Rangefinder Magazine
May 2006

Sam Leinhardt by Molly S. Detwiler
Renaissance Man for the Digital Age

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Painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer and scientist Leonardo da Vinci was the quintessential “Renaissance man”—a great mind whose versatility and creative power have captivated the world for 500 years. Leonardos exist today too, many of them in the entrepreneurial realm of high technology, where science and art come together in surprising and inspiring ways at a breathless pace.

Few people understand the territory where science and art converge better than Dr. Sam Leinhardt. A Renaissance man himself, he is a brilliant scientist, educator, inventor, and entrepreneur.

He has founded four high-technology companies, sold them to corporate giants such as Lockheed Martin and Nokia, and in 2005 formed a fifth—Penthera Technologies— to develop software for broadcast mobile TV. He holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago, has taught at universities around the world, and today is an adjunct professor of computer science in the Human- Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He also is an accomplished photographer.

From the age of 12, Leinhardt has been a photography enthusiast, starting with a Yashica Mat 120/220 film camera. It is a pursuit that he says “keeps him sane” in the wake of his hectic business schedule. Over the past 50 years, he has seen the evolution of technology from film to digital and passionately embraced the latter for its ability to blend his technical interests and artistic proclivities.

“As a computer scientist, I’m always thinking about the underlying technology of photography,” he says. “I work with data and pixels in my professional life, so I was quick to jump on board with digital early, and I absolutely adore it.

“Digital photography changes the nature of the game by offering increased freedom of expression and ease of manipulation. The parameters are no longer controlled by the film producer, the camera manufacturer, or the paper company. Digital photography returns control to the photographer so that, like a painter, you become the chemist as well as the artist.”

Today Leinhardt uses three Canon digital cameras: an EOS- 20D in the field, an EOS-1Ds Mark II in the studio, and a PowerShot S70 that lives in his pocket, just in case. And what more fitting tool could he employ to process his digital images than Adobe Photoshop CS2? It is, after all, the flagship application of a software company founded by computer scientists.

Leinhardt’s imagery is a testimony to his love of nature and his skill with Photoshop. The perfectly formed petals of a water lily, the delicate wings of a butterfly, or the serene beauty of a parkland grotto all become arresting studies in light, color, and exquisite detail in his talented and capable hands.

“I want viewers to see flowers, insects, and other natural elements as I see them,” he says, “to isolate them in the context of time and place, so that they become something else entirely. It’s what painters do.” To realize his vision, Leinhardt begins with a simple shot, such as the lone white tulip he spotted in a home garden while strolling in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The flower was glowing with back lighting from the afternoon sun,” he says. “I rested my Canon 20D, fitted with a Canon EF 100–400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens, on the old stone fence in front of the house, set the focal length to max, minimized shutter speed, spot metered on the flower, held the reading, recomposed, and shot. The result was an ordinary image of a tulip with a lot of background material that was intentionally out of focus.”

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The image would not stay ordinary for long. Back at home on his Macintosh G5, he began to work on the RAW file in Adobe Bridge. Leinhardt warmed up the image, and then reduced the exposure to darken and simplify the background. He increased the contrast and color saturation to heighten the brilliance of the white petals, yellow base, and green stem. Then he cropped out the leaf and periwinkles at the stem base and removed vignetting around the edges of the flower, gradually isolating just the flower and stem. In Photoshop, Leinhardt used the Clone Stamp tool to eliminate unnecessary detail, and the Spot Healing Brush to erase blemishes and dirt on the tulip petals and smooth out color inconsistencies. With the Pen and Lasso tools, he selected the bulb and stem, being careful not to lose the fine detail. He inverted the selection, then desaturated it to turn the background color completely black.

“In proceeding this way I achieve the isolation I desire and draw the viewer’s eye toward the parts that I find most attractive, but which are often lost in the confusion created by similar color and brightness values in natural lighting situations,” says Leinhardt. “Using RAW files in Adobe Bridge and Photoshop enables me to achieve the starkness I seek while protecting my image as originally shot.”

In typical fashion, Leinhardt printed the enhanced image on an Epson 2200 Photo Stylus printer, on Epson Watercolor paper. The combination of the inks and matte finish enhances the glow of the tulip on the dark background. “The result is everything I saw in the shot when I made it,” he says.

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All Images Copyright © Sam Leighardt	before

At Formtek, the second company he founded, Leinhardt helped develop methods for stitching together CAD/CAM drawings to create panoramic views of aircraft wire harnesses and other large objects. Lockheed Martin subsequently bought the company, but he retained his love of panoramic images, a concept he explores regularly in his photography.

To create an Andy Warhol-like montage of tulips, Leinhardt joined multiple frames using the Adobe Photomerge tool in Photoshop, and then modified the image for artistic effect. The result looks like a single large frame.

Similarly, for a “hyper-real,” 180-degree Pittsburgh cityscape, he used Photoshop tools to stitch together multiple images, as well as to remove unwanted elements and correct the lighting, which changed as he set up and shot each frame. He’s now experimenting with creating panoramic images of botanical macros, moving the camera horizontally on a rack and pinion track to preserve the depth of field, rather than rotating the camera on a fixed point. With so many ideas and inspirations, Leinhardt may shoot a hundred frames in a field session and use one.

On a recent three-week trip to the U.K., for example, he came home with more than 2000 RAW images, even after dumping the ones he didn’t like. His archive currently exceeds 10,000 RAW and enhanced images, for which he uses Adobe Bridge to quickly review and sort shots and help keep his inventory under control.

As a trained economist, Leinhardt appreciates the affordability of digital photography. “The capture process is almost cost-free after you purchase your equipment and software,” he says. “If the marginal cost of a frame is zero, you can shoot to capture the moment, change anything you want, and experiment endlessly.”

And, like any responsible software developer, he’s vigilant and methodical about data security. “It’s taken me a long time and disastrous losses to fine-tune my backup system,” he says. “Digital information is more fragile and easier to lose than you think.” Leinhardt typically uses a Hitachi Microdrive in the field, and then copies the RAW images onto an Epson P-2000 photo viewer as well as his Macintosh laptop. In his home studio, he copies the files yet again, onto the hard drive of his Macintosh G5 workstation and onto an external LaCie hard drive used for archiving. Once he’s satisfied that the images are safely home, he erases the microdrive, P-2000 and laptop files.

Brilliant as he is, Leinhardt also is smart enough to seek expertise in building his photographic skills. He has studied digital capture techniques with George Lepp, digital workflow with Seth Resnick, and Photoshop processing with Katrin Eismann—modern-day masters all.

“Sam Leinhardt’s work is beautiful and innovative,” says Eismann. “Plus, he’s a technology genius who grasps Photoshop with enviable ease.”

Earlier photographers who most inspire Leinhardt were, like him, trained in technical fields yet powerfully drawn to capture the natural world. Ansel Adams was a professional musician, and Eliot Porter a Harvard-educated physician. These Leonardos, like Leinhardt, traveled freely in the land where science and art intersect, creating unforgettable images that will captivate viewers for generations to come.

Molly Detwiler is a freelance writer based in Northern California. She spent 18 years in corporate communications at Silicon Valley companies.