My favorite photography tip

Someone was asking me the other day about which of several cameras to buy to improve their photography. The typical photography enthusiast's response to that question is that the camera doesn't matter, and it's the stock response because it's true. However, I'm not immune to a bit of gadget lust so I'll always offer some recommendation if asked.

However, one of the simplest tips about improving one's photography is one I learned from the filmmaking, and it's a simple one that takes no skill to understand or learn. It's a concept that everyone who's ever watched a lot of movies knows, even if unconsciously.

Take photos where your subjects aren't looking directly into the lens.

In the movies, looking into the camera is known as breaking the fourth wall. It takes many actors years of practice to both be aware of where the camera is yet resist the temptation to let it affect their performance. In one student film I worked on, one actor constantly made the mistake of either glancing at camera or actively avoiding the camera with his gaze, ruining multiple takes.

[Most people recognize bad acting, but few understand just how hard it is to be an actor. I had to take an acting class in film school even though I was in the directing program, and it was one of the most frightening and uncomfortable things I've ever done, and it gave me an appreciation for actors that will last until I'm six feet under.]

Occasionally a director will break the fourth wall intentionally, but in the vast majority of narrative movies, the actors never look at the camera. Not once. To do so would break the fictive dream.

The reason this tip works is that photos are stories, and whenever your subject looks into the lens, the story is almost always, “Someone posed for a photo at this place.” It's a story, to be sure, just not an interesting one. What's more, it draws attention to the invisible photographer, too, since the subjects are responding to a camera being held by a person.

The vast majority of photos I see of people on Instagram or Facebook are of people, and of those, the vast majority feature those people looking into the camera. Selfies, posed group photos. They lack, for the most part, drama. They function as visual check-ins. Looking through a bunch of those in a news feed is like scanning a newspaper column which reads, “So and so were here. So and so were there. She was there. They were there.”

The moment your subject looks off camera, suddenly you are a photojournalist. For the viewer, it's as if they are transported to that place, and it puts them in a different state of engagement with the photo, a state of awakening. Suddenly they examine the body language and the arrangement of subjects within the scene (the mise en scène) to try to understand what is happening, just as viewers do when they watch TV and movies. Because the subject isn't looking into camera, the viewer doesn't read the body language as a pose, they read it as natural and thus more honest, worth deeper scrutiny.

As with most tips and rules, this one is not universal. Sometimes a gaze into camera is disarming, makes the viewer complicit, catches them in a moment of voyeurism. Sometimes you really do just want the subject gazing into the lens, as in much of portraiture. And sometimes the story you want to tell really is that some people were in a place together.

But if you're a beginning photographer and want to improve, that's my favorite tip because most photographers who are starting out take lots of pictures of people. At the next wedding or night out, try to shoot all your photos this way. It will force you to work a bit harder because when people pose for a head-on portrait the shooting angles are quite limited, but when you're photographing people who aren't looking at camera you can shoot them from almost any angle. It will cost you nothing.

There is no #nofilter

Our filter-friendly life is coming under so much scrutiny lately. First, hipster Barbie touched a nerve by parodying all the stereotypes of the Instagram hashtag #liveauthentic. Now, Chompoo Baritone, a Thai photographer based in Bangkok, has published a new series of picturesthat reveal all the messy reality we usually crop from our social media shots.

 

It’s the predictable round up of relaxing work spaces, quiet alone time in the sun, glamorously plated fresh vegetables and—of course—a copy of indie lifestyle magazine Kinfolk. But in Baritone’s photos, the rest of the scene remains in the frame: curious pets and onlookers, messy plates of food, clothes piled on the bed.
 

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Via Quartz. See Baritone's full album here.

This is why I find the #nofilter tag so amusing. Even if you don't apply one of Instagram's preset filters, the mere act of photography is a form of filtering. It's not just what you crop out of the photo, but how many pics you toss before finding one suitable for sharing with your social media following.

Kylie Jenner, someone you might call a “selfie professional,” admits to taking about 500 selfies for everyone one she publishes. You can see that as vain, if you'd like, but in a world where that digital photo is reputational currency, especially for a celebrity who most people won't ever see in person, it is also rational behavior.

What's the long German word for shame?

The scrubbing chemistry is also what gave away Volkswagen’s alleged cover-up. In 2013, a small non-profit group decided to compare diesel emissions from European cars, which are notoriously high, with the US versions of the same vehicles. A team led by Drew Kodjak, executive director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, worked with emissions researchers at West Virginia University to test three four-cylinder 2.0-liter diesel cars in the Los Angeles area: a Jetta, a Passat, and a BMW. Only the BMW passed.
 

“We felt that it would be possible to get low emissions for diesels,” Kodjak said. “You can imagine our surprise when we found two of the three vehicles had significant emissions.”
 

The ICCT reported its findings to the EPA and the California Air Resources Board. Regulators met with VW officials in 2014 and the automaker agreed to fix the problem with a voluntary recall. But in July 2015, CARB did some follow up testing and again the cars failed—the scrubber technology was present, but off most of the time.
 

How this happened is pretty neat. Michigan’s Stefanopolou says computer sensors monitored the steering column. Under normal driving conditions, the column oscillates as the driver negotiates turns. But during emissions testing, the wheels of the car move, but the steering wheel doesn’t. That seems to have have been the signal for the “defeat device” to turn the catalytic scrubber up to full power, allowing the car to pass the test.
 

Clever detective work catching Volkswagen in this nefarious scheme. The Guardian does the math on the potential damage:

The rigging of emissions tests may have added nearly a million tonnes of air pollution by VW cars annually – roughly the same as the UK’s combined emissions for all power stations, vehicles, industry and agriculture. According to a Guardian analysis, the 482,000 non-compliant US vehicles would have released between 10,392 and 41,571 tonnes of NOx annually at an average US mileage, rather than the 1,039 tonnes the EPA standards would imply. Scaled to the 11m global vehicles, that would mean up to 948,691 tonnes of NOx emissions annually. Western Europe’s biggest power station, Drax in the UK, emits 39,000 tonnes of NOx each year.
 

Now some expert should translate that into a rough number of deaths or years of human life expunged. It's tantamount to indirect murder, and it's laughable that CEO Martin Winterkorn refuses to resign. It will be fascinating to see who concocted the scheme and how it was agreed upon.

At the very least, Winterkorn and others responsible should be forced to walk naked through the streets while people shout, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and throw fruit at them.

UPDATE: Just a few hours after I posted this Winterkorn resigned. He maintains he had no idea of this scheme, and it's quite possible that's true. It will still be interesting to see just how the scheme was concocted and how it was approved and carried out without Winterkorn's knowledge. Breakdowns are often more revealing than successes.

The Hottest Restaurant of 2081

Matt Buchanan conjures an interview with New York's hottest chef...of the year 2081.

On a warm, very yellow November morning, I met the chef Paul Nova in front of his new restaurant, Farm & Table, which is finally set to open next week after two years of intensely secret research and development. 2081’s most anticipated new opening occupies the first flood-safe floor of a six-story trapezoid of condos, but it's a remarkable contrast to the checkerboard of glass and steel that wraps around the top five stories—bright, heavy wood doors open into a room of fifty seats that's lit by scavenged orange incandescent bulbs, littered with the occasional hunk of heirloom cast-iron industrial equipment. Otherwise, the space is a collection of all-wood everything, from wall to wall to wall—festooned with the occasional animal trophy, half of the species extinct—that looks and feels sturdy and knotted, not like re-composited bamboo or synthetics, but old, lived-in wood from trees that once grew tall and strong.
 

Nova’s new project is both of a piece and pointedly different from his first megahit restaurant. Toro! Toro! Toro! was a revival of the clubby, twentieth-century fin de siècle sushi restaurants where Nova’s exquisitely perfect reproductions of extinct fish—in terms of fidelity of texture and clarity of flavor, years beyond practically any other plant-based replication of seafood in the last decade—revealed him as a trailblazer in the medium of engineered protein. Predictably, it spawned wave after wave of imitators, and while no one has come close to his craftsmanship or success, the rumors are that with his second revivalist restaurant, Nova is pushing beyond optimized protein to a new horizon, one that has been uncharted for years: real meat.
 

I often ask people what common practice of today will be regarded by subsequent generations as horrific, because it's inevitable, isn't it? As much as I'd like to say retweeting praise, I'm more confident that we'll look back on our raising of animals in horrific conditions for our consumption to be abhorrent.

That's not the only thing Buchanan imagines will be an opportunity for nostalgia in 2081.

The biggest aspect of it, besides the real food, will be real service. We're going a step further than Toro! Toro! Toro!, and you won't even interact with any software when you come in: We're going to have human hosts in these wonderful knit hats and chambray shirts and classic selvedge jeans who take you to your seat, another human who takes your order, and another who brings the food to you, and yet another who clears the table. I don't know any other restaurant that will have as many bodies as ours will, certainly not as carefully adorned in period dress.
 

You'll even get the bill written down on paper—we found a lot of these GREAT vintage Moleskine pads, very period—and you'll pay a separate small fee, like twenty percent, to the servers if they do a good job. (It sounds weird, but people used to do this routinely! We're including a keepsake booklet for every guest that explains how to figure out the amount.) We're even chucking dynamic pricing for this restaurant. The only things that'll be different than how it used to be back then is that you can't pay with paper like people used to, because of the blockchain, though if we could figure out a way to make that work, we totally would.

Opening borders to migrants

“European countries are turning into old people’s homes. In 2050, I plan on being 80. Either I’ll be cared for by a robot or by a Syrian”
 

Simon Kuper writes a manifesto on why Europe should welcome migrants.

1. We need young workers

Many European countries are gradually turning into old people’s homes. Germany, Italy, Spain and others have some of the lowest birth rates in human history. About one-third of their populations will be aged over 65 in 2050, predicts the Pew Research Center in the US. Germany needs to import at least 350,000 people a year to keep its workforce stable, calculates the German foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung. No wonder Angela Merkel has been more welcoming than David Cameron, whose country is younger. But all over Europe, carers for old people are already scarce. Norway found oil under the seabed but it would have been better off if it had discovered 50,000 nurses there instead. In 2050, I plan on being 80. Either I’ll be cared for by a robot or by a Syrian.
 

2. We have enough space for migrants

Many rightwingers think we have reached our limits. “KEEP OUT, BRITAIN IS FULL UP”, said a fairly typical front page in the Daily Express newspaper in 2009. This feeling is widespread. And it’s true that western Europe is one of the most densely populated regions on earth. Indeed, density has long been Europe’s unique selling point: with so many people of different nations closely packed together, we have always traded goods and exchanged ideas fast. 
 

But we have plenty more room. Many European cities aren’t dense enough. Places such as Brussels, Dublin and others sprawled during the automobile era. We can make space for newcomers through densification, says Stephanie Wunder, senior fellow of the Ecologic Institute in Berlin.
 

Many of the same points could be made for the U.S., and many other countries in the world.