He means "dodging in" overexposed areas (you burn in underexposed areas). But that was back in the days of the dinosaurs when people actually made prints on a projector and table (not easy for color, but I once did it for B&W prints taken through a red filter, ala Ansel Adams).

For color, Dah Compuuuter and digital image processing has made all that obsolete. Not that you can entirely compensate for bad exposure even so....

In the the environment in which Shakers was working the above isn't really feasible. Even if the organizers permitted it, no one is going to lay out an array of flashes, radio triggers, and such.

The man mainly needs longer, faster lenses and a camera with larger pixels. But that is truly serious money.

It's true that you'll never learn to become a good photographer if you don't get out there and take pictures. However, it's not enough to go out there and take pictures; you also have to look at them afterward critically, and learn from your successes and your failures.

The Wikipedia environment does not provide useful feedback toward this: the Featured Picture cabal has idiotic standards for quality that are difficult to meet and have very little to do with actual photographic quality; outside of that particular land of stupid the evaluatory metric is weighted so heavily on the licensing question (which is completely irrelevant from a quality standpoint) that an aspiring photographer who uploads content to Wikipedia is actually more likely to receive damaging feedback than helpful feedback, in the sense of using that feedback to improve their skill.

Even holding a flash in your off hand over your head and off to the side will improve the quality of many shots by providing some off-axis lighting. (The problem with integral camera flashes is that they only provide on-axis lighting.) I've done with with one of my flashes, which has a photoelectric slaving option.

Nah, he needs to learn how to compose shots, and how to discard crap. That's got nothing to do with the camera. No quantity, or quality, of equipment can substitute for the skill of the photographer.

Yes. However, I prefer using flash brackets.



Well, I tried to separate his earnestness from his quality. The man clearly has the balls for the job of a photojournalist. But it is also true, as you say, he needs a lesson in how to use the delete button on the camera and general editorial restraint. But then again, Wikipedia/Commons arguably needs to learn to delete crap on sight. What does hoarding it forever accomplish?

But the equipment I recommended would make the output far better -- once the delete-button starts to get used! The long, fast, lenses blur out the background (which emphasizes the subject), and you don't need to hammer poor target with as much flash. Timing and basic composition is something that will come with practice.

Do you mean more pixels?

Larger pixels collect more light, have higher dynamic range and have lower noise in poor light. More pixels is mostly marketing crap.

I assure you I'm using my terms correctly. "Burning in" comes from old-school dark room techniques where you expose parts of the paper for a longer period of time to darken parts of the picture that were over-exposed on the negative. I understand how in this day of digital photography this can be confusing, but Photoshop has a brush that does this and happens to be called "Burn in."

Shankers has expressed disdain about having to "Photoshop" pictures to improve their quality. This only exposes how much of an amateur he is. Any photographer worth their salt, professional or otherwise, knows that framing the shot and snapping the shutter button is the easy part. The art is done in post-processing.

I can't completely agree with this in all situations, but anyone who takes a posed shot on a red carpet using the auto-flash and then gets a stick up his ass about cleaning up the glare from that flash can't be taken seriously.

Start out with contradictory goals and you're guaranteed to fail.

And yet Wikipedia is still here.

I said fail, not cease existing.

Then why in the same breath does he boast about spending all that money on software? Did he pay for Photoshop!?!

I actually read the blog piece. WITH RED INK FOR MAXIMUM QUEEN OUT EFFECT. Yes, I know, I feel kind of dirty and ashamed from having gone over there ... but you know how it is.

Its a shame he did not retire his ego. How could the Mediawiki Foundation refer the New York Times to him ... to fluff his reputation even further?

He sticks photographs of his erection (or his boyfriend's erection, spare me the details) on a high profile website likely to be used by children for school research to be archive for 'posteriority'!!!

I mean, it-was-not-even-a-very-big-one-by-david-shankers.jpg. These people are insane ... and the term "boyfriend" is merely a slightly more neutral euphemism than "model").

Imagine if you stuck a picture of an glistening erection up on your work or school noticeboard, what would happen to you?

Yes, and I meant for the sake of a nice bit of posterior rather than 'posterity'.

Yep, you're right. There's even a Burning and dodging Wiki. My memory was reversed (easy to do) and of course burning (more light) makes the positive print paper darker and dodging leaves it light. Thus, as you say, you "burn in" parts that have been overexposed (and so would be too light on the positive print), by leaving the printing light on longer (the burn). But you then you often have to "dodge" (block light from other areas of the print sometimes, during the print exposure) to save the rest of the photo from being over-printed. Happens a lot with background problems where a subject is taken indoors against a window or something. Or the opposite, when they are too close to a flash and were off center so your flash exposure missed the primary subject. We did it with a lot of literal handwaving (between lens and paper) for the dodge. Manual image processing was more fun that digital, as most things are.

Like painting with light. Sure with digital you can futz and undo, archive different versions, mask, apply filters, not have to deal with the smell of the chemicals, accidentally exposed paper, wet fingers or drying racks. But it's still not as fun as playing with light and watching the images magically appear in the developing fluid.




I think it's a sign of narcissm. He wants to be recognized for all the toil and trouble. This is why he labels every file with "by David Shankbone" and includes a byline in every caption for pictures that are included in articles. He wants to be seen as Wikipedia's preeminent photographer, which is why he's so butthurt by this article.

It's a sign of amateur status that he shows disdain for touching up photographs. It a common novice conception that perfect photographs are conceived in-camera. It can happen, but it's rare.