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Around The Horn
28 August 2021
In this recurring column, we highlight a few items we've run across that don't merit a full story of their own but are interesting enough to bring to your attention. This time we look at Kathy Ryan, frame averaging, the Panasonic 50mm f1.8 and Andrew Molitor.
- In A Newsroom, On Pause, Maureen Dowd writes about Kathy Ryan's black-and-whte photos of the empty offices at the New York Times during Covid. Ryan, the Times director of photography, undertook the project at the behest of Jeffrey Henson Scales, the Opinion section's photo editor. "There is something profoundly sad about a newsroom without noise or people," Dowd writes. It has the look of Pompeii, she suggests. We featured Ryan's office photography in our Saturday Matinee series in 2015.
- Kevin Raber falls in love with Frame Averaging on the Phase One XT. "The magic is long exposure photography without the use of neutral density filters and all the hassles that come with them," he writes. Don't despair if you don't have $50,000 laying around gather dust for a Phase One system. In Averaging Images in Photoshop, Jim Kasson outlined how to do the same thing in Photoshop. The trick preserves as sharp whatever is static in a set of images while letting the moving parts blur.
- Kirk Tuck calls the Panasonic 50mm f1.8 the "Goldilocks 50mm lens of the current era." With 9 elements in 8 groups, it's different from the 5/4 or 6/5 designs of the past. "Essentially, I am getting the same performance (minus 2/3rds of a stop) that I was getting with Panasonic's 'reference' lens, the 50mm f1.4 S-Pro --- but at 1/3rd the weight and one quarter the price," he writes.
- In Something to Look At, Andrew Molitor takes a closer look at an Irina Rozovsky image. "It feels very much as if we are supposed to get a specific thing from the work and that this thing is an illusion that can only be maintained if we don't look very carefully at the pictures," he writes. "It feels a little like a cheat."
More to come! Meanwhile, here's a look back. And please support our efforts...