I have another website at photographworks.com. It is self-hosted, meaning that I host in on a host for which I pay a yearly fee. And it is built on the self-hosted version of WordPress. It’s seen a number of twists and turns over the years. For the longest time I reviewed Nikon cameras, and I had affiliate links to Amazon from which I earned almost nothing. That was because – well who knows really – but a part of it was that I wanted to keep the aesthetics of the site and I didn’t want it plastered with ads at the top and the bottom and every conceivable place.

Then I took it down but kept the domain name going. More recently I wrote about photography, and more recently still I took out everything except the portraits.

That was OK but then I was looking at a photographer’s website and it had this neat feature that when you clicked on the image it cycled to the next image in the image stack. And my intention was to copy that layout that had a sidebar with categories of image stacks.

The photographer’s site was built on Squarespace, and I thought maybe I could accomplish that on WP without a plugin but I lost puff trying to figure it out.

Instead I put a simple gallery up in a sticky post to that it is the first thing you see when you visit the site. I didn’t think too hard when choosing the images for the gallery. I just pulled the first fifteen images that fitted the bill.

Well here on photographworks.me I have 4,170 images in the media library. Of course most of them are not portraits, but I pulled these you see in the gallery below.

Those 4,170 images take up a grand total of 678.1 MB out of 13.2 GB upload limit (5%) on my Premium plan. I have taken up so little space because I prepare my images for the Web. which means preparing the images at a suitable size to be viewed on a computer screen.

There is no point in uploading an image bigger than the screen can display, and 200KB (kilobytes) for a detailed image 1,500 pixels on the longer side is all that is needed. Many images I upload are half that file size.

Printing Versus Computer Screens

If I take a photograph to a printer and ask them to print it full size, they would print it at 300 dots per inch. Each dot is a squirt of ink or pigment onto the paper.

When viewed from a ‘normal viewing distance’, an image printed at 300 dots per inch will look continuous to the human eye, meaning you won’t see that it is made up of individual dots. Of course if you put your eye very close up to the image you will see the dots. But close up is not what we do.

We look at a normal viewing distance.

It’s always that normal viewing distance that’s important.

If I ask the printer to make a really big print it will work. But there will come a point when the print I ask him to make will be so big and there are so few dots in a given area that the image loses definition and I will see that at the normal viewing distance.

But again, it depends on the viewing distance. If I asked the printer to print the photo ten metres wide to put on the side of a bus, he would have to print it at a much smaller number of dots per inch. But I would not look at the bus from two metres away.

I would probably see it from at least twenty metres away. And my eye would piece together the dots and I would still see the photo as a whole.

When you stand very close to a giant poster or to the side of a bus, you can see the individual dots. But from further away, your eye and brain rolls it all together sees one continuous image. Again, what looks OK depends on what is the normal viewing distance.

Computer Screens Are Different

Computer screens are different. Each model has its own native resolution or pixel density.

72 dots per inch is usually taken as a good standard. And here is the crucial difference. Unlike with printing onto paper, you can’t cram or squirt more pixels onto the screen. You may be able to lower the screen resolution in the settings, but you can’t increase the screen resolution.

The screen is built to a specification and you can’t make the pixel density higher. You can’t cram in extra pixels and you can’t make the image look denser. That means any ‘extra’ pixels are wasted. And each unneeded, extra pixel increases file size for no purpose.

That’s why the small file of just 100-200 kilobytes is enough for a large image on the Web. Any more pixels would just be wasted.

Pixels and JPEGs

A good question is why some JPEGs are bigger file sizes – more kilobytes – than other JPEGs with the same pixel measurements.

The reason has to do with the way JPEGs work, which is that the program that compresses the images works by each pixel looking at its neighbour, and if the two are the same colour then they amalgamate when they are saved and separate when they are unpacked.

Images with many colours that are not the same – think of the leaves on a tree – can’t amalgamate as much as for example an image that has a single colour occupying a chunk of the image.

And now, finally, the gallery.

The Gallery

This is a striking photograph, isn’t it.

I have known Lee Miller’s photos for years, and I know this photo very well because it is so striking. You feel there is a story there.

Until I saw the photo in the Lee Miller exhibition at the Tate I thought Miller had photographed two women doing their bit for the war effort spotting German planes approaching the coast.

But it was only on reading the text accompanying the photo in the Lee Miller exhibition that I understood how it was taken.

It was really a fashion shoot.

The photo, entitled Fire masks, was shot in 1941 outside the air raid shelter in Miller’s Hampstead garden. The scene is staged for Vogue and the two women are wearing rubber and tin masks used by air-raid wardens to protect against fire bombs.

I can see that one woman is holding a whistle that was issued to Air Raid Wardens to warn people about an impending raid, telling them to get to the shelters.

Anderson shelters were made of corrugated iron half sunk below ground to take the force of a blast. This one may have been covered over with earth to give it more protection.

Whether this is a standard shelter or not, when World War II started 1939 there were around one and a half million Anderson shelters in people’s gardens. and another two million were put in people’s gardens over the course of the war.

Was the threat of German bombing raids real?

The answer is in the numbers. More than 40,000 people were killed in bombing raids in 1940-41 alone, during what is known as the Battle of Britain.

Add to that the deaths from flying bombs – V1s and then the later V2 rockets and the number was over 50,000.

One in eight houses were made uninhabitable by bombs from German bombing raids in WWII.

The main targets of German raids were London and Liverpool and that’s where the majority of casualties were.

Elizabeth Miller Eloui

Miller’s War Correspondent’s pass recites her name as Elizabeth Miller Eloui. The name Eloui is from her husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian businessman previously married to Nimet, who was a model for Man Ray just as Miller was at one time.

Eloui Bey left Nimet for Lee Miller and the two married in 1934 and moved to Cairo.

She got bored and went to Paris, and in 1937 she met the surrealist painter Roland Penrose.

Then in June 1939, Miller left Eloui Bey and moved in with Penrose in London, and in 1947 Miller and Eloui Bey divorced.

But throughout the war she was Elizabeth Miller Eloui but her byline and photos were under the name Lee Miller.

Vogue

Vogue, the fashion magazine, is the ‘Arm or Service’ named on her war correspondent pass. How funny – a fashion and design label named as the authorisation for a war correspondent.

Before she left for mainland Europe, Miller worked at Vogue’s offices, which were bombed and firebombed. This photo was taken by David Scherman, with whom she travelled across Europe as correspondents. She photographed him in Hitler’s bath and he photographed her in the bath. A little f**k you to Hitler.

Click for the first part of The Photographer Lee Miller.

The churches in central London are unspoken guardians of what was. Developers may level whole swathes of the city but they cannot touch the churches. They are sacrosanct – too meaningful to be interfered with.

And so it is with the Cathedral of the Holy Family that used to be known as the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family in Exile. Quite a mouthful, which is maybe why they shortened it.

It is the cathedral of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Eparchy of the Holy Family of London.

Eparchy is a new word to me and means an ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Christianity equivalent to a diocese in the Western Church, and an eparch is the equivalent of a bishop.

I’ve walked past this church on Duke Street quite a few times while exploring the area south of Bond Street Underground station on Oxford Street in London.

Today a little note by the door said the church was open and I went inside and stood for a while. Then I noticed the curve of the balcony and that’s how this shot came about.

I like the idea of the inclusivity of a continuous balcony rather than two lines opposite one another.

I read that since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the cathedral has become a rallying point for the British Ukrainian community.