put out will spread. And at the same time you’ll discover some classic nature photography (actually not just nature) which deserves to be widely known.

I have just uploaded a new gallery, simply called “Ice”. It contains a set of photos taken at various places and times, all featuring ice in diverse, and mainly quite abstract, forms.

This set has been edited with a new RAW processor, Photo Ninja, the successor to the highly regarded Noise Ninja. I have to say I didn’t really expect to see much new in the world of RAW software at this point in time. I’m quite happy in general with Apple Aperture, although I keep an eye on Adobe Camera Raw, Capture One, and in particular Iridient RAW Developer. But none of these offer anything other than barely perceptible advantages over Aperture, if any at all. Aperture’s RAW engine is highly under-rated for some reason, perhaps simply Apple fatigue, although I suppose it depends on what camera you use. But for my Olympus & Ricoh files, I have no complaints. And the workflow is head & shoulders above anything else.

Photo Ninja’s quite minimalist user interface

So why bother with anything else ? Well, Photo Ninja is actually quite, remarkably, different. If there is one defining thing about it, it is that you need to go against habits and wise teachings, and let it do its thing. Once you set up a few preferences to steer it the right direction, its first attempt is usually pretty remarkable. Unlike other RAW processors, it has a real “look” of its own, which I suspect people will love or hate.  There is scope for plenty of fiddling, with a mix of standard and less standard controls (such as “illumination” which is a sort of contrast control that can be linked to exposure). But often I just come back to the auto settings - something I NEVER do usually. A huge amount of thought has gone into Photo Ninja’s automatic algorithms, and they should not be thought of as the usual “auto contrast” white / black point settings most rivals offer.

Photo Ninja’s tool list. Note its ancestor, Noise Ninja, is present & correct

Photo Ninja is a version 1.0 release and it does seem to do some weird things on the odd occasion. One of the images in the set it did something very weird indeed to, so I’ve used the Aperture version CORRECTION: I take it back. It was user error on my part. Nothing weird at all. Speaking of Aperture, Photo Ninja integrates with it extremely well and supports multiple round-trip editing of the original RAW file. I don’t believe anybody else has worked that one out. So you can retain Aperture’s excellent workflow and management features whilst using Photo Ninja as an alternative convertor.

Photo Ninja’s default setting on the left, Aperture 3.2’s on the right. It’s been said that Photo Ninja has a “Kodachrome” look.

You can get a free demo of Photo Ninja, so I suggest that if you’re interested, you just try it. If nothing else it will give you a new perspective on your images.  The photos in the “Ice” set are the first I’ve published in a long time that were not processed in Aperture. I’m not yet sure I’d want to use Photo Ninja exclusively, but I’m certainly going to keep it around.