Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Shakespeare tourists must have unusual taste, or perhaps some midsummer night’s dream overwhelms their normal sensibilities. Why else would there be a store selling Christmas decorations in July opposite the bard’s birthplace? And so the man sits and waits for Christmas, or maybe for his wife to return from the cottage tour that he preferred to skip.

And I sit and wait for Christmas in Austin. It came last week in the form of my new iMac but, like getting a radio controlled car without batteries under the tree, I have been forced to twiddle the knobs without seeing it really run. The Adobe process for converting a Photoshop for Windows license to Photoshop for Mac appears to have been conceived in the 1970’s and left unchanged since then. Three days were lost to the fact that you must speak to a salesperson and they, understandably, do not work nights and weekends. You pay your upgrade fee to the sales person (if you are not already on the current version) and listen carefully to the verbal instructions that follow: your support case number, your order number and how to Google for the fabled “Letter of Destruction.”  You wonder where the part that could not have been done online will reveal itself as you cast around for a pen to write down the numbers. You do the Googling, download the “Letter of Destruction,” sign it, scan it and upload it to Adobe’s support site … and wait a little.

Exciting news, the signed promise to delete all prior copies is seen and approved within a few hours so now they can ship your copy of Photoshop CS4 for the Mac. Except it doesn’t ship, it stays in “pending” purgatory. Thursday evening brings a FedEx tracking number … but FedEx does not have the package. Not until Saturday does the blue box finally start its journey to Texas; estimated delivery Tuesday. Christmas will arrive on Tuesday, 10 days after Christmas Eve.

And so I call my reluctant PC out of retirement to process one more image after all. An image of a guy in a polo shirt, waiting for Christmas.

Making his escape

The photograph above was taken in Stratford-On-Avon last summer, just down the street from where Shakespeare was born. I hope my escape will be more successful than this poor fox’s, he’s already stuffed. While he failed to dodge the hunter’s dogs and guns, I am making a good run at escaping from Microsoft Windows after 24 years. Yes, I really did use Windows 1.0, I am that old!

The image above is probably the last that I shall process on Windows for I am typing this blog on my new 27 inch screen iMac. If Adobe’s sales staff worked weekends then my old PC would have remained cold and lifeless all day, as it is I must wait until Monday to arrange for my Photoshop “cross grade” license transfer from PC to Mac. Sadly, that is not something you can do online or through Adobe’s support line: Photoshop for the Mac is a different product from Photoshop for Windows. The license keys for one are not recognized by the other and I have to speak to a human sales rep, cap in hand and promising to delete my old copy, to obtain a replacement license. Like any kid with a new toy I am frustrated by the extra wait but at least the transfer is possible, besides, I needed to get the 2009 tax return paperwork done today anyway.

I believe that I will also have to purchase an upgrade from CS3 to CS4 since “cross grades” are only supported for the current version. That’s OK except that Adobe releases new versions about every two years and on that schedule CS5 is due this summer; you can bet that CS5 will come out a couple of weeks too late for me to qualify for a free upgrade. That’s what happened when I had to purchase CS3 because CS2 did not support my then new Nikon D300 RAW file format; CS4 came out 6 weeks later. So it goes.

So why am I moving to a Mac after all this time? Well, there is no one overarching reason but my dissatisfaction with Microsoft has been brewing for many years and the break would have come much sooner if Macs were just a little cheaper. My old 21″ Samsung 213T is failing with numerous vertical purple lines spoiling the picture and making calibration impossible, my PC is not quite as old but definitely showing its age. The need to replace both at the same time lowered the bar and a generous subsidy from my father gave me the extra lift to get over it (I am glad that parents never stop being parents even when you are old enough to have used Windows 1.0 and worry about paying for college for your own kids).

The 27″ screen was definitely a significant seduction factor; seduction is the operative word for there really is nothing that you can do on a Mac that you can’t do on a PC. I worried long and hard about whether the glossy surface of the huge monitor would be a problem for photo editing? To my great relief it’s not, at least not in my north facing home office but your mileage may vary considerably if you work in a brighter room. I can avoid or limit the impact of most reflections; if I were sitting with my back to the window it would be a different story.

It’s late, I have to stop caressing my new love’s keys and turn in before my wife gets too jealous and regrets allowing me to have it.

Whitby rooftops, Yorkshire 1982

I’m stalling for time by posting an older image. What I really want to do is organize a selection of motion abstraction images on the main site and post a few of them on this blog but life has been busy with other priorities.

This photograph is from genuine Ilford HP5 black and white film processed the old fashioned way in a Paterson film tank.

An older reader might recognize the scene as being close to that in the background of the cover shot and first plate from Ian Berry‘s in 1978 book, The English. Probably the first photography monograph that I had ever purchased; that image was definitely in my mind when my then girlfriend, now wife, and I visited on a much cooler spring day.

Whitby, Yorkshire - Photograph by Ian Berry

Pretending it's summer, Hyde Park, London - 1980

They might look like they are at the beach but they were in central London. It might be sunny but it was not summer; each of the deck chair occupants is bundled in a heavy coat. It is a thoroughly British scene.

At least, it was. Britain and the British have changed since 1980 but I stopped experiencing those changes when I left for Texas ten years after this picture was made.

When I lived in Britain I hoped there would be a summer. Now I live in Texas and hope their will be a fall. I am no longer thoroughly British.

Boy and pigeons - Hyde Park, 1980

Soon there will be no more decisive moments, no more perfectly (or luckily) timed exposures capturing the ideal composition of human and street topography, no more envy of Cartier-Bresson’s instincts. We have hardly caught our breath from the demise of film and another technology inflection point looms like a second wave crashing over a stunned and struggling swimmer.

In June of this year I bought what will probably be my last still camera, A Nikon D300. That was five years after my first digital camera, a D100. Roll the clock on less than five years from now and there is zero chance that my next camera will not have high definition movie capability. And I am not talking measly 2 mega-pixel broadcast resolution High-Def, I am talking 9.7 mega-pixel, 3626×2664, 4K theatre resolution at 30 frames per second.

Shooting near 10 mega-pixel images at 30 frames per second you can’t miss the moment, at least not all of them. The wedding photographer won’t have to say cheese any more; the mother that blinks will have her eyes open and on camera two seconds later so print that frame. The fashion photographer can grab 30 seconds of video, at night, in the rain, and take the one shot where the model had just the right angle in her elbow.

The way we make photographs will change, what we photograph will change; some of us will adapt easily, some of us won’t. That’s OK, this is not the first time that the tools have changed. Change is good. Postmodern critics declared the end of art, there was nothing left to do. They were wrong, change is the catalyst of art.