I’ve been a photographer since high school, and an electrical engineer all of my professional life. The two things came together for a while. From 1989 until the middle of 1995, I worked as an IBM Fellow at the Almaden Research laboratory south of San Jose, CA. For those six years, my principal area of research was color management, color processing for digital photography, and color transformations such as gamut mapping. At other times in my career, I researched speech recognition and speech bandwidth compression and developed data acquisition and process control computer systems, telephone switching systems, and data communication systems.
I retired in 2000, and for the last 22 years when I’m not serving on NFP boards unrelated to photography, I’ve been spending most of my free time making photographs.
Equipment
The Hasselblad XCD 135/2.8 is one of the first batch of lenses for the Hasselblad X1D and X2D (X mount) cameras. It is usually sold bundled with a matched 1.7x teleconverter (TC) and a tripod collar that attaches to the TC. Except for the focusing ring, the lens is completely devoid of controls – the […]
Equipment
The Hasselblad XCD 55V is a 55mm f/2.5 lens for the X1D and X2D (X-mount) cameras. It is one of the V-series X-mount lenses. The line currently consists of 25mm, 38mm, 55mm, and 90mm lenses. All have f/2.5 as their widest aperture. All have high-speed leaf shutters, which are great for outdoor flash synchronization but […]
Equipment
Many years ago, I wrote an article on backing up photographic images. Quite a few bytes have flowed under the figurative bridge since then, and the original article is sufficiently obsolete as to be nearly useless. So, I’m going to take another crack at it, with liberal self-plagiarization from the original article. In chemical photography, […]
Equipment
There seems to be some confusion on the issue of how modern camera shutters work. I’m going to try to clear some of that up in this post. Some caveats: There are variations among camera manufacturers that I’m going to gloss over. This applies to CMOS sensors that employ at least one analog-to-digital converter per […]
Geek Articles
I live near Carmel, California. The photographic history of this place is freighted with an approach to image-making called previsualization. Ansel Adams wrote about visualization, which he defined as “the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure”. Minor White later distinguished between what he called “pre-visualization”, or visualization before the negative is exposed, […]
