Stephen Johnson

Always a lovely moment when the post lady drops off samples of the books I have been involved with! A couple of good ones this week:

BBC Kingdom: Narratred by David Attenborough and follows the lives of four major species. As always the camera work on the programs is cinematic and a pleasure to watch. It is in Ultra High Definition with a bright high dynamic range to really emerse yourself into the environment.

My job was to translate video grabs and stills images into the confined spaces of the printed pages but retain the open feel of colour and tone that shape the images.

When I first got involved with BBC Books in 2011 it was for the origional Frozen Planet. There may have been the ocassional screen grab by the early HD cameras limited the use to small inserts. Fast forward 16 years and the 4k and 5k+ cameras are more than capable of stunning double page spreads. Of the 287 images I worked on in the book the majority (188) were from log stills provided in the ACES colour space – normally used in Cinema workflows. This did mean using Davinci Resolve to work on the images leaving Photoshop to do the CMYK conversion. By using images from the shot sequences its possible to expand on the behaviour shown  in the programs, the images are accompanied with detailed and highly readable text by Will Millard and Felicity Lanchester who are able to refer directly to the behaviour in them.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year Portfolio 35 : A strong showing from this years competition winners. As before my remit was to adjust the images from the winners to preserve their look and mood by doing custom CMYK conversion to get the most out of the printing process.

In an age of AI its good to work with images of nature captured by people sensitive to the reality in front of them.

A bit of a strange one this. I have been doing some video work and switched my Eizo ColorEdge CG279X into the Rec  2020 color space and found that when I launched a Google Chrome web browser that the window displayed without its contents with just a transparent frame around where the Chrome window should be. When I chose a different colour space (Rec 709, Adobe 1998 etc.) Chrome displayed properly.

I had tried everything before this (uninstalling the program etc.) but it was only when I changed the colour space that things fixed themselves.

Pleased to receive my complimentary copy of the new book accompanying the new BBC series Planet Earth III narrated by David Attenborough. This new series has all the stops pulled out and has music by Hans Zimmer!

My task was to colour grade all the photography and video grabs used in the book so that they printed well and depicted the subject matter in a natural way.

My careful image grading techniques are designed to fit a large tonal and colour space within the confines of printed paper, unlike HDR televisions which have a huge contrast range CMYK printing has a limited range and in order to make the pictures sing their best I used my 35 years of repro and photo knowledge to work some magic.

The book is published by Penguin and will be available in all good book shops or Amazon on the 19th October 2023.  You can see the trailer for the new series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ0VZM1rz78

Copyrightimage is the place to go for the highest quality stills and custom video grab processing, talk to me about your project and lets see what we can do together. stephen@copyrightimage.co.uk

The latest David Attenborough series is due to air in the UK on Sunday 12th March 2023. The book of the series is available now at all good book shops (and Amazon).

Many thanks to the series producer Alastair Fothergill and others who got me involved to make sure most technically difficult shots in the book were up to the standard of the rest.

Ethical grading and retouching ensures that the images on the page reflect the nature they represent and not issues with noise, exposure and white balance that would introduce unnatural artefacts in the images. Also provided were my techniques to keep the dynamic range of the HDR material as much as possible, without care this can print very badly on the more limited tonal and colour range of CMYK, by mitigating against this the images can sing out.

If your organization needs to improve the quality of your publications, exhibitions or photolibraries then send me an email stephen@copyrightimage.co.uk

A pleasure to work on Julian’s images recently for his latest major exhibition “Atmospheria” at the William Turner Gallery in LA.

My task was to prepare the files used in making the very large prints.  These were made on a metal base using dye sublimation.

The file preparation was a very machine intensive process and some images grew to over 5GB when layered in Photoshop. The final stage of the process was quality checking at 1:1 to ensure no artefacts or dust spots made their way to these very high quality premium prints.

Careful work ensured that the prints retained the intentions of the photographer and allowed for close inspection of detail on the photographic surface without any significant enlargement artefacts even when viewed close up.

You can read more about the exhibition here

I received the most beautiful book through the post today Its by Photographer Christopher Swann and called “Sea of Dreams”. It covers the subject of Whales, dolphins and wildlife of Baja California. 450 pages of superb photography, illustrations and insightful text. ISBN: 978-1-7396721-0-2.

Tipping the scales at well over 3.3KG (the limit of my scales!) it is superbly printed and has to be considered the most in depth and beautiful interpretation of its subjects.

My work on the project was to help translate the more problematic underwater RGB files that often struggle to appear their best when printed in CMYK. I used all the options in my specialist toolbox to bring out the true brilliance in the images. I also worked on selected topside images to enable them to print smoothly across double page spreads.

Swanny is a very modest man but his work seen through this book is simply superb. I am very fortunate to work with one of the very best marine life photographers in the world, we share a desire to translate life to the page and are prepared to go through some pains to acheive it.

Thank you Swanny!
https://cswannphotography.com/

I took the image on the left in the 1980s and submitted it to the Tony Stone Photo library (later Getty Images). The images on the right are generated on my computer using the Stable Diffusion program with the text string “big ben clockface high resolution golden light dark sky dslr medium format highly detailed”

The image on the left was captured on film on location in Parliament square, the images on the right were generated by a program that used an algorithm to process  such “real life images” and extract from them a sense of what the clock face is and without copying pixels recreate new images. I don’t know if my picture was one of the millions of web images processed in order to train the AI but I doubt that permission to use images in this way was granted by the photographers.

Getty Images announced that they will not represent images generated by AI on its sales platforms for this very reason, neither the source images were likely licensed and the output from these AI programs likely copyrightable. Getty clients are of course free to generate their own AI images but may run into trouble if their work then becomes public domain and a new message attached.

Some of the images generated were more like my photograph but they always came out kind of “strange”, not quite right. What I found more interesting was the mistakes (like the above images), the results of a fever dream or using a consciousness altering drug.

I’m reminded of a scene in the 1980 film “Fame”, in which the tutor (Shorofsky) and his student have this conversation:

Shorofsky : One man is not an orchestra.

Bruno Martelli : Who needs orchestras? You can do it all with a keyboard, an amp and enough power.

Shorofsky : You going to play all by yourself?

Bruno Martelli : You don’t need anybody else.

Shorofsky : That’s not music, Martelli. That’s masturbation.

What I think Shorofsky is getting at here is that a piece of classical music played by an orchestra is made up of humans responding to each other. Each player and their instrument are following and reacting with the conductor and others to create something unique and subtle, a synth can only play samples  and does not have this human dynamic.

I would equate ethical photography to playing in an orchestra, an individual photographer interacts with the scene in front of them, they respond to the subject and the subject to them, they move around a scene and frame to find the light and the moment that comes together to make the image meaningful.

Ethical photography depends on honesty, introduce or remove elements (either in real life or in photoshop) and suddenly that nature is tainted, introduce AI generated elements and the integrity is compromised completely.

The counter view:

Use the same synthesiser and create new kinds of music (Kraftwerk / Brian Eno) and suddenly something new and interesting is created. I like the way AI images give us a fresh take on things, I like the “mistakes” stable diffusion and other AI systems make. Is it Photography? – no, not in a million years. Does it have a use? perhaps!